It took us NINE MONTHS to get a server installed in a data center a few years back. This was Marine-Corps fielded hardware running an ATO'd[1] software stack for real-world situational awareness, going into a Marine Corps data center. The people that run the data center have a glacial Change Management process, exacerbated by everyone in their organization not talking to each other, even though they are separated by cubical walls.
I too have no faith of seeing this stuff implemented anytime soon...
[1] (Authority to Operate, basically approval from the highest IT authorities to utilize something on a DoD network)
If that argument (that leveraging any available artificial enhancement is ok) held any conceptual weight, we would embrace PEDs in athletics. We don't. Ask yourself why?
It's all the fault of those damn Puritans: people who were such sticks in the mud they were essentially kicked out of Europe because nobody wanted to hear their prudish nonsense. They were all about the "fire & brimstone".
>>>I don't imagine many people would trade sitting on a throne in a grand hall enjoying a feast whilst watching the era's leading performers personally dedicate performances to them for the possibility of selling their body to download a superhero movie and buy a burrito and packet of cigarettes.
That "grand hall" had worse climate control than a Motel-6, and the food was dirty. We can debate the subjective utility of skilled medieval musicians vs a low-end local rock/metal concert with supporting audiovisual systems (a ticket to that can fit within the budget of a few tricks), I would charitably call that a break-even. And a $50 trick buys a LOT more than a burrito and a pack of cigs. You can get a steak dinner at Texas Roadhouse to with your pack of Newport 100s.
The "ick factor" of selling their body was just to demonstrate that even the most down-on-their-luck, homeless, destitute American has a path to access the commodity goods of our age. I don't think it's an absurd reduction to point that out.
Did you read the healthcare link I provided? Death from those sorts of diseases are a tiny fraction of fatalities in the US. They're so small that it is disingenuous to extrapolate them as indicative of the plight of "the poor in Cleveland" writ large.
But just for English kings who died of natural causes, dysentery killed 2 and food poisoning 1, out of 60 total (dead from natural causes, not 60 total monarchs....a 5% fatality rate for the most powerful people in the land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monarchs_of_the_Britis...
"made to feel insignificant" "have no power"....I'd really like to see how you are quantifying these, and why you would weight them so heavily in a quality-of-life assessment to even mention them in the same breadth as dying of preventable food sanitation diseases.
>>>At first, I was confused reading your assertions of what poor people of the US can do, things that obviously demand money - cash or credit - that a person in poverty don't have.
A homeless, flat-broke prostitute can turn 4 tricks in a day. Let's call them $50 each, for $200 cash-in-hand. Then they can take that $200 to Wal-Mart, buy an Android phone for $50, a SIM card for $50, and one of those loadable debit cards for $50. That leaves them with $50 cash and a $50 debit card balance. They can use their smartphone and debit card to access many of the modern amenities that the parent post mentioned, such as a delivery meal from Uber Eats, or a Greyhound bus ticket, or music on iTunes. The point is, this stuff is within the realm of the possible for the modern poor. It is NOT for a medieval king. Not at all. No matter how large his army, no matter how much gold in his coffers, Richard the Lionheart can't instantly access music from the other side of the planet while traveling across England in a climate-controlled vehicle at twice the speed of a horse.
>>> In fact, for many people (including many men), advice is the least important part and often unwelcome at first. What people are looking for is empathy, being heard and validated.
Maybe I'm just wired differently, but I usually come away a bit frustrated if I reach out to someone and the conversation is basically "I feel you and can commiserate. But I don't have any recommended actions."
In contrast, I had a former roommate who would point out: "See at Step 2? You messed up by taking Action X. Next time do Action Y, and follow up with Action Z at Step 3. That's how you avoid this problem." I don't always agree with his advice or conclusions, but he gives me something actionable, or at least something that triggers thinking through a modified solution to whatever problem I'm trying to overcome.
Funny. I'd say the same applies for you. The whole point of the article is that men and women have different value systems in how they evaluate interpersonal relationships, and your contribution to this discussion has only been: "While I put forth no evidence to the contrary, their conclusion is wrong....and any men who utilize such a value system are bad human beings." It's the same sort of overbearing, arrogant, intrusive shaming language used by religious conservatives in opposition to gay marriage.
>>>you should assume they are judging you by the same standards
I would absolutely assume that my friends are holding me accountable to the same standards to which I hold them. And if they didn't, then I wouldn't trust them as true friends. They should be able to share hard truths ("Hey, you are failing yourself right now") and also be willing to offer assistance to get me back on my path.
>>>If your relationship with all your friends is based on their utility to advance your status, you don’t actually have any friends.
What are the metrics underpinning your assessment of friendship? In order to achieve a status of !friend, there would need to be failure modes for evaluation of actions to drive that conclusion. What are those failure modes? And which of my friends have you evaluated against these metrics to support your assertion? We all know the answer to that: NONE.
Men are under no obligations to evaluate their friendships using YOUR mental model, and possessing a working model that is different from yours does not inherently make them misanthropes out of touch with reality. The level of uncomprehending arrogance needed to come into a discussion with that as a leading talking point is astounding.
Our previous Commanding General once quipped that PowerPoint presentations that transition between geographic focus areas should include slide after slide after slide of blue ocean, to communicate the vast distances involved in our Area of Operations. Otherwise no one appreciates the distances between the islands that are of interest. Too many people think Hawaii and Guam and the Philippines and Okinawa are all just down the street from each other.
You are shooting at strawmen. No one is discussing severing existing relationship bonds due to evolving life circumstances. There are undoubtedly far more variables in such an equation, with complex mitigating factors.
The article is about ideal preferences. Exercising those preferences, often towards objectively-superior utility characteristics, is not misanthropic.
That line of thought would make about as much sense as saying "all lesbians are inherently misandrist". Choosing A over B does not imply any hatred of {B}, or of {A+B} in general.
As a guy, I don't make time to hang out with other guys who are woefully out of shape / hideously ugly, broke, and with no Game(tm). Those people are not Force Multipliers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication ), so why would I allocate my most precious resource, my time, to them?
>>>That's essentially an unveiled admission of a want to hold the rest of the world hostage and establish domination. There's little rational nor justifiable about such a want from the perspective of anyone who isn't a U.S. citizen.
We've already been holding the world hostage, arguably since we ended Breton Woods in favor of the Petrodollar, and definitely since the Soviet Union collapsed. This might be rational or justifiable to non-US citizens if we better communicated how Pax Americana is to their benefit. But we suck at soft power, and have squandered much of our goodwill with our devastation of the Middle East. So I fully understand and appreciate, for example, Russia and China doing everything in their power to break the back of our supremacy.
>>>Well, they signed the treaty anyway, did they?....Call it virtue signaling, but in international diplomacy, it's a pretty powerful statement.
It cost the signatories nothing substantive, and it changed nothing substantive. I will absolutely call it virtue signaling.
>>>Which objectives? To who's benefit? Yours? The U.S.? The rest of the world?
Which objectives? The objectives of the nations that employ said security professionals, as typically laid out in a "National Security Strategy" or similar document. So my point here is that in order to convince the people who control nuclear assets to change, one needs to understand them. You can't persuade them if you are not communicating with language that resonates with them in the first place.
>>>This is used as an argument for new, upcoming powers like India or China to forge their own path forward, for better or worse. If the U.S. wants to keep playing a role of significance in the 21st and 22nd centuries, it will have to relinquish its hegemonic stance.
This is actually something I strongly agree with. I think it is folly for a mismanaged nation of 330 million to expect to continue to lord over 7+ billion people that are rapidly closing the gap of technical and/or institutional competency across the board. The US is failing on several key fronts 1) failing to recognize the limitations of its hard (aka military) power 2) failing to make the necessary domestic investments in infrastructure and education to even keep it abreast of rising, high-population nations 3) failing to capitalize on existing soft power.
We should have begun to pivot away from the Petrodollar after the Soviet Union fell, should have kept the footprint in Afghanistan smaller, and never should have invaded Iraq. I would have cut the active-duty Army and Air Force to the bone outside of special operations forces, and relied on expeditionary Navy/Marine forces, sailing from the US itself. That's still an overwhelming amount of combat power for most global security threats. Spend the money saved on high-speed rail, thorium reactors, fusion research, and pre-collegiate education that doesn't suck.
>>>I was only arguing against your point that this treaty was just a bunch of plebs signing a petition.
I don't mind going down the rabbit hole on this word usage. I was trying to use plebs to communicate "not the people making impactful decisions in the halls of power". The governments of non-nuclear powers have no ability to force nuclear states to do anything, so for all practical purposes they are indistinguishable from the commoner folk.
I'll agree that digging deeper into the case of South Africa might yield some insights, but I think much of it boiled down to avoiding international pariah status, which was already a problem due to apartheid.
The Comprehensive Test Ban is one of those brilliant "pulling up the ladder after you've made it" moves. It's a tool to hang over the heads of anyone that needs to debug their nuclear weapons, such as up-and-coming nuclear powers (NKorea, Iran). It hurts the existing nuclear powers (who already have giant datasets and fine-tuned nuclear equations) less than it hurts potential newcomers. And even still, it's not enforced as most of the existing nuke powers haven't ratified it.
>>> My point is only to counter a hypothetical scenario which favors one outcome with another equally fictional that favors the other.
Our two scenarios are not in any way, shape, or form "equally" fictional. Anyone with even the most basic real-life work exposure to the national security establishments of Great Powers can attest to that. And often the populations themselves are cut from a similar cloth. My hypothetical, where the nuclear powers ignore the requests of the non-nuclear nations, isn't too far off from the long-standing refusal to modify the permanent membership/veto power of the UN Security Council. ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1758-5899.1... ) So we already have precedent for the Great Powers telling everyone else to pound sand.
In contrast, your hypothetical scenario that posits Russia would eliminate nukes due to "popular domestic demand" is completely out of touch with reality. Look at Figures 6 & 7 from this paper: ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep29483.16 ) A whopping 68% of Russians support either maintaining or expanding the number of nuclear weapons. In the second chart, 52% say the government does "enough" to ward off external aggression via nukes and a further 23% responded the government doesn't do enough and should do more. Although what "the people" want is of limited concern as they don't run Russia anyway ( https://www.amacad.org/publication/russias-oligarchs-unlikel... ). Look at similar public perception survey results for China: ( https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/205316802110328... ). The population wants their government to retain nuclear weapons. Overwhelmingly. The Chinese don't "fear the optics" of nuke possession, or see the program as expensive and unrealistic. Their population, especially the younger generations, are quite hawkish ( https://uscet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/How-Hawkish-Is-... ) As for India and Pakistan easing tensions and jointly signing an anti-nuke treaty?!?! These two nations don't even have an established back-channel for defusing nuclear escalation! ( https://www.iiss.org/blogs/research-paper/2021/05/nuclear-de... )
I'll bow out, I doubt we will reach any common ground, but I applaud you for maintaining a cordial conversation on a serious and difficult subject.
In the early 2000s they were entirely focused on counter-insurgency in the Caucasus. They had restructured their military to be brigade-based, so they could deploy small formations easily. What convinced Russia to re-focus on larger, nation-state threats in their near abroad? There was a really good article on the subject which I can't find now, written when Russia reformed the 1st Guards Tank Army in 2014. That reformation meant they assessed a serious risk of a peer conflict from their Western border, and needed a powerful combat formation optimized for such a fight. Russia has eaten 3 nation-shattering invasions along the Western axis of approach to Moscow (1812, 1915, 1941), where there are few natural geographic/terrain barriers. Do you see how sticking weapon systems in their near abroad that undermine their nuclear MAD deterrence, while expanding your military alliance ever-closer to their territory, might make them paranoid?
>>>Some very powerful governments (like Austria, Brazil, and Indonesia) have already signed it and it is already ratified by 59 nations. This is hardly a bunch of plebs signing a petition.
Austria? Brazil? Indonesia? None of those are nuclear-armed states...which means that their "power" is effectively ZERO. It also costs them nothing to slap a signature on a document that has no material impact on their national security, because they have no capability to lose. You seem to have a very....idealistic view of international relations. Let me explain how nuclear disarmament would play out in the real world:
UN Signatories: We don't think anyone should have nuclear weapons.
US/Russia/China/etc: Nah, keeping these "just in case" is an important part of our international influence.
UN Signatories: I guess we will have to forcibly disarm you?
UN Signatories: Ok on second thought we'll just send you another sternly-worded letter....
And that's how the conversation ends. Because sovereign states that are unable to enforce their will on others have no real power.
>>>What I’m pitching here is for you to contact your national government and encourage them to sign it if they haven’t done so already.
I'm a citizen of not only a nuclear-armed state, but arguably the world's most influential global hegemon: the USA. If any of my politicians even HINTED at supporting such a disarmament, I'd vote them out of office ASAP.
I read the entire treaty here: ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Prohibition_of_... ). The Preamble reads like it was drafted by a drum circle of hippies, stoned on a beach in California. It's not written in a manner that is in any way persuasive to the people who actually need to be convinced: the national security leadership.
If this is a policy you seriously want to advance, I recommend taking a hard look at how national security professionals establish values and objectives, assess problems, and work through cost-benefit analyses in pursuit of said objectives. Know your audience, or you will never talk them into an alternative course of action.
I too have no faith of seeing this stuff implemented anytime soon...
[1] (Authority to Operate, basically approval from the highest IT authorities to utilize something on a DoD network)