Some of the things CA "receives" from the federal government are zero percent interest rates and preferential access to vast capital markets, a heavy implicit labor cost subsidy via immigration policy, an implicit promise of massive earthquake insurance, access to the Colorado River, copyright & patent protections for its primary industries...
Looking at fiscal inflows and outflows isn't the benchmark of who gains from a relationship and whether it is positive-sum.
If merely hosting a headline & link like this is problematic, you must also have an issue walking by news stands, visiting bookstores, or watching CNN. It sounds exhausting.
It's fascinating to see how the people pushing this argument prioritize economic nationalism exactly to the extent it promotes open borders, and exactly no further.
You also have a problem with precision. A test with a 100% pass threshold is a really poor estimator of an underlying failure rate; at best it can bound it, but you really do care about the precise underlying odds of failure.
If your system requires 100% perfection from all of its subcomponents, it is a shitty, fragile system. Robust systems can be made of parts with known failure rates.
This this this. I really see this as the core of my job, career even. Build reliable systems out of unreliable parts. Hardware fails, software has bugs, people have bad days. Yet we still make insanely reliable stuff.
Until you actually launch the missile, it should be ok to do nothing.
People will invariably fuck up. The system needs affordences to handle those inevitablys. Ideally a drunk commander shouldn't matter, matter much anyway.
Accidentally launching a missile is pretty hard and I'm confident that we have enough safeguards against that. I'm not so sure we have enough safeguards against terrorists stealing nuclear weapons (or the essential components for making one). You only need somebody with motive and motivation, and a mistake by pair of truck drivers. It's fairly hard to make a reliable system out of that failure mode.
A friend worked with that kind of transportation in the 80s. At the time it wasn't 2 truck drivers. Perhaps 30 people with lead and follow cars. Iirc, most were us martials, everyone was armed. the trailer was a rolling fortress. Security was probably much better in the Cold War. My friend had a story about a truck hitting some ice, and tipping over. They had prepared for many contingencys and had it handled in a few hours. The only person who noticed something was up was another truck driver who stopped to help. He was confused that the trailer didn't tear itself apart, but didn't make a bid deal out of it.
Not cheap. But likely pretty reliable.
Perhaps without the Russian villains the system has atrophied. Stories like that make me think it can work, but perhaps require a bit more wherewithal to maintain it.
The Wiki entry[0] for the secure trucks reads like some kind of Tom Clancy fiction. They allegedly have automated weapons systems that will kill attackers even after all defenders become casualties.
My friend likely worked with the prior generation. They were unwilling to go into any sort of detail. they did say, you don't want to be any where near one if the operators think you shouldn't be there. Their phrase was something like "There are extensive anti personnel defenses".
You have to assume that such a truck is constantly "phoning home" and hopefully has some kind of asset tasked to watch it constantly. Maybe the process to get in involves authorization from "home base" in the form of that private key?
While I doubt that anything could stop a truly determined and well equipped adversary, I would frankly not be shocked if the whole thing was basically packed in claymores facing out, just for starters. You won't care in that extreme about compromising the physics package; you'll already be scrambling every resource including NEST to the site. You just want to buy time, and there are a lot of ways you could do that.
Hell, maybe they include an EPFCG... that would be really clever.
It's such a complex network of systems and people and policies; all of which is constantly in flux. All of which has to yield a perfect result, every time. You can argue about robust systems, but the reality is that these systems are far from robust.
Look at what happened when the USSR collapsed for god's sake! We're still cleaning that up.
Very much this: A system should be designed with the mindframe that the user won't be at 100%. Especially this, weirdly - because in a time of crisis, folks might not be at 100% even though they should be.
Its why some things just won't work unless put together just right - to account for people's mistakes. It'd make sense for a submarine to refuse to dive if the seals aren't sealed, for example. I'd think there would be something that could be applied even for this.
That sounds very good, but now here are your real-world constraints.
You have a network of detection systems which you give you (optimistically) 15-40 minutes of warning before everything and everyone you've ever known and cared about ends. In that time you have to make the decision to launch a counter-attack. Your decision needs to be something which can be rapidly acted upon, but also needs to be something that absolutely cannot be interfered with by any adversary launching the first strike. If you delay, your ability to counterattack will be forever lost. If you're wrong, you'll be setting off Armageddon.
Perimetr, the Russian system, is one solution. The USSR decided not to go for launch on warning. Their plan is that, when things get tense, they activate Perimeter. This is sometimes called "The Dead Hand". If the system was enabled, detected nuclear explosions, and there was no way to communicate with higher authority, it would automatically release weapons control to some lower level of authority. Even then, it's not auto launch; there are people in bunkers somewhere who have to make that decision.
Part of the rationale is that this didn't give the leadership of the USSR direct launch authority. They could enable the system, but that didn't cause a launch. It took H-bombs on Moscow plus an enabled system to do that. This provided a safeguard against the leadership going nuts.
In theory sure, but point me to the long-term practice of making it actually work. In practice, nuclear weapons have been subject to obvious and critical fuck-ups.
The flip side of strong ethnic ties and ingroup preferences enabling fraud, is that they make it possible for, eg, Hasids to conduct an extemely high-value diamond trade on a handshake basis internally. https://www.algemeiner.com/2014/05/21/new-yorks-diamond-dist...
I don't think that's true; traders in the stock markets with no racial or familial ties regularly make such deals, especially in the days of open outcry markets.
The South Korean presidential scandal is one of the odder bits of contemporary political history. Imagine an alternate-history US President Hillary Clinton being impeached over PizzaGate and it starts to get close. Besides the actual corruption mentioned in the article, there are credible reports swirling of a "8 Goddesses" cabal and various occult practices.
The "Eight heavenly ladies" part didn't pan out. So far, it seems there was only Choi Soonsil; I dunno, there might be seven stupid ladies who believed they were important just because they were Choi's friends.
Yeah, but others are more or less factual. And that doesn't even begin to address the more odd bits, like Choi's friend Ko Young-Tae, who is a former Asian Game medalist who became a gigolo, made friends with Choi, and then reportedly had a fallout with Choi over a puppy owned by Choi's daughter...
Imagine that Americans elected Tom Cruise to the White House and it turns out that the Church of Scientology was pulling his strings. That would be an apt analogy.
Good. The entire premise of the internet is that it allows coordination at low latency over distance.
It's also probably not fantastic for the United States to be strip mining the entire >130 IQ population of eg Sudan and packing them into SF/NY/DC to work on ad optimization when they're desperately needed by their own people; setting up infrastructure to work remotely is a great first step to eliminating the brain drain problem period.
I like the way your world-view treats intelligent people. Instead of having them being independent agents, there's some form of ownership of them... such that if they head off to foreign lands to pursue what they feel is a better life and earn more money, then it's a theft of community property.
All Sudanese should be happy with their lot in life and either work to improve it or rot. So how dare these Western companies pay the dark skinned people of Sudan as much money as rich white people could earn!!!
(No seriously though, the implications of what you say are disturbing to me.)
The disturbance you feel is likely at least partly cognitive dissonance at the idea of open borders amounting to labor colonialism.
It's an interesting idea, wouldn't you say? What are the effects of ensuring Sudan or wherever is unable to maintain a functional local elite? Are they good or bad, on balance? If we strip-mine all of their potentially capable administrators, do we have an obligation to administer their state for them, or just airdrop rice every couple years, or what?
The idea that states and people have reciprocal obligations beyond Maximum GDP isn't exactly novel.
The traditional answer is various ways of forced community-building (collective punishment & reward, forming in/outgroups, etc) as a way of building loyalty to their individual unit.
Also note that in modern militaries, the ratio of behind-the-lines support troops to front-line trigger pullers is absurdly high. Depending on the country, you can end up with conscripts e.g. running the vehicle pool and doing logistics while the core infantry is essential volunteer.
http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2