Americans pay more for worse outcomes, so this is clearly a political/priorities issue, not an issue with wealth.
Other counterexamples are the other European countries with the same safety net which are not petro states (they do have colonial wealth though).
A lot of this was possible because of high corporate taxes and high marginal taxes on high incomes, so in theory this model could apply in most places.
Not all european countries have colonial wealth. There is universal healthcare in croatia and that nation started from scratch essentially 30 years ago and isn’t really a very strong economy today either.
What a lot of people find refreshing in podcasts, etc. is that they don’t hide their biases. They might tell the truth, or maybe they lie, but at least they tell you (or clearly signal) their position.
People I’ve spoken to are sick of media that pretends to be neutral, while they are clearly serving the interests of the rich. In that sense it’s really refreshing to have someone tell you what they really think.
I don’t have any solutions, but I can certainly understand the thought process.
I agree with you, although I would put it differently.
Learning requires feedback, not necessarily failure. The issue with watching a video is not that you can’t fail, you can certainly fail to get the point made in a video, but as you can’t get any feedback it would be hard to figure out that you didn’t get it.
In my view the difference between watching a video, vs trying to implement an idea as code is the direct feedback you get. If you’re wrong or made a mistake, you’ll know and can adjust your mental model accordingly.
It’s also what I like about writing code, if a colleague and I disagree we can just design a test together and find out and learn together.
Confessions, sure. But what about location of military bases? Obviously torturing people to make them admit to crimes is just horrible, and sure torture in general is pretty horrible.
But if you capture a soldier and want to know where his friends are, what their plans are etc it's probably worth a shot. You can often verify information and ask followup questions etc. I'm not saying it's the moral thing to do, I'm just saying I think it'd have a non-zero success rate. Maybe even a pretty high success rate. And honestly if I was Ukrainian I'm not sure I'd have any moral obligations to torturing some Russians either. As far as I'm concerned when a nation attacks another they forfeit any kind of human rights. If they wanted to stay safe they could have stayed home.
If you torture the soldier, at best he is providing you the information you can verify and nothing else. At worst he is providing you incomplete/wrong verifiable information. There are only limited studies on this, but consensus of intelligence experts is that it is an ineffective method
In contrast, if you convince the subject to give up information voluntarily, it may provide you not only the location of the military base, but also much more valuable information about the base and its content, and information you didn't know to ask for.
"Come on. We already know you're the Easter Bunny, your friend next door already confirmed it. All this can stop immediately, we just need you to admit it and tell us how you did it"
Dutch bicycle infrastructure didn’t just happen, our postwar governments were all set on building car infrastructure. They were even planning to demolish huge parts of old Amsterdam to build a highway right through the city. It took two decades of protest and a lot of traffic deaths before the government started the development of dedicated bicycle infrastructure in the 1980’s. You can read more here: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
Amsterdam’s answer to faster vehicles is to move them to the main road with other faster traffic. Although it is now moving to slow down nearly all traffic inside the city to a 30km/h limit, which will improve cyclist safety a lot.
Turning the power off would work, but is that feasible? Even if we’d be able to spot the CME, would then have enough time left to shut down the entire power grid?
The time between detection and the CME hitting us would probably be measured in minutes. I don’t think it’s possible to shut down the grid in that timeframe.
The problem is figuring out how big the event is, and how directly it will hit us. So while we have over 17 hours to prepare, there might be some false positives due to our limited prediction skills. And, no matter the real consequences, people have limited patience for large economic disruptions over things that turned out to be nothing.
Even better, if you turn off the electricity and prevent major destruction and nothing happens (other than the power down/up) then you're the one who caused "the problem".
There's no reward for fixing a problem that doesn't happen and that people don't want to believe even exists. Bonus, if other networks are damaged while yours aren't, it must be because you protected your network so you're responsible!
17 hours sounds like a long time, but it's not like there's a big red button and a guy standing by to press it.
So the information chain, starting with the telescope that detects the flare, and then has to work it's way up the food chain, so that sufficient people agree, and take presumably synchronised action, well, good luck with that.
You'd also ideally need a multi-hour warning, planes gotta land etc.
Make no mistake, shutting it down will result in some deaths [1]. And those deaths will be on the news tomorrow (if indeed news still exists.) On the other hand not shutting down will cause more deaths and massive destruction.
[1] think hospitals where the backup power failed, or didn't last long enough. Traffic intersections. Elevators. Water pumps. Airplanes. Trains. Take your pick.
CME are "Coronal Mass Ejection" with mass being the operative word here.
Electromagnetic radiation (electrons photons) can make the trip between
sun and earth in about 8 minute but anything with neutrons or protons
(such as the coronal plasma) takes much longer as in,
a day and a half to several days.
CME are not hard to spot leaving the sun with even with tiny amateur telescopes
(the sun does not require much in the way of light gathering) so even without
the professional scopes (SOHO) with dedicated satellites leading and trailing earth orbit
constantly viewing around the edge of the sun as seen from earth
or being able to acoustically "hear" (if you can call 5 minute pressure waves sound)
the far side of the sun,
it is not conceivable to me we would not be warned a CME was incoming,
doing something about it is another story.
It takes 15-24 hours for CME to arrive at the Earth after solar flare. The particles are much slower than the radiation which arrive immediately. We have pretty good prediction if CME will hit Earth.
Since it is light, the concept of immediacy breaks down, right? Do events outside our light cone exist yet?
Let’s ask the photon how much time has passed between it being created and hitting our eyeballs. I’m sure it will produce a very sensible answer—oh dear, hmm…
I can do a lot in 8 mins. If you had 8 minute warning for an earthquake, what could you do? Luckily, we get more notice than that now for tornadoes, but 8 minutes is enough time to seek shelter. In 8 minutes, there's plenty of time to ctrl-s on everything, and then close apps and shut down computers.
The problem is communicating to everyone when that 8 minutes starts and how much time is left.
It is something we computed. Why? Because there is no way to measure the time it takes for light to get from the sun to the earth. You cannot synchronize a message. There is no "hello". There is no beginning. This is not like firing a starting pistol. We cannot ever know what is happening at the sun with less than 8 minutes of lag. It is a fundamental limit. Even sending a highly robust and extremely precise clock into the sun to measure events, then comparing those events to timelines on earth, would not work. You cannot do it in real time, but even after the fact is pretty much not possible due to relativistic effects.
Even more pedantically, you'd be measuring the round trip time from the earth to a mirror located near the sun and back, but not at the sun. Does there even exist a mirror anywhere in this universe that could survive and float on the "surface" of the sun? Does the sun even have a surface? Is there a laser powerful enough to overcome all of the electromagnetic radiation from the sun such that you could actually discern it's signal? Not pedantically, I stand by my assertion that it cannot be directly measured.
>If you had 8 minute warning for an earthquake, what could you do
That's not how it works. There may be detectable precursors that could actually give warning, but the 8 minutes referenced is the time it takes light from the sun to reach earth. It's immediate in the sense that it is physically impossible to detect that before those 8 minutes have already elapsed and the light is hitting your detectors. You could try to move your detectors closer to the sun to detect earlier, but any signal you can possibly send back to earth goes at the same speed, so it doesn't help.
It's pointless to talk about that 8 minute warning because the speed of light is effectively the speed of causality. There is no way we can signal back faster than that initial wave of radiation hitting us. There is no way to alert us that that 8 minutes is starting because are theoretical fastest communication will still take 8 minutes to get to us.
But we're not worried about that part of things anyway - it's the mass part of the CME that is the issue.
We can, and have, shut off large portions of the grid in seconds.
Take the 2003 blackout. Yes, the whole shut down took 15 minutes (?). But thats because it was a cascading effect that had to travel down the lines. Once the fault was detected by a particular segment of the grid, the relays responded in milliseconds. They have since the 1920s? Add in an "incoming solar flare" fault condition and we can trip the whole grid in seconds and send a start signal to the diesel generators to warm up to bring her back up.
Pretty nifty trick.
Question is why would we? The grid has been undergoing a lot of strengthening against EMPs and flares for decades. Its not obvious to me that a flare can take it out, especially if we shed dumb loads (partial blackout, say data centers) before it hits to give the conductors and transformers head space.
If we had done enough to mitigate EMPs, the nuclear powers of the world wouldn't have space-based nuclear EMPs as the first step of their attack plan. We still do, and so does Russia.
Geomagnetically-induced current is different from the plain-vanilla EMPs anyway—GIC can last for hours.
I don't think there are any space-based EMPs, at least no publicly known ones. There have been and perhaps still are plans to detonate high-yield nuclear weapons at high altitude above enemy territory to cause an EMP, but that is a very different situation from a CME solar storm. We're able to spot a CME hours in advance vs mere minutes for submarine-launched ICBMs, and the latter would only ever be deployed in the opening minutes of an all-out nuclear war, in which the electric grid and all grid-level precautions against solar flares are likely to be irrelevant, because most of its critical components would be vaporized or torn to shreds by attacks on ground targets anyway. Even just forcing the other side to keep burning money on military countermeasures that do work might be worth a few launchers and warheads.
Ish. There seems to be some vocabulary fuckery going on around the term "orbital", most likely due to a poor choice of wording upstream. "Orbital" in the shit-blew-up-outside-the-atmosphere sense EMP strikes are absolutely phase 1A of any large scale nuclear attack and such capabilities are trivially executed by ICBMs with appropriate warhead selection and detonation altitude parameters. "Orbital" in the EMP-weapons-literally-orbiting-the-planet sense violates several international treaties. Given the levels of secrecy required to pull that off for any length of time it seems unlikely but is impossible to rule out entirely.
I fail to understand why we don't do more to make equipment robust to this kind of thing. There's a whole range of problems that this solves looong before we get to general nuclear exchange.
If stuff was shielded, isolated, and grounded better, everything from your phone to your WiFi would work a lot better and have longer range. Wind slapping power lines together wouldn't destroy everything plugged in inside your house and solar flares wouldn't be more than a passing concern. The design changes to affect all of this aren't remotely expensive or difficult, we just don't.
There is no need to shield electronics. The induced currents only cause damage to long conductors, to the electrical grid and to long fiber optic cables.
That's a complicated one, it's still the electronics but they need a particular circuit that can stop short rise time transients. Also, any larger devices probably want to have shielding and ethernet devices will need some extra hardening, we're talking 25+kv/m events here so unless your computer can handle the monitor being at a 25kv differential from the tower you're gonna have a bad time.
It's not very different in terms of amplitude, though rise times for an E1 EMP impulse can supposedly be single digit nanoseconds so equivalent to a >400 MHz impulse. I know from experience that modern electronics can't handle that because I've fried USB ports by operating radio systems in that band, though there are some obvious differences there.
We might easily be unprepared, but that the military tries things that might not work. Military attack is all about trying things that might cripple the enemy and/or increase the cost of an effective defence. So an EMP isn't necessarily because it is expected to do horrific damage. It is just part of a thorough test of an adversaries preparations, making it harder to protect their infrastructure.
> We can, and have, shut off large portions of the grid in seconds.
Speaking from personal experience, this is BS. During a bad wind event, a bunch of lines came down, started a huge forest fire around 10 or 11pm which was heading for a small town with 50-70mph winds. First responders couldn't get in to warn anyone because the downed lines were energized, so they called up the power plant. The whole process to de-energize took hours. There is a kill-switch now, but most power plants apparently can't shut off the juice in a matter of seconds, and they may not even have a plan to do so in an emergency.
Yeah I question if it's something we even could do.
But even if is, it's going to kill and hurt a lot of people. Probably less than setting every electrical device on (half of) the planet on fire or whatever, but good luck convincing people of that when their dad is on dialysis or all their food spoils and they can't get to the store.
Historically being fat was a signifier of wealth, as it implies that you can afford a lot of food. Some cultures also see it as a sign of fertility. This was also the case in the Western world until recently.
Another well known historical signifier for wealth was fair skin. As you wouldn’t get a tan if you didn’t have to labour out in the sun.
It's probably due to genetics, their body assimilate food better than Caucasian, due to their diet for 5000 years being really light of fat and sugar, so when they follow the Caucasian diet (2300 cal a day high carbs high fat) it does not work.
Also, they are poor countries who can't produce the food they need for multiple reason (sometime it's population, but often it's mining/industrial pollution related) and they have to import the cheapest food available, ie leftover from US (and recently China) food processing.
It seems to flow from the idea that “might makes right”, but you replace might with money.
If you make money you’re doing well. That idea can be extended to imply that being poor means you’ve done something wrong.
To me it echoes feudalist ideas like divine rule. The king deserved to be king, otherwise God would not have allowed him to be king. Therefore the king must be good.
In my opinion this way of thinking is formed by looking at existing hierarchies and retroactively defining morality based on those hierarchies. Which then leads to the idea that poor people must be poor because of something they did, how could the hierarchy exist otherwise?
This line of thinking also leads to the opinion that rich people do better, which does not consider that poor people might be doing the best they can under their circumstances, even if it is not the optimal strategy.
Other counterexamples are the other European countries with the same safety net which are not petro states (they do have colonial wealth though).
A lot of this was possible because of high corporate taxes and high marginal taxes on high incomes, so in theory this model could apply in most places.