Some places (including some places in the US) ban cashless stores. It seems reasonable to me to try to legally protect people who struggle to adapt to new technologies.
960 karma · joined January 10, 2020
In what sense? Czechia is richer per capita. Almost all of the former Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe have had largely peaceful (since 1991) sustained economic growth. The exceptions are exactly those countries which continue to have Russian troops occupying portions, namely Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova.
Finally a use for all the wasted hours I’ve spent on HN — my next word prediction is marginally better than that of the AI.
I do appreciate your point of view, but I maintain that in a lengthy land war with a near peer, missile stockpiles would run low and 4th gen fighters would be unable to contest enemy airspace. Of course, the caveat is that the US would very much like to avoid any such conflict via either diplomacy or a decisive first few weeks of combat. And the hope is that 5th gen fighters would evade air defenses. Even so, US doctrine calls for being capable of fighting prolonged land wars on multiple fronts.
Artillery has proved decisive in every conflict with static lines in the last 100 years. Sure, hopefully air supremacy would overwhelm your opponent and prevent a static conflict, but no air force has ever established supremacy in a conflict with saturated strategic air defenses. Perhaps the US air forces could, but this capability is untested. Sadam and Yugoslavia were limited to tactical air defenses in relatively small numbers compared with modern day Russia or China.
In short, artillery remains important, which is why US artillery shell production is up an order of magnitude over the last 3 years, and will continue to rise.
One issue with your claim though is that once you have interstellar flight, you certainly have weapons of mass destruction. Even crashing a coke-can sized meteor into the Earth at 1% of the speed of light would cause major destruction.
>> These things happen.
No, they really don’t. That’s why it has made national news.
Guyana has almost no military, but the Venezuelan military doesn’t really have any offensive capabilities that the US cant easily deter. The US actually appears to be a stabilizing force in this case; if the US committed to non-intervention, it would make sense for Venezuela to invade immediately.
As is, the strategic balance is not in favor of Venezuela attempting to annex the land by force.
I suspect most Americans with a passing interest in nuclear deterrence have heard of this.
Moreover, the article is almost entirely about the sentinel land-based ICBM program, which is only 100 B of those 1.5 T. I would argue it is pretty shocking how cheap our nuclear deterrent is, especially compared to our conventional military budget (1.5 T per year).
The article includes the suggestion that the land-based nuclear fleet may be superfluous, but does not even attempt to explore the game theory behind keeping it intact (E.g., nuclear missile failure rates, warhead fratricide, the historical difficulty of keeping a boomer fleet stealthy, etc.)
Still a major step forward on the path of missile defense.
Being able to blindly fumble for it in the dark is essential.
And the point of a phone is to be a mobile computer. A bulky phone case kind of defeats that point.
[1] https://balloonstodrones.com/2022/10/19/looking-back-at-iraq...
You have named two countries with credible and substantial air forces. Critically, both the Algerian air force and Chilean air force exist (the claim that I initially defended). Indeed, both Chile and Algeria have similarly-sized economies to Ukraine, and both countries operate sizeable air forces relative to other countries in South America and North Africa.
It is worth noting that the Ukrainian air force has 50+ F-16s scheduled for delivery in the near future.
>> Last I checked, they literally had more trainer aircraft than actual combat jets left.
They did have a relatively impressive number of L-39 jet trainers at the beginning of the war, as you alluded to. It is difficult to assess how many have survived the war. I would presume that you are correct to estimate that trainer aircraft have a lower attrition rate than combat jets during war.