I’m more talking about diminishing capacity rather than temporary disruption, the less valuable or complicated any given part, the easier it is to replace it fairly quickly. Cutting a line is annoying, but it can be repaired fairly quickly, transformers, battery banks, and panels are more expensive and difficult to replace, but order of magnitude easier than a gas turbine.
Like say a bomb gets dropped in a field of solar panels, it’ll destroy some in the direct blast, and damage others near by with debris or other things, but, a significant portion of the field would probably be fine and could be running again fairly quickly. A bomb that blows up the turbine at a gas plant is a causing a lot more pain.
Solar and wind are fundamentally not something that can be effectively protected from attack, it is necessarily exposed and dispersed over wide areas that will be essentially impossible to guard comprehensively. You can’t have someone with a MANPAD or AA gun guarding every single windmill or field of solar panels. but there are no particularly valuable points in the system, no Achilles heel. It will take damage, it will require constant replacements and repair, but, it will be extremely difficult to comprehensively disable it. And so long as the cost to replace and repair is not much more than the cost of munitions used on it, then it’s not exactly an economical usage of the attacker’s resources.
As supposed to a system of refineries, large power plants, and pipelines. Those are dense high value targets, you can plaster them from head to toe with high end air defense because there aren’t that many to protect. But if those defenses fail or are overwhelmed, replacing them is a multi year multi million dollar project. And realistically, the bomber will always get through, eventually the defenses will fail and you will loose a huge chunk of capacity that can’t be replaced easily. Even if it takes 10 cruise missiles, 100 drones, and 20 informants on the ground feeding information about defenses, it’s still much cheaper for the attacker to destroy than defender to defend or replace.
So there is an interesting concept in studies of authoritarian regimes, namely that a personalist authoritarian leader must maintain the illusion that they will be in power for the forceable future up until the last moment, if they don’t, then their whole power structure breaks down.
The dynamic of a personalist regime is one of competition between subordinates, with the leader acting as a key figure that arbitrates disputes between the subordinates and protects them from each other. In turn, the leader is able to extract loyalty and power from the subordinates through this role. This dynamic hinges on the idea that the leader will be there for the foreseeable future performing this role, the moment there is any sort of uncertainty, the system breaks down as the subordinates become more interested in shoring up their own power bases and positioning them selves to fight each other for their chance at the top spot, or a better position under the next leader, rather than maintaining the power of the current leader.
Regardless of the feasibility or practicality, the leader must maintain an internal fiction with in the regime that they will always be there, and that they have a plan to always be there. The subordinates don’t even have to believe it, they just need to think all the other subordinates believe it.
Oh boy, 200,000 more people looking for work, surely this won’t negatively impact the job market. Or like, decrease consumer spending in an already unstable K shaped recovery.
Nah this goes way back, this is home grown New Labor security state ideas. Blair tried doing it 15 years ago and has been banging on about it from the side lines since then.
Louis Rossman did a video a while back basically suggesting it as a form of visible protest against the over reach of the tech industry.
Like “clippy wouldn’t try and harvest all your data or force you to make accounts you don’t want, sure he could be annoying, but you could turn him off.” Like the worst thing tech companies used to do was something like clippy, maybe annoying but trying to be helpful
Like, she’s the only viable option at this point, there literally isn’t any other national level politician on the Democratic ticket (under the age of 75) who can rally mass support, as supposed to mass indifference or mass gritted teeth reluctance.
The not-trump side of politics needs an actual win, like, enough of a public mandate to actually push through reforms, not just a barely limping across the line, thin majority. They need a filibuster busting win and a candidate willing to actually make significant reform, and that won’t come from a milquetoast careerist centrist that leans to the right.
This stinks of a compromise, like RFK needs to announce some “cause of autism” because that’s his entire base of political support, but he can’t say “vaccines” like his base wants, because doing so would be so beyond the pale for the public health professionals in the organization that they might just refuse to work with him, ruining his ability to use his position to grift.
RFK is between a rock and a hard place regarding vaccines, on the one hand, he has his base of support, who are obsessed with blaming vaccines for stuff, and on the other is… all the health professionals in the admin he now runs that he needs to maintain some kind of workable relationship with. Mass condemnation of vaccines from him might actually destroy his ability to run the organization.
Even waymo’s “good” numbers, which probably have been massaged a bit, from cars driving in carefully selected conditions, is nearly 2.5 times the rate of accidents per mile driven of fatal and non-fatal accidents in the US.
The technology isn’t ready yet and shouldn’t be on the roads. If it takes it being on the roads to improve it, then maybe it shouldn’t improve, maybe it should be abandoned and the money being wasted on it should go to extant, proven solutions.
The fact that Amtrak and local public transit authorities are struggling to secure funding to maintain and expand operations while self driving car companies burn cash for decades on nothing burgers drives me crazy.
More like continuing to try to will something in to existence that can replace smart phones because they want to be in charge of the hardware so they don’t have to go through Apple and Google.
People liked TikTok, and it got really big, not because of the format, but because its recommendation system was optimizing for “Show people things they like”. If you change that to “show people things I want them to believe” people who don’t already believe those things will stop engaging and move away.
it may take time, but they will migrate. The network effect can slow that down, but a platform like TikTok is distinctly not one built by networks. Like, people don’t go there to fallow creators or their friends, they go there to see random stuff from people they don’t know, and it actively makes it difficult to get a consistent feed from people you fallow.
i think the “party with in a party” strategy is much more promising than outright 3rd party runs. As in using the Democratic ticket to make their candidates relevant, but not using the democrats electoral and fundraising infrastructure, instead developing parallel party infrastructure to campaign and mobilize voters.
The DSA (and WFP to a lesser extent) have been much more electorally successful, particularly at the local level, than organizations that just run third party outright. I don’t think the DSA will have much luck in suburban areas, but I think other coalitions with a similar strategy could be successful.
I’m more talking about diminishing capacity rather than temporary disruption, the less valuable or complicated any given part, the easier it is to replace it fairly quickly. Cutting a line is annoying, but it can be repaired fairly quickly, transformers, battery banks, and panels are more expensive and difficult to replace, but order of magnitude easier than a gas turbine.
Like say a bomb gets dropped in a field of solar panels, it’ll destroy some in the direct blast, and damage others near by with debris or other things, but, a significant portion of the field would probably be fine and could be running again fairly quickly. A bomb that blows up the turbine at a gas plant is a causing a lot more pain.