Crazy how we have a $1.4T national defense budget and yet we remain powerless in the face of some wind and rain.
Beginning to wonder if the budgets for the F-35A/B/C/D/I, the Virginia Class submarines, and STAR WARS anti-ICBM space laser systems might have been misspent relative to the need for sea walls, dykes, and storm bunkers.
Wind and rain that we knew a century ago how to prevent. The greenhouse effect was discovered during the French Revolution. Catastrophic anthropogenic climate change has been known for about 50 years now.
The thing is handling wind and rain sounds easy until you understand it as force carried through the media of air and water. As a midwesterner I know not to underestimate wind, it can destroy your home without slowing down. This is a bombing campaign of force in a different form.
The thing is handling wind and rain sounds easy until you understand it as force carried through the media of air and water.
But we do have industrial scale infrastructure to curb the effect of these storm surges. We have construction techniques to make buildings more durable. We have artificial breakwaters and coastal preserves to blunt the landfall of these big storms. We have mass transit infrastructure technology to evacuate people quickly and efficiently, rather than stranding them in giant traffic jams in the middle of a storm.
This is a bombing campaign of force in a different form.
We’ve known how to build bunkers for over a century. Perhaps we need a modern day Enver Hoxha in the Florida governor’s seat.
I prefer anthropogenic runaway global heating (ARGH). “Climate change” is a pretty weak formulation of the underlying problem, even weaker than “global warming”.
It chooses to address the effects rather than the cause. Climate change addresses that it’s not just going to get hotter, we’re also experiencing changes to currents in both the air and water, and things like rainfall are going to wildly change. To some people like folks in Bengal the heat is the problem, but to Albertans the issue is that drier conditions will cause increased wildfires, meanwhile over in the eastern United States it’s hurricanes and tornadoes while Western Europe is going to lose its whole “temperate rainforests at a high latitude” thing as the Gulf Stream collapses.
Oh then things will get real end Permian but that’s more of an atmospheric makeup thing.
Climate change is a phrase created by republican messaging specialist Luntz.
“The climate has always been changing.” I’m sure you’ve heard that dismissal before, no? Not that it matters. Denialists gonna deny. It’s the same people that will see it snow once in the winter and say “so much for global warming.”
I stand by the money comment, there’s zero indication there isn’t money to complete both coastal hardening projects, and robust disaster relief.
I stand by the conservative comment because Manchin and the like are conservative in all but name. More directly, desantis and such openly avoid collaboration with the democratic white house out of spite
That’s fine. But it isn’t just a question of money. Its a question of expertise and manpower. At some point, you have a soft cap on the volume of intellectual and engineering man hours at your disposal. Funneling our best and brightest into a Pentagon vanity project means drawing down the pool of skilled workers in other industries.
It’s the same problem modern mathematics and physics is having with the financials industry. Anyone who excels at high level mathematics gets sucked up to do HFT at some Wall Street hedge fund. They spend their best years combing over market data for optimizing arbitrage in regional commodities prices. The modern day Hawkings and Einsteins are very likely tied up inventing new ways to raid your pension funds, rather than spearheading the next generation of astronomy and physics.
In the same way, the trillions we spend on the F-35 are drawing people into a field that exists exclusively for the cat-and-mouse of perimeter intrusion. Meanwhile, civil engineering is a field for neo-babies looking for government sinecures and B-students who don’t realize they’re getting into a retreating field.
Manchin and the like are conservative in all but name
Conservatives-in-all-but-Name are a big chunk of the party. Manchin isn’t the exception in the Senate, he’s just the name we all recognize. Gillibrand and Hickenlooper and Ossoff and Durbin and King and Tester and on and on… they’re all along for the ride.
DeSantis is a freak on social issues. But on fiscal austerity and “business-friendly” subsidies, he’s right in line with the Dems in his state’s congressional delegation.
I agree with much of your comment but must say I feel you moved the goalposts a bit from raw funds to expertise and manpower. I understand your draw argument, but would contend that it’s not that overlapped a Venn diagram. There aren’t that many aerospace engineer / civil engineer hybrids that you’re losing staff from one to the other.
I feel you moved the goalposts a bit from raw funds to expertise and manpower
When you’re the US Feds, money isn’t real. You can spend 20% of GDP while carrying a $35T debt and nobody cares.
But you still need to spend the money on stuff. You can’t buy a trillion in waffles because that many waffles don’t exist. Similarly, you can’t hire $2T in engineering talent over 10 years without depleting a well of talent shared by other engineering professions.
You’re creating an enormous vacuum in the industry when you can pay 2x-5x what other engineers are making and you’re employing thousands of people for the job over a decade.
There aren’t that many aerospace engineer / civil engineer hybrids
This isn’t a question of “hybrid”. This is a question of “which college has the best graduate salaries?” and “which professors are in the highest demand into the next decade?”
$2T over ten years is it’s own (very lucrative) industry. That’s before you get into the draw this has on electrical engineers and materials specialists and management training.
Crazy how we have a $1.4T national defense budget and yet we remain powerless in the face of some wind and rain.
Beginning to wonder if the budgets for the F-35A/B/C/D/I, the Virginia Class submarines, and STAR WARS anti-ICBM space laser systems might have been misspent relative to the need for sea walls, dykes, and storm bunkers.
Wind and rain that we knew a century ago how to prevent. The greenhouse effect was discovered during the French Revolution. Catastrophic anthropogenic climate change has been known for about 50 years now.
The thing is handling wind and rain sounds easy until you understand it as force carried through the media of air and water. As a midwesterner I know not to underestimate wind, it can destroy your home without slowing down. This is a bombing campaign of force in a different form.
But we do have industrial scale infrastructure to curb the effect of these storm surges. We have construction techniques to make buildings more durable. We have artificial breakwaters and coastal preserves to blunt the landfall of these big storms. We have mass transit infrastructure technology to evacuate people quickly and efficiently, rather than stranding them in giant traffic jams in the middle of a storm.
We’ve known how to build bunkers for over a century. Perhaps we need a modern day Enver Hoxha in the Florida governor’s seat.
I prefer anthropogenic runaway global heating (ARGH). “Climate change” is a pretty weak formulation of the underlying problem, even weaker than “global warming”.
It chooses to address the effects rather than the cause. Climate change addresses that it’s not just going to get hotter, we’re also experiencing changes to currents in both the air and water, and things like rainfall are going to wildly change. To some people like folks in Bengal the heat is the problem, but to Albertans the issue is that drier conditions will cause increased wildfires, meanwhile over in the eastern United States it’s hurricanes and tornadoes while Western Europe is going to lose its whole “temperate rainforests at a high latitude” thing as the Gulf Stream collapses.
Oh then things will get real end Permian but that’s more of an atmospheric makeup thing.
Climate change is a phrase created by republican messaging specialist Luntz.
“The climate has always been changing.” I’m sure you’ve heard that dismissal before, no? Not that it matters. Denialists gonna deny. It’s the same people that will see it snow once in the winter and say “so much for global warming.”
Everyone knows immigrants caused climate change anyway.
There’s ample money for both. Conservatives just block it.
glancing at the F-35 $2T budget
At some point, you start making trade offs.
glancing at the voting records of Manchin, Sinema, and Coons
I wish it was just conservatives.
I stand by the money comment, there’s zero indication there isn’t money to complete both coastal hardening projects, and robust disaster relief.
I stand by the conservative comment because Manchin and the like are conservative in all but name. More directly, desantis and such openly avoid collaboration with the democratic white house out of spite
That’s fine. But it isn’t just a question of money. Its a question of expertise and manpower. At some point, you have a soft cap on the volume of intellectual and engineering man hours at your disposal. Funneling our best and brightest into a Pentagon vanity project means drawing down the pool of skilled workers in other industries.
It’s the same problem modern mathematics and physics is having with the financials industry. Anyone who excels at high level mathematics gets sucked up to do HFT at some Wall Street hedge fund. They spend their best years combing over market data for optimizing arbitrage in regional commodities prices. The modern day Hawkings and Einsteins are very likely tied up inventing new ways to raid your pension funds, rather than spearheading the next generation of astronomy and physics.
In the same way, the trillions we spend on the F-35 are drawing people into a field that exists exclusively for the cat-and-mouse of perimeter intrusion. Meanwhile, civil engineering is a field for neo-babies looking for government sinecures and B-students who don’t realize they’re getting into a retreating field.
Conservatives-in-all-but-Name are a big chunk of the party. Manchin isn’t the exception in the Senate, he’s just the name we all recognize. Gillibrand and Hickenlooper and Ossoff and Durbin and King and Tester and on and on… they’re all along for the ride.
DeSantis is a freak on social issues. But on fiscal austerity and “business-friendly” subsidies, he’s right in line with the Dems in his state’s congressional delegation.
I agree with much of your comment but must say I feel you moved the goalposts a bit from raw funds to expertise and manpower. I understand your draw argument, but would contend that it’s not that overlapped a Venn diagram. There aren’t that many aerospace engineer / civil engineer hybrids that you’re losing staff from one to the other.
When you’re the US Feds, money isn’t real. You can spend 20% of GDP while carrying a $35T debt and nobody cares.
But you still need to spend the money on stuff. You can’t buy a trillion in waffles because that many waffles don’t exist. Similarly, you can’t hire $2T in engineering talent over 10 years without depleting a well of talent shared by other engineering professions.
You’re creating an enormous vacuum in the industry when you can pay 2x-5x what other engineers are making and you’re employing thousands of people for the job over a decade.
This isn’t a question of “hybrid”. This is a question of “which college has the best graduate salaries?” and “which professors are in the highest demand into the next decade?”
$2T over ten years is it’s own (very lucrative) industry. That’s before you get into the draw this has on electrical engineers and materials specialists and management training.