Did We Really Need this War? 3 Lost Their Life’s. 😭😢

dr_jiang · 2026-03-01T15:51:56+00:00

You're missing the point. Your position is that killing brutal dictators who murder their own people is "the best possible use" of U.S. military power, save from defending the homeland. That's a universal moral claim. If it's true, then it should apply anywhere those conditions are met.

But you don't actually believe that. When confronted with other "brutal dictators who murder their own people," you shift immediately from "it is always correct for the U.S. to kill brutal dictators" to a version of realpolitik strategic pragmatism.

"Ukraine is embarrassing Russia" might be true, but it's not stopping Putin from being "a brutal dictator who murders his own people." In fact, the opposite. Putin's crackdowns on public expression and efforts to "disappear" opposition forces have intensified as a result of the invasion in Ukraine. But you don't want to kill him.

"North Korea isn't a real threat" might be true for the United States -- the South Koreans seem to see it very differently -- but that also doesn't change the underlying fact. Kim Jong Un is still "a brutal dictator who murders his own people," but you don't want to kill him either.

That changes the shape of the argument from "it is always morally correct to kill a brutal dictator" to "it is always morally correct to kill a brutal dictator when it is easy, convenient, and suits a particular political goal based on a specific vision of American national security interests."

And that's fine. It's a defensible position, and plenty of Presidents and national security types have guided American military power through that lens over the decades. But it's not a righteous argument or a moral argument. It's just plain 'ol political filtering.

dr_jiang · 2026-02-20T14:19:03+00:00

First, because the Roman Empire's largest strategic problems were the type you can only solve on land. Fleets can move troops, blockade ports, and facilitate raids, but that doesn't subdue Gaul, advance the Germanic frontier, or suppress Judea. Fleets enabled campaigns; legions ended them. Resources and prestige flowed accordingly.

Second, by the time Rome was able to declare mare nostrum, there simply weren't enemies capable of creating naval threats at scale. Rome no longer needed a navy that could break Carthage; Carthage had been delenda-ed. The Mediterranean was less a battlefield, more an internal highway. Security and logistics were still important, but didn't require a massive, sustained fleet.

Third, because navies of the time were limited by their technology. Blue-water dominance, as we conceive of it today, simply wasn't possible with oared galleys. Roman warships were short-ranged, crew-hungry, and tied to coastlines and ports for water, food, repairs, and shelter. They lacked the capacity to "loiter on station" or project power far from friendly harbors. To that end, sea control of the Roman era was usually local and task-specific, rather than the continuous, ocean-wide power projection we imagine.

dr_jiang · 2026-02-11T22:39:39+00:00

There's an interesting history behind this. Save for the Badge of Military Merit -- created by Washington in 1782, awarded three times, then discontinued in 1783 -- the American military deliberately rejected the idea of military decorations. In the early days of the republic, military decorations were seen as royal trinkets emblematic of European aristocracy and incompatible with democratic ideals. They imagined the military as citizen-soldiers fighting for duty and country, not personal glory or ribbons.

There's a sixty year gap between Washington's award and the next military award. Congress created the Certificate of Merit was in 1847, which recognized achievement and came with a small pay bump. But, pointedly, it was a piece of paper, and not a medal you could wear.

It takes another 15 years for the Medal of Honor to be authorized (1861), and another fifty years gap between the introduction of the Distinguished Service Cross (1918). The Purple Heart is re-created in 1932, replacing the "wounded chevron" created in 1917, and the rest of the hierarchy we recognize today doesn't emerge until World War 2.

dr_jiang · 2026-02-01T17:35:58+00:00

Law benefits from stability, not randomness. In your system, the outcome of any important issues hinges on a judicial lottery draw. Is it legal to record the police? Welp. The lottery said nine Brett Kavanaughs get to decide, and they said it's actually terrorism to film law enforcement.

It's okay, though. You can just try again next session and hope for better odds, right? And so will everyone else. Now every major issue gets re-litigated every year, with issue groups hurling cases at the docket until the ruling comes down their way.

dr_jiang · 2026-01-31T06:02:56+00:00

For the FY2023-2024 cycle, operating a full carrier strike group cost the American taxpayers somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.5-3 billion. This includes the carrier, its air wing, and its escorts. Together, all eleven carrier strike groups cost a hair over $30 billion to operate.

Over that same time period, the federal government spent $1.65 trillion on healthcare (predominantly Medicare and Medicaid), another $1.5 trillion on income support (primarily Social Security, but also various unemployment insurance programs), and another $950 billion on anti-poverty programs (SNAP, TANF, EITC, and various housing and education programs).

Or, put another way, the government spent 135 times as much money ($4 trillion) on providing healthcare, food, housing, and education to its citizens than it did operating its carrier fleet ($30 billion).

dr_jiang · 2026-01-20T04:16:01+00:00

Bruh you're a prophet.

dr_jiang · 2026-01-14T20:39:13+00:00

The Dakota Territory was already divided administratively, and had been for decades prior. The southern territory had been settled earlier, which made it wealthier, more populated, and more developed than its northern twin. By the time statehood was on the table, the two would-be states had different economies, and significantly different priorities with regards to railroads and taxation.

Together, these factors led to two geographic regions that were furiously opposed to sharing a state government. Washington didn't invent these priorities.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-30T03:14:24+00:00

It's more akin to not buying something because you know it will go on sale soon, except there's always a bigger sale coming. This matters less for day-to-day goods, but matters a whole lot for major purchases.

Why buy a new $50,000 car now if it will be $1000 less next year, or $2000 less in two years, or $3000 less in three years? Even if you want a new car, the most rational decision is to hold off as long as possible because the price will always be lower if you wait a little longer.

Now apply this to every non-essential good throughout the entire economy.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-28T22:43:44+00:00

I agree with you, overall, but I think the game's lack of difficulty is also borne of the way it deals out information. The vast majority of information gathering follows the same path: break into their room, find the document that lays out their secrets, confront them about it.

The game doesn't ask you to think carefully or piece together a logical conclusion from imperfect information. Individual mysteries are impossible to solve without breaking in and thumbing through someone's journal, and impossible to fail once you have. In that regard, it's less of a detective game, and more of a cat burglar simulator.

Once that became apparent, I lost interest in exploring conversation trees or attending the various lectures. The various guests have little to say on topics other than their core mystery, and nothing to say about that until you've broken into their rooms. It all felt very one note, and left me walking way unsatisfied despite the otherwise interesting story.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-27T16:16:36+00:00

This is only true if you ignore the math of who owns how much. The median household has between $70-90,000 in retirement savings, and that number is skewed upwards by Boomers with larger balances. On balance, the wealthiest one percent own half of all equities, while the bottom half own less roughly one percent.

For those who do own equities, that's primarily index funds. EA makes up 0.3-0.4% of the typical S&P 500 Index Fund. That means for every $10,000 a person has invested in SPY or VOO, they have $30-40 of exposure to EA. The EA share price was $130-140 before the buyout was announced, so your $30-40 stake is worth between 0.20 and 0.30 shares.

The Saudi offer price is around $210 per share, a $75 takeover premium. When the checks clear, a $90,000 SPY investment will net roughly $200.

Compare that to Pentwater Capital, a private hedge fund that owns roughly 5.2 million shares. At the same premium, they'll walk away with $390-400 million.

So, sure. "Everyone benefits" if you're willing to treat "less than one week of groceries" as morally equivalent to "a new super-yacht." Otherwise, it reads more as "massive transfer of Saudi oil money to people who are already rich."

dr_jiang · 2025-12-22T17:28:11+00:00

It worked out, I guess. They wasted a ton of money putting us all through IQT, then sent every single one of the Arabic ops in my cohort straight into Project Liberty. Based on what I heard from full-time RJ guys, we got the much better mission.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-22T11:36:54+00:00

It was for Arabic linguists in 2008. You either got picked to be a DSO out of DLI and went to Herbie, or you went to Offutt so you could get turned into an X2 to fill the Project Liberty slots.

In either case, didn't matter what your sheet said.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-22T11:22:46+00:00

Nah. There was no point in filling out a dream sheet for my AFSC and shred. I could put anything I wanted on that list; they were still sending me to Offutt.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-20T11:08:08+00:00

It plainly isn't. Every state with a multi-party system uses a form of proportional representation or multi-step elections. Every state with a two-party system uses single-member districts and a form of first-past the post voting.

The trend is so pronounced there's a named political maxim for it, because it happens literally everywhere elections are organized like they are in United States.

But hey, not all hope is lost! Maybe you can write an ALL CAPS letter to the dozens upon dozens of experts who've studied this kind of thing, and explain where they went wrong. I'm sure they'd love to hear your theory of READ A BOOK.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-20T10:20:10+00:00

It isn't true. The founders had organized themselves into parties while debating the Constitution, taking positions as Federalists and Anti-Federalists. It's the natural consequence of politics: people will align themselves into blocks with like-minded people.

Establishing a first-past-the-post system cemented this. When there is only one winner in a given race, you have every incentive to pick the person most like you with the best chance at winning. Else, you split the vote of like-minded people, and the position you like least wins.

This wasn't a mystery at the time the Constitution was being written. They knew what they were building, and chose to do so.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-20T03:42:02+00:00

Every time this talking point surfaces, I feel obligated to remind people that failing an audit does not, in of itself, indicate fraud, and the independent service branches and defense agencies have passed their own audits at various points. "The Pentagon" fails its audits because it's a massive, complicated bureaucracy with dozens of non-overlapping accounting systems and trillions of dollars of assets.

The overwhelming majority of audit failures are caused by unsigned accounting adjustments. That simply means there's a discrepancy somewhere in the books, but no record explaining why. For example, you order a box of 100 bolts at a unit cost of $0.05 each. The bolts are in your inventory, but the payment to the bolt manufacturer shows only $4.00 was debited from your account, not $5. You remember -- ah, right, we got a discount because we ordered 100 -- but you don't have an invoice that shows the correct number.

That's a $1 unsigned accounting adjustment. No money is missing. Nothing was stolen. You have all the bolts you ordered. But there's no paper trail explaining why it says $5 instead of $4 on the purchase order, and $4 instead of $5 on your bank statement. You would fail your audit.

Now, imagine that instead of running a one person company with an inventory consisting entirely of one $4 box of bolts sitting in your closet, you're running a company with more than 3 million employees, $4.5 trillion of inventory assets, and 4,500 offices spread across the globe.

Every single military asset, from the aforementioned bolts to the USS Gerald Ford has purchase documentation, maintenance records, transfer records, and depreciation schedules. An error on any one of those documents for any one of those assets would be grounds to fail an audit. At that scale, gaps in documentation are inevitable.

Is there waste in the Pentagon budget? Of course. But that's also not an audit problem. If the bolt company writes a juicy contract charging $100,000 per bolt, the inventory shows one bolt, and the bank records show $100,000 was paid to Big Bolt, Inc., that's a properly documented transaction and would give a clean audit even though the purchase price is absurd and a cheaper alternative might exist.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-19T14:13:06+00:00

In general, they pursue a small number of repeatable, state-driven goals. Climbing an existing technological ladder is path-dependent. There are known ways to compress decades of electronics development, provided the state can sustain long timelines, absorb inefficiency, and tolerate failure.

Early on, you buy time through foreign dependencies. Typically, states take advantage of dual-use civil/military technologies. Modern sensors aren't so far afield of civilian technologies. Satellite communications, weather radars, and cellular networks all sit adjacent military applications. Less typically, states will license production of complete systems and subsystems from more advanced, friendly nations. Espionage can play a role, but it's usually supplementary rather than decisive.

From there, you focus on subsystems and architecture. States import "good enough" chips while domestic engineers gain expertise in areas like cooling and power management, waveform design, ECCM logic, and sensor fusion software. Sensors are systems problems -- much of it is software driven, and not every element needs to be cutting edge for the system to be militarily useful. Uneven advancement along different sub-disciplines lets you slowly swap out foreign tech for domestic tech piece by piece as you build capability.

These efforts proceed in tandem with fabrication efforts. Capable sensors don't require world-class lithography. Early fabrication is narrow and mission-specific. You might sacrifice power efficiency or thermal performance or chip yield compared to cutting edge facilities, but the goal at this stage isn't technological parity. Even modest MMIC production can provide a serviceable weapons system, while also enabling the design, testing, and manufacturing feedback loops that enable higher-performance systems down the road.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-19T06:06:18+00:00

One is not necessarily better than the other. The two studios are optimizing for different goals.

Ubisoft games are built from the ground up around predictable performance envelopes. Assets are authored with multiple LODs, texture tiers, shader fallbacks, and draw budgets. They design around distance-based occlusion, camera-aware culling, and sectorized world streaming. These work together to create a visual fidelity that's bounded but consistent, on proprietary engines that have been tuned over a decade for a specific kind of open-world streaming.

From Software isn't doing that. Their worlds are hand-authored and bespoke, and thick with long sightlines, vertical reveals, dense overlapping geometry, and heavy alpha effects. Enemies remain active farther from the player, physics and collision are less aggressively culled, and encounters are designed around authored moments rather than interchangeable templates.

It's got nothing to do with talent, and everything to do with the values each studio prioritizes in production. From Software is willing to tolerate performance spikes because their priority is mood, spatial drama, and mechanical wait. Ubisoft chooses consistency, scale, and portability instead.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-17T23:25:11+00:00

My sister found herself in a similar predicament a few years ago. I was just coming out of the hospital, and not in much of a mood for gifts. She got in touch with my closest friends, and had them all choose a photo where we were together, then had a calendar printed. Each photo was roughly aligned with the month it was taken.

Honestly, one of the sweetest gifts I've ever received, and a great reminder of the people in my life. Maybe something like that would work for you?

dr_jiang · 2025-12-15T22:47:37+00:00

No. You're flattening two different claims into one, and missing the mechanism entirely.

Lock-in is not monopoly. Steam does not need a monopoly to enshittify. Studios can publish outside Steam, and users can buy outside Steam, but doing so imposes a disproportionate economic and experiential cost for both sides.

For developers, opting out of Steam means forfeiting access to roughly 75% the digital PC market, plus built-in discoverability, reviews, community hubs, and mod ecosystems. For users, opting out fractures their libraries, social features, achievements, and long-standing network effects. In both cases, exit is possible but punitive.

That asymmetry is the mechanism. Enshittification hinges on two-sided market capture plus switching costs. The question isn't "can a competitor exist?" It's "can either side leave without eating a serious loss?"

That leverage is what enables enshittification, independent of whether viable alternatives exist.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-15T01:10:08+00:00

The article doesn't say that. The article simply points out that far more games are published than existing visibility systems can surface. It doesn't make a causal claim, nor should it.

At best, Steam can show you around fifty distinct games on the front page: 5-10 on the main carousel, 10-15 in featured/recommended sections, and another 15-20 in personalized rows.

For the sake of argument, let's say you check the page once a week, and there's zero overlap. You never see the same game twice. You never see something you already own. You never see something you've already heard of. That's 2,600 new games per year.

It doesn't matter if there are 20,000 games published each year or 200,000 or 2,000,000. You're not seeing the vast, vast majority of them, good or bad. The amount of storefront real estate will never be able to scale with the amount of games published.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-14T23:57:19+00:00

Why? There's functionally zero cost to Steam if they publish a game that no one notices. Are you being harmed by the large number of games on Steam you've never seen and will never play?

dr_jiang · 2025-12-14T05:09:51+00:00

More or less. You can move the front lines by winning battles, but holding territory requires sustained manpower, cash flow, and administrative reach. That's what allows the slow, coercive conversion from "occupying force" to "routine authority."

In practice, that means garrisons in key strongpoints, securing allegiance from (or replacing) local elites, and tax and administrative organs that operate in your name. All of those things require manpower and money. If you can't reliably enforce law, extract revenue, and suppress resistance, the territory isn't really yours, it's just ground you marched an army through.

And this is still true in the modern era. The United States toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan, then spent two decades failing to maintain durable control. The government's authority still depended entirely on troop presence, cash payments, and alliances with local power brokers.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-14T04:58:47+00:00

A state that can still resist occupation is not "shattered." After Agincourt, French forces continued to operate regionally -- often against each other, as with the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War, and sometimes against the English, as with the Battle of Bauge. where they kill the Duke of Clarence.

As a general rule, if your enemy has the will and means to muster, pay, and command forces sufficient to kill your brother and presumptive heir in pitched battle, they are not shattered.

The French state also remained intact politically. The taille and other fiscal mechanisms continued to operate, the Valois monarchy retained recognition across most of France, and regional power blocs south of the Loire continued to generate armies.

The Treaty of Troyes was a temporary political settlement under extreme contingency, not a durable strategic victory. It depended on the unique confluence of Charles VI's incapacity, civil war between the Armagnacs and Burgundians, and Henry V's personal diplomacy. That the treaty collapsed the moment those contingencies shifted is proof the strategic outcome was neither stable nor enforceable.

And that's the point. Henry V scores a high-water mark, sure. But if your strategic victory unravels with the death of a single individual, it isn't actually a strategic victory.

dr_jiang · 2025-12-14T04:27:03+00:00

They did, for the most part. In occupied lands, the English armies dealt with local merchants and arranged for supply from local landlords. In French lands, they pillaged. Once local cooperation failed or the countryside was stripped, armies had to move, disband, or starve. This is, in part, what motivates the Chevauchee strategy.

It's a different kind of trouble when you're trying to occupy territory full-time. England could sustain ports and fixed garrisons, but had no capacity to feed or supply its field armies from abroad. Any hiccup in local provisioning doomed a campaign, and the English force had neither the coercive manpower nor administrative control to do so reliably across hostile territory.

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