How can you acknowledge that the USG colludes with domestic platforms to censor Americans and not think that it is targeting foreign platforms because they make that censorship more difficult?
You know, the obvious explanation that doesn’t require an unseen CCP bogeyman.
Let’s all keep in mind that “adversaries” are just regular countries that some people in government have decided are a competitive threat or strategic obstacle. This is, frankly, bullshit.
If you want to declare a country an enemy of the United States and cut off my ability to access information from that country, you should have the fortitude to declare war. Otherwise I’m not interested in the opinion of some bureaucrat at State, thank you very much.
I’ve seen way too many people speculate recently that Russia’s nuclear arsenal possibly doesn’t work. This is incredibly dangerous.
What’s the plan when humanity is so many decades into a test ban that nuclear detonations are a generational memory? Something akin to a myth. The relative stability afforded by MAD doctrine is bound to decline.
How long until subcritical experiments need to turn into supercritical ones? At some point you have to do an integration test or no one can say anything of certainty.
Proving a sample of plutonium emits the right dose of radiation when whacked appropriately is a great starting point, but it doesn't validate the rest of the weapon system.
You could test the bombs with inert cores to prove everything outside the physics package is valid, but there is still the "but sometimes" bullshit space where perhaps the core seems good on paper but the neutron initiator has an undue delay related to aging circuitry and we lose 80% of the expected yield. Whatever the case - in isolation both system elements might test OK but they could still fail when combined.
I feel like the dial-a-yield devices are most precarious (e.g. B61). How could you really know you aren't going to over/undershoot massively? What is the range of uncertainty on that system after 3 decades?
Instead of a dumb inert core they use a smart inert core that broadcasts precise measurements of the implosion using fiber optics and triboluminescent capsules that flash as the implosion wavefront crushes them. The computer has to broadcast the data before it itself gets crushed microseconds later. But yes, I still share your overall concern even though we can push the question marks one step later in the delicate process.
There are multiple ways in which nuclear weapons are 'precise'.
The yields are known to precise amounts - with more than 2,000 nuclear weapons already detonated both below and above ground there's a mind boggling array of technical data available.
There's data on the physical impulse of various types of nuclear detonation, and data on how much or little direct radiation is created by doping the core and surrounds.
The effects of those yields is known for a wide range of scenarios; very high in the atmosphere, above the ground such that the blast radius barely touches the ground, at ground level and below ground.
Data exists to show they essentially suck for technical engineering and canal building, they irradiate vast amounts of debris at ground level and create massive clouds of fallout, and that they flatten cities with minimal side effect if detonated high enough for the shock wave to do all the work of crushing buildings.
The precision is sufficient to setup in advance to create 'Dixie Showgirl' bad ballet photoshoots:
Also: we don't want someone lobbing 10x as many warheads because they only think half work
I think a few countries will feel a bit vulnerable at some point (like Poland/Japan/Australia/SouthKorea) and start to question if concepts like the US umbrella is truly a sufficient deterrent, and probably start their own development/testing
When I took a class on strategic nuclear game theory back in the 80s the options were 1, 2 and all, with "all" being the only serious cases. The assumption was the enemy would try to take out all your nukes so you'd have to launch quickly before they were taken out.
Subs, of course, being the ultimate terror weapon, changed the calculus completely. What I really got out of the class was that this kind of game theory was almost useless once you had subs with nukes on them.
"Almost" because antimissile defense was destabilizing even without subs, so is in everybody's interest to negotiate away.
MAD is a scenario, not the only or most likely. There are a million and one scenarios where you have some kind of nuclear conflict and it stays regional. And actually this part is a massive problem for the US since we don’t have a viable tactical nuclear arsenal.
Our strategic options are limited and the US wouldn’t be able to respond tit-for-tat if, say, the Russians started using smaller weapons in a battlefield situation, our only option is to either do nothing, or level a city and escalate the conflict.
This was not considered "strategic" decision making back in the 80s, but I see your point. I do think it's good the US junked its tactical nuke programs (Davy Crocket et al) because they are tricky and hard to find good use cases for. They are also hard not to lose (most people don't realize how many portable things get lost in combat).
Allegedly Russia has various "red lines" which, when crossed would lead to tactical nukes in the Ukraine theatre. Many of those lines have been crossed with no nuke use. Prof Phillips P. OBrien pointed out that tactical nukes at this point would be an admission of weakness and would turn many allies against Russia. Also, like chemical weapons, they are simply hard to use without interfering with your own troops. Probably, IMO, the only use case is on day 0 right at the initial invasion.
The US has a wide range of non-weaponry responses, and who knows what they have in their subs, They may have smaller scale nukes as well. Subs are destabilizing today because nobody knows where they are. They used to be destabilizing because that also meant they were inaccurate (thus only useful against cities, where, like the game of horseshoes, "close" is good enough). Nowadays once they are launched they can use GPS, the stars, and probably simply vision since they know the approximate launch and destination locations.
You're currently getting downvoted which seems unreasonable.
B61s are aircraft delivered gravity bombs, a relic of the 1960s. It’s an entirely different category compared to the short range ICBMs that Russia employs from mobile ground vehicles.
Yes, it's a totally different category from SRBMs - so maybe the US's ability to deliver tactical nuclear weapons more than 10-100km into highly contested airspace is poorer, but given your original scenario (battlefield use and tit for tat vs Russia), I don't see this being a significant limitation?
As it stands today, I have no reason to believe that American aircraft (F-35 and B-2 both carry B-61) cannot conduct operations over the forward areas of Russian ground forces.
Ukraine has been able to use GMLRS and, launch cruise missile strikes into Russian held territory success. Ukraine believes that ATACMS will be viable. I don't believe the current evidence indicates that Russian IADS are capable of sufficiently deflecting/deterring an American air strike.
While game theory is useful when developing nuclear strategy I don't think anyone takes MAD seriously: It isn't subgame perfect. Once the rockets are up, retaliation is no longer credible... because the purpose of the threat of retaliation is to discourage an attack in the first place.
MAD is stable because people aren't rational beings and game theory is therefore nuts.
When I have 500 nukes headed my way, I wont stop to think "well, maybe the remaining 10% of my population can scrape by a living as dogs. Lets not retaliate and maybe they wont launch their remaining 500"
Deep underground in unpopulated areas works fairly well; we learned how to do it without fallout as early as the late 1950s. You're at dramatically greater health risk living downwind of a coal power plant.
> Why would you test them near where someone lives?
Because they're Australians, Pacfic Islanders, gamblers that already visit Las Vegas, etc.
We already have the answer to "why test near where people live" from the 2000+ tests already taken place at Yucca Flat (fallout on Vegas & elsewhere), Emu Fields (Adelaide and a future British PM dusted with fallout), Castle Bravo (shat on people's lovely island home and created Gojira (allegedly)), etc.
With eight billion+ on the planet it's hard to test anywhere without affecting someone - hence the move away from above ground to below ground (Atmospheric testing was banned by the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty) and a later move to simulations only by the US (although not India, Pakistan, North Korea, etc).
Each of the fallout issues you identify stem from atmospheric testing.
Again, we've known how to prevent fallout via underground tests and carefully constructed tunnel layouts for ~70 years now. No one of influence in the West is proposing a return to atmospheric testing.
Underground or overground the answer to the question you posed ( "Why would you test them near where someone lives?" ) is, from past experience, because we (for various values of 'we') just do.
Actual tests of real weapons (not simulations) underground collapse mountains (North Korea) and affect fault lines, sub surface water flows, etc - these things will likely affect some people in a 200 km radius - and places with no one in that vicinity are hard to come by - generally you move people off their islands, off their land, or simply don't care.
I find it somewhat incredible from a pure engineering point of view that Trinity worked in the first test and that both Little Boy (Test #2) and Fat Man (Test #3) also worked.
It's easy to predict that this will drive privatization in Russia. Things that can't be done efficiently under the byzantine government rulebook will be farmed out to private entities. Americans should be well familiar with the dynamic.
By the way, we see the same security paranoia cropping up in the West about the use of software of Russian origin. Some of the mockery here seems un-self-aware.
it's much easier to live without Russian software than to live without non-Russian software. I'm not criticizing their paranoia - the West can and will infiltrate their systems - but it's so much easier for America to blacklist Kaspersky Antivirus and 7-zip than for Russia to blacklist Windows, OS X, all major Linux distros (can they even use the Linux kernel at all?), Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OracleDB, Mysql, Photoshop, Autocad, Visual Studio (Code), Chrome, Firefox, etc. not to mention all the embedded controller firmware on all the devices they import.
Like, if they actually went so far as to require fully Russian source code for anything running on a government machine, they'd be starting back from the 70s. Good luck.
No, likely they'll farm out contracts to cronies who will slap their logo on pirated or open-source projects and sell it to the Russian government for a hefty markup.
What’s alt-right about it? Every example given on that page is a belief I’ve seen espoused by mainstream conservatives since I started paying attention to politics in the late 90s. The “alt” right of the last decade was a reaction against this.
Besides borrowing language from 4chan, it sounds like a cringe con for milquetoast Republicans who feel targeted for their political beliefs.
That describes Carmack to a tee, but he apparently wanted to support ideologically disloyal art without provoking conflict. The organizers were clumsy, and this mea culpa is unhelpful.
More than 90% of natural gas used in the United States is produced domestically. In California, over 50% of electricity generation comes from natural gas. Supply is less precarious than just about anything else.
Even in a future where the electrical grid is fully nuclear + renewable, using gas for cooking would be a completely affordable luxury and not risky at all.
You're describing a federation of platforms, and this can work, at least technically. XMPP worked wonderfully for a brief moment. Unfortunately, profit incentives are aligned against it.
The Fediverse, at least as I see it advocated here, is not a federation of platforms but a federation of social cliques, where your ability to communicate with someone else is determined by connectivity in the clique graph.
This is a great thing for the kinds of people who would have become deeply invested in a web forum or newsgroup back in the day, but it cannot (and arguably should not attempt to) address the mass market.
XMPP still works wonderfully if you want to setup a chat server for your friends and family and be independent from all the walled garden messaging apps.
Great post, and the best point is highlighted in bold.
> Yes, the issues the blog mentioned were real human rights issues, but selective coverage of human rights is propaganda.
Russia’s primary internal justification for war is based around a human rights argument regarding the ethnic Russians in the East.
Similarly, many US interventions around the world.
I guess people here will say our concerns are totally valid and theirs are fake. Western governments don’t lie.
When your scope of concern maps 1:1 to that of the State Department, though, it’s a fair question to ask what’s your motivation for amplifying these messages.
Yes, what’s happening in Iran is bad - what do you want done about it exactly? Because certain people in the US government have ideas about that which may not exactly improve the situation.
Western governments lie all the time. You are absolutely correct to assume that the State Department’s interests in Iran do not necessarily align with Iranians who want to live under a non-autocratic government.
At the same time: you are wrong to insinuate that the Rust project’s motivations (or anyone’s really) are those of any government or state’s. The unrest in Iran has the world’s eye; there is nothing about the situation that suggests ulterior motives.
> I think the people involved have consumed so much American state-affiliated media that they simply don’t ask themselves these questions.
Influence is one of these “how’s the water” problems. We don’t have any evidence that Rust’s release team is getting their viewpoints from state-affiliated media any more than they’re getting them from Iranian dissidents on Twitter.
To put it another way: interests align all the time, and evidence of their alignment is not evidence of influence (much less collusion).
It appears that the interests of the Rust community have aligned with the interests of state-sponsored American media several times now, and on several disparate subjects, none of which are related to software.
At some point, that's not a coincidence, that's an echo chamber.
“Twice” is not several. You’re also omitting the part where the positions in question are overwhelmingly popular positions, both in the US and everywhere else (except the governments of Russia and Iran).
You can gripe about politics and software if you’d like. But there’s no evidence of an “echo chamber” (what does that even mean in this context?), much less collusion with the US government or media.
I don't know where you got "twice" when the article we are discussing has 3 instances, and those are only instances of political messaging in rust release logs, not any of the other myriad references to politics that appear around the Rust community.
One of the three - the police brutality statement from release 1.44 - is US-centric and very much controversial in the US. That statement was issued in June 2020, when about 40% of the US disagreed with the reference (which was a reference to a specific instance of police violence). The other two statements had about 75% support at the time they were issued (25% disagreed).
One of the problems of political messaging in evergreen things like programming languages is that you can make popular statements at the time and they can become unpopular. At this point, a majority of US residents would not support the fact that the 1.44 release had that message, and a majority may be upset with all the support for Ukraine (a recent poll said that 57% of US residents thought it was time for peace in Ukraine).
An echo chamber is a community in which people who agree with each other echo each others' views, thereby causing people in the echo chamber to believe that their views are more popular than they are. Many tech employees live in an echo chamber where US progressive politics (pushed by the US media) is the dominant view, despite being unpopular in the US and around the world.
I don't think there's any evidence of state collusion. There is a lot of evidence that the community of Rust maintainers and power-users is unfortunately insular (an echo chamber), and follows the views of US media a lot more than a healthy community probably should.
> Yes, the issues the blog mentioned were real human rights issues, but selective coverage of human rights is propaganda.
This is not a good argument, it's just an appeal to nihilism.
That's not even remotely what propaganda is, and if you accept that that's what propaganda is then literally all human rights discussion is propaganda because it is nearly impossible to enumerate all of it.
The iMessage model? Somehow make having a Twitter brand Twitter account into a status symbol. Turn the screws on monetization while giving the product away for free to VIPs. Banish the poors and undesirables to the fediverse, where they can green tweet as long as they like.
the imessage model works because its a "status symbol" that actually isn't: the majority of people in America have the blue bubble (and way more among demographics that care). this in turn enables building cool extra features because it's a "status symbol" but actually common enough for them to work, even though both parties have to have an iphone. this produces a network effect, almost like a social media platform..... oh wait
You know, the obvious explanation that doesn’t require an unseen CCP bogeyman.