Charlz Guybon posted:

Lasers don't even use ammunition. How is spamming lasers not way cheaper than missiles that coat a million dollar each and are one use weapons?

Charlz Guybon posted:

That's why they've built so many submarines.
Can't sink what you can't find.

And once laser anti missile defense weapons are more polished, carriers will be much safer.

Charlz Guybon posted:

Lasers don't even use ammunition. How is spamming lasers not way cheaper than missiles that coat a million dollar each and are one use weapons?

Nevvy Z posted:

Doctoress is a woman doctor. Oh no I just broke everything!

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

You can call a male or female doctor a doctor, you can only call a female doctor a doctress, how does that break anything? That is the general rule. A yellow pie or a colon and a parenthesis are a boy, you add a bow to get a girl. Men are the default, women are a specific case.

Party Plane Jones posted:

bird dumps

Space Gopher posted:

If you have enough lasers on your billion-dollar boat to engage five missiles before they hit you, and your enemy fires ten missiles costing a million dollars each at the same time, you're pretty much boned on both the "lost your boat" and "lost a lot more money in that exchange" standpoints.

Mulva posted:

Yes, and if your laser can shoot down a billion missiles including ship launched nuclear missiles, MAD is dead and we rule the world if we want to. Hypotheticals are stupid like that.

Post 9-11 User posted:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/888895687865380864

skylined! posted:

https://twitter.com/ashleyfeinberg/status/888919158850822147

Post 9-11 User posted:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/888895687865380864

Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:

Huge scoop

https://twitter.com/littletboca/status/888911944081473537

SubG posted:

Immediately prior to WWI it was popular to cite The Great Illusion by Norman Angell to explain why there would be no war:

Ralepozozaxe posted:

I'm getting a little tired of people saying Trump would do the right thing if they just appealed to his vanity, and it's only the republicans who are keeping him from doing so.

Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:

Huge scoop

https://twitter.com/littletboca/status/888911944081473537

bird food bathtub posted:

Doesn't that actually somewhat amplify the gender imbalance problem? Having millions of men who also happen to be low socioeconomic class, with all the misery and bleakness that comes with it, that on top of that also numerically cannot find anyone to form a stable family life with just sounds like a recipe for really bad times. Not that it is going to be THE single factor underlying anything and everything, but it really sounds like that would definitely be cranking up the temperature of the pressure cooker a few degrees all by itself.

Arglebargle III posted:

The 80s and 90s generation in China points to kind of selfish people who form strong peer group bonds. So basically completely normal people.

The gender imbalance is more complicated than it looks on the surface. In reality the gender imbalance is local and in some places even skews female. This is mostly because female migrant workers are in demand for semi skilled manufacturing labor because they're more patient and possibly more tractable, and male migrant workers tend towards more strenuous manual labor. So in big manufacturing cities that attract hundreds of thousands of young women you can have a great marriage market for young men despite the larger gender imbalance. Especially if the in laws are dirt farmers and thus easily impressed.

The places with the worst gender imbalance in terms of unmarriagable young men tend to be poor and rural, which isn't great for uprising chances but means that the issue is unlikely to produce a movement with real chances of doing anything since the new middle class and the wealthy are not sympathetic in general to rural peasants.

In the short term the middle class can be expected to freak the gently caress out about falling property prices since the coming crash/correction (nobody knows which one) will be the first time in their experience with capitalism that a house won't be a good investment. Lots of middle class families in big cities got most of their wealth from essentially lucking into valuable property when the state gave people their formerly collectivized housing and are probably not prepared for the concept that the gravy train is over and their children will never get that opportunity no matter how many apartments they buy.

Cyrano4747 posted:

The men who matter will get jobs and wives. No upper middle class dude with a good income is going without a woman, even if he has to marry "down market" from what his parents might prefer. The places where you're seeing masses of dudes who can't get a wife are rural villages where all the women are heading out to the cities and using their newfound value to nab a husband a bit better in the prospects department than a pig farmer.

The poor dudes who can't get a wife and whose factory/farming/etc jobs are kind of hosed? Yeah, they're going to be pissed but this is China. Short of them somehow getting a major revolution off the ground (hard to do without the support of the middle class) nothing is going to happen. If they revolt the PLA will go in, massacre the gently caress out of a bunch of people, and it will either be explained as suppressing disruptive <insert local minority ethnicity> elements or just whitewashed out of the national history in 10 years a la Tienanmen.

...

Since I'm thinking about it a bit, I think the potential for revolution caused by screwing the poor gets widely exaggerated. The simple fact is that if there is even the slightest chance of advancement to a working middle class that poo poo doesn't happen. if you look at successful revolutions that change governments (as opposed to breaking away as an independent state) they tend to have immense gaps in wealth with near-zero chance of going from the bottom to the top. We can talk about how awful the income gap in the US is, but it looks like nothing compared to Tsarist Russia or the Republic of China. Even then both of those examples needed MASSIVE wars to turbo-gently caress the incumbent governments in unrecoverable ways.

...

It won't ever get to that point. The gender imbalance is bad, but it's not catastrophic bad. It's at about 700 million men and 667 million women. It's an ongoing issue, incidentally, with about 1.15 male births per female birth.

That's the sort of thing that's going to gently caress up your rural villages something fierce, and maybe junior NCOs won't have wives, but anyone with more pull than a E3 is going to find someone. Again, you don't need to compare favorably to a business tycoon, you just need to be more attractive than saying in BumFuck Hunan and marrying a dirt farmer.

Plus, the Chinese are buddying up to the Philippines. If anything we might have to worry about them stealing our source of lance corporal army wives.

Crabtree posted:

George Soros is actually paying me right now to post this.

Robot Hobo posted:

Even if this were true, isn't using unlimited amounts of money to influence politics something the Republicans have fought hard to say is a perfectly ethical, valid, and protected use of the first amendment?

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Audible gasses emanating from Tom Clancy's bloated corpse don't count as "theories."

Gumbel2Gumbel posted:

That doesn't make much sense. China doesn't want a goddamn thing to happen to North Korea because they don't want all those people flowing across the border.

Robot Hobo posted:

Even if this were true, isn't using unlimited amounts of money to influence politics something the Republicans have fought hard to say is a perfectly ethical, valid, and protected use of the first amendment?

Comrade Fakename posted:

To be fair, a couple of years ago the idea that Russia would invade Ukraine was the most Clancy-esque theory possible.

Comrade Fakename posted:

To be fair, a couple of years ago the idea that Russia would invade Ukraine was the most Clancy-esque theory possible.


I think that the idea is that if China took the initiative and invaded NK from their end they could halt the flood of refugees with their massive army in the way. They couldn't do that if the US invaded from the south or if the regime collapsed on its own.

Anyway, it's just a theory, it's not like I want this to happen.

Raenir Salazar posted:

No. It's more complicated than it appears. You're talking about a demographic distributed mainly in poorer areas across the whole country and not at all concentrated, so it isn't likely to lead to any kind of social movement.

I found some posts in the AIRPOWER thread in GiP:


There's more but I'm having trouble searching the forums, I know the posts are in either the Chinese Megathread, Chinese Economy Megathread, or the AIRPOWER/Cold War thread; but the basic idea is that absolutely anyone who is at all important for the creation of any kind of popular movement is also important, wealthy, or influential enough, or simply prestigious enough as a position in society, to find a wife; even if it means "marrying below" the standards of his parents. Plus with so many overseas projects there's also opportunities to marry outside of China and bring home a wife.

e:

I found some posts from Cyrano4747 that I think make sense.

A big flaming stink posted:

It's stupid Tom Clancy bullshit. Do you think China is going to massacre every single North Korean? Because when the masses of refuges are facing starvation in their newly collapsed state, that's literally the only way to stop the flood.

WampaLord posted:

I know this thread gets a little weird and off topic on the weekends but "hypothetical inevitable China war" has been a real whopper of a dumb derail.

glowing-fish posted:

In case anyone was wondering, I can confirm that China has real mountains.

empty whippet box posted:

Who's going on the sunday shows tomorrow? Are we gonna get some more quality Trump fellatio by Patrick Bateman?

glowing-fish posted:

In case anyone was wondering, I can confirm that China has real mountains.

DaveWoo posted:

https://twitter.com/epngo/status/888946472254922752

glowing-fish posted:

In case anyone was wondering, I can confirm that China has real mountains.

enraged_camel posted:

what's a "real mountain"?

that was a joke, please don't answer

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

re: verbal approval:

https://twitter.com/skyqrose/status/888598658865926146

WampaLord posted:

This would have been a much better derail.


NO, DO IT!

Dick Trauma posted:

Fintilgin posted:

I don't care about Musk or the hyperloop, but articles like this are exasperating. Like, no poo poo a brand new technology isn't instantly going to be more affordable and better in every way then existing tech that has 200 years of experience and infrastructure.

All I can picture is a sniffy article from 1898 about how this so-called 'horseless carriage' is nothing but a worthless toy for the idle rich, inherently discriminatory against the nations poor. Imagine, furthermore, the expense and logistics of paving this great nations thousands of miles of roadways and establishing regular 'refueling stations' filled with dangerous flammable liquid, when that money might be better invested in wainwrights and horse farms...