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Business, Economics, and Taxes: Capitalism. Yay? >=(

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Kepler said:
Been there, done that.

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Perfect. One of the finest posts this board has ever seen.
 
dxmnkd316 said:
Perfect. One of the finest posts this board has ever seen.
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No kidding- just splendid. F-35 is destined to join a long and undistinguished list of Jack-of-all-trades airplanes. When you are 85% as good at something as your adversary, you end up 100% dead. Show airplane that is:

- almost stealthy enough to avoid an integrated air defense system, and
- almost able to dogfight with the pure fighters, and
- almost able to carry enough ordinance to be an effective strike aircraft, and
- has almost enough range to bring those inadequate tools to the fight...

...and I’ll show you a hangar queen.
 
Waking up on day 4 in New Orleans to a text from a friend about Doge being at $.57 was nice! This will be all of us on Saturday:

tenor.gif
 
I came within a hair of buying $20 worth a year ago when the nerds were shooting for a penny. I'm so regretting that.

I'll dump it at a buck for sure. Likely Sunday.
 
LynahFan said:
No kidding- just splendid. F-35 is destined to join a long and undistinguished list of Jack-of-all-trades airplanes. When you are 85% as good at something as your adversary, you end up 100% dead. Show airplane that is:

- almost stealthy enough to avoid an integrated air defense system, and
- almost able to dogfight with the pure fighters, and
- almost able to carry enough ordinance to be an effective strike aircraft, and
- has almost enough range to bring those inadequate tools to the fight...

...and I’ll show you a hangar queen.
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I've occasionally wondered what Wings Over the World would take.

Say I come by infinite resources, never mind how (porn). And say I take you aside at a Cornell hockey game and explain what I want: a secret science and engineering society that will design and manufacture superweapons for the sole purpose of disarming everyone else.

(1) How many scientists and engineers would it take?
(2) How much in resources to design and test the prototypes that will completely overwhelm all existing weapons systems created by commercial companies (and stolen by competing companies and countries)?
(3) How much in resources to manufacture and supply the weapons to eliminate every nation's armed forces and end the rule of the apes?

We would be designing strictly without regard to anybody's politics. We would not need to lard budgets, retain legacy systems, spread the effort among constituencies, employ and recompense bureaucrats not devoted to the actual mission, and we would not have to bribe governments or enrich shareholders.

There are two questions, really:

(1) How much inefficiency, in addition to the usual waste, fraud, and abuse, is in the existing system?
(2) How far ahead could we jump if we only cared about science and engineering and not economics or politics?

I am assuming a world in which scientists and engineers will take our offer to free the world over the existing nations and companies because they're smart and moral enough to see the waste and immorality of the present system. Also, we will let them have that porn. And we will pay them more.
 
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I’m not sure I even understand your premise, Kepler. “Disarming everyone else” to me implies not just winning an arms race (building up your own superior arsenal to the point that your adversaries *choose* to disarm themselves, because why bother investing in peashooters when I have an AR-15) but instead somehow actually destroying or at least disabling the adversaries’ weapons via surgical strike and/or infiltration and sabotage (including infiltration in the cyber domain).

Assuming we’re talking about actually destroying all existing (big) weapons (don’t think you’re talking about destroying every pistol and handgun in circulation), the biggest variable would probably be the level of collateral damage you are willing to impose. If you really want to take out everyone’s missile silos without harming their civilian populations, that’s a lot tougher problem than just loading nukes on trucks, smuggling them near where they need to be, and letting ‘er rip. The hardest part of that operation would be the human operation needed to simultaneously infiltrate all the places you would need to go - Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel - not to mention UK, France, and the US. You could do one at a time, but the third and fourth ones might catch on....

Or is your question really just about the efficiency of the MIC? That is, If we take, say Amazon’s efficiency at extracting profits as a sort of upper bound on corporate efficiency, then how much investment would it take to build up a military capability on par with the US from scratch, if the entities involved were as efficient as Amazon? Even then, it’s easily 10s of trillions. Or, given that the US does not have such overwhelming military superiority that our adversaries have given up, would you want that efficient enterprise to build up a capability vastly superior even to what the US has today, so that even the US would disband its military? Then you’re probably talking 100s of trillions, even at maximum efficiency.
 
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LynahFan said:
I’m not sure I even understand your premise, Kepler. “Disarming everyone else” to me implies not just winning an arms race (building up your own superior arsenal to the point that your adversaries *choose* to disarm themselves, because why bother investing in peashooters when I have an AR-15) but instead somehow actually destroying or at least disabling the adversaries’ weapons via surgical strike and/or infiltration and sabotage (including infiltration in the cyber domain).

Assuming we’re talking about actually destroying all existing (big) weapons (don’t think you’re talking about destroying every pistol and handgun in circulation), the biggest variable would probably be the level of collateral damage you are willing to impose. If you really want to take out everyone’s missile silos without harming their civilian populations, that’s a lot tougher problem than just loading nukes on trucks, smuggling them near where they need to be, and letting ‘er rip. The hardest part of that operation would be the human operation needed to simultaneously infiltrate all the places you would need to go - Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel - not to mention UK, France, and the US. You could do one at a time, but the third and fourth ones might catch on....

Or is your question really just about the efficiency of the MIC? That is, If we take, say Amazon’s efficiency at extracting profits as a sort of upper bound on corporate efficiency, then how much investment would it take to build up a military capability on par with the US from scratch, if the entities involved were as efficient as Amazon? Even then, it’s easily 10s of trillions. Or, given that the US does not have such overwhelming military superiority that our adversaries have given up, would you want that efficient enterprise to build up a capability vastly superior even to what the US has today, so that even the US would disband its military? Then you’re probably talking 100s of trillions, even at maximum efficiency.
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Say, the scenario in which WOW is able to credibly send this message to the world:

"You will no longer be permitted any violent action above (pick a threshold). Hitherto, your excuse to build and use weapons was as a defensive measure to deter or punish your neighbors. Henceforth, we will take care of that. Do whatever you want with your weapons -- keep building them, bankrupting yourselves, and starving your people -- for all we care. We are not forcing you to live without weapons, we are only offering you the option. If the appearance of violence sovereignty is that important to your dick size, sure, whatever. But you will never use it again."

So maybe I can make the question simpler: how can we create WOW to end war? I am making the following assumptions:

1. Technological advancement can create means to render less advanced weapons obsolete (spearmen vs mechanized infantry)

2. Technological advancement is a product of trained, intelligent people (scientists and engineers)

3. Trained, intelligent people have hitherto allowed their talents to be exploited by stupid, violent apes because they had to (coercion, sustenance, the only game in town)

4. Trained, intelligent people can starve the stupid, violent apes of their abilities and products and make them harmless and irrelevant

tl; dr: end the authoritarians; save the world
 
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Oh, I see. Start a sort of non-governmental League of Extraordinary Gentlemen/Batmen (WOW) whose privately funded arsenal is *so* superior to what politicians and the MIC have scratched together that WOW can prevent every government from using its weapons in any way that is deemed "unauthorized" by WOW, including, of course, military attacks on WoW itself. And the WOW leaders somehow manage not to become just as greedy and corrupt and authoritarian as governments are today.


Hmmmm. That would take a lot of money. Certainly trillions.
 
LynahFan said:
Oh, I see. Start a sort of non-governmental League of Extraordinary Gentlemen/Batmen (WOW) whose privately funded arsenal is *so* superior to what politicians and the MIC have scratched together that WOW can prevent every government from using its weapons in any way that is deemed "unauthorized" by WOW, including, of course, military attacks on WoW itself. And the WOW leaders somehow manage not to become just as greedy and corrupt and authoritarian as governments are today.
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Exactly.

WOW has genetic testing for RWAs in the womb and that's where we get our stem cells from.
 
dxmnkd316 said:
Oh god, they even have a performance of Tosca in the movie. Come on Kepler, that's a little too on the nose.
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That Tosca sequence is amazing.


It's been the basis of many stories. The name "Wings Over the World" is taken from the most well thought-out version: Things to Come.

Two other very good takes:

Master of the World
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

All three stories are written by H.G. Wells or Jules Verne.

What is with the "come on" part? That it isn't practical? Well no sh-t. That it isn't a nice fantasy?

Why isn't it?
 
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