saphroneth.bsky.social
43 posts
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Either I've missed an abbreviation, or there's no Imperator Rome on there, which seems like an error in fulfilling the religious part of your magisterial duties?
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(on an income-% basis, that is - the US spends more than other states in absolute terms. Because it's so rich.)
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The average French person thus gives about the same in absolute terms as the average US American, despite a lower per capita GNI (about half).
US aid is (was) critical simply because the US is so rich, even as the US spends less than many other states.
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US aid by the above graph is 0.24% of GNI; French aid is 0.48%, which is double, but French GNI is much less than US GNI (US 27.5 trillion, French 3 trillion) so the US gives about 5x as much in absolute terms because it's rich.
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Looking at the tables at ourworldindata.org/grapher/fore... most of the countries that "once ruled or colonized" less wealthy parts of the world give more than the US as a GDP %. Portugal is about the only exception.
It's the "richest large country/largest rich country" problem.
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Of course, depending on how you count brevets either Garland or Lee doesn't count anyway! And I don't think there's a time point where Lee and Thomas are US colonels simultaneously - and of course if you go late enough in 1861 there's loads more officers of Colonel and up, even some from VA.
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Abert is listed as born in MD and being appointed from DC on the Army Register, so didn't fall into the quadrat (I used "Appointed From"); Edmund B. Alexander is listed as born in KY and appointed from KY. Thomas of course is VA but not a Col at the start of the year.
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Of these, two (Garland and Lawson) are dead by the end of June, Cooke and Seawell continue serving the Union through the war in some fashion, Payne dies 1862 and Lee is obvious, but the closest other one to him is Fauntleroy. He joins the VA Provisional Army but resigns when the CS Army absorbs it.
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I count seven on the Army List as of Q1 1861, but reading the Army List was a pain and I may have missed some.
Colonels with a higher brevet rank
John Garland
Colonels by rank
Thomas Lawson
Thomas Fauntleroy
Phillip St. George Cooke
Matthew Payne
Washington Seawell
Colonels by brevet only
RE Lee
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So... why give up the advantage? Why let them define it as America Versus Mexico - instead of Them Versus America?
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Playing into that narrative - the narrative of "the violence that is suppressed to keep public order" - essentially does their work for them! And some measurable percentage of people would be more horrified by seeing American-flag-waving protestors tear-gassed than Mexican-flag-waving ones.
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...congratulations, it's a problem we have today and a problem that's been around for decades or even centuries. Clean protests always make overreach starker. There are competing narratives, and the narrative pushed by the oppression is simple and is tempting for that reason.
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The assumption that you're making is essentially that a clean protest would be weaponized against future protests. But this I think is backwards - protests are, strategically, an effort to gain broad appeal. If the problem we end up having is that less-clean protests get less appeal in 20 years...
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I think this ends up basically assuming that doing things *by* attempting to appeal to people who would be horrified by violence turned on peaceful protest but turned off by seeing *violent* protest is a thing you can do without and still win. But all we can know is that it makes winning harder.
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The danger of course is that the "harder" approach - by definition, in this case - materially reduces the chance of victory! And it's better to have this conversation again in twenty years having won now - than to have a rather different conversation in twenty years about if elections will happen.
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They're not entirely separate - elected politicians come from the culture, if nothing else, and of course there's hundreds of them in any legislative coalition so you can't legislate based on a single opinion - you need enough support.
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As I recall, the ACA is *significantly* more popular than Obamacare.
Which tells you a lot about how much public opinion is shaped by framing - the Republicans spent a lot of time railing against Obamacare, so people hate it, but they like the ACA.
They don't get that they're the same darn thing.
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Unless your suggestion involves blowing away the filibuster, in which case a Republican congress could of course just reverse it (something they can't do to a Supreme Court decision). And of course the Supreme Court can still negate a codify-Roe law eve if the filibuster is gone.
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Which gets overturned on federalism grounds, probably still during the Democratic presidency in question.
More to the point, there's not actually a very significant period of time when this is possible - it's about four months in 2009, the period in which the ACA was hammered out and got through.
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As for expanding the Supreme Court, it's certainly my understanding that it's... like... a good thing that that's not something you can do with a simple trifecta?
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So I'm not especially clear on this - how exactly could the Dems have "codified Roe into law" or "pack the courts"? So far as I'm aware for example Roe WAS law - it was an explicit Supreme Court decision that the 14th Amendment made abortion legal and you can't get more codified than that.
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...the chance of three detonations is about 20%, two detonations 36%, one detonation 30%, no detonations 13%. And the attacker can't know which of the warheads will get stopped - will it be the one aimed at the rail station or the one aimed at Congress?
So DC gets even more missiles-elsewhere less.
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Certainly if an ICBM is carrying 10 warheads AND many decoys, the decoys are going to be balloons...
If the ICBM is only carrying 3 warheads and the other 7 slots are solid decoys, then the ABM system is relying on chance - but if it stops five random warheads...
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So what are the decoys made of, then? My understanding is that most decoys are mylar balloons - they'll get filtered out by the upper atmosphere because they're not as dense as a warhead.
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Of course, if you use nuclear warheads on your ABMs, it's very easy! But even if you don't - well, if you have a battery of ABMs around DC, that means more ICBMs aimed at DC *and fewer aimed elsewhere*. That second part is the value of the system.
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Because the value of the defence is that it makes attack harder. Not impossible - harder - so it takes more effort for the attacker to be sure of the same outcome. And that effort comes out of the attacker's ability to hit multiple targets.
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...at most, *one* warhead. But it still caused a huge British reaction. The Moscow ABM system wouldn't have saved Moscow from the British deterrent - but it would have saved Leningrad, Kiev, Tula etc. All the other cities that those other 15 missiles aren't pointed at because they're aimed at Moscow
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They went from having 16 missiles able to hit 16 cities with 48 warheads to 16 missiles able to hit 1 city, because the assumption was a saturation attack was required to deal with the Moscow ABMs.
The Moscow system was never tested and the Russians reportedly thought it could intercept ...
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The idea that you need one hundred percent coverage or the system is useless is one I reject - the goal of a defensive system is never to be impervious, it's to raise the cost of attacking.
Witness Chevaline - the Brits spent hugely on a multi-warhead multi-decoy system to overcome the Moscow ABMs.
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Given canonical figures of ~25,000 ISDs at full strength, and the fact that we see on screen six AT-ATs attack a fortified Rebel base and pretty comfortably succeed, the ~500,000 AT-ATs that Kuat sold the Empire is... astonishing.
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Plus of course, you know... the RVs can be seen coming ahead of time! There are tricks to mess that up, decoys etc, but even if you use the upper atmosphere to declutter the RVs you still have time. I suspect it's an easier problem than modern anti missile naval point defence, except for range.
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Also the intercepting rocket is smaller and has less fuel and is thus cheaper than the ICBM, all else being equal - it doesn't have to get to Russia or China, just to the upper atmosphere, and it needs much less delta-V to do it.
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A really bad ABM system that the attacker guesses will stops 50% of RVs means the attacker puts extra RVs assigned to the high priority targets... but that means low priority targets don't get *any* RVs. Because there's never truly enough RVs for the attacker to do everything.
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And the thing that an ABM system does is that it raises the number of missiles that an attacker has to throw *per target* to be confident of at least one hit - virtual attrition. No attacker can ever afford *enough* RVs so they have to prioritize.
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The critical period is the drop from 100,000 feet to detonation altitude (where a nuclear weapon can do appreciable damage). Interception is very much viable in that zone because of the aforementioned reason - the RV is going at lower mach numbers (early ones subsonic) and eminently interceptable.
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But the RV is coming towards you, by definition. And it can't come down at mach 25 or whatever, or it'll hit the atmosphere so hard it crushes the warhead (we're talking about literally millions of g). RVs have to slow down in the upper atmosphere or get destroyed.
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And of course, it is explicitly established that there's nobody else willing to do anything helpful as of the start of TROS, so there's not much scope for much of anything in between unless all the pro-Resistance people in it die by the end of the story.
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I think part of that is that they pretty much flow directly into one another. There's YEARS between any two of the other movies - but TFA flows into TLJ directly (as in, only a few hours) and TLJ has an unspecified but very short amount of time between then and TROS; then TROS is *one day long*.
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That and the Selective Service Act. It meant that the US had been effectively cutting years (2ON) or a year (SSA) off the time before they would have additional deployable military forces of quality on top of the prewar state.
Shifting US industrial/mobilization to start AT Pearl is a major delay.
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This person, so far as I understand it, has a physics degree.
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My basic understanding: lots and lots of generals "simultaneously" (over ca. 50 years) realizing that the main difference between a general and an emperor by that point was that the emperor was a general who got to tell the others what to do.