I don't think anyone engaging in a good faith discussion would make the conclusion you just made.
1,774 karma · joined September 30, 2014
For all their failures, the allies never bombed cities with nerve agents.
But even if you want to do that, why don't you go just a couple more years further and argue that Bosnians should've been left to be genocided?
Have you seen what Russia is doing to Ukraine?
What's wrong with a European company working on not letting the same (or worse) repeat in the Baltic states or Poland?
Living in a hostel with a shared bathroom can cut the biggest expense (rent) by more than half.
Would you?
The savings that can be made from living in a tiny box with a shared bathroom instead of a regular American house are extreme and are much bigger than savings from not owning a car. Do you seriously think that will convince people and we will see the death of dedicated housing units in the near future?
Phil also recommends this lecture in one of his videos [3], which is still one of my all time favourite lectures ever.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@PhilsLab
People buy cars because it's a little bubble of home away from home. They store their stuff in there, it smells like them, and they don't get stranger's vomit on a seat when they want to drive somewhere.
The "people won't buy cars because self-driving" take just completely ignores the human nature.
No, prop drones don't "geometrically catchup". Shahed's extreme range achieved by flying really slow, the top speed (which they don't sustain constantly to conserve fuel) is about 185kph, for the maximum flight time of about 13 hours. US carriers officially can sustain 60kph indefinitely, and in practice they can go faster. That means on a straight line a Shahed can only gain 1600km in the absolute best scenario. In reality it's much less, because launching takes time and the average speed is slower.
The capabilities that you're describing are a fantasy.
Small quad hype is just techbro delusion. Those quads have their place, but the vast majority of the defence toolkit needs to be much more sophisticated. For example, Ukraine is still struggling to manufacture a domestic ballistic missile four years into the war, despite having tons of funding, a ballistic program pre-war, and Western experts willing to help. If western countries stopped low-rate production that normally goes into stockpiles, the timeline to start manufacturing up would be similar.
You're confusing short range, highly Ukraine-specific Group 1 quads with long range OWA drones.
Just for your benefit, stealth coatings and materials (not "paint") are a tertiary defence after shaping and electronic warfare.
Group 3 UAS can't be assembled in homes and office buildings in any meaningful numbers. They are too big. Even Group 2 is marginal. I think you're confusing Group 1 quadcopters with long range OWA drones like Shaheds.
But that means either trashing the output in a few months (emulating Ukraine), or being able to stockpile.
Ukrainian munitions get used up almost immediately. They don't need to stockpile, they are in a steady state wartime production.
On the contrary, peace time countries have to stockpile. A manufacturing line cannot be ramped up from zero to wartime, we need low volume manufacturing to retain the expertise and the supply lines. But that, in turn, means that we have to either trash the entire manufacturing output every few months (which would be insane), or stockpile. The latter option also requires building more capable systems so that the stockpiles are still relevant in a few years.
You can fit three Ukraines between Guam and Taiwan.
Note that the original article doesn't say anywhere that F-35-like capability is not needed.
> The railway can capture the value it creates for me by charging me a fare, but it cannot capture the value it creates for those at my destination. As transport infrastructure creates benefits that produce no revenue for providers, free markets rarely build enough of it.
…but then very confusingly argues that railways should be profitable, including on per-passenger basis. A profitable transport system with positive externalities is inevitably either too expensive or under-investing (or maybe both) with respect to maximising the total economic productivity. Ancillary monopolies in real estate and retail might offset that somewhat, but only to an extent.
Similarly, I don't understand why the article speaks positively of the closure of 83 "loss-making lines". The lines being loss-making for the rail company doesn't mean they aren't improving total productivity, as the very same article argues!
Further, they mention the over-crowding in Tokyo later on
> Tokyo’s infamously crammed trains are a symptom of underpriced rush hour traffic
…but somehow blame it on the price being too low, and not under-investment into more capacity by the commercial companies! People commuting less because they can't afford it would be bad for the businesses on the other side of their commute!
I suppose this is the centre-right ideological slant of Works in Progress showing, which is a bit of a shame when it leads to those self-contradictions in the usually quite rigorous publication.
Kinzhal is just an air-launched version of Iskander with a bit better energetics because of not launching stationary from the ground. It's not a magic superweapon.
Its terminal manoeuvring is hardly new, Pershing II was doing that back in the 70s.
The top speed of a ballistic missile (that you're citing) is not the same as its speed in the interception-relevant section of the flight, because atmosphere gets denser and slows missiles down (and manoeuvring slows MARVs down even further). The Ukrainian operators claim that the observed speed was close to Mach 3.6.
The primary interceptor for the higher energy Kinzhal would be THAAD, not PAC-3. Sadly, Ukraine didn't get THAAD.
"Plasma stealth" is a sci-fi fabrication. The US had no problem tracking ICBM RVs with their much higher speeds close enough for a direct hit during a Sprint test back in the 70s.
I couldn't care less about "winning".
The answer is trivial and well-known: federal-level gun controls (because anything state-level is a joke without hard borders between states), coupled with a buy-back program, amnesties, and real enforcement. There are no school shootings in the UK or Australia.
Unfortunately, there are too many people who'd rather have more guns and more dead kids (and adults) than fewer dead kids and fewer guns around. They'd justify that by talking about "preventing tyranny" or something, ignoring that paramilitaries executing people in broad daylight on camera with no consequences is already the reality of the US today, and guns played zero to negative role preventing that. Coincidentally, there are no such paramilitaries in the UK or in Australia either.
As for "the rights of citizens": there is no such thing as an immutable unconditional right. American citizens don't have a right to own nuclear weapons, neither should they, even though it's perfectly possible to have a very expansive definition of "bearing arms". Plus, the Constitution itself was amended many times in the past, and by now is clearly in need of a major overhaul, as evidenced by the US sliding down in various democracy indices (for example, World Press Freedom Index puts the US under Romania in 2025). So there is nothing impossible or uniquely oppressive about the reforms necessary to stop children being shot in schools, but because it's such a foundational element of identity for so many with a lot of money behind it (the NRA is exceptionally well funded), in practice there's indeed "No Way to Prevent This".
Hypersonic gliders can't be nearly as numerous as ballistic RVs because physics, and they are getting their own interceptor (GPI).
I think this conversation would benefit from splitting theatre ballistic threats (evidently, those are now being effectively countered without 30 to 1 ratios) from strategic threats. For strategic threats, the logic is substantially more complex: even 50% intercept rate greatly complicates counter-force strikes and is valuable. In practice, the rate is substantially higher than 50%.
Chevaline wasn't the only program, the US had its own they didn't end up deploying. Both countries concluded that effective decoys end up weighing roughly the same as warheads.
Your SSPK is way WAY too low. Also, the math on interceptions changes completely with multiple KKVs per interceptor (see NGI).
Decoys don't work even at the highest end (ICBMs), see Chevaline's history and its rapid decomissioning for an example of just that.