- science4sailYeah, this article appears to be from 2023
- > One singular nuclear warhead can be enough to eradicate the entire population in the US.
How big would this warhead be? "One singular nuclear warhead" wasn't enough to eradicate the entire populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, much less Japan.
- 2029? Wouldn't that be in the Vance or third Trump administration? Why would they send those CEOs to prison?
- A lot of Hacker News posters work for Google and/or SaaS crapware companies. There's economic self interest at play here.
- But how does raising awareness help anything in this case? In the current political climate, companies are likely more afraid of presidential punishment for not supporting Israel than of any public disapproval for supporting Israel.
- > This is easier than it sounds from a military perspective because Israel is small and simple to isolate.
Does that sort of thing even work against nuclear powers? You could certainly isolate them like North Korea, but no country would be willing to invade for fear of seeing a mushroom cloud over their capital.
- I thought that there were only four planets? Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune
- The banner doesn't always seem to display; here's the direct link to the White House YouTube if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLhwIQUE0DU
- Tax havens aren't immune to economic disaster though. If the US dollar becomes worthless, then it doesn't matter how many dollars you have in your offshore bank account. Ditto if you're storing wealth as equities or bonds. Real estate value will collapse if tenants can't pay rent or if the local government decides to confiscate land.
I suppose that you could keep gold or bitcoin wallets in a vault, but then it actually belongs to the vault guards, not to you.
Basically you need a collapse that's bad enough to shrink asset prices but not bad enough to break the social contact.
- > Nvidia, the report said, will “continue to spare no effort” to make products that comply with regulations and “unswervingly serve the Chinese market.”
> A few weeks ago, Mr. Huang met with Mr. Trump in Mar-a-Lago at a dinner that cost $1 million per person.
Nvidia reminds me of third-world countries during the Cold War - playing off superpower suitors against each other. Potentially very lucrative, but also a very dangerous game.
- I don't understand this question - professional wrestling is a form of sport/entertainment and generally irrelevant to international relations. Is "wrestling" supposed to be a metaphor for something else?
- After looking at the author's bio, I don't think that the author of this article is particularly specialized in the Middle East. They probably have the same level of understanding of the area's ethnography as most Americans: an Arab is anyone who isn't an Israeli.
Therefore, Persians, Assyrians, Kurds, and Lawrence of Arabia are all Arabs. It's unclear where Arab Israelis fall in this taxonomy.
- The article notes that state backed entities and the Chinese government itself are showing interest in DeepSeek. The investment money may be "an offer that they can't refuse".
- If you're okay with just a flyby of the Voyager probes though, then you can use a laser sail. Breakthrough Starshot[1] is aiming for 60,000 km/s of delta-v. Lightsails have already been demonstrated several times in practice[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail#Projects_operating_...
- It's definitely doable. The "'Momentum Limited' Orion" concept[0] has a delta-v of 10,000 km/s, which should be plenty enough to catch up to either of the Voyager probes. It can also carry ~25,000 tons of payload - that's a lot of spare parts!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
- As a thought experiment, if one wanted to advantage labor over capital, then a durable way to do so would be to engineer a simultaneous labor shortage and a capital surplus. The amazing Silicon Valley employee perks of the 2010s were the product of such an environment.
Labor shortages can be induced by cutting supply: the Black Death was a famous example of this. More modern ways to do so could be reducing the birthrate or deporting able-bodied, working-age immigrants.
Capital surplus can occur if there is too much cash and not enough investment opportunities. Importing more rich people and printing money can accomplish the former. Low interest rates and technological stagnation can accomplish the latter. War is also an option: war profiteering is a poor investment since the losing side's investors often get their assets confiscated as loot or reparations.
One risk of this approach is that retirement becomes near-impossible. This is because retirees are capital holders: either directly via defined-contribution pensions or indirectly via annuities (defined-benefit pensions). The only way to retire will be if one has kids (or at least younger friends) willing to support them.
Another risk of this is that the capital class will try to defy economics by abolishing civil rights and re-instituting slavery or serfdom. After all, it worked for Constantine...
- Don't most billionaires have at least some of their assets in the American financial ecosystem? If so then one could find buyers via extortion: first sanction them or freeze their assets, then make permanent residents and citizens exempt from sanctions.
- When I hear about ESR nowadays, it's usually in the context of extreme right-wing politics. I'm not sure whether that's an accurate description of the man or a smear campaign against him.
That said, if you dig into the Jargon File on catb.org, you can find some interesting descriptions of how ESR perceived his hacker[0] community.
[0]Notably, his "hackers" are computer programmers from the ARPANET, USENET, and 1990s Internet cultures. Not cybercriminals or Silicon Valley startup founders.
- What other jobs? I guess that they could pull a fall-of-the-Soviet-Union scenario and sell their skills to foreign countries? Surely there must be a lot of countries interested in starting their own nuclear weapons programs in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war.
- Probably similar given the same yield unless the bomber has some way to utilize the kinetic energy of the orbit.
The difference though is that a nuking from orbit has less chance of retaliation since the aggressor is no longer on the same planet (unless the victim has ASAT weapons).