When Nazi Germany was occupying the rest of Europe, it also labelled any inside movement of resistance as Terrorism. International law recognizes both occupation and colonization as crimes. Labeling and merging the Palestinians into a single entity called "the terrorists" is a lazy attempt to deny the legitimate claim for freedom and self-determination of an indigenous populations.
the Netherlands (and most of the European countries) has the skills to build nukes and ICBM in 6 months if it wanted to. The tech is 80 years old at this point.
Let me draw your attention to "Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons" (1995)[0]. Basically, it takes a nation state 4 years to develop its first nuclear weapon, and no amount of explicit knowledge-sharing speeds up the process. The only thing that speeds up the process is sharing tacit knowledge by embedding a nuclear scientist who has already been through the process.
> the Netherlands (and most of the European countries) has the skills to build nukes and ICBM in 6 months if it wanted to
Eh, probably not. The Dutch have a serious nuclear power economy [1]. But procuring and refining the uranium would take at least a year. Their larger strategic deficit in long-range missile production (or a civil launch industry).
Because of the counter-intuitive way uranium enrichment works, enrichment from natural uranium to commercial reactor fuel takes more separative work than going from commercial reactor fuel to bomb material:
Because commercial power reactors consume so much uranium per year, the on-site inventory needed just to produce a year's worth of commercial reactor fuel is enough to make many bomb cores. Nuclear breakout could be very fast if the Netherlands were willing to endure all the diplomatic consequences of withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
I agree about the longer timeline to develop a ballistic missile system that could deliver a warhead.
They'd more likely get sanctioned to death or invaded if they tried. Have you noticed what happens to "have nots" that try (or are accused of trying) to become the "haves" in the nuclear game?
Also, like 'JumpCrisscross notices, weapons themselves are but half of the equation - the other one is delivery. A few nukes and a trigger-happy dictator can get everyone to back away and indulge you some (see: North Korea), but to play at the big table, you need to have the capacity to deal a serious blow to another country (see: lesser nuclear powers) - but no one will let you get to that point. Nuclear-capable countries are not particularly keen on there being more of them.
> They'd more likely get sanctioned to death or invaded if they tried
Sanctions, maybe. Invaded, almost certainly not. If there is a consistent theme to American, Chinese and Russian foreign policy over the last 30 years, it's that there is a nuclear sovereignty respected above all.
If recent history proves anything, it's that nuclear sovereignty is the only form of actual sovereignty today. But what I'm saying is, the major players don't want anyone new to join the "nuclear club", so they'll stop those trying before they develop that capability.
Despite what 'Qiu_Zhanxuan wrote, you can't actually go from 0 to nuclear sovereignty in 6 months, and you definitely can't hide that you're doing it for long.
> you can't actually go from 0 to nuclear sovereignty in 6 months, and you definitely can't hide that you're doing it for long
No, but you can go from 0 to "possibly nuclear everyone yell about it," and stay there until you're actually nuclear.
Nobody will do anything about possibly nuclear. And nobody will do anything once you're nuclear. This was the critical hole in non-proliferation, and for a while it worked, because everyone pretended nuclear sovereignty wasn't a thing, but now that it is there is--and should be--a race to who are the regional powers, and who are subsurvient to them. The Netherlands have a history of being conquered and being rich. It makes sense for them to be a nuclear sovereign.
Unironically, I think this is one of the "main benefits" that the disconnected people in places of power seems to covet. They won't have a human operator that will do their dirty jobs and potentially leaks the truth out of guilt.
I'm bearish on 'ai war' but this sounds like a huge positive if it comes to fruition because war would become more about two sides trying to kill each each sides leaders, instead of these leaders sending masses of doe eyed young people off to die for them.
If politicians had real skin in the game there'd be far less war.
That's already being done. Saddam Hussein was quickly killed, and what followed? Same goes for Ghaddaffi. Israel has killed a lot of leaders and is clearly not satisfied with having done that.
What they want is border and population control that involves very few ordinary citizens, in large part in expectation of something like hundreds of millions of climate refugees. After having spent a couple of years killing and maiming poor people with almost nowhere to go you tend to need quite a bit of medical care and usually join the anti-war movement regardless if you got a college degree out of it or not.
I find it likely we'll see gun mounted robodog patrols along occidental borders within ten years from now, after having tested it on populations elsewhere.
The lifecycle emission of an electric car is on average a total of 10T of C02-equivalent. Contrast that the ~40T with a fuel-powered gas or electricity generated from a coal plant. It's still a reduction-factor of 3 to 4.
Source : https://www.carbone4.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcarbo...
(accounting for electricity from a Nuclear Power plant in France, VH = hybrid, VE = electric, Thermique = Combustion Engine)
Granted, it would be better to have no car at all but on this front, the US is doomed.
> My comment is that the lifespan of a car in the US is short (5 years, 10?) so ICE vs EV more or less evens out?
The average car in the US is 12.6 years old, implying that the average car has a total lifespan of something like 25 years (because the average car will be average, i.e. currently at around half of its total lifespan).
> Considering old cars are exported to poor countries, that is another reason in favor of ICE since EV are a no go here.
I don't think anybody chooses a new car based on what kind of charging infrastructure might be available to third hand purchasers in other countries in 20 years.
What could possibly make you think cars only last 5 years in the US??? You’re just pulling numbers out of your ass to rationalize the conclusion you already made, that they even out. Neither of them are true.
European talking but do you feel the proportion of tax being wasted has increased or decreased since the last 2 decades ? Did public service got better or worse ? Social program ? Education ? Foreign Policy ?
I always felt that America had low taxes and most of it was used to deliver the bare minimum services (police, defense, public servant, social program) or even below (public schools, teacher, justice, IRS...) what is necessary for a society to sustain itself.
I see tax wasting increasing. For example my local and state government spend lots of taxes on funding activist / social justice programs that are simply not wanted by most citizens but are still pushed through by dedicated extremist activists. These programs always have generic names and goals like “community building” and they achieve nothing, except handing out our hard earned money to politician’s friends (who they can count on for election support) and their political causes. Meanwhile basic government functions like policing and prosecution and education are failing.
Here’s one example among a LONG list of grifts that illustrates how reckless politically biased elected officials can be with everyone else’s money - spending millions so some activist group can run a minor survey:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-s...
Another example: here, funding for public schools has increased a huge amount - it is more than double what it was a decade ago. Our schools spend something like 20-25K USD per student per year now. But the schools are in poor physical condition, the quality of education is low, programs like music are on the chopping block, many schools are being closed to save money, the teachers and their unions are unaccountable for performance, and the school/district leaders are focused on political battles like injecting ethnic studies into math (https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/new-course-outlin...).
The thing is government programs are generally not held to any standard of performance and accountability, and citizens don’t have much time to watch over them. Spending and budgets always go up not down, because there is always some dedicated group fighting to extract something for themselves. The leaders who are enabling all this act in ways that ensure election and re election, not good results for their citizens. And they act in favor of their personal political and ideological goals instead of being neutral. This type of “corruption” then causes many people to want to just reduce taxes because they’re not even getting the basics they thought they already pay for. I don’t have a solution, I just think it is some kind of spiral that leads to people believing taxes are wasted more as time goes on.
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