> However, given this study applied a heterogeneous ASB formula, it could not adequately consider the role of specific artificial sweeteners. Further research is needed to evaluate the potential effect of different artificial sweeteners and their doses on health.
The estimates I’ve seen say they lost/used 33% of their conventional capacity, 33% was rendered inoperable but recoverable.
I’d guess with the ceasefire, they’re probably back to 40-50% online.
The nuclear capability story is even worse: they were mostly mothballed prewar, suffered partial refinement damage and minimal stockpile loss. Refinement will be back online sometime in the next few years (unless this is a forever war), with weapons following shortly after that.
We were burning a year worth of global patriot manufacturing capacity every day at the beginning of the war. Math says we slowed down and are also running out.
What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones?
The only thing I can come up with is “war crimes”, but, as Iran pointed out, if you can afford an aircraft carrier, you have trillions of dollars of easily hit civilian targets, so you pretty much automatically lose if the other side retaliates in kind.
> What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones?
What makes you think they can't?
Ignoring some kind of dedicated anti-drone missile systems that they could equip (if you're just hitting drones you could probably carry like 500 tiny missiles or something, who knows), you can just go and destroy whatever platform is carrying the drones, since your carrier aircraft is pretty much going to outrange it by definition.
China’s selling cheap cruise missiles. They come in unmarked shipping containers, so they can reach any target globally, as long as it is within a few hundred miles of a shipping route.
Now, consider how many drones can be manufactured in garages using a shipping container full of components and 3d printer filament.
(Doing it that way means the drone designs improve continuously and with minimal manufacturing lag after tactics shift.)
Electrifying the economy with renewables (and I’ll count nuclear as renewable) is the single most important thing countries can do right now to ensure their own military and economic security.
Distributed solar and wind are more difficult to bomb than nuclear, so they’re probably a slightly better choice (especially if they’re built to island / work off grid).
Non-nuclear renewables ("intermittables") need something else as back up. That is almost always natural gas.
That's been causing a lot of problems for Europe for years now.
There's the dependence on Russia, there's the dependence on the North Sea supply -- and the full-scale invasion started while the Danish fields were off-line -- and there's the dependency on LNG imports from actors that are either unreliable (the US) or far away (the US and Qatar) or both. LNG is also quite expensive.
Stockpiling doesn’t really do much vs. investing in manufacturing.
Contrast the US in the civil war or wwii to the current situation. In both those wars, civilian factories were rapidly converted for the war and manufacturing capabilities were ramped fast.
In Iran, we’ve burned through years or decades of manufacturing capacity and probably used up most of our top tier stockpile.
That only exhausted/destroyed about 33% of Iran’s cruise missile stockpiles. It’s unclear what it did to their drone manufacturing capabilities. It guaranteed they’ll pursue nuclear capabilities moving forward.
At the same time, US investment in manufacturing is tanking due to warmongering and isolationist economic policies.
Iran stalemated us in a month or two, and all the trends I see (education, manufacturing, high tech innovation) point to US capabilities eroding rapidly in the short to medium term.
Being able to stockpile is not the goal, it's a pre-requisite. Having a serious manufacturing capability helps to scale, but you can't convert an iphone assembly line to ballistic missile interceptors, and especially when you don't produce the interceptors at some low rate. There is a lot of technology and know-how that goes into those capabilities, and both get lost if they aren't exercised.
But that means either trashing the output in a few months (emulating Ukraine), or being able to stockpile.
Why would you waste the factory output during peacetime?
It seems like pork spending to me. Put the factories to good use, and maybe have 1% of output go to prototypes; 10% to dual use.
Miniaturization of weaponry (like drones) makes this even more attractive. Also, a iPhone factory (if such a thing existed) could certainly convert to drone manufacturing in short order. Aluminum and glass aren’t great materials for drones, but aluminum is useful for things like machinery that manufactures plastic.
That's because the modern weapon tech tree is vast and complex. It's not factorio, there are no factories that can switch from producing DSLRs to MWIR cameras. A playdough factory can't cast solid rocket motors. A Tesla manufacturing line can't just switch to welding 10cm steel slabs for tanks. Moreover, those military-relevant processes and techniques require know-how that gets lost if the processes are not run.
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.
The fertilizer and helium shortages are unfortunate, but expensive gas has ~ doubled global demand for EVs. That’s an ecological miracle, given the idiocy of the US government. That’s probably where the good news ends though.
If spent on humanitarian aid shortfalls, the funds wasted by just the US on this war could have saved 87M lives:
To put that in relative terms: WWII killed ~85M globally; 2/3 of them were civilians. So that’s killed 150% as many as the war crimes committed by Stalin, Hitler and the Japanese occupation of China combined.
I don’t mean to minimize the famine that’s definitely coming later this year.
I can’t decide if the economy has bifurcated or if these inflation stats are totally bogus.
Diesel is almost $7/gallon here. All the stuff we buy (food, services, electronics) are up 30-100% since the beginning of last year, but federal inflation stats claim 3%.
Gas is certainly bifurcated. The west coast is paying up to $5.80 and Texas/midwest are paying $3.20 or so. NY and New England is paying a lot, but from Virginia on down, they are paying less. All the midwest is paying close to texas prices except Illinois, which is paying California prices.
Some of that is differences in taxes, but some of it is due to getting gas from different sources. If we had a pipeline from Texas to CA, there would be less bifurcation.
In terms of food being bifurcated, that too is happening, but to a smaller degree.
Basically the entire West coast is suffering from high inflation.
For the national 3% average to hold, for the low end of my range (30%) to hold on the west coast, the rest of the country would have to be suffering from deflation.
You’re probably better off drinking cane sugar soda because it is more filling than HFCS soda.
Anyway orange juice is probably better still. At least it has some vitamin C and maybe trace fiber in it.
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