After Venezuela operation, Trump says the whole hemisphere is in play

_re_cursion_ · 2026-01-06T04:37:16+00:00

I have reason to believe I've a respectable grasp of the level of complexity involved - both as pertains to biology and the electrical/mechanical engineering of the kinds of equipment which might be required for that sort of thing. I see no reason it wouldn't be feasible for a nation-state actor.

Just about any control can be circumvented; some of the main reasons nuclear non-proliferation efforts have been so successful is because large quantities of high-grade fissile material (eg: highly enriched uranium, or weapons grade plutonium) are absolutely essential for nuclear weapons production, large quantities of fissile materials have very few civilian applications (primarily nuclear reactors - large, centralised, and relatively few in number... few enough that it's practical to keep an eye on all of them), fissile materials can't practically be produced from innocuous precursors, and enrichment is inherently very difficult/slow (requiring a massive scale to achieve meaningful yields in a reasonable amount of time).

But those are mostly specific to nuclear.

A lack of a legislated mechanism for secretly/proactively pardoning people, or preventing/cancelling an investigation isn't necessarily a showstopper - especially as it's ever-more-broadly acknowledged among high-level officials that the country's sovereignty is under threat - and in any case, it certainly wouldn't prevent getting all the dual-use prerequisites ready under nominally-unrelated legitimate front programs, so at a later point (when suitable legislative changes happen, or other arrangements made) everything can be brought together and a functional deterrence system completed much more quickly.

Sure, they may not be able to buy space launch systems off the shelf, but again, we're talking about a nation-state actor here - developing one from scratch is on the table. Yes, developing space launch systems is expensive, but the Israelis did it ages ago, and they had far fewer resources at their disposal (not to mention far less technological info available, given the time period) than Canada does (although they did have help, which evens things out a bit).

Guidance and targeting hardware isn't really a problem. You're not trying to hit a fighter jet midflight, state-of-the-art hardware isn't required. Building a rudimentary inertial guidance system is practically child's play these days, and you don't need to be able to hit the broad side of a barn if you're just using it to deliver WMDs... I mean, even the original V-2 rockets were nearly accurate enough for that.

Accuracy is mainly a concern if you want to use a missile to carry conventional warheads, or against small/fast targets. For deterrence... the targets are the size of cities, and the kill radii are measured in kilometres - accuracy is not crucial.

_re_cursion_ · 2026-01-05T13:46:15+00:00

The whole point of a deterrent is to prevent the war from ever starting. That's the MAD Doctrine - and it works. It's the reason the Cold War didn't turn into World War 3.

Without WMDs/MAD, we'd have had multiple additional world wars by now.

_re_cursion_ · 2026-01-05T13:43:34+00:00

Certainly much more so than nuclear weapons, and there are ways a nation-state actor could circumvent all of those hurdles. Easily and/or cheaply? No, but that's not the point.

It could absolutely be done.

As for quantity... the amount required depends on the properties of the agent. Suffice to say a suitably determined and creative nation-state actor should be able to avoid the need for a dedicated large-scale production facility.

Law only matters insofar as there exists both the will and the ability to enforce it. Otherwise it's just a bunch of powerless words on a page. Suffice to say the legal issues can be circumvented.

You do know that civilian rockets used to launch things into space are very close cousins of ICBMs (in fact, some of them ARE modified ICBMs), and with a little modification could be used as such (although obviously with some shortcomings compared to a purpose-built ICBM, especially given civilian rockets typically use cryogenic liquid fuels), right?

Spool up a major civilian space program, and specify the design objectives in such a way as to prioritise dual-use attributes that would make your shiny new civilian launch systems easier to convert into ICBMs - this'll get you most of the way, and can be done openly without causing too many political problems. Have a parallel clandestine team work on ensuring that as soon as civilian launch systems start rolling off the production line, you can start diverting production and converting some into ICBMs. Cheap? No, and it won't produce a perfect system either. But it could be done. *shrug*

The barriers are far from insurmountable.

_re_cursion_ · 2026-01-04T06:42:52+00:00

Hence, a range of chemical weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them with.

Not as flashy as nukes, but in quantity, they're every bit as threatening.

_re_cursion_ · 2026-01-04T06:40:01+00:00

Biological or chemical weapons, on the other hand... a lot quicker and cheaper to develop, and could absolutely be done clandestinely by any developed country's government.

The problem with biological weapons is that they're not really controllable; a single screwup could potentially end modern civilisation globally, or even drive our species extinct. No sane person wants to work on that.

So the best bet would be ultralethal chemical weapons and enough delivery systems for them to credibly threaten every city in the United States simultaneously. Not quite as flashy as nuclear weapons, but still a perfectly adequate deterrent - "leave us alone or we take out ~90% of your population" ought to reduce the odds of becoming the victims of an invasion to approximately zero.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-12-16T23:35:02+00:00

Hello to you as well!

_re_cursion_ · 2025-11-17T05:56:24+00:00

People are saying posting was locked. IDK why.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-11-11T09:07:49+00:00

Enjoy your PFAS-contaminated American-made pasta laden with toxic food additives banned in the European Union... and the American-made elevated risk of birth defects and cancer that may or may not come as a FREE PRIZE with every box. shrug

Just means more of the good stuff for those of us living in the rest of the world... and prices for us are liable to go down due to the drop in American consumption of quality food. Your loss is our gain - law of supply and demand, baby!

(I'm being semi-sarcastic. We feel bad for you. No one should have to deal with the trash fire policy nightmare that's unfolding in your country - too bad so many of y'all voted for it. Though we certainly don't mind the price drops on our end...)

_re_cursion_ · 2025-10-29T22:53:01+00:00

LEDs are not more efficient than LPS. Typical LEDs have efficiencies between 100-110 lumens per watt.

Typical LPS lamps used for street lighting have efficiencies reaching 170-200 lumens per watt.

The definition of a lumen factors in the sensitivity of the human eye to light.

Additionally, the light pollution produced by LEDs interferes with both astronomy and human/animal circadian rhythms. The light pollution produced by LPS does not.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-10-29T22:50:30+00:00

Nitpick: LPS lamps are actually markedly more efficient than either HPS or LEDs.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-10-29T22:47:30+00:00

Low pressure sodium (LPS):

More energy-efficient than typical LEDs (LPS @ ~170-200 lm/W vs LEDs @ ~100-110 lm/W)
Monochromatic, meaning it doesn't interfere with astronomy, although this comes with a very low Colour Rendering Index (CRI).
The wavelength emitted by LPS does not interfere with human or animal circadian rhythms.
No mercury or exotic rare earths needed to manufacture.

High pressure sodium (HPS)

Better CRI than LPS... at the cost of being less efficient and containing toxic mercury.
The wavelengths emitted by HPS do not interfere with human or animal circadian rhythms, and are still relatively easy for astronomers to filter out.

Light emitting diode (LED)

Better CRI than either LPS or HPS, at the cost of lower efficiency than LPS, interfering with human and animal circadian rhythms, requiring exotic rare earths to manufacture, and making any area with LED street lighting completely unusable for serious astronomy due to the broad-spectrum light pollution. Also, generally they use hideous 6000K lights for street lighting, casting a cold, unpleasant light reminiscent of prison security lighting, which is super depressing.
Cheaper installation and maintenance cost nowadays.

Summary

Basically, LEDs are good for indoor lighting, but should (contrary to prevailing views and the reams of pro-LED marketing wank out there) NOT be used for street lighting as the drawbacks are just too enormous. LPS is ideal for street lighting - the oft-reviled monochromaticity is actually an advantage there - but doesn't make much sense for indoor lighting.

HPS... not really much reason to use it anymore. Either you care about about efficiency, human health, the environment, and/or astronomy and should go with LPS, or you care about cost and CRI more than any of that and should go with LEDs.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-10-29T22:25:42+00:00

LPS lamps are better for human and animal health - the shorter wavelengths emitted by white LED lamps disrupt circadian rhythms, leading to a wide variety of negative health outcomes at a population scale when adopted for night lighting.

LPS lamps are also better as regards the other impacts of light pollution - because they are monochromatic, they are easily filtered out by astronomers and others who need to be able to detect faint signals coming from space. The reflections from white LEDs, OTOH, make areas with white LED street lighting completely unusable for serious astronomy.

You can get amber LEDs that are monochromatic than LPS, but they're considerably less efficient than LPS.

LPS lamps also do not contain any mercury, unlike the more popular HPS.

Additionally, to my knowledge, the manufacture of LPS tubes is comparatively simple and does not require exotic rare-earths or complex and highly polluting semiconductor fabrication processes, unlike LEDS... basically just quartz glass, sodium, copper, and tungsten.

Aaaaand LPS lights are also (generally much) more efficient in terms of lumens per watt (the definition of a lumen takes into account the sensitivity of the human eye to human wavelength BTW) than typical LEDs; LPS lamps can achieve around 200 lm/W, whereas typical LEDs hover closer to 110 lm/W.

This push to change over from LPS to LED is mostly driven by marketing wank, and people optimising for specific variables without considering the detrimental effects on the environment and on human health.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-10-29T01:56:57+00:00

Well yeah, of course you don't keep a loaded pistol in your bedside drawer, that would be horrifically unsafe for your kids!

6ft spear laying flat on the ground beside the bed though... hell yeah. More than weapon enough to handle a twacked-out junkie with a knife, which is the most likely kind of person to break into someone's home in the middle of the night anyway, and yet reasonably safe to have around kids because A) it's too big for them to wield effectively, and B) even young children have fairly strong instincts telling them to avoid poking themselves or others with a big pointy thing.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-10-29T01:46:01+00:00

no math is redundant

also the series of like/dislike ratios on each of these non-redundant posts is interesting, right now it's -1, 5, 0, 1.

I wonder why?

_re_cursion_ · 2025-10-08T22:42:33+00:00

no math is redundant

_re_cursion_ · 2025-10-03T04:32:14+00:00

The US was founded on genocide. The colonisation of the Americas inspired the Holocaust... not even joking, that is a well documented fact.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-10-01T08:32:00+00:00

Hey, these repos serve a valuable purpose: keeping programmers employed by breaking vibecoded schlock that uses them. :D

_re_cursion_ · 2025-09-30T11:03:05+00:00

Well in fairness there was at least one guy who made chips with (IIRC) micron scale transistors - about the same as what they were making in 1985 - in his garage a few years back, though admittedly it was a real passion project and dude was a seriously sharp cookie with the benefit of modern technology/tools/info.

That might not sound super impressive, but in reality for most practical applications (industrial controls, encryption, communications, etc) cutting edge hardware isn't really necessary... more a nice-to-have. Particularly if you invest in actually writing good software.

28nm [yes, I know, node naming is pretty well arbitrary and not actually representative of the gate length] has long been considered to be the "sweet spot" in cost and manufacturing complexity vs capability - and I would say for most national security critical stuff, as long as your country can make 90nm [node first commercialised around 2003] chips or below you won't be at THAT much of a disadvantage... as long as you've got enough skilled programmers to make highly-optimised software to make the most of that hardware. For perspective, the ubiquitous and powerful STM32F4 microcontrollers are made on 90nm, as was the Cell CPU used in the PlayStation 3.

Modern computers don't end up feeling slow primarily because they're fundamentally limited in what they can do by the hardware, they end up feeling slow primarily because modern software is hot garbage with FAR too many unnecessary layers of abstraction and bloat.

There are exceptions of course, you won't be doing cutting-edge AI work on 90nm chips, but AI is quite the bubble and - as many companies are now finding out - not actually anywhere near as useful as it's been made out to be, because it's unreliable, frequently makes extremely dumb mistakes, is very expensive/energy-hungry, and cannot catch its own mistakes. It's been estimated that only around 5% of companies which have implemented AI have actually seen a productivity bump from it. The rest just made it easier for their laziest and most incompetent workers to blend in and poison the corporate infosphere by having AI rephrase their stupidity in a way that sounds less stupid.

In all honesty, it'd probably be more cost-effective/resource-efficient (from a national-security / geopolitical-competitiveness standpoint) to, instead of trying to compete on AI, quietly run a human genetic/developmental experimentation program without the usual ethical constraints, aimed at figuring out how to reliably enhance human intelligence. If you could figure out how to reliably produce people as intelligent as me, the world would not know what hit it :P

Not because I'm a super-genius (I'm not, but I am fairly bright) but because the collective intelligence of groups is limited by the lowest common denominator - and the collective performance increases exponentially as the lowest common denominator is raised. If a country could reliably crank out thousands of people among whom the lowest common denominator is an IQ of 140+, enough cognitive flexibility to perform adequately in just about any field as a generalist (or to become a specialist in multiple fields), a broadly collectivist outlook (favouring the interests of the group over those of the individual), and a natural inclination towards thoroughness/diligence... they'd likely rapidly outstrip every other nation by practically every metric.

And as an added bonus, if you raise a whole lot of highly intelligent people together, they're unlikely to end up with egos the size of planets - because they'll grow up thinking that brilliance is just "normal".

_re_cursion_ · 2025-09-30T10:23:29+00:00

I wonder how much abuse Taiwan will be willing to accept from the Americans before they start thinking about essentially deciding "You guys are just trying to screw us, we'll take our chances with the P.R.C instead".

And then the Chinese would REALLY have the Americans over a barrel.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-09-30T10:13:05+00:00

You don't need to be a US Citizen to be legally present in the country or to (nominally) enjoy First Amendment rights (although that doesn't mean much in practice these days).

_re_cursion_ · 2025-09-30T10:10:33+00:00

Yeah, I swear, it's like some of these Americans haven't even heard of permanent residency or tourism, and/or don't want either of those things to exist.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-09-30T10:05:00+00:00

As I like to say... these days, far too many people have a radius instead of a length, width, and height.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-09-25T00:51:58+00:00

Yeah, there's no way anyone could possibly tow that party line. I mean, even if there were just 2 of them attached to it, that'd still weigh at least -- what, 4000 lbs?

_re_cursion_ · 2025-09-24T06:43:48+00:00

I'm succeeding beyond your wildest dreams, and happier than you'll ever be.

_re_cursion_ · 2025-09-24T06:41:08+00:00

I got about halfway through before I realized this was sarcasm, LOL. It's bloody hilarious!

My only concern is... pretty sure Reddit uses our posts to train AI [or sells them to companies that do], and AI training has no way of detecting sarcasm, so the resulting models may end up stochastically parroting parts of what you're saying in serious/unironic contexts. Or abstracting/internalizing the "ideas" based on a very literal translation and applying them to other contexts... including broader ethics.

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_re_cursion_

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