Note that I was careful to write the EU in the second part, considering that both the Balkans and Ukraine are in Europe.
4,086 karma · joined May 17, 2012
It’s easy to imagine a world where violence between nations was almost forgotten and conflicts were always solved by negotiations and following previous agreements. See what the EU accomplished: can anyone imagine, say, Germany go to war with France today, even considering the history of those countries.
Yes, I’m afraid of wars! I don’t want my children dying alone in the cold mud. I don’t want my grandchildren crying of fear in a shelter. I don’t want our prosperity used to build tanks and airplanes instead of building schools and hospitals and fight climate change.
So I do get all the advantages of a connected device, but if the adapter is bricked, I can easily replace just that small device. And more likely, when there’s a new standard, most of my equipment is unaffected.
The real problem is that a lot of people use everyone else as an excuse to do nothing, and then nothing gets done.
Reading before commenting saves everyone time, not only mine and yours, but everyone else’s that might stumble upon this thread.
It is far from straightforward whether it is better to leave the forests standing or cut down and replant. The forestry industry is of course claiming that a cultivated forest is better for the climate. The environmentalists are claiming that old forests that are left alone are better for the climate and in addition better for ecological diversity.
I tend to believe the side whose income doesn’t depend on their claim.
Because it is just plain wrong. And it glorifies military spending and war. Just because the military complex has so much money that their spare change dwarfs many other sources of research funding doesn't mean it is money that couldn't have been used much more efficiently if it was spent wisely from the start.
And about the plain wrong part:
> You have WW2 to thank for nuclear technology,
The fundamental research was done before the war by the international scientific community, and in particular people from Germany and Italy. The hard part done during the Manhattan project was to develop the industrial processes to produce enough fissile material to make the bombs, but making the bombs from that was fairly trivial.
> lasers
Were first created in 1961.
> the space race.
It has been argued that the reason we stopped going to the moon and beyond is that the rush during the Cold War made it too expensive to continue. A more paced development would have been sustainable and would have gone much further.
> Even QM takes on military funding to take it from niche curiosity to applied research and real world impact.
Why do you think so?
In the end, imagine a world where even a fraction of all the money spent on military was spent on research directly instead.