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Monday’s Forum
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22 responses to “Monday’s Forum”
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Relevant or irrelevant.
US-Iran ceasefire set to expire with talks at a standstill
The fragile monthlong ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran appears set to expire Monday absent a last-minute deal to extend it and potentially end the war between the two nations.
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How to kill an industry:
Once Globally Preeminent, U.S. Universities Are Sliding Into Decline
American colleges and universities rose to the ranks of the best in the world. They attracted top scholars who won a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes. They helped drive the innovation economy. As trade deficits beset other industries, education became the sixth-largest U.S. services export. At their peak enrollment, international students brought in more than $40 billion a year.
Now, as a new academic year begins, American dominance in higher education globally is incontrovertibly in decline, according to data, international rankings, and independent experts.The slide has been accelerated by a year and a half of funding cuts, restrictions on international students and curbs on what can be said or taught. But it began before those political challenges, with enrollment declines, lackluster returns on ever-rising prices, and public mistrust.
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Top scholars are leaving. Fewer international students are coming. U.S. universities are slipping in international rankings. And American universities have failed to keep pace as other countries pour resources into their higher education systems.Read the whole article. Lots of numbers backing up the assertions.
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How to win friends and influence people.
President Trump threatened Monday to bomb Oman if the country “gets in the way” of U.S. efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war with Iran, according to Fox News. Earlier, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said Tehran had reached an agreement with Oman regarding future shipping routes in the strait.
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I still think too many people, and El Taco, believe nukes is magic, because it took one (2) to end WWII!
Now and then there are offhand, almost throwaway, mentions in histories of the 50s and 60s, that some General (namely MacArthur and LeMay*), that using nukes in Korea and Vietnam would have given the US overwhelming victories in both.
How they’d be used is never explained. Korea was a more conventional war with front lines and massed armies. It also involved China (which at the time had no nukes of its own), and the USSR in indirect roles like the supply of weapons and training. A nuke used either on the front lines, or on Pyongyang or even a Chinese city to force a surrender WWII style, would certainly have escalated matters. they had few nukes at the time, but I can see them use one or two in retaliation.
Vietnam was mostly a guerilla war, for which a battlefield nuke seems useless. In any case, the Soviets were involved as well, again in support, and had far more nukes and better delivery means by then.
I don’t think Mad Vlad would like El Taco Loco to nuke his ally. Xi might not appreciate it, either. Nukes now number in the thousands, there are ICBMs that can reach any part of the US and Europe and Asia in minutes, and yields for many of them are in megatons now.
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The destruction wrought on on several German and Japanese cities by conventional bombing was in the nuclear range (at the lower end of the scale).
In the case of Japan, a faction in the Japanese government that won over the emperor was already convinced the war was lost, and looking for an exit.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided them with a means to face down the military hardliners.
Some of whom still attempted a coup to prevent capitulation.I seriously doubt that Hitler would have ever contemplated surrender even if, as easily could have happened with a slight shift in the timelines, nuclear weapons had been used against Germany.
Or that a a coup against Hitler was likely to succeed.-
I’m still looking for a way to falsify conterfactuals.
Had uranium separation gone a little faster, or started sooner, or had the war in Europe progressed a bit differently, one can see two nukes assembled and ready to be used before VE Day.
If the difference is small enough, say nukes by early April 1945, when Elon’s Germany was nearly defeated, I can see one reason why FDR, or Truman a week or so later, might have nuked a German city anyway: to scare the living sh*t out of the advancing Red Army. They might have even targeted a city in view of Red Army units.
Had Elon refused to surrender even after two such attacks, I imagine less insane German nazis might have fed him to his pet dogs and surrendered.
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Over at Neurologica, Dr. Novella asks whether we can terraform Mars
TL;DR: Very likely probably not.
Assuming a large space based industrial base (and rainbows and unicorns while we’re at it), I can see ways to capture comets, and maybe fragments of Saturn’s rings, and ease them on to the surface of Mars where they can be melted. Also to place incredibly HUGE mirrors in orbit to reflect more sunlight on the surface, especially on the nigh side (thus ruining nights forever). This could take anywhere from decades to centuries, and a magnetic field to shield for radiation and prevent atmospheric erosion would still be lacking*.
BTW, the much overhyped Xtarship has yet to go into orbit, deploy a single gram of anything into orbit, recover an upper stage, or even test the upper stage thermal shielding at orbital return speeds.
From more technical stuff I’ve come across recently, it looks like Adolf’s promises as regards payload capacity (either to low Earth orbit or geostationary orbit) and cost per launch, were exaggerated (shocker!!!!)
Some analysts think at best Xtarship may lift as much as a Xalcon 9 Heavy. That’s not a terrible deal, but there’s already a Xalcon 9 Heavy that does not require however many billions Adolf has poured into Xtarship, and does not risk damage to the launchpad for recovering the boosters. True, the upper stage is not recoverable and much less reusable. I don’t think this justifies the added expense Xtarship ahs incurred, and who know what the actual launch costs will be, even for deploying the latest generation of Xtarlink satellites, which are XpaceS’s actual business.
*I’m looking into whether a sufficient number of rotating dipoles can be deployed around a planet to make up a sort of magnetic field around it. Rotating dipoles do generate a magnetic field, albeit a small one. So you’d need lots of them.
But imagine spending trillions to provide Mars with an atmosphere and surface water, only watch both erode away by the solar wind over a millennium or so.
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You sell Martian real estate. Or, better yet, lease it. Then charge people for passage, then for air, food, and water. It’s a rust-colored gold mine!
BTW, given the dystopian and increasingly ridiculous nature of the broligarchs, I wonder how many (Adolf) have thought “What if we just took Earth’s atmosphere to Mars?
Force people to pay for passage and leased land, and air, food, and water.
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imho terrforming Mars may well be possible, but likely to only be so on the scale of centuries.
I can see no viable way this can be carried out by any capitalist enterprise; highly hypothetical return on investment in at best a hundred years time seems unlikely to attract shareholders.
I’ve seen varying arguments about whether radiation would or would not screw the pooch, given the shielding effect of a denser atmosphere.
But atmosphere loss is likely to require a continual steady replenishment source of some sort.
A constant inflow of directed ice dust from the outer moons, perhaps?I wonder how long it would take to neutralise the Martian toxic soil chemistry.
And to bind the dust fines into mud.All things considered, the Sahara Desert or the high Arctic are far more easy to utilise by orders of magnitude.
But few people seem inclined to bother.As that’s the case on Earth, I see little incentive to move to Mars.
(Though I hope that won’t stop Elron from departing asap)-
The only reasons to land people on Mars are scientific. We’d learn a lot more about geology if we could examine a planet as thoroughly as we’ve examined Earth. And also about other fields. If by chance some kind of microbial life exists, or even is found to have existed, we’d learn a hell of a lot about biology.
Arguably such things can be accomplished with probes, especially as we make better and more capable robot explorers.
However, you’ll never get Apollo levels of funding for probes, no matter how important the research is. And, to be honest, there’s better things to spend money on research on earthly matters like infectious disease, cancer, clean energy, waste reduction, etc.
The current mania for landing NASA astronauts on the Moon comes from China’s intention to land their people and set up a base there. And that hasn’t elicited Apollo size budgets for NASA.
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For some reason I remembered that the Squirrel Nut Zippers exist (It happens, there’s nothing inherently wrong with them, but I can go years without thinking of them), and in particular their song “Bad Businessman”
There’s a man going around in this town selling lies
He’s the bad businessman
And the mess he sells is bad
And the mess he leaves is sad
He’s a clown
That’s going to get bounced around
If he don’t keep his business underground
He’s a player
But every time he deals a round
It’s a bad hand
What a bad man
Beware of what he sells
It’s shooting you straight to hell
“Tain’t no bottom in that wishing well
Bad businessmanDecades before Trump rode down the golden escalator, and there they are, warning us. Why did we take all the wrong lessons for the inexplicable swing revival of 1996-7?
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Trump Tells 10 Year Old He Would Have Let Him Drown
Nathanial Rai had been swept off his feet along the California coast, was rescued by a 16-year-old lifeguard – and was now sitting in the Oval Office with Donald Trump.
Of the rescuer, Ryder Williams, Trump said to Rai: “He’s a real hero. I don’t know if I’d do it.
“I wouldn’t, probably. You’re lucky I wasn’t on the service that day.”
Look, I get it, I would have let the kid drown too, but you don’t tell him that. Kid’s going to be at a therapist later in life, complaining about how he’s worthless and capping it off saying “and then the President said he would have just let me drown.”
Lots of ways to just not say anything.
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Would you go to a beach where only luck prevents the lifeguard on duty to be an out of shape, ailing, demented 80 year old who doesn’t give a damn about anyone other than himself?
I wonder, though, if this happens every time he is honest: he ends up looking bad.
This would explain why he otherwise always lies.
Lots of ways to just not say anything.
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” Attributed to Lisa Simpson.
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Since Reagan, Republican’s have been shills for big business, helping them screw the little guy at every chance. Remember the “let’s get government out of services, they don’t know how to run a business, the private sector will do it all for half the cost and twice the service” of the 80’s and 90’s? Here’s what happened to the suckers that believed their nonsense. Hundreds of dollars a month, even $1000 for a water bill and people bathing once a week.
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I tend to think that you there is a way to have private enterprise manage government resources or deliver government services. But the incentives have to be aligned with the public good*, and the costs have to include a regulatory and oversight infrastructure.
I want to believe that having the regulators being as separate from the implementers is a good thing, so private companies offering services seems good.
But it never works out that way, does it?
I am a filthy neoliberal being slowly backed into a corner of socialism by the repeated and incessant failures of privatization.
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*: turning a profit by denying services is a definite no-no.Getting a cut of money saved when identifying fraud that results in charges and/or convictions… sure. Up until we discover the private company is tricking people into committing fraud so they can detect it.
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I can say telephone service improved a great deal when Mexico’s government privatized the state phone monopoly, Telmex, and then allowed competition in the sector.
The second might have more to do with improvements than the first. Plus landline service, even including broadband, has changed so much, I’ve no clue whether it’s still mostly Telmex or there are other players…
But, to illustrate. When my brother moved after getting married in the late 80s, the wait for a phone line was so long, he wound up getting one of the early bricks that served as cell phones at the time. This was before cell operators subsidized phones with long term contracts, and cell service was hideously expensive.
On the other hand, while the national electric utility is still a state enterprise, and there’s no competition for residential service, the service it provides ahs improved a great deal. Fewer blackouts or power failures, and a more regular voltage overall. It’s also far more expensive.
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The Iranians land a zinger on the claim they are trying to assassinate Trump. “Trump is already destroying the United States. We do not want to eliminate him.”
Hard to argue with that.
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