The U.S. Military Emits More CO2 Than Many Industrialized Nations (2019)

Another analogous situation is infosec. I used to work in that space, and a big problem companies have is trying to figure out how much money to sink into their infosec teams. Good orgs invest in infosec, but they also don't just give all their profits to those teams. The value proposition of security in general is just hard to measure; that said organizations have a tendency to either massively overinvest (because fear, and it's hard to measure) or underinvest (because you don't need it until something goes wrong). A lot of times they start out underinvested, something bad happens, and then suddenly they're overinvested because they are afraid of bad thing happening again. I think this last description is very apt for the US.

Similarly doesn't take an Einstein to look at US Military budget and compare it to the opportunity costs: with just proportionally small portions of the military budget, we could change education and healthcare dramatically. A healthy well educated populace is actually really important for global competitiveness.

If you've ever worked in a large organization, you know that there's a difference between underfunding an effort and pushing back to force them to prioritize better and become more efficient with resources.

Also, normally in well functioning organizations, there are metrics to measure how efficiently resources are being utilized. The US Military lacks oversight in this dimension.

What in particular about the news abroad tells you the US military is underfunded?

You don't solve them by throwing more money at the fire either. The budget has consistently risen YoY pretty much as long as I've been alive.

> money is being spent to its maximal potential

Historically countries that prioritize military (ex. North Korea) over education and other domestic programs do not succeed against countries with more balanced budgets. We will have to compete with brain drain if academics and entrepreneurs realize they can live better lives elsewhere. We have to be able to offer a country worth defending in order to convince people with good ideas that they should be defending us.

> then there's more capital that can be raised.

By raising taxes? Who would willingly want to pay more taxes to a government that isn't competent enough to safely defend its own land with the largest military in known history?

> Who are you that I or anyone here should care what you personally believe

An American citizen who can vote which qualifies me just as much as the next guy.

> hardly even old enough to drink.

Old enough to serve, old enough to pay taxes, and old enough to be drafted, which qualifies me to have a say even more. Unless you want to argue that I should be able to choose whether my tax money goes to inefficient institutions, in which case I would certainly agree in having that choice.

But I think you would agree that everyone should get a say in where their money is spent.

> general ethos driving China's debt-driven expansion

If China was serious about challenging the US any time soon it would be making serious strides to decouple its economy from the Western world, which so far has not happened and doesn't appear to be on the horizon. In fact I would argue the US's trade war is the closest we've come to forcing a division, but it appears that things are just going to go back to normal now, and China is willing to continue having the US as its largest customer.

China is obviously undergoing large scale economic growth and citizens everywhere are climbing up the poverty ladder, but that's not a sign of war nor should it be a pretense for one. Get back to me when Chinese aircraft carriers (when they build more, anyways) are sitting off the coast of NYC. Until then, this is just strongman bluffing. Every country in that region has a history of human rights abuses. Why is China the only one that we think will force us to conform to their ideals?

Relevant study:

https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/handle/123456789/52153

We contribute to the extensive literature on international influences on democratization and democratic breakdowns by conceptualizing hegemonic mechanisms of regime change and assessing them empirically. Our findings are based on a multi-methods approach and highlight the varying importance of hegemonic influences in post-1945 Latin America. We argue that US support for democratization was consistent in the wave of transitions to democracy that began in Latin America in 1978 and that it was decisive in many of these transitions. While past work has attributed responsibility to the US for the waves of democratic breakdowns from 1948 to 1956 and 1964 to 1976, an examination of the 27 breakdowns from 1945 to 2010 gives reason to doubt this interpretation. Future research could use these conceptual and methodological tools to explore the role of other powers in waves of democracy and authoritarianism.

* concentration camps for Asian-related ( including born in the Us to mixed Asian heritage) people during WWII * genocides against native Americans * sponsoring regimes like Pol Pot, Pinochet, Batista, etc * invasions with hundreds of thousands of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan * illegal detainment and torture of people in Guantanamo and other black sites

This doesn’t make what China is doing okay, nor does China make our crimes matter less. That kind of morally relativistic thinking makes it way too easy to justify crimes against humanity.

For the human kind, no there is no doubt that we will survive.

But don't act like it's nothing. Here's one of many examples https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3322

>Around 30% of the world’s population is currently exposed to climatic conditions exceeding this deadly threshold for at least 20 days a year. By 2100, this percentage is projected to increase to ∼48% under a scenario with drastic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and ∼74% under a scenario of growing emissions.