My main take away from your comment is that Keith Alexander is Enabran Tain & that I feel like the US is approximating the Cardassian Union more everyday.
The existence of nuclear weapons has rendered traditional warfare unprofitable, except against the very weak, and even in those cases only military contractors benefit.
We invaded and occupied Iraq and didn't even get any oil, just a trillion or so in national debt. At least in the time of Rome citizen soldiers were titled large swaths of land in the conquered territories.
I expect in the long drawn out economic warfare to come that cyber espionage and surveillance to be critical advantages & well connected military contractors with access to the NSA's total information awareness database to profit handsomely from insider trading.
Update & Question:
I'm taking a short break from work and wondering why this comment has been down voted twice?
Instead of down voting & unless you just hate ST: DS9 references, can you provide a plausible argument against the inevitability that tapping the entire world's communications will not lead to insider trading?
There are so few terrorists in the world, and so many opportunities to profit from having early access to employment reports, corporate revenue numbers and other economic data.
Please give me a compelling reason why a wiretap on all the worlds communications is more likely to be used to catch terrorists than for simple greed?
>We invaded and occupied Iraq and didn't even get any oil, just a trillion or so in national debt. At least in the time of Rome citizen soldiers were titled large swaths of land in the conquered territories.
The trillions in national debt benefits somebody. Somebody somewhere gets those interest payments and they wouldn't have if the U.S had not borrowed from them.
Yes, but the cost far outweighs the benefits. The world (and the economy) is not a zero-sum game. People usually say that when they want to state that value can be created, but it cuts both ways. The fact that it's not a zero-sum game means that value can be destroyed.
We blew a trillion bucks on nothing useful. That's destroyed value. That somebody is benefitting in some small way from the side effects of this doesn't change that fact overall.
To reduce it to more comprehensible terms, imagine that I take out a $10,000 loan to buy a car, then crush that car into a cube. That's one less car in the world than before. That's a waste of $10,000 in value. That my creditors benefitted because they got interest off the loan doesn't change that fact.
This is an interesting question, what is value? What I took away from my econ classes long ago is that it's hard to determine the value of something outside of price (objectively). So if the hypothetical US taxpayer is satisfied with the perceived security they got from building
expensive machines, transporting them to the other side of the world, and blowing them up, then it's hard to argue with him.
This perspective, horribly, leans towards moving the large bulk of defense spending into the category of non-essential goods like cable tv, or beer, football, shopping at pottery barn. This is spending with a focus on the psychological state the good induces.
On the other hand, a true believer in the project of us military probably really feels that resources spent on war are actually essential to survival and should be categorized with spending on food, shelter,medical care, insurance.
Yep, excellent points there. I think my beliefs about the value of the war are superior to others' (because I'd change them if I didn't think that!) so I'd just call those people wrong and say that value really was destroyed. But, of course, I could be the one who is wrong.
If this was all capitalistic private enterprise, it would be much simpler. The people who saw value in it would contribute whatever money they thought was worthwhile, and that would be the "value" of the effort. I kind of doubt that most of the people who feel the war was necessary would actually put up the $3,000 per person if they had to write a check for it, but who knows.
When you get government involved, the question of value becomes much more complex.
I don't understand. My argument is simply that value can be destroyed, and that people can still benefit during this process even when the value being destroyed greatly dwarfs the benefit. There's nothing about that which requires the cost and benefit to go to the same place.
A car is a depreciating asset, so all crushing it does is accelerate its depreciation. Some utility is lost, but you also have to consider the impact of the 10k. Some went to steel mills, to workers, to dealers, etc. It's not like burning a stack of $100 bills.
If one were especially paranoid, one could note that the massive increase in debt from the Iraq war makes the "starve the beast" approach to government [1] much more plausible.
I don't think the US far right is quite that farsighted or quite that cynical. However, I've historically been too optimistic about the American power elite, so I wouldn't take my word for it.
Oh, come on. Bush went into office to starve the beast from day 1, and that's what we were all talking about when he rammed is stupid tax cuts through congress. That's what was going on when Senators were flipping from R to D until he was distracted by 9/11.
Control of the oil in Iraq is more strategically important than in the one scenario you describe.
As an aside I never read that Hussein had threatened to flood the market, I read that he threatened, as a negotiating tactic, to withhold oil. Do you have a source for the "flooding the market" claim?
For values of "for other things" of creating a massive flood of dollars on the world financial markets, undercutting its value, and precipitating a financial crisis the likes of which the US still hasn't seen.
There's also the theory suggested by some (I've just watched Robert Newberg's "History of Oil" though I've seen the point made elsewhere) that it was the move by Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela to move oil sales from dollars to Euros which had something to do with the war.
Unfortunately those "investments" in war came at a time when investments in the US infrastructure and renewable energy would have paid MUCH bigger dividends.
Just a few days ago was the 75th anniversary of Henry Ford getting a medal from Hitler. I guess we learn from history that we don't learn from history.
Those boys aren't so interested in "starving the beast" as they are in feeding their wealthy constituent-donors. We need campaign finance reform.
And then, it's of course also about redistributing these tax dollars to your own benefit. It's about politicians taking money out of the tax pot and giving it to their friends.
...a "business" which companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. are certainly doing/planning on doing too, at least indirectly, privately or otherwise under the radar.
They can also simply look at the correlations between the movements of their data and the market movements, and then make their predictions and thus investment decisions. It's not even rocket science.
Given their "Big Data" treasures, I don't think they will be able to resist that temptation.
This is another reason why I generally see a future of decentralization: it's simply a concept that's less prone to corruption and failure.
The existence of nuclear weapons has rendered traditional warfare unprofitable, except against the very weak, and even in those cases only military contractors benefit.
We invaded and occupied Iraq and didn't even get any oil, just a trillion or so in national debt. At least in the time of Rome citizen soldiers were titled large swaths of land in the conquered territories.
I expect in the long drawn out economic warfare to come that cyber espionage and surveillance to be critical advantages & well connected military contractors with access to the NSA's total information awareness database to profit handsomely from insider trading.
Update & Question:
I'm taking a short break from work and wondering why this comment has been down voted twice?
Instead of down voting & unless you just hate ST: DS9 references, can you provide a plausible argument against the inevitability that tapping the entire world's communications will not lead to insider trading?
There are so few terrorists in the world, and so many opportunities to profit from having early access to employment reports, corporate revenue numbers and other economic data.
Please give me a compelling reason why a wiretap on all the worlds communications is more likely to be used to catch terrorists than for simple greed?