The EU? Russia? My bet is on China
Trump: If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.
Previously https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5733236-gallup-stops-pres...
But like the east wing I’m sure they’ll do it before there’s a chance.
Fuck this timeline
iiuc us per capita emissions are not far from 1910s levels
I see this move as an attempt to stifle 2 by hiding 3. It seems like a bet that if we don’t focus on the global issues (like a collapsing current) then much of the political power behind climate change disappears since we are frankly quite lucky in the US to have a beautiful, and largely clean environment/air. Grassroots movements and politically powerful messages are likely an annoyance for those who want to keep doing business as usual since it benefits them to do so. Not trying to make a strong claim that our current response to climate change or what anyone in particular is doing is right or wrong but it seems clear that climate change is a powerful message that pushes for much grander scale changes than most people are comfortable with especially those with strong private interests in ignoring it.
...Why is Europe reliant on the US for monitoring oceans between Greenland & Iceland, i.e within European territory & therefore European monitoring? Shouldn't they have their own infra to work from?
It’s the same reason that many more countries than just Argentina built the Pierre Auger observatory, or that the Vatican built the Pope Scope in Arizona.
Just to be clear I am against this as well, just the journalism is so filthy now.
Congrats, the funding came back that time; but jobs were already cut, people already got deported whose college time depended on it, the professor got axed because the college couldn’t afford it anymore, etc.
Stability is worth its weight in gold in some areas. This isn’t that.
no, factories are closing and workers are protesting due to factory shutdowns in china. if you go to target, most things are made in bangladesh, pakistan India, maylaysia, thailand, vietnam where before they'd all be from china. also us consumption generally is decreasing, and anyways, transportation and direct energy was always the biggest contributor.
It's clear that this is driven by performative climate denialism and a pro fossil fuel stance. The Trump administration made a billion dollar deal with an energy company to stop construction of offshore wind farms and redirect the investment into fossil fuel projects. Trump constantly talks about the "green new scam" and "climate alarmism". And on top of signaling to his base, Trump met with oil executives at Mar-a-Lago before the 2024 election and pitched them on rolling back climate regulation in exchange for $1B in campaign cash. Destroying the instruments that would document the consequences and might spark alarm and activism is one way to hold up his end of the deal.
Same reasoning as removal of many post office boxes in last days of Trump 1 term.
Oil industry pays and Trump delivers.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-exec...
But Trump was fooled and is more committed than ever to the since-abandoned misinformation campaign. It took on a bigger life than Exxon ever could've imagined.
The snowflakiest of them all - they can't handle unbiased readings from instruments that survey our planet.
George Orwell, 1984.
The Republican project is one of making the population dumber while enriching military contractors and other private interests. This achieves it perfectly.
For actual context, F-35 program receives $9B per year (amortized over lifetime), which is $3000 per year per graduate student. Erasing the F-35 program entirely would make something like a 10% difference in graduate wages, while destroying the US Air Force as a modern military.
So no — your request to fund graduate students is more expensive than the F-35 program and delivers at best marginal results.
When you math through per unit or per capita or per year, we already spend more on education and science than the military — and it’s unclear further science funding to the detriment of the military would improve things.
I understand why you want more money, though.
Note that many will have industry, international or self funded (for MS it is less common to have funding). The 9B figure for maintaining the F35 you just said is very close to the entire annual budget of the NSF. Which is the main funding source of most of non medical research.
Also we are not talking about military budget, just the F35 maintenance program here.
Later, after the math showing that graduate students as a whole are more expensive than the F35 program, you claim that the U.S already spends more on education and science than the military.
The claim is of course somewhat unclear, because what comprises science spending. Is Darpa science and not military. Does Nasa count as science in this claim? If Nasa does then it might be that you throw all the budgets of NOAA and the EPA and other similar organizations into the Science pile. I say it just because I am unsure how you are calculating one part of your budget. Actually the education part I am going to suggest that is just higher education.
Higher education is around 100 billion a year, without student loans which doubles that.
The U.S government spends also approximately a couple hundred billion for Science, if I am reading this correctly https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf26314 which does a lot of work putting government and business spending together which gives you a number essentially what the government spends on the military.
I can easily construct something that shows the U.S does pay more for science and education than it does for military, but only by being IMHO somewhat misleading, for example by throwing K-12 spending together with the higher education payments and mixing federal and state monies, so to clarify what I mean when I say the U.S in these kinds of conversations and what I think most people mean is "the federal government"
I suppose that the original poster also meant the federal government or it wouldn't make any sense to mention F-35s either.
Under this limitation I believe that the combined ratio of science and higher education is at best 0.8% of GDP and military is 2.8%.
Although it is not really possible to trust very much the data one receives from the American government any more so I am uncertain.
for example this document - I am just having a hard time to trust what data goes into these various parts as federal spending in that area.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
At any rate the military 2.8% I am quoting based on looking around is historically low. I would expect, especially given Iran, that it would be more in line with the historical 4.1%.
pgpf on https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-o...
Looked at from a policy maker's viewpoint, things look very different.
Everything is changing. Including our influence.
Well, given that the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed for months despite Iran's military supposedly being decimated, and the President of the United States is now threatening to bomb one of our closest Mideast allies (Oman), a reasonable person might ask where this military hegemony and political influence you're referring to is.
Every single European country that already ordered them had immediately afterwards long hard talks about completely cancelling those orders and most ended up at least loweing massively the ordered amount (I presume due to contractual requirements and some money already sent, nobody expected backstabbing crooks on the other side when they were signed).
At this point its trojan horse and much worse than having nothing - it gives illusion of certain (extremely expensive) capability, but only if you lick specific ass hard and frequently enough, peppered with a billion here and there flowing in the right hands. Even then, the other side may be licking harder and thats it. Its ridiculous, and intensively insulting to every decent human being.
We are certainly not naive enough to think that Lockheed Martin does basic research.
All good questions 3 years ago. How many would rely on US weapons or their US relationship today?
And then there is the unimpressive show in the Middle East.
We haven't been able to produce a complete F-35 since Feb 2026 because we lack the necessary rare earths to do create their electronics.
Why? Because we stopped doing that work (and science) in the 90s and now China produces over 90% of rare earths on the planet and said the US can't have any for military purposes (its being negotiated).
There are zero under and post graduate programs that specialize in rare earth extraction and refining outside of China. None. And China has barred their scientists from collaborating with any colleagues from the US on the topic.
Sooooo, you're right, the F-35 program offers a lot, but can it do so "by itself" and does it provide that value in an economically viable way? Much less clear cut of an answer.
Hilarious to say this, given the very public and very significant failures of US foreign policy these past couple decades, not least of all the current special military operation.
Grad schools do more than research, they train people for these industries, for the shop floor.
For the privilege of spending enormous sums of treasure flying around dropping bombs on brown people what did we get?
I would have rather seen that spent on giving lunch to every school age child or paying graduate students a wage above poverty level. At least something useful would have been accomplished
All of tech traces its roots to American academia.
American tech enthralls more of humanity than American military has ever fought.
Its minumum speed is worse than the f16, which make drone interception an issue (f16 are already a bit to fast for that according to Ukrainians), despite a pretty low takeoff speed. It should be capable of less, i'm pretty sure it's software limiters tbh, the wing design seems fine, even if the weight is a bit high (i mean, you don't need to be able to fly at 15 knot like a Rafale, but still).
It _still_ have cooling issues that brick it if you don't bring an external cooler after it landed (which is crazy to me, how did Lockeed not fix that? it's like half the reason why the availability rate is so low).
The availability rate is slow (as said earlier) but it is still more expensive than other jet yearly, despite 2/3rd of the flight hours.
F35 pilots now have less flight hours per year than recommended by NATO (a lot less) (which used to be below US standards btw), and while US f35 pilot still have more hours than their russian conterpart (~145 vs 120), it is very possible that smaller countries who made the mistake of buying them without an economy strong enough to bear the costs might fly their pilot less than 100 hours per year and complete the rest in sims (which, as demontrated by the russian, is a _very_ bad idea) (i'm afraid Greek pilots will suffer from this, which would be a shame)
On the "political influence", it's wrong. Selling the F35 cost the US influence in Norway (thank you wikileaks). In fact, each time the f35 lost a competition, political influence was expended to make the country still buy it. Imho, scientists and scientific conferences are a better way to get influence over allies and adversaries (Cas9 is probably the best example, without Doudna having an international recognition and the conference being hosted in the US, Charpentier might have gone to another RNA specialist)
[edit] to be clear, i think the f35 is a great plane for the US, and a good plane for rich countries who want to go on offensive wars, mainly due to its EW capacity that are second to none and its ability to penetrate enemy territory (which is second only to other US planes). I do also think that it still needs _massive_ improvements to be usable by regular, defensive armies, and the US expending political power to sell it to countries who don't want/need to attack their neighbors was a mistake. Also, not a good cold weather plane, which make it even worse for Norway and Canada.
Also i think its software impairs it, because the wing design seems almost perfect for its missions, and at least on paper, the reactor seems great too
The military isn't some limitless resource, and lead by incompetence, it is useless. There are no policy makers in this administration, they go on vibes and bad ones at that.
Even a guy named mad dog said that diplomacy was cheaper than bullets.
You’re right that it’s all policy making and that’s why you’re supposed to elect competent politicians and administrators.
Then again, military weapons are indeed insanely expensive.
Idk what your idea of budgets are for these sorts of labs but I think most engineers would be shocked at the shoestring budgets they run on (at least the ones I know are a fraction of the cost of a single engineering team).
Source: I paid grad students the majority of my research funding for 16 years, and so did all my colleagues.
Unless you’re building a new facility at CERN, etc, the bulk of research cost is people.
Putting “fight” into quotes here is terrific amount of low level shade for a scientific publication. chef’s kiss
Edit: probably not this one but atleast tells us why measurement is needed https://youtube.com/shorts/-X5EhUbzLTY?si=_N92PNUiTi3STat6
I don’t like any direction this administration has taken, but acting like it’s not the completely legitimate will of the people is BS.
I think liberals and progressives have a higher propensity to vote, so you can’t assume the non voters are less likely to lean Trump.
Zuck Musk Bezos Pichai Thiel
Add more
Let’s map their names to the companies they run. Then reflect on whether we buy their products: Apple, Google, Amazon, Tesla/SpaceX, Meta.
Facts cease to exist because you ignore them. I think Huxley wrote that.
I'm not sure people realize just how dire this is. The politics of the largest, most powerful country on Earth are dominated by people who truly believe in dispensational premillenialism [2]. For these people their time on Earth is limited. Wrecking the Earth doesn't matter. The afterlife is forever. Senior government officials take seriously bringing on the apocalypse through a red heifer [3]. In fact, it's the cornerstone of Christian Zionism [4].
And what began this political movement? Racism [5], specifically a ruling that schools in the South couldn't be both tax-exempt and segregationist.
We live in the dumbest timeline.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkWl7NaGprE
[3]: https://medium.com/@nour_alhakk/the-red-heifer-and-the-u-s-a...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism
[5]: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-ri...
The Internet and social media. It did in a few years was mass media had been working toward for the better part of a century.
Can anyone here, hand of heart, say "I agree with this decision"?
That wasn't arbitrary, and it wasn't for no benefit. It was so that landowners along the coast could continue to use faulty sea level studies to justify state road and infrastructure investments.
This, too, isn't mindless vandalism. It's worse. It's greedy, it's short-sighted, and it's cruel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatori...
A few points:
1. The ocean observation system began operating in 2016 and was expected to continue for 25 years.
2. It cost $48 million annually to operate the network. The Trump administration repeatedly tried to shutter it, proposing to cut its funding by 80 percent in both 2025 and again in 2026. Congress pushed back, restoring the money.
3. “One of the real tragedies here is that collecting data effectively at this site was a huge engineering challenge, and it’s not the kind of thing where you can just leave your notes for the next person who comes in,” Dr. Palevsky said. “There’s a lot of expertise that has the potential to be lost.”
The administration is, as I understand it, in violation of the constitution by shutting this down. It was funded by Congress, twice. The executive branch cannot just legally not spend that money.
Time and time again this proves to be rather irrelevant to this administration. There's literally no consequences for illegal actions and even if they're called out on it all that is reactionary. The system will be well broken before a ruling.
How much money do you think the United States has spent since 1945 on the Cold War? $10 trillion (in 1990).
This is about removing the ability to measure in order to undercut the claims of global warming ("we don't have sufficient evidence")
In the future historians will look back at this administration the way we look at the Roman Inquisition who persecuted scientists for challenging their accepted dogma.
Climate Activist: The oceans are getting warmer & global currents are threatened by imminent collapse - we must do something!
Big Oil: Prove it!
Climate Activist: Data gathered between 2016 and 2026 shows ...
Big Oil: That's old news! Do you have more recent data?
Climate Activist: Well, no, because Trump2 dismantled the ocean observation system in 2026 ...
Big Oil: So you have no data to back up your claims?
Climate Activist: Not recent data, no, but ...
Big Oil: Case dismissed! Why should anyone take action based on subjective opinion, not backed up by hard data? For all we know the oceans could have miraculously cooled & the currents are fine!
But the US is already doing it, it’s already there. It benefits the entire world to have this data. It’s not expensive.
Why reinvent the wheel? More, why not let another country take it over?
The reason is because there are those with ties to the American government’s current administration that have decided they will benefit tremendously from climate change and don’t care about its consequences.
When the second wave of Trump idiocy hit academic institutions by forcing foreign institutions to sign a document indicating they "do not support DEI", this caused some major trouble. Public institutions gave in to the Americans' demands because there was no way to gather the information necessary to finish research in a reasonable time frame.
I think it's time Europe treated the USA the way they want to be treated, as an outsider and a potential threat, and that it's time to stop seeing them as a partner when it comes to science. We need our own measurements, our own instruments, our own satellites, our own databases, and we need to invest now.
Unfortunately, anti-intellectualism isn't just on the rise in the USA. Plus, now now that many countries are struggling with the increased fuel prices thanks to the USA's invasion of Iran, it's hard to find money to invest in science that a worrying amount of people choose to ignore/pretend doesn't exist because it doesn't suit their personal interests.
Although with Trump, it's more specific than "owning the libs": a clear motivating force is undoing anything Obama did or that was around on his watch. Pulling out of the JPOA agreement Obama made with Iran, then launching a war at the price of tanking the global economy which best case will result in a pale imitation of the JPOA (along with a much stronger and richer Iran), is only the latest example.
There has been two and a half decades of FUD billowing around the entire program, like the world's most expensive fart, so don't expect to know the truth until they fly the thing past Zamami Island in anger. But I personally will be mentally prepared for disappointment, with some bitter despair as digestif.
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/104/6/1341/9774...
Seems that sending a bunch of people with guns/bombs/etc to another country is almost always bad.
The military doing good things like ... um ... helping out during natural disasters or genuine peacekeeping is entirely a rare thing.
Cars - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler, but he didn't patent it), Germany (Carl Benz which made the first patent).
Motorbikes - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler)
Train - invented in Germany
Radio transmission - UK (James Clark Maxwell described them theoretically), Germany (Heinrich Hertz created/used them first in experiments)
X-Ray - Germany (Gustav Röntgen)
Telephone - Germany (Philipp Reis, your Bell bought examples and reverse engineered them)
Bookpress with movable letters - Germany (Johannes Gensfleisch a.k.a. Gutenberg)
Lightbulb - Germany (Heinrich Göbel)
Periodic system of elements - Russia (Dimitri Mendelejew) and Germany (Justus Lothar Meyer)
Dynamo / Generator - Germany (Werner von Siemens)
Vaccination - UK (Edward Jenner)
Gliding plane - Germany (Otto Lilienthal)
Pain killer - Germany (Felix Hoffmann, Aspirin)
Relativity theory, Quantum theory - Albert Einstein, Planck,
TV - Germany (Manfred von Ardenne)
Cathod ray tube in TVs - Germany (Conrad Röntgen experimentally, Ferdinand Braun with horizontal and vertical directivity of the ray)
Computer - France (Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace) for mechanical ones and Germany (Konrad Zuse) for electric ones
Atomic fissure, used in plants and bombs - Germany (Otto Hahn)
Chip cards - Germany (Jürgen Dethloff, Helmut Gröttrup)
MP3 music compression - Germany (Fraunhofer Institut)
Electricity - actually already in ancient greek they used electrostatic charging of amber. And one century before Christ they had actual batteries in Bagdad! But then a plethorary of european scientists brought the work forward: UK (William Gilbert, Francis Hauksbee, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday), Germany (Otto von Guericke, Ewald Jürgen Georg von Kleist, Georg Simon Ohm, Carl Friedrich Gauß), Italy (Luigi Galvani, Allesandro Volta), France (Charles du Fay, Charles Augustin de Coulomb, André-Marie Ampère), Netherlands (Pieter van Musschenbroek), Denmark (Hans Christian Ørsted).
I actually terminate this electricity list here. I could go on and on.
Also note that physical units named after their discoverer indicate some kind of importance of the relevant invention. So we have e.g. Volt, Ampere, Coulomb, Farad, Gauss, Watt, Ørsted, Tesla, Weber as units. None of them is based on USA's academia.
If we look at unit names outside of electricity we also find outdated ones like Röntgen or Curie. And still used ones like Plack constant, Newton, Pascal, Kelvin, Becquerel, Gray, Sievert. So where are the USA american ones if "all" of technology is supposed to stem from their academia?
IF we want to trace the roots, then perhaps we need to go back to antique greek philisophers. Because western academia itself traces itself there. But then again ... something like that existed also in ancient India and maybe China.
Enthralls as in we are stuck to our phones, typically running iOS, Android, consuming media, or using services with HQs in America.
I disagree: total tax burden and allocation is the relevant aspect, regardless of pointless semantics about which government unit disbursed the funds.
You admit the fact:
US governments spend more on education and science than the military, as measured by total funds allocated to purpose.
I think you’re the one being misleading by quibbling semantics about who dispersed the money: US taxpayers give more of their tax money to science and education than the military.
You focus on the federal government rather than totals is precisely to obscure that fact — which you know to be true, but find inconvenient for your politics. Hence the semantic quibbles.
thank you for adhering so well to HN guidelines.
I happen to believe this document on money more than others, because publication controlled by congress and not the executive.
Atlas of Military Compensation (Biden) https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59475
If we also ask congress for Scientific research funding https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48307 (also under Biden)
about 50% of the 0.6%-0.7% of GDP it reports is to the Department of Defense.
The military industrial complex is getting money from all sorts of things that we describe as separate, but are really part of it.
Republicans have voters that understand your guy has to be in the seat before you want something to happen. They correctly understand that if you just vote for more guys, you get more of what you want to happen, and correctly identify that the solution to not getting what you want is to get more seats in the next election.
I can never understand the shocking lack of civics education from people who get upset at democrats for not having power when the system describes in plain language that you need numbers for the power.
When Mitch McConnell prevented the vote to appoint a new supreme court justice, it was because he had that power as senate majority leader. If Democrats had a senate majority at that time, he could not have prevented the vote.
The logical conclusion then if despite everyone voting D then getting their votes tossed out is either violent revolution or liberation with the aid of another nuclear-armed state.
Those economies have essentially ceased functioning as competitive markets for ideas, globally.
In general, newsrooms don’t make enough money to independently cover local news, and are consolidated under political/private parties. Journalism isn’t dead, but it is definitely on life support.
America though, has a further metastasized issue, in that there exists market capture. Republicans and their media apparatus have effective agenda setting power over a large enough section of the populace.
The short version of it is that in the right leaning media sphere, the rules of journalism have changed. A common through line for headline stories begins with a fringe theory on the internet. This fringe theory shows up on some podcast, which then gets repeated by a guest on a channel like Fox. This in turn gets alluded to by the White House, and then it can be reported on as a position that the Executive is considering, making it fact.
The GOP didn’t need to throw out votes, provided it could muddy the waters effectively enough.
The research by Roberts, Faris and Benkler, is what this is based on.
Reality always wins in the end, so now with the increase in oil prices, the limits of information dominance are visible, and they will need to leverage their strength in other domains to gain advantage for the upcoming elections.
I took the total number of graduate students, to spread the money across them. We could also look at the same number as, eg, funding an increase from 3.1M to 3.3M or 3.4M graduate students.
I stand by my original claim:
A 10% increase in graduate salary or number of students doesn’t justify dismantling our air force.
And again, the F-35 is not synonymous with the entire air force.
The F-22 is still a viable Air Superiority Fighter but there's about 100 of them. It cannot hold back a peer air force. The primary point of the F-35 was a cheaper F-22 that we could build 3000 of.
4th gen fighters like the F-18 cannot compete in an air war with a large amount of stealth fighters using modern long range missiles, like China is fielding. They would be defeated before even seeing a blip on their radars.
Without the power of Air Superiority, all the rest of our air force is basically useless. B2s and B21s might still be usable, but they cannot maintain a strategic bombing campaign on their own. The money spent on 4th gen missile trucks is pointless.
Giving up the F-35 is equivalent to total abandonment of our "Best Air Force" doctrine and would require a significant shakeup of how we view the military, and billions poured into other parts of the military to make up for giving up the sky. It also means capitulating to China in advance. Though, if we are willing to do that, we could save like half the military budget every year.
Just have to abandon the entire pacific, Japan, and South Korea, and the Philippines, and Australia, and Vietnam, etc etc etc.
[1] https://gml.noaa.gov/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2/co2_mm_mlo.txt
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/01/climate/trump-cuts-mauna-loa-...
The correct response when that happens is to say "both" until/unless the perpetrators want to plead just one or the other.
No. One was damaged by ground fire and landed at a US base.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/f-35a-lands-after-taking-f...
You may be thinking of the F-15s shot down by Kuwaiti "friendly fire".
Yeah I guess the only thing we’ll give away for free these days is $100,000 bombs.
Iraq has for the first time ever entered in the high category of HDI.
https://www.undp.org/arab-states/press-releases/iraqs-human-...
I think it’s extremely clear that the major contributor to instability in the Middle East over the past two decades has been the United States.
1953 was somewhat more than two decades ago.
The regime is all kinds of bad, but you cannot change govts from without. Stability comes from people changing govts from within. Every time the US has changed a govt to support themselves it has ended badly.
This latest war has not unseated the IRGC, indeed it has entrenched it further. This is not surprising; they are the largest organised structure in the country. There are no other structures of comparable size or influence in the country.
Unfortunately the US military does not just project power. To justify its existence (far beyond the realm of self defence) it actively creates and enjoys conflicts. And increasingly those conflicts are showing the real limitations of military power projection.
By contrast the soft influence projected by technological leadership, USAid etc are much more influential. It's not surprising that support for these alternatives are the first target of a govt susceptible to being influenced. A trillion $ industry will not go quietly into the night.
Yes, of course, the US could deploy troops into Iran. They could topple the IRGC if desired. But it would be very expensive politically. (And I don't mean to the Republicans, but that also) but to the Military Industry. Because the electorate clearly indicated that after Afghanistan the appetite for foreign wars is dwindling. Another debacle in Iran (even more than the debacle it is now) would be disastrous.
I have no love for the Iranian regime. But no military intervention from outside has the ability to improve it. And the Iranian people will not support a US puppet govt - that influence was burned in 1956.
Govts change when people inside rise up to change them. Recent examples in Afghanistan, South Africa, Romania and even Iran (1979) show this over and over again.
Interestingly the Soviet Union fell because the satellite states broke away. Because the people in Poland, Hungary etc rose up. Not because of outside intervention.
This latest war in Iran follows a long tradition of US and UK meddling in the region, all of which is designed to get oil, not create stability. Indeed this latest foray has created instability in the supply of oil, and that is an unforgivable sin to the US public.
Agreed, but I wouldn't call Israel a regime.
Let’s see, we’ve got:
Meta
Amazon
Appl… oh
Donald Trump plus candidates who withdrew from the race and endorsed Donald Trump DID get a majority of votes though.
Sadly you can only count the votes the candidate who ran actually received. And he had a plurality - the weakest of all possible victories other than his victory of Clinton where she had more votes than him and still lost on an arcana.
The “whole thing” is never cheap. Running something like a university — providing the environment, infrastructure, administration, facilities, compliance systems, equipment, libraries, grants offices, laboratories, and institutional platform that allow professors and graduate students to do research — is itself extremely expensive.
After all, if you look at the fiscal budgets of major economies, public spending on education and research is often much larger than military spending.
Trump was 316,571 short of majority, Harris was 2,601,538.
Neither party gained an absolute majority because 2.9 million out of 155.2 million voters picked third-party candidates: 862,049 Green, 756,393 RFKJr, 650,126 Libertarian, 171,786 PSL, and 477,755 "other".
One of the many failings of the US electoral system is that it effectively ignores these 2,918,109 million voters. But, if forced to state a preference between the two majority candidates, how do you genuinely think they would've gone?
I don't think there's any question that, even just among the 756,393 people who voted for a guy actively campaigning for Trump, there are 316,571 people who would prefer a Trump presidency over a Harris presidency.
That in itself - if 100% of Greens and 100% of Libertarians, and 100% of PSL, and 100% of "other", and the other 58.14% of RFKJr voters ALL prefer Harris - is enough to grant an absolute majority to Trump.
If you plug more realistic guesstimates into preference distributions for the minor candidates, I don't think there is a plausible run-off result below 50.5-49.5 Trump out of those numbers.
Even the fanciest self propelled artillery is getting destroyed by these little cheap buggers.
You make an incorrect conclusion which is unfortunately both quite popular and incorrect among westerners who read two and half editorials about Russo-Ukrainian war in some NYT/WAPO/whatever and think they now understand modern warfare. The reality of the situation is that drones are a very useful tool, but any side achieving actual air supremacy would result their fighters and bombers cruising over frontline and enemy towns on low altitudes taking out any high-value targets at whim. The situation would be similar to boots-on-the-ground phase of The Iraq War, resulting one of the sides to rapidly gaining ground and winning the war. Keep in mind that the cited "40k per-hour" price is quite cheap compared to per-hour operation cost of any kind of big ground force.
In fact, last thing US wants is to be in Russia's shoes unable to meaningfully advance into the territory of by all measures much weaker enemy.
We just failed to do all of those things quite visibly.
Iran made a choice not to escalate to destroying desalination capabilities and that's why a lot of Saudis and Emiratis are still alive. It's not because we protected them.
Such as a Russian strategic bomber base thousands of miles from the front?
Ukraine has other long-range strike drones but haven't heard of more than a thousand miles range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
https://sofrep.com/news/deepstrike-campaign-drone-attacks-ag...
You mean like when the Zionists openly stopped food from getting into Gaza, while the western governments were backing the Zuonists? Those people concerned with civilian casualties?
An enemy unconcerned with civilian casualties, give me a break.
But I am sure of who I wouldn't put in charge of critical military operations.
The US war on Iran also demonstrates the problems of drones too: the US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores, because of the use of an awful lot of weapons systems that aren't drones. Iran is unable to dislodge that military, or even meaningfully impact its ability to carry out said war, not 100 miles away from its shores, despite a heavy use of drones to attempt to do so.
The war also demonstrates another big issue... the continued delusion of many civilian and military leaders that strategic bombing alone is sufficient to win a war despite this failing literally every single time it's been attempted in the past 100 years.
That used to be true, but I don't think that the case anymore. UA is now striking logistics ~150KM behind the contact line with drones. Regular artillery can't do that. Guided rockets maybe could, but they'd be more expensive and come in smaller quantities.
> US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores
For a rather restricted use of "wage a war". They did not stop Iranians from doing their thing. Bombing alone does not have a history of winning wars.
The strait is physically open but no insurance company will cover massive oil carriers because they are so easy to hit with small weaponry from the ridges of Iran.
And even if they had to pay a claim, it would cost the population less than the higher gas prices, since increasing supply lowers the market price for all supply, not just the incremental units.
Which even the morons who started this conflict know is suicidal because Iran has literally at least a million loyal fanatics (Basij, the same organisation doing unarmed meat waves against Iraq)!ready to die for the regime, and the terrain is in their favour.
So that's not military hegemony.
It doesn’t matter what the reason, if you can’t do something you can’t do it.
Its like saying russia could/can conquer whole Europe, if only X, Y and Z. That effectively means they can't, as we see playing out right now despite them trying desperately to achieve this very thing.
> last time I recall by taliban sheepherders
Spiderweb was a modern-day Doolittle Raid. It didn't scale, at least not immediately, but it still changed the tenor of the war. It put the Russians on notice that they weren't safe. Not that the Russians care, but most countries would. Imagine if someone attacked an Air Force base in the US with similar tactics and a similar outcome...
Sure it was a huge shock to Russia but clearly was a once-off, and required undercover Ukrainian operatives to assemble the smuggled drone parts near the Ukrainian or Kazakh borders, and Russian truckers to unwittingly move containers. All of that operation was revealed and probably can not be repeated; the operatives were evacuated.
> It put the Russians on notice that they weren't safe. Not that the Russians care, but most countries would.
Well there was no GSM jamming near sensitive Russian sites but there is now, and that seems to be annoying Russian civilians intensely, along with internet blocking.
Because personally, I'd still take Lebron on a basketball team even if he wasn't willing to dunk the ball that one time.
Yes, this is a terrible analogy for the war in Iran. Hugely unpopular, costing Americans vast sums of money daily, headed for possible catastrophe. Very much not a low-stakes "Lebron walks by" situation.
Better analogy with Lebron would be: championship game with a title on the line. He gets possession as time runs down and the team needs him to score or make a play that scores. It's not okay for him to then say he's fully capable of scoring but doesn't want to at just that moment for reasons.
NB: this is not to say the US military couldn't cause untold damage on the region. This is obvious, anybody can look at recent history to see that the US military is more than capable of destroying a country in the region.
Rather, this is an object lesson that war is politics by other means, and here we tried to do war without any politics and it has not gone well for us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/discovering-that-...
Climate change, and science in general, is associated with nerds, boring reality, obstacles to immediate gratification, and effects on poor people.
Fossil fuels are associated with large wads of cash, action films, and sticking it to the libs.
Decisions might have terrible consequences. Who cares? Thinking things through is boring, and the people making the decisions are rich enough to be insulated from anything that might happen and old enough to not be around when it does.
I’d honestly prefer the explanation to be that they’re just that evil, at least that aligns with my worldview.
I don't believe that, sorry. I mean I believe you that your father says so. But I don't think that holds for most right voters.
Now, you’re right in some ways. He doesn’t care for the science or the electric cars and so on; but after a lifetime of exposure to the situation, it’s hard to keep dismissing it. He grew up in a very different country, weather-wise, and made the connection between climate change and why his potato harvest failed.
I believe, without proof, that most people understand that the world’s climate is changing and creating Big Problems. They might not admit it or understand the science, but can see the consequences. And no, they don’t agree with how to solve this.
Those are the majority of the Republican voters at this stage. To make them happy you do things like spend millions to tear up infrastructure which challenges their worldview. This should result in increased votes for the current administration at the mid-terms. So even if climate change is a real and current threat, you need to say it isn't to get re-elected.
The resentment is not versus fate or calamity but against those people who study and give voice to complexity. If someone can just shut those people up and make them go away, we will be restored to a simpler and more moral world. Where tragedy can rightly live in the realms of Gods and Mystery.
I would gently remind those that prefer such simplicity that not all nations do. We are not alone in the world. The nation that better understands the complexities of the natural world will, all else being equal, utterly trounce the nation that persists in fictionalizing existence. Unless you want to re-write your national anthem in Mandarin, you will someday need to (re-?)grapple with the complexities of the universe.
Might be linked to petrol cars being cheaper to buy for the same amount of car? That seems like an easier explanation. There is a masculine element in that men want to be seen to own big things to show off, but I doubt it has anything to do with liking black smoke. If they wanted loud noises they'd go a motorbike or get an obnoxious horn.
There are still a ton of cash transactions out here in the sticks. When I ask why they say they don't want the government knowing their business. But I guess from that conversation it also helps you get a date?
These people do exist, unfortunately.
I've had several friends tell me they just couldn't drive an EV because it just doesn't have a soul, meaning it doesn't have that roar for its performance. It being nearly silent as it accelerates hard is missing half the point. It's a common thing among car enthusiasts.
US Naval doctrine has been a paper tiger ever since that Millenium Challenge exercise.
Military power projection is the reason the US was able to destroy a significant portion of Iranian leadership, nuclear infrastructure, and weapons infrastructure with no retaliation from Iran back in the US nor any pushback from any of Irans allies.
Military hegemony has nothing to do with being a perfect police force that can stop anything from happening anywhere.
>but we still couldn't have stopped them with our vaunted carrier-based power projection, or with our exhausted ABM capabilities.
Who is “we”? Your account started posting nothing but anti-US stances and pro-China/Iran stances since this conflict began.
First, Iran doesn't have allies, it has friends of convenience (Russia like the military cooperation but don't like the cheap oil competition, China love the cheap oil competition but don't care for the damage, etc).
Second, US bases and US allies (in the actual sense of the word) were attacked by Iran, successfully. US and all its allies were also impacted by the trivial closure of the Hormuz. US allies now will forever know that the US is not a reliable ally and can't protect them; stocks of crucial materiel were wasted on achieving nothing; and high oil prices will cost the US domestic politics dearly. US power projection whacked a few nutjobs from a regime full of them. Oh, and they're a theocracy that believes in martyrdom! And the new supreme leader is a strong proponent of nuclear weapons (unlike his predecessor and father), and saw half his family blown up in front of him.
> Military hegemony has nothing to do with being a perfect police force that can stop anything from happening anywhere.
Being unable to enforce your will on an enemy is not "hegemony". Iran will walk out of this conflict with their nuclear programme back on track, a revenge minded regime, and maybe even a toll on an international strait to fill up their coffers.
Military hegemony in the gulf region would mean being able to force Iran to stop attacking gulf targets, rather than negotiating a ceasefire because both sides are hurting. What we have is a multipolar situation, it's not arguable, it's right on the scoreboard.
A hegemon would be able to unilaterally open the straits.
Best for everyone to recognize it and act accordingly. It's got nothing to do with cheerleading, that stuff is for rubes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil#2002_State_of_the...
Iran didn't attack the desalination plants because that would amount to actual warcrimes - and they care about their public perception in the broader community of nations. Unlike, of course, Israel and the USA, who don't mind turning a few schools and hospitals to smithereens.
You might call this "assured non-mutual destruction", and of course it helps that the US is located away from Iran's immediate neighborhood, but destroying the lifelines of the GCC countries would assure an economic collapse globally that the world has never seen before. Imagine something on the lines of oil at $300 a barrel, zero fertilizer, zero semiconductors, zero plastics, the works. And Iran could just as easily turn Israel to glass, with a death by a thousand papercuts (or drones, whatever your flavor). Of course, all of this at a huge cost to itself.
US does not have capability to destroy them. It can make lives of civilians hard, as it tried, but foreigners attacking civilians dont make regimes fall.
Obviously there are many differences, no question. But it's actions like this where a bit of the comparison seems apt -- fervent, nonsensical anti-intellectualism / anti-science actions done purely in the name of ideology.
Why else would one actually go out of the way to dismantle a working ocean observation system, which provides a rich amount of data for multiple purposes?
The only action that seems to make sense is that: A) Some of that data can be used to observe climate change issues. B) In Trumpism, it is not enough anymore to propagandize that climate change is not happening. One must also actively suppress anything that could suggest climate change is happening, no matter how much the cost, no matter how much it hurts other non-related things.
But to be clear, the comment I replied to was one in which you made an abstract point that it doesn't make a difference to someone if you can do something but in practice don't/aren't willing to and I think that this is obviously wrong (just because Lebron didn't dunk doesn't mean he can't or is a bad ball player). You don't like the Lebron analogy, that's fine. Let's use a war analogy: in 2025 Pakistan and India, two nuclear armed countries, exchanged significant fire. Neither was willing to use their nuclear arsenals. Should we now conclude from this that they can't use their nuclear arsenals and are therefore equivalent to being non-nuclear countries? I mean who cares if they have nuclear weapons which can (can't?) kill millions if this one time their political will wasn't there for them to use them in their defense?
> Rather, this is an object lesson that war is politics by other means, and here we tried to do war without any politics and it has not gone well for us.
Be careful not to trip over your rhetoric in an attempt do display profundity. If war is politics by other means, then doing war is always done with politics. This whole statement is word salad nonsense.
The stakes of a given situation matter to the disposition of the participants. Is this not obvious?
I'm really confused as to what your larger point is. Nobody disagrees that the US military can kill untold numbers of people and cause untold damage in Iran and the wider region. Was this the point you wanted to make? Yes, the US military is capable of killing everyone in the region, which would make the Strait "open" again.
> If war is politics by other means, then doing war is always done with politics.
The problem is doing so has not/does not appear to be on a path to achieve the stated political aims of the administration, inasmuch as they have been willing to articulate aims.
Anyway, you're being insulting and not making coherent points. Good evening/morning/afternoon.
(It’s ok, nobody in the administration has read him either. And before you accuse me of partisan hackery, the prior admin was just as incompetent.)
Eradicating species, destroying economies, and eliminating entire ways to enjoy nature's bounty here on earth –– a small price to pay to hurr hur hurrr... own the libs ;)
The DSM needs to be updated soon for this type of sociopathic cynicism. It can't be kept with the rest of society.
The sort of gear that could count atoms from Fukushima drifting across the oceans to end up in HVAC filters in middle North America.
The Just Cash Pallets Over Americans agreement, where Iran was rewarded for all the wrong things and the public kept in the dark.
1. Didn't read them and know that they expire in 10 years.
2. Think that 10 years is a long enough time in the future where whatever happens then doesn't matter to their current goals.
3. Would like to see a nuclear-capable Iran.
For what it's worth, January 2026 already passed 5 months ago.
> Would like to see a nuclear-capable Iran.
Postponing their nuclear programme with at least 10 years is absolutely worth doing. Because realistically you cannot, I repeat, cannot force them to stop it. If the regime wants to continue, it will and their facilities deep under the mountains are impenetrable.
> Or alternatively, in 2026 Iran would have been hooked on closer economic cooperation and trade, (relative) reformers would be in power, and the deal would have been renewed.
That's called imperialism. I believe it's no longer fashionable.
How is that worse than the current situation? Iran is closer to nuclear capability now than in your counterfactual, yet those who disagree with you are the ones who want a nuclear-capable Iran?
What do you mean culture and value system? You think isolation and nuclear weapons are parts of the Iranian culture????
And yes, Iran had multiple bouts of reformer presidents. Reformer within the limits of what the Supreme Leader would allow of course, but there is still a massive gulf of difference between them and the hardliners. A few years of visible economic development under reformers would have nudged things in the reconciliation direction.
Again, yanking the deal, even before the current strikes during negotiations, ensures that Iran will never fully trust the US. So realistically, what other choices do they have other than procure nuclear weapons for protection?
The topic is Iran. A theocracy with an unelected supreme leader with final say on political decisions and candidates for all elections in the otherwise relatively democratic system. Reformer in their context (hence the relative qualifier I used) is people like Ahmadinejad who are for rapprochement and trade with the world, but without too many concessions. We're not talking about socially progressive or "western" or anything of the like. They are infinitely better than the hardliners aligned with the IRGC who are against anything other than autarky and building more strategic security via stuff like nukes. The reformers got their way with the JCPOA, and were proven wrong by the orange moron destroying that. Since then the hardliners have been in power and they are not going anywhere now.
Did you mean Ahmadinejad or Rouhani? The negotiations technically started under Ahmadinejad but Rouhani would be more reasonably considered a reformer, and is probably more relevant in the context of the JCPOA's lifecycle
> people like Ahmadinejad
Oh, this guy:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-23538717
Let's look at some of his policies:
- Holocaust denial
- Calling for the destruction of the state of Israel
- Provided funding, training and arms to Hezbollah and Hamas
- Condemned by the UK, Germany, Austria, and even the UN
- Condemned the Palestinian Authority for holding peace talks with Israel
- A nice quote of his: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country."
Thank you for explaining to all those who won't listen to me because I'm Israel and therefore biased, what a "reformed" Iran would look like. Now they can understand just how hateful the current "unreformed" Iran looks like.
Is Iran, ran by hateful men, but open to trade, integration, reform, inspections and having a lot to lose perfect? Of course it fucking isn't. But realistically it's the best we could have had.
Instead we have Iran ruled by even more hateful men. Men that saw their families blown up in front of them, and have nothing to lose. The economy is already shit, and they don't care about regular people, and as we saw in the recent protests, power structures are intact and they do not hesitate using them to enforce their rule. Men who were demonstrated multiple times that American promises don't mean anything. Those men also have a pretty clear path on how they'd be left alone - Kim's nuclear weapons / threat of destroying Seoul.
How is that any better? It isn't. It's drastically worse for everyone, from the common Iranian suffering under the regime to every single one of us that will have to live under the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons and worldwide economic disruption via Hormuz and direct sabotage.
> open to trade, integration, reform, inspections
The Iranians are as interested in reforming their society into American ideals, as Americans are interested in reforming American society into Iranian ideals.