> we can make sure the United States is prepared to stop a conflict and save countless lives
> building something incredibly cool and want to make a positive difference in geopolitics
Someone has never used their critical thinking skills. MLK Jr said the US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. These missiles won't be used against rogue states, they'll be used to kill innocent people and children in the poorer countries that aren't behaving like the empire wants.
> These missiles won't be used against rogue states, they'll be used to kill innocent people and children in the poorer countries that aren't behaving like the empire wants.
They’re antiship missiles. Are there innocent children on missile cruisers somewhere I am unaware of?
Cruisers? These are meant for stuff like destroyers. Wimpy stuff that can't put up the defense a cruiser could.
I do agree, however, that anti-ship missiles will always be aimed at military targets. You use missiles to penetrate hostile airspace. If you don't need standoff capability you can put more boom on target cheaper with a laser guided bomb.
This is conflating different things. Most people want the US to be able to defend itself and potentially others. But almost all of the military conflicts the US has been involved in lately have had dubious value to that end.
Once you build a better weapon, you can’t control how it will be used anymore.
Yeah, that's what the mafia guys will tell you when they come round to collect their protection money. "We keep you safe". What they don't say: "... from people like us".
I agree that the cheer leading for military products strikes me as disconcerting.
But let's keep this in perspective. A cheap anti-ship missile available in large quantities has a very focused purpose in the near term: to deter China from an invasion of Taiwan. Such a prospect would be tremendously bad for the entire world, and turning Taiwan into a missile toting equivalent of a porcupine might be worth it if it prevents such a disastrous invasion.
The deaths you describe won’t be changed by these type of products.
These types of weapons are critical in actual, legitimate wars where enemies have air defense systems, large front lines, and thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops. Particularly, if air defenses are present, you have to evade them or overwhelm them. The Russia-Ukraine war has largely demonstrated the later wins out.
The American airstrikes on defenseless “assets” in foreign nations will continue to use high value, precision weapons. The strikes are generally limited in nature and unlikely to be intercepted by air defense systems.
Potentially nothing, but apartment buildings don't move, so an artillery shell at one-hundredth the cost would probably be the preferred option anyway for nations motivated toward such things.
Well, I've seen our allies use a $249,000-a-pop FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile against a solitary soldier where a $0.49 rifle shell would do [1], so I don't price matters. Especially when we're giving the stuff away.
Nothing, but they can do that already. Since residential apartments don’t often come with anti-air defenses, they’ll be guaranteed a hit with a high quality, precision missile.
These missile are about overwhelming quantities in a hostile environment. We’re basically seeing this in the Russia-Ukraine war, in two different ways:
* some missiles attacks will be a mix of high precision weapons and loads of low precision weapons. The low precision weapons eat up air defenses allowing the high precision weapons to hit their intended target.
* “cheap” drones are sent in large quantities. Many will be shot down, but enough will make it through to targets to be effective.
As anti-ship missiles, you can imagine how huge quantities could overwhelm relatively limited number of available defense assets.
You'll have to rip out the whole seeker to do that.
And even Russia isn't shooting missiles at apartments. Rather, they are shooting missiles at things they consider a military advantage to destroy (although Geneva would disagree with some of it--things like taking down the power so the people are cold isn't acceptable even if you gain advantage from it) and their guidance systems are junk.
And a lot of what Russia does looks very much like the result of a boss making impossible requests and not listening to reason. The underlings do whatever they think is as close to the request as possible, even when it's just flailing.
Aside from the fact that complete worldwide peace has yet to happen, it is also worth mentioning that this period also coincided with nuclear proliferation. If Iraq had nuclear ICBMs they would not have been invaded.
Yes? Large-scale war in Europe and the Middle East every few decades used to be the norm. The Hamas-Israel 'war' is nothing compared to those uprisings. It's like chump change. Also it can be ended tomorrow if the USA wanted it too (or Israel). There is no major threat to world peace at the given time, and it's amazing. It's caused poverty to fall drastically pretty much everywhere. All thanks to 11 aircraft carriers. Who knew peace was so easy.
"any other take is frankly disingenuous" - come on now, you're basically saying "I'm right and anyone who disagrees with me is just wrong". Not really top notch argumentation there.
Many have said that the US military adventurism and support for 3rd world despots has made the world a more dangerous place. I think there's plenty of room to debate such ideas instead of discarding such dialogue so rashly.
That's because the data is pretty much unequivocal about casualties due to war. War used to be the common state of the world in most countries.
Now? The contingent of countries between whom war is unthinkable is growing every year. Amazing. Many empires have achieved similar results regionally, but America is the first to have done so worldwide with the actual ability to enforce it. Amazing
The Bretton Woods Agreement did yield a long lasting pact among Western nations and helped to provide an effective counterbalance (and then some) to the power of the USSR and allied states. The peace dividend post-Cold War improved that situation even more. Overall I think we can agree that deaths due to war post-1944 have trended down significantly. This does not mean that the USA "forced peace" upon the world.
The USA has been involved with many conflicts and supported bloody dictators around the world, including:
- Wars with Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, and more
- Supporting corrupt regimes including such gems Pinochet, Hussein, Bin Laden, Gaddafi among MANY others
- Supported destabilizing coups and (counter) revolutions, often with significant blowback (Iran, 911, etc)
Overall the post-WWII context was better than the eras that preceded it. This occasionally came with a very high cost to (mostly) innocent people in far away lands. The US did not 'force peace' upon the world, it pursued its interests, and humanitarian outcome was little more than an afterthought. The death toll in Vietnam and Iraq alone show this rather directly.
In capitalism, this manifests as monopolies. But other systems have their own problems with the same root cause. Soviet newspapers were ... not exactly a fun or interesting read.
There's a link to everything in the blog post, including crates.io in the sentence it talks about the crate the post is about, but no link to the crate itself :/
I really wish the Hacker News Enhanced extension would add keyword story filtering. I'm tired of hearing about how Steve Jobs was a genius and I'm tired of hearing about how he was a loony dickhead. I'd love to go the rest of my life without ever hearing his name again. I was weary of Steve Jobs before he died and I'm weary of him now.
The book Becoming Steve Jobs is pretty good and it is a fair portrayal of him (or it seems that way to me). He is obviously amazingly talented, he also had a difficult personality. But he convinced lots of talented people to work for him and do great work under him (most have not gone on to anywhere near their past level of success after leaving Apple). In my experience, talented people have options and if they choose to work for a difficult boss it's generally because that boss has good traits as well.
Best in class at marketing though. Half of my masters level marketing class was basically understanding how and why he was successful when competitors had similar/better products.
> we can make sure the United States is prepared to stop a conflict and save countless lives
> building something incredibly cool and want to make a positive difference in geopolitics
Someone has never used their critical thinking skills. MLK Jr said the US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. These missiles won't be used against rogue states, they'll be used to kill innocent people and children in the poorer countries that aren't behaving like the empire wants.