As I understand it, the US inherited a common law tradition from England that empowers judges to effectively create laws. For example the US Criminal code sets penalties for "assault" but a long series of precedents define the actual crime:
> The term “assault” is not defined in the criminal code. Courts use common law to define the term.
> There is no indication in the statute that Congress sought to depart from the common-law definition of “simple assault” when using the phrase in § 111. The phrase is not defined in the statute, or indeed in any provision of the U.S. Code. This is the classic case of a statute importing a common-law term—with, therefore, all of its “soil.”
Judges are usually bound to precedent but can reject precedent in response to novel situations, like the standard of "probable cause" that came out of car stops and searches instead of placing cars entirely in the existing public or private spheres. Policing the Open Road is a great exploration of this.
In contrast Japan (and the state of Louisiana) have a legal system derived from the civil law tradition.
IANAL so I'll defer to anyone that has corrections.
> The US inherited a common law tradition from England that empowers judges to effectively create laws.
Yes, but, in the English tradition (unwritten constitution) Parliament is supreme, and can explicitly choose to supercede any court (or previous Parliamentary) decision.
(The current state in common-law countries varies; Canada acquired a US-style Supreme Court in 1982.)
The US and the HMMWV did great at the combat part of Iraq and Afghanistan. The real switch was from conventional military operations to the long peace.
"Instead, the new incentive for most countries would be to build a military in a way that aims to minimize the political costs... it makes sense not to build an army for conventional operations but instead with an eye towards the kinds of actions which mitigate the harm caused by failed states: armies aimed at policing actions or humanitarian operations."
MRAPs exist to minimize the political costs (dead and wounded soldiers) in a policing action. When you look at conventional wars like Ukraine, HMMWVs remain very relevant in their doctrinal role.
> The US and the HMMWV did great at the combat part of Iraq and Afghanistan. The real switch was from conventional military operations to the long peace
The combat part was ok I guess, but what OP is pointing out was what we went to conflict with. Lots of money was spent upgrading Humvees with armor and turret mounts that didn't exist. The equipment fielded by US troops actually looked very different from a comparison of 2001 and 2005. Body armor went through development iterations, camouflage patterns, infantry equipment like magazine carriers and weapons optics, and so on.
Had the US tried to drive into the Afghan and Iraqi desert the way we did against fighters armed with heavier weapons and fighting skills then the US losses would have been a lot higher.
The Iraqi military had more formidable equipment but was so ill-trained and the moral so low that it was very much a paper tiger.
I think people underestimate hiw much the US military has transformed over the two two-decade long conflicts. There have been striking changes both organizationally, culturally, and technologically.
I think the hypothetical you posit is wrong, as US doctrine places primacy on air power. In Iraq, I & II, air strikes at the outset destroyed much of the Iraqi armor and spurred a lot of desertion.
I’m not a military and/or Iraq war expert so I don’t want to argue definitively, but I don’t think you can say US losses would have been significantly higher had the Iraqi army had heavier weapons and fighting skills — they’d have needed effective air defense, too.
I think the Ru-UKR war shows the vulnerability of contemporary air forces to air defense, however, and that Western/NATO forces themselves lack cost-effective short-range and medium-range air defense systems. The US Air Force fields exquisite weapons (“platforms”) and these may prove useless in a conflict like Ru-UKR. Or, perhaps, they’re good enough to overcome the difficulties that the Sukhoi/MiG-based air forces of either side have encountered. Hard to know.
Range and mobility in artillery systems also seems like a weak point for the US military. The Excalibur precision shell is very expensive but likely cost effective—one shot, one kill. But the US M777 towed howitzer costs ~$3.7M (titanium) while the French Caesar costs $5-6M and can outrange the M777 in addition to driving away immediately after firing.
Excals are not very high precision in my experience, and definitely not "one shot one kill." I don't remember exact data and I'm sure it would be classified even if I did, but... suffice it to say that laser guidance for final targeting is not good for dusty environments. (Ditto for GBU-12s, which were worthless.)
> But the US M777 towed howitzer costs ~$3.7M (titanium) while the French Caesar costs $5-6M and can outrange the M777 in addition to driving away immediately after firing.
The US has the M109 which can serve in some of the same roles the Caesar can.
Also, does France have much rocket artillery? That might play a factor in the requirements for other artillery systems.
You are actually correct. The speed of light you always hear about is the speed of EM radiation in a perfect vacuum. In a medium such as the atmosphere, the pulse doesn't travel as fast. The slowdown depends on the refractive index, which itself depends on the frequency of the wave -- longer wavelengths have lower indices. This means that microwaves will move the tiniest bit faster than light through the atmosphere.
Because we're too expensive to waste on something another employee could do. The bitter irony is we're so expensive largely because being siloed leads to wasted effort and rework.
But while spirits became a larger share of alcohol consumed, "per capita annual consumption [immediately after the repeal of prohibition] stood at 1.2 US gallons (4.5 liters), less than half the level of the pre-Prohibition period". Likewise, "[d]eath rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply". In short, prohibition worked as a public health policy.
You can't just point out that something will cause unintended consequences. You have to actually weight them against the benefits the policy provides. Obviously fewer potheads for more heroin addicts was a bade trade, but fewer cigarette smokers for a slightly larger black market has proven to be a great one. We haven't seen the nicotine equivalent of fentanyl your "risk ladder" model predicts.
> A treatment that's beneficial on the individual level is all but guaranteed to be detrimental on the aggregate: "The country's average mass is overweight! Everyone is now mandated to skip one meal a day until we are at an acceptable weight" kills malnourished people
This Ayn Rand fever dream ignores the fact that the government has tons of policies that are beneficial on the individual level: banning trans fats, mandating nutrition labels, and taxing sodas just to name a few.
>the government has tons of policies that are beneficial on the individual level: banning trans fats, mandating nutrition labels, and taxing sodas just to name a few.
Listing the benefits of a policy while neglecting the iatrogenics is precisely my point about the complexity dynamics. Before a treatment, it is unknowable how adding another domain will effect all the other domains.
Take a hypothetical policy of weekly fire-sprinkler checks being instituted. As a result 3% of all systems were nonfunctional but repaired! But this neglects the inspections also caused a chilling effect of people behavior ("Sorry Anne Frank, I can't take you in as a refugee because there's an increased likely hood that the police will find you now that they started doing sprinkler checks")
Would you take a drug without someone certifying it's side effects first? Why do the same with policy?
> We haven't seen the nicotine equivalent of fentanyl your "risk ladder" model predicts.
Only if you're looking at that end of the risk ladder. On the other end are vaping products like Juul that (while not perfect) are far safer than smoking. And, what do you know, there is increasing pressure to ban them as well. In the interest of not going off in the weeds, I won't even approach the deficits of government nutrition policies or soda taxation attempts.
You're ignoring the time period it all took place. Irresponsible drinking probably skyrocketed during the Gilded Age and Great Depression. It should be no surprise that people stopped drinking so much when everything started getting better - which aligned closely with the end of prohibition.
That table is expressly from the point of view of an English speaker; I'm sure it would look very different if written for Arabic speakers. Since it's largely a function of similarity to your native tongue, how would we even measure if a language is easy or hard to learn?
And what counts as "normal language classes"? Until at least high school in the US, every class other than math focuses on reading and writing.
While I agree jumping to the conclusion that they're unreliable and flaky is ridiculous, being "polite" like that does no one any favors.
Just be honest and explain you've been caught up with higher priority issues and haven't made progress. That gives the asker an opportunity to explain why the task is more important than you thought, find someone else with less on their plate to do it, or at the very least understand what's taking so long.
Anyone that's read even the intro section of the Fermi paradox Wikipedia page already has: "There have been many attempts to explain the Fermi paradox ... suggesting that intelligent extraterrestrial life is extremely rare". The paper just formalizes that by demonstrating we can arrive at low enough expected numbers of aliens (namely 0) with reasonable inputs to the drake equation.
> Imagine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 billion alien civilization. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth.
This occludes a lot more than it illuminates. Although the end section of the paper uses the bayesian inference Sniffnoy hinted at, the graphs SSC used (and his analysis of the papers results) come from the earlier section of the paper that still use the "chance of aliens per star" model. Even the bayesian part merely refines this probability based on observations; it's hardly "the wrong way to think about it" as SSC claims.
I'm sure you're extremely smart and dedicated -- I've only dreamed of putting in that much work -- but have you considered your mindset might be holding you back? Would you hire someone who had never worked in low-level game programming and didn't have a bachelors but told you "I can do everything you can do"?
If you're serious about getting a PhD-level job without a PhD, getting someone to recommend and vouch for you is even more important than usual. Since you're up to date with papers, why not email researchers you admire with questions that demonstrate you deeply understand their work? Many will be too busy, but some will probably be impressed by your determination. Once you have a relationship, see if you can assist with their research, even if initially it's just grunt work. It will take time, but integrating yourself into the academic "web of trust" and maybe getting your name on some papers is the only plausible way you can expect a company that doesn't know you to take you seriously.
Data science is not a PhD level job. PhDs may be well suited for it, certainly, but 80% of data science can be done by peoplenwth bachelor's degree in stats / math-heavy science.
There's always a domain specificity that sometimes comes from grad school, but data is data and industries are filled with SMEs who understand the domain.
Source: I hire data scientists for Fortune 500 companies.
Campbell is tremendously overestimating how much extreme prepping actually increases your chances of survival. Keeping a week or two of food, water, and energy is smart, but "zombie prepping" is useless:
Revolutionary War: Unless they chose to fight, the "middle class" of independent farmers wasn't much affected (though I'll admit they were already zombie-prepped). The poor did the dying, and the elites got kicked out.
Civil War: Much more calamitous, but little that could be done about it. If you were displaced, your stocks of supplies were reduced to only what you could escape with. If you were killed violently, well, no point buying a gun when you'll be given one before sent charging into artillery fire.
Russia: See Civil War above. And just for fun, remember that having a large private store of grain wasn't exactly smiled upon during collectivization.
France: While farmers were undoubtedly more food-secure than their urban compatriots during occupation, those who cached guns and joined the Resistance weren't exactly making the safe choice.
China/North Korea/Vietnam: See Russia above
Africa: Is an entire continent, and reducing its 1.2 billion inhabitants to "where to begin" is incredibly insulting to their individual histories and experiences. But if we're talking colonialism, advising people to buy land is a bit out of touch, don't you think?
> Is an entire continent, and reducing its 1.2 billion inhabitants to "where to begin" is incredibly insulting to their individual histories and experiences.
Acknowledging that they aren't currently equipped to adequately cover this in depth is insulting?
You also seem to be ignoring the premise that being armed is a key part of these plans. The goal isn't just to be food secure, it is to prevent being victimized while the crisis is ongoing or you escape the crisis.
> Acknowledging that they aren't currently equipped to adequately cover this in depth is insulting?
Except he doesn't acknowledge ignorance, he plows ahead and puts the entire continent in the same category as Syria and Afganistan. Less than 2% of Africans live in the countries he does deign to mention.
> You also seem to be ignoring the premise that being armed is a key part of these plans.
Good luck singlehandedly fighting off the Venezuelan/Russian/Union/rebel army when they come to appropriate your assets. There's a reason insurgents use hit-and-run tactics, they'd be slaughtered in a pitched battle.
I don't think you're discussing the same threat model as the author. You're talking about fighting an army. He's talking about other dangerous, non-military people (e.g. Another gang of survivors, who happen to have guns while you just have food)
To be fair, military presence is certainly a problematic situation, but it seems more likely you'd encounter other, uh, less-than-savory people out there in an apocalyptic scenario, who are more likely to be dangerous to you than military personnel.
I think he lumped African countries for convenience. I have a friend living in Kampala for 30 yrs. He takes his family to stay on a boat in Lake Victoria for a month during any major election period. Or leaves the country. The authors Syria observation is a perfect example. The major points are simple. The benefits of firearm ownership among those who consider themselves able to defend their family/property for a short time outweighs any negatives they are likely to experience.
The US history with revolutions/rebellions is also weird - in both cases, it was the State-level of government rebelling against the parent government.
>Africa: Is an entire continent, and reducing its 1.2 billion inhabitants to "where to begin" is incredibly insulting to their individual histories and experiences.
This, and the related link to his article on "culture war" is a strong signal that indicates to me that this falls into the the Using Pseudoscience to Justify Jingoism bucket.
This and the fact the when one side or the other comes to draft, a handgun won't stop them.
More disturbing is that somehow large swathes of the population have come to hate and fear their democratic institutions so much in the last decades that they prepare to violently topple them. And while the vast bulk of mankind is bewildered by the US gun culture, they should be very wary that their own people are somehow influenced to hate their democracies too.
> This and the fact the when one side or the other comes to draft, a handgun won't stop them.
The subtitle of the piece is literally, "who needs an AR-15 anyway." You're kind of ignoring the point that the idea of being heavily armed is about having more than a single gun for home defense.
> More disturbing is that somehow large swathes of the population have come to hate and fear their democratic institutions so much in the last decades that they prepare to violently topple them.
I recall a series of results recently indicating that democracies tend to have outcomes favored by the elites.[1]
This suggests that the democracy isn't functioning and some degree of skepticism and activism is warrented.
> And while the vast bulk of mankind is bewildered by the US gun culture, they should be very wary that their own people are somehow influenced to hate their democracies too.
I am bewildered by many customs of other cultures, and confused what the decidedly odd US gun culture has to do with the dissatisfaction people have with their system of governance and feelings of powerlessness?
I'm not sure what "US gun culture has to do with the dissatisfaction people have with their system of governance and feelings of powerlessness", or that it matters.
Near as I can tell you have: a) people who believe they should exercise their rights in order to not lose them, b) people who believe having a gun or three will better help them if ever they are burgled while at home, c) people who believe that an armed society is a polite society, d) people who believe that an armed society is less likely to become tyrannical, e) preppers, f) hunters/sportspeople... These groups/motivations often overlap. You only need one of these motivations to convince you to own a firearm, but many people will be swayed by just one of these. It seems every week we see a news item about a burglar repulsed by an armed homeowner, for example. And recall that the plaintiffs in Heller (the case that established that there really is a second amendment right to have firearms) were gay people in D.C. who felt unsafe. And recall that during the Civil Rights era (and before! going back all the way to Reconstruction) many black people felt they needed to be armed to resist lynchings (were they wrong?).
I didn't list "dissatisfaction people have with their system of governance and feelings of powerlessness" because, as far as I can see, that's not a common reason for people arming themselves. Fear of tyrannical government is one reason people arm themselves, but I wouldn't say that's a feeling of powerlessness, or of dissatisfaction with government -- it's not at all incompatible with feeling empowered and satisfied with one's government.
It is true though, I think, that if push came to shove, the fact that people are armed wouldn't be likely to make much difference to a determined tyrannical government that can mobilize (and motivate) modern military and/or police forces against rebels. But it sure would be easier for a tyrannical government to have a disarmed population. It's not for nothing that tyrants generally disarm their populations (Hitler, for example, did this). Thus having a well-armed population functions as a canary in the coal mine: if and when the would-be tyrants decide to confiscate firearms, that's when you might start thinking about hopping on a plane to some other place for a while. As a corollary, if the U.S. (federal and/or state) governments don't go confiscating peoples' guns, many people will not think them tyrannical.
For me, as long as we have free, orderly, timely, and clean elections, and as long as the state espionage machinery is not used to twist elected officials' arms, then we do not have a tyranny that cannot be corrected at the next election day. One of the most enduring parts of the American Constitution is that it focuses on process and that those constitutional provisions establishing process are the ones that have least been ignored, maligned, or violated by the institutions it provides for -- the U.S. Constitution is a work of genius, and this multi-century resiliency (while also being flexible enough to be amended, and with a Supreme Court that has enough power to fill in the blanks) is something to behold.
The Constitution is ultimately the biggest reason that the American system is stable, not that the people are armed, but I'm not at all convinced that the people being armed has no role in this, for there is another reason for American stability: its great decentralization and large geographic area. How would one mount a coup in the U.S.? I don't see how. In many countries you see the military (say) take over TV and radio stations, newspapers, shut down the Internet or otherwise impose severe controls on it, and park tanks at key intersections in key cities, and then it's all over. But in the U.S., if someone tried this, they might control one, or maybe two cities, but the rest of the country could easily refuse to go along -- how would one make sure 50 states go along when they all have national guard units, and some even separate militaries as well? It would require a civil war, and no one in the U.S. wants a civil war. In a civil war, the fact that so many civilians are armed would definitely count for something, thus making a coup even less likely.
> The term “assault” is not defined in the criminal code. Courts use common law to define the term.
https://govt.westlaw.com/wcrji/Document/Iefa7d8b5e10d11daade...
> There is no indication in the statute that Congress sought to depart from the common-law definition of “simple assault” when using the phrase in § 111. The phrase is not defined in the statute, or indeed in any provision of the U.S. Code. This is the classic case of a statute importing a common-law term—with, therefore, all of its “soil.”
Amicus brief from the national association of criminal defense lawyers: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-6826/213937/202...
> Absent a statutory definition of assault, the courts have looked to the common law
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Judges are usually bound to precedent but can reject precedent in response to novel situations, like the standard of "probable cause" that came out of car stops and searches instead of placing cars entirely in the existing public or private spheres. Policing the Open Road is a great exploration of this.
In contrast Japan (and the state of Louisiana) have a legal system derived from the civil law tradition.
IANAL so I'll defer to anyone that has corrections.