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Cake day: June 24th, 2025

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  • Frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldOk, boomer
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    11 hours ago

    The hardship Boomers had was mostly far away and hypothetical. They grew up with the constant threat of nuclear war.

    The old Star Trek episode “Gary Seven” has an interesting take on this. Boomers expected that civilization would end before they got to adulthood. Then it didn’t, and they had no idea what to do with themselves.

    Then they come to a time when they’re resented by both their parents and their children. The Greatest Generation was horny after the war and literally fucked the Boomers into existence, but realized too late that they didn’t actually like having children. Boomers treated their children the way their parents treated them. Gen X sorta puts up with it, but Millennials aren’t having it.

    Other than that, capitalism knew by the 1950s that if they push the working class too hard, they’ll revolt. Better to back off the money printer a little to make sure we can keep running it for as long as possible. And so the working class could have a reasonably comfy life doing the same trades for their whole working life (provided they were white). Over time, capitalism found that it can keep a working class revolt from happening by dividing the working class against each other; racism and religion works pretty well. Then it was time to overclock the money printer.









  • The world security environment is deteriorating.

    In part thanks to the Heritage Foundation.

    Just, why? Why? We already have more nukes than anyone except Russia, and even that is just a number at this point. There is no deterrence gain for adding more. None. Even accepting deterrence arguments as valid, we already have far in excess of what’s needed. At most, we need to swap some old cores.

    This has been studied by several military experts over the years:

    What was the “right” number? Given the subjective nature of the process, there can be no single figure. However, over the years, a number of knowledgeable individuals have tried to quantify a minimum nuclear requirement and it is worth considering the results of some of their efforts.

    In 1957, Admiral Arleigh Burke, then the chief of naval operations, estimated that 720 warheads aboard 45 Polaris submarines were sufficient to achieve deterrence. This figure took into account the fact that some weapons would not work and that some would be destroyed in a Soviet attack (Burke believed that just 232 warheads were required to destroy the Soviet Union). At the time Burke made this estimate, the U.S. arsenal already held six times as many warheads.

    Several years later, in 1960, General Maxwell Taylor, former Army chief of staff and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote that “a few hundred reliable and accurate missiles” (armed with a few hundred warheads) and supplemented by a small number of bombers was adequate to deter the Soviet Union. Yet by this time the United States had some 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads.

    In 1964, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his “whiz kids” calculated that 400 “equivalent megatons” (megatons weighted to take into account the varying blast effects from warheads of different yields) would be enough to achieve Mutual Assured Destruction and destroy the Soviet Union as a functioning society. At that time, the U.S. arsenal contained 17,000 equivalent megatons, or 17 billion tons of TNT equivalent.

    Even if we accept that we have to have these infernal things, we’re at least an order of magnitude beyond what we actually need.

    This is pure giveaway to nuclear military contractors.




  • Frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world#environmentalist
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    5 days ago

    I remember when disability rights groups pointed out that these laws were placing extra burden on disabled people that weren’t being put on everyone else.

    These laws accomplish nothing except make liberals feel good that they actually passed some kind of environmental rules. Meanwhile, conservatives are making sure they can legally torture gay kids, let billionaires get away with pedophilia, and burn lots and lots of coal. But we passed straw bans in a couple of cities. Yay us.