No, the point of this paper is that masks are not completely, absolutely, perfectly, 100% effective and foolproof, and therefore we shouldn't use them at all.
I really have to wonder if the people pushing this have some kind of agenda.
Correlation doesn't guarantee causation, but the Asian countries where mask-wearing has been commonplace for a long time have done far, far, far better with this pandemic than nations where no one wears masks in public.
This is a vacuous statement in this context and adds nothing to the discussion, because you can never prove causation via a study/experiment, only reject the null hypothesis.
This is the key here, and what all these "masks don't work!" people seem to constantly miss somehow. No, masks are not 100% effective at filtration; any idiot can see that. They don't have to be 100% effective, they just need to be better than nothing, and that'll slow the spread of the disease. Keeping people from spewing germs 20 feet when they sneeze or cough is a big help in slowing this pandemic.
There's a reason masks have been commonplace in Asia for many years now: they're meant to protect society, not the wearer. When someone thinks they're sick in Japan, they're supposed to wear a mask to keep everyone else from getting sick: it's good manners. It only works when lots of people are doing the same thing.
Similarly, the cloth masks are actually called "surgical masks", because they're normally used in surgery. They have absolutely nothing to do with keeping the surgeon safe from the patient; they're in place to keep the patient, who has a huge gaping wound in his body, from being infected by droplets from the surgeon as the surgeon bends over the wound site, and is breathing and talking to other people.
I've read that SSDs can't be used to replace HDDs for long-term archival use: if you leave them powered off for too long, the data degrades. I can store data long-term on a regular HDD and stick in a closet or safe-deposit box and then get it out after a few years, plug it in, and read it just fine.
>while The Troubles didn't induce the UK to give any concessions it wasn't already willing to give beforehand.
If you look farther back in Ireland's history, it seems like Ireland's independence from UK was achieved mostly by violent resistance. After there was too much violence, England finally decided it wasn't worth it, and came up with an agreement allowing most of the island to become independent, with the exception of a handful of northern counties.
What exactly are nutjobs going to do with any of these weapons?
We've had cases of nutjobs getting their hands on tanks, or building their own armored bulldozers, and going on rampages. It's a pain, but it's not a complete disaster. These vehicles aren't invincible. They generally get stuck somewhere, and then the police break open the hatch and shoot the nutjob. Tanks really can't do much by themselves besides drive around and run into some things (or over them, but again, you have to be careful or it can get stuck, break a tread, etc.). Tanks armed with 120mm cannon rounds, of course, can do some serious damage, but private individuals aren't allowed to own that kind of weaponry at all.
It's the same with an older fighter jet. What are you going to do with it? Fly it into a building? Sure, that'll be worse than flying a Cessna into a building, but still, it's not like a WMD. Even if you could fully load the 20mm cannon, you're not going to do that much damage; they don't hold that much ammo anyway (only enough for something like 5-10 seconds of sustained fire I think). Yeah, being able to drop a bunch of 500lb bombs would be a disaster, but again, you can't get that stuff.
Yes, if Elon or Jeff wanted a nuclear-armed ICBM, the government would certainly stop them. Building a rocket is one thing, building a nuclear warhead is something else entirely, and is not something trivial that just anyone can do. Iran (an actual nation-state) has been trying for some time and still hasn't succeeded as far as we know. It takes a lot of facilities and special materials to build something like that.
I guess there are two sides, it took just ten nutjobs to get the forever wars going. On the other hand they didn't need more sophisticated weapons than knives.
Though I don't know why a nutjob couldn't do just as bad with something heavier.
Sounds to me like the military is simply shooting itself in the food with its "up or out" policies. Why force highly-trained and experienced people to leave just because they've gotten to a plateau in their career where they're both competent and comfortable?
Seems like part of it would be to ensure that you will always be training new pilots.
If you have a lot of 'comfortable' pilots, you have less need to do the training, so when you fight a war and start losing pilots, you have less bandwidth to create new ones.
So there's a couple of things:
You could always recall and retrain the ones you've released if you're low on pilots, that's pretty straightforward for a wartime government if they're desperate.
It is much harder to scale the recruiting / training pipeline if it is insufficient to comfortably replace the losses you're taking. So you run your pipeline at a higher rate than necessary so that in wartime you can maintain your forces.
I think this also explains why the US would allow Boeing to sell things like advanced air-force fighters to other countries. At the surface, it makes no sense to give away your best stuff to another country. But if you think about it, it lets you run your pipeline at a higher rate, and the other guy can't replace his stuff when it starts getting blown up, you get priority. So you get to run at closer to a wartime production rate, with maintenance subsidized by other countries.
It may be cheaper to do the pilot training another way, but the last thing you want is to end up with a shortage of pilots when you actually end up needing them. It is not about cost so much as it is about winning wars and the supply chain therin.
I suspect a lot of countries don't have this policy because they have a grand total of 22 planes and no way to replace them, so if they get blown up there's nothing for new pilots to fly.
tldr; think about them resources that get expended and that you will inevitably have to create more of, rather than as highly skilled professionals
I've always thought the most fascinating part of such sales is if and where backdoors would be put into aircraft and other military exports and how they would be utilised in a scenario. It think I read somewhere about France doing this at one point with fighters.
For example there is no way I'm gonna believe a Saudi F15 doesn't have something that the US could manipulate to its advantage if it chose to.
Of course building a backdoor would mean if an event found it, then could also utilise it. And it would be bad for business if it was found.
In WW2 Germany specificallydidn't take skilled pilots out of combat. This is why lists of WW2 aces are dominated by the Germans, but it also had the side effect that those experienced pilots weren't around to train new pilots, contributing to the degradation of Germany's air capabilities towards the end of the war
Because they clog up slots that could be used by someone ambitious. If you've got 500 Major slots, but 400 of them are occupied by people who don't want to get promoted, then you only have 100 Majors who can get promoted. So they either have to spend less time in the job than you really want, because you need a certain number of Majors to get promoted to Lt Col each year... or you don't get enough Lt Col promotions, so you don't promote to Colonel as fast as you should. Repeat for every other rank.
That said, of late in the USAF, the promotion rate for every rank below Lt Col has been 95%+. And I think Lt Col has been fairly high as well. The issue isn't kicking them out once they reach a rank, but rather them deciding to get out before then.
Because those pilots theoretically move "up" to being staff officers, and then a few of them reach the highest levels of command, with the benefit of a diverse background.
It turns out that being Erich Hartmann, Maverick, or the Red Baron doesn't really translate well into being a good executive leader, and while western militaries want officers who have experience "at the sharp end", the also require leaders who understand how a headquarters works, logistics, politics, etc.
That probably doesn't matter to the people pushing the NDA. Why should they care about the realities of contract law, when they can just make up lies and get people to believe them under threat of lawsuit?
It's just like how so many car dealerships will tell you that getting your car serviced anywhere else will "void your warranty" even though that's blatantly illegal.
Not signing a contract and signing a contract of dubious legal value are two different things. In the second case you need to argue the legality, in the first case there is nothing to argue about.
I really have to wonder if the people pushing this have some kind of agenda.