The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

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junk
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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by junk »

I think a lot of people also forget that for instance nazi germany was always on the very brink of economic collapse. Yes, the state was supporting a very large workforce, but it was always just ahead of insolvency.

One of the methods it used to get to get ahead was by very aggressive expansion, expatriation of funds and resources and overall acting a bit like a swarn of cicadas.

It really was tiered in a lot of ways. The first cash influx came from a fairly rich class within Germany itself, afterwards it began grabbing treasuries of countries it defeated, while keeping them sovereign in their own debts. It was really a byzantine system in a lot of ways.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by Overkill Engine »

Mr Bojangles wrote:
Game Theory wrote: I know the reasons why you "shouldn't" use AI, and I disagree with all that I have heard of so far.

1) It's dangerous: Yes it is, to your enemy. You don't have to make an AGI to traverse terrain and pull a trigger, and considering that Umaki are Umaki and look nothing like Loroi, that makes it fully useful in large scale Napoleonic warfare and perhaps even urban fighting. (Assuming you don't care that Umaki civilians will die.)

2) It's hack-able: Than don't connect it to outside systems. So what if you can't make weekly updates android style, you'll be making new robots at the same rate.

3) It might malfunction: This is actually a serious one, but If you test them properly than you can just redesign whichever model didn't work out. Even if it goes berserk, it's be doing that when it's next to the enemy and next to expendable drones. You can just introduce the newest models into "low risk" situations like open ground combat on some desert world and than move it into civilian situations.

4) They're too expensive: I actually don't know about this one, but the software is the "game changing" portion of a robotic soldier so it should ideally cost less than large transport vehicles.
AI in warfare is definitely a tough topic to discuss. There are any number of ethical and philosophical arguments you could present for and against its use in war, but I think practical reasons are sufficient.
  1. Expense -
    Creating quality software is NEVER a simple process and the more you intend for the software to do, the less trivial it becomes to create. When you start adding in mil-spec requirements, it can become a positively Herculean task. And, now you want that software to be able to think for itself? It's going to be hideously expensive developing and deploying it.
  2. Malfunctions -
    This is part of the expense of developing quality software. The developers will never be able to think of every failure mode or every possible interaction of the code, both with itself and external inputs. No test they devise will catch every possible situation the software will encounter. The more free and dynamic the environment is meant to operate in, e.g., a warzone containing free agents (humans), the greater the likelihood of the software making incorrect decisions. And with a war AI a malfunction can equate to significant casualties.
  3. Hacking -
    That AI is going to have an outside connection: it's going to need to communicate with HQ and any soldiers it needs to interact with. You can encrypt the connection and harden its internal lines, but any opening can be exploited. This also builds on the previous points: A hack is equivalent to a malfunction and eliminating potential malfunctions is expensive. It's bad enough if your comms get hacked, but if your weaponized AI gets hacked...
  4. Dangerous -
    Well, this is sort of a loaded point. Anything meant to be a weapon is dangerous to someone, whether or not the weapon has intelligence built in. If an enemy combatant somehow managed to hack into the weapons control of an armed fly-by-wire aircraft, it doesn't matter that the aircraft can't think for itself. If the AI weapon malfunctions, that's not necessarily due to its intelligence, but more likely the software's complexity.
I think when it comes to AI on the battlefield, it's not really "you shouldn't." It's more a matter of "should you?" The fact is, an organic human brain provides everything such an AI would, but at a far reduced cost, a lower risk of malfunctions, and without risk of being hacked. The same can be said for any of the brains of any of the combatants involved in the primary conflict of Outsider.

Now, none of this is to say that I think it isn't possible or shouldn't be done. My research background is in AI, and if we ever manage to create something we recognize as sentient, it will likely be capable of thinking in terms of tactics and strategy. And, it's not like Outsider hasn't already shown us an example of an advanced AI - the Historians apparently trust their AIs enough to act as emissaries/diplomats (which, as was seen in another thread on this forum, can be quite the subtle and contentious undertaking).

Also, yes, exosuits are an awesome thing and I think they could be of some use in warfare, buuuut this post is more than long enough as it is. :)
The only way I can see AI being feasible and reliable enough for its intended use in direct combat is in a disposable locust swarm bomb fashion, rather than a direct and intelligent soldier replacement. At best insect intellect and no real need for IFF (can be spoofed/misdirected), or communications, since its orders never change. (ex; seek heat source % larger than self, close to x range, detonate!)

Not something you deploy in areas you intend to occupy with meat-bag forces simultaneously, more like something you scatter from orbit on an enemy world to allow it to wreak havoc until its intended obsolescence. Anything else is too ripe for exploitation and too expensive to lose or have turned on you. Machines even now can be programmed with far faster reflexes than humans, and if you add in human level or higher intellect on top of that you have exponential trouble incoming if it malfunctions.

Only way I can see to sidestep traditional robotics/AI issues for direct combat is to get more into the artificial life-form realm of design, which raises all sorts of long term ethical problems; plus potentially goes right back to having to deal with some of the vulnerabilities of meat-bags that one was trying to avoid.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by junk »

Honestly, I think the best use case scenario for AIs is in the form of neural networks for tactical and strategic computers.

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Mr Bojangles
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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by Mr Bojangles »

Overkill Engine wrote: The only way I can see AI being feasible and reliable enough for its intended use in direct combat is in a disposable locust swarm bomb fashion, rather than a direct and intelligent soldier replacement. At best insect intellect and no real need for IFF (can be spoofed/misdirected), or communications, since its orders never change. (ex; seek heat source % larger than self, close to x range, detonate!)

Not something you deploy in areas you intend to occupy with meat-bag forces simultaneously, more like something you scatter from orbit on an enemy world to allow it to wreak havoc until its intended obsolescence. Anything else is too ripe for exploitation and too expensive to lose or have turned on you. Machines even now can be programmed with far faster reflexes than humans, and if you add in human level or higher intellect on top of that you have exponential trouble incoming if it malfunctions.

Only way I can see to sidestep traditional robotics/AI issues for direct combat is to get more into the artificial life-form realm of design, which raises all sorts of long term ethical problems; plus potentially goes right back to having to deal with some of the vulnerabilities of meat-bags that one was trying to avoid.
Well, how you discriminate targets will be the determining factor in what level of AI you use. If you make no distinction between combatants and non-combatants, then a swarm of robots with insect-type intelligence would probably be fine. If you do differentiate targets, then that won't suffice. You'll need a more advanced AI for that, which runs into the issues addressed so far.

If you're going to deploy them from orbit, then they kind of become redundant. It implies that you have control over local space and if you're willing to deploy such machines, it'd be more efficient just to bombard targets of choice (since you don't care about who you're hitting). If you don't actually control local space, sending a swarm of robots down to the surface doesn't really net you anything.

It might be possible to grow an AI or an artificial lifeform for the battlefield. Doing so might reduce design, manufacturing and operational costs. It will likely also introduce control and performance issues. You may define the math and structure, but once you expose it to training and/or evolution, guaranteeing a particular set of behaviors is no simple task. You'll more than likely come full circle back to the issues you were trying to avoid (complexity, cost, robustness, vulnerability).
junk wrote: Honestly, I think the best use case scenario for AIs is in the form of neural networks for tactical and strategic computers.
I think this is actually a very good use case for AI: to assist commanders with tactics and strategies. And it probably wouldn't have to be NN-based. You could use relatively simpler rule-based systems and leave the fuzzy thinking to the meat.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by Argron »

All this talk about costs, ethics, risks and such is all well and good until there is a battle for a planet in which an army loses a million or several million soldiers, which could have been reduced to a fraction with combat AI.
It's not just the loss of resources the death or incapacitating injury of a soldier is, or how AIs will be so much better than humans at fighting to a point the comparison is ridiculous, it's also the morale hit. Nobody wants to see thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of bodybags, in particular their families back home, and the civil unrest this causes can topple governments, even dictatorial militaristic ones. Not the Loroi or Umiak due to the way their societies work and how they see the death of a soldier, but certainly the human government and some of the other Outsider nations' governments would be at risk.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by dragoongfa »

You are 'modernizing' the way societies respond to combat casualties. Modern western societies are for all intents and purposes completely averse from war, something that sooner or later will come back and bite them in the ass.

The Soviets in WW2, lost around 8 to 10 million soldiers, the Germans 4 to 5,5 million, the Japanese 2,5 million. All of these societies didn't face any societal upheaval due to these severe casualties, quite the contrary all of the above had very stable governments even when they were near collapse.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by Argron »

dragoongfa wrote:You are 'modernizing' the way societies respond to combat casualties. Modern western societies are for all intents and purposes completely averse from war, something that sooner or later will come back and bite them in the ass.

The Soviets in WW2, lost around 8 to 10 million soldiers, the Germans 4 to 5,5 million, the Japanese 2,5 million. All of these societies didn't face any societal upheaval due to these severe casualties, quite the contrary all of the above had very stable governments even when they were near collapse.
Notice how I said
... an army loses a million or several million soldiers, which could have been reduced to a fraction with combat AI.

WW2 is a perfect example of how societies in total war would use every weapon at their disposal to minimize casualties and win. Mind you, their technology level didn't allow for much reduction but sure as hell they tried. Attempts at body armor, better vehicles, better weapons, medicine, research in all fields, and ultimately the nuclear bomb, which was used to end the war and avoid having to invade Japan (which could have cost the USA more than a million casualties). Many scientists believed the nuclear bomb could ignite the whole atmosphere but it was still tested and used, and so will AI in frontline military vehicles, total war or not (but sure as hell will be used if we have it and face a war of extermination).

WW2 russia had those numbers of casualties because they had to throw everything at the enemy or face genocide and a change in regime and their leadership didn't care about the loss of life as much as it cared about said change, and germany suffered those casualties when they became completely outnumbered in troops, tanks and airplanes and their leadership decided to stand their ground instead of using common sense. None had a choice but they did try to minimize losses as much as they could. The japanese were just plain retards using obsolete tactics and being too stuck in their ways to change them.
There was no choice for their societies but to accept those casualties, if they even knew the real numbers due to massive propaganda, and the leadership was trying to minimize casualties within their technological capabilities and stupidity.

Western societies are adverse to war and death because the memory of losing almost 40 million europeans and having whole countries flattened is still fresh in the collective memory of Europe and USA, and also social advances and higher living standards make people value life more, it's a natural process and one most societies would eventually reach and one from which I don't believe there will be any turning back.
Maybe not warrior societies, or hive-like societies where the individual doesn't count, but surely humanity from 140 years in the future will.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by dragoongfa »

Of course all societies try to minimize war casualties, this has always happened throughout human history with no exception. My point isn't that, its that societies acclimated in war can and will tolerate high rates of casualties. I should make it clearer but WW2 combatants were all acclimated in war, one way or the other but the societies that were totally or partially adverse in war either lost (France) or had to be bailed out for a second time (UK).

As for turning back to that point, a pendulum of human morality has being observed throughout human history. Currently the western world is having a second 'peaceful' humanist period, the first being a sparse few decades after the Napoleonic wars and ended when Bismark became the Prussian Chancellor in the 1860's with the climax of the era that followed being the two world wars and the cold war. Our current era is also one of peaceful humanism, it started with the fall of the USSR and is a marked humanistic and post colonialist period. This era will end when the economic bubble in China bursts (very close now) and when the EU breaking point is reached (see the UK wanting to leave), events that will cause China to seek solutions for its domestic problems through other means and the EU to be replaced by a few power blocks due to internal and external pressures.

In short, when the breaking point of a societal lifestyle is reached, societal morality shifts back as a pendulum.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by Kava »

icekatze wrote:hi hi

Define True Value. Is this an objective measurement you can take of an object or item? If so, how do you measure the True Value of an item? What is the unit of measurement for True Value, and is it recognized by the International Organization for Standardization?
Should I take these questions seriously? True value just means something physical like food to sustain life. There are objective measurements of that, yes.

Money has an arbitrary value. We need a certain amount of food to live, but the amount of money that's supposedly equivalent in value to that food can change.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by Kava »

Argron wrote: Children used stacks of money for playing, people used it to insulate the walls of their houses or even to burn to keep themselves warm. When the paper you print money on is more expensive than the money value it represents you are in trouble lol

If salaries don't keep up with price rises middle class people fall into poverty and poor people may not be able to feed themselves and their families. Continue long enough and you will starve your whole society to death.

No, money is a limiting factor in a war for sure.
But it's simply not true that money is necessary to distribute food. So, money is not a limiting factor.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by Kava »

Razor One wrote:You seem to be labouring under the point that money is worthless (trust and confidence are not worthless in a modern economy) and that taxation somehow removes money from the economy (it doesn't) and that people profit from the results of their work instead of because of their work (they don't).
What worth does money have? Trust and confidence aren't necessary, either, but do make things easier since otherwise it would probably take coercion.

Isn't it possible to destroy money that is taxed? I don't see why money can't be stopped from being circulated on a whim.

Why would someone profit because of their work instead of from the results? Working can create something worthless. A company can go under and fail to pay its employees' salaries.

Could be that we're falling off topic, but I suppose it's just an intellectual discussion and a few interesting tangents don't hurt anything.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

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Kava wrote:
Razor One wrote:You seem to be labouring under the point that money is worthless (trust and confidence are not worthless in a modern economy) and that taxation somehow removes money from the economy (it doesn't) and that people profit from the results of their work instead of because of their work (they don't).
What worth does money have? Trust and confidence aren't necessary, either, but do make things easier since otherwise it would probably take coercion.
Trust and confidence have value. They are absolutely necessary in giving fiat currency value, as fiat currency with neither are considered worthless. See the Zimbabwe Dollar for a contemporary currency that has neither, as well as for an example of a failed state incapable of waging war on anyone.

Beyond that, money is a system for equitable exchange. I do work worth X dollars. I can exchange those X dollars for Y foodstuffs. I could work for foodstuffs, but what if I then also wanted water? Would I then need to work for water? Would I have to then trade food for water? What if the water trader does not want food, but blankets? Do I have to renegotiate with my employer to be paid in blankets temporarily so I can afford water?

Money has value because we say it does. The same way that life has meaning, because we say it does. Or that we convince ourselves that what we do matters, because we say that it does.

If you insist that money has no value, I will insist that you send your worthless money to me. If indeed it is of no value to you, surely you will not miss its presence in your life.

Isn't it possible to destroy money that is taxed? I don't see why money can't be stopped from being circulated on a whim.
That defeats the purpose of printing infinite money. Creating money only to destroy it after one circulation through the economy and back into government coffers is pointless and wasteful. You may as well print only the money you need to replace damaged or destroyed notes and recirculate it back into the economy. Government spending on the economy has a large stimulus effect, creating jobs, wealth and prosperity, growing the economy and thus your ability to make war if push comes to shove, or averting a war entirely because your enemy does not dare risk the devastating trade sanctions you'll impose.

As I explained in my prior post, money is the oil of the economy. Remove (or add) it without due consideration and you gum up the works.

Why would someone profit because of their work instead of from the results? Working can create something worthless. A company can go under and fail to pay its employees' salaries.
Let's say there are two jobs on offer. One is to make wooden toys, the other is to sell them. The toy making job pays by the toy. More toys, more money. The toy selling job pays by the hour. Both jobs have pros and cons. The toy maker can make a lot of money if his toys are good and he makes a lot of them. The toy seller makes a fixed and predictable income, no matter how many toys he sells.

This example is of course ridiculously simplified. Put simply, not everyone can produce toys, produce them in the quantity they require to survive, or make them well enough to entice buyers to part with their money, to say nothing of supply and demand. Customer service and retail don't actually make anything physically valuable, but their jobs are necessary, valued by customers, critical for their employers, and they must be compensated... thus they profit because of their work and not from the results. A person working in accounting doesn't make money by balancing the books. He gets paid to to balance the books. He profits because of his work, not from the results of his work. If, in any case, the work they do is shit, they get fired and replaced by someone competent.

Companies go belly up all the time. Companies that produce nothing of worth are usually scams (illegal, unless we're getting into a 'true value' argument) or soon to be insolvent and in receivership. The usual solution for the former employees is to clear their desks and find a new job ASAP, or failing that, apply for welfare to support them until they can find a new job. If the insolvency issue is bad enough, the employees could issue a class suit against the former companies receivers and attempt to extract their due from them, though that's usually a long and drawn out legal battle, and more often it's just called a loss.

Most jobs will compensate their employees at a fixed rate by the hour or via salary. Some do it by commission, with mixes and matches depending on what field of employment you go into. The people that profit from the results of their work are artists, writers, real estate agents and so forth. Often these people sell a product (a painting, a book they wrote, a portion of the profits they made etc.) to enrich themselves. The people that profit because of their work include people working in retail, IT support, help desks, factory workers, journalists, waiters*, the military and the police, secretaries and so on. Their work often enriches others, and those others will compensate their work in turn or risk their valuable employees walking off the job for more gainful employment. The pay will vary depending on many factors, from unions to supply and demand and labour laws.

So... in short... generally people profit because of their work because it offers a stable and reliable income that they can budget with. People who profit off the results of their work have unstable incomes and cannot budget as well.

In an ideal world, Arioch would be doing Outsider full time and would be a millionaire on the profits he reaped, profiting from the results of his work. In reality, Arioch works a full time job for a stable income and does Outsider in his spare time, and occasionally gets supplementary income when or if someone feels like donating because they like the comic. The stable job lets him put food on the table and a roof over his head, where otherwise living from the donations would have resulted in him starving to death long ago.

In an even more ideal world, nobody has to work period, since we'd be in a post-scarcity society and would want for nothing. Any work you would do you'd do because you enjoyed it. Money would be obsolete in such a society and would thus actually have no value, even in trust and confidence, since anything anyone could want could be gotten for free and in whatever quantities you want. Short of developing a cornucopia device though, this is nothing more than a mildly pleasing fantasy. We live in a world where resources have finite limits, from iron to skilled labour, from software to scientific knowledge, thus money will always have a place as a medium of exchange for those resources that cannot be directly converted from one into another.

*Unless you're in the United States, where you get paid in tips, which is absolutely disgraceful.
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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by discord »

razor: arguably we in the western world are already in a post scarcity society, or the beginning of one at the very least when it comes to the digital market, and i can tell you that economists really get upset when you insert 'zero' or 'infinite' into their equations.

and to clarify, effectively zero cost and infinite supply(of digitally reproducible goods) changes how pricing works just a tad bit.

and you said it quite well yourself, money is damn useful.

kava: money has value, if you believe otherwise please give all of yours of away then wait a few weeks and see what happens.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by Razor One »

discord wrote:razor: arguably we in the western world are already in a post scarcity society, or the beginning of one at the very least when it comes to the digital market, and i can tell you that economists really get upset when you insert 'zero' or 'infinite' into their equations.

and to clarify, effectively zero cost and infinite supply(of digitally reproducible goods) changes how pricing works just a tad bit.

and you said it quite well yourself, money is damn useful.
Digital commodities are effectively post-scarcity already given how easy it is to copy and distribute in this day and age. Our response is of course to force scarcity via a perversion of copyright laws original intentions and litigation, since post-scarcity anything is bad for business if your business happens to be content distribution and production, at least under the old paradigm. New paradigms like Patreon and free digital distribution are definitely the way of the future.

The western world at large though is still very much not a post scarcity society. There's still a limit to how much cabbage is grown, how many heaters are made, how much petroleum is imported and produced, and how much chocolate is on shelves. A truly post-scarcity society is one in which anyone who fancies building a hundred gold statues of themselves can happily do so at no cost to themselves or anyone else.

To me, post-scarcity means unlimited goods, resources and labour for zero (or effectively zero) cost. The only stuff that would cost anything are the things you can't physically make, such as time, living space, or exotic elements that can't be found in nature and so on. I did pretty much call it a fantasy. Going by the Tech Levels section of the Insider, a truly post-scarcity society like the one I'm imagining kicks in at around Tech Level 14 with replicators and hits its stride at 15 with matter transmission.
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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by dragoongfa »

The one thing the video above forgot to take in the equation is energy consumption, the fact that energy sources are finite and dwindling while fully automated environments are the heaviest energy consumers.

Energy conservation will stop full automation by 2050 when the supply of oil will have run out, by then the vast majority of raw and industrial resources will be going to renewable energy sources which will severely limit the available raw materials for the production of other kind of machinery.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by discord »

dragoongfa: yeah, that energy thing...blame luddites and green muppets(tech fearing and environmental saving crazy people).

what does this have to do with it? well take thorium reactors, the known and accessible supply of that could keep us with 'enough' energy for an expanding energy consumption for the next thousand years plus, and if we have not figured out something better by then the human race is doing something strange.
or getting fusion to work, water comes in, power and helium comes out....

but it's nuclear! that is bad and not green!.... yeah about that, the existing nuclear power has some of the lowest enviro impact of all power generation we have, thorium just makes that better, effing green muppet luddite morons, they are just as bad as those SJW crazy people....
actually, they are the same kind of people, just different causes. huh never thought of that before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environme ... generation <---- not be all and end all of facts but it shows my point and if you do not believe it, check data yourself.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by Razor One »

discord wrote:
but it's nuclear! that is bad and not green!.... yeah about that, the existing nuclear power has some of the lowest enviro impact of all power generation we have, thorium just makes that better, effing green muppet luddite morons, they are just as bad as those SJW crazy people....
actually, they are the same kind of people, just different causes. huh never thought of that before.
There's actually a reason why that is the way it is.

The anti-nuclear sentiment in the green movement can be traced back to the sixties where the main goal was nuclear disarmament, arguably a good thing. Nuclear weapons and power generation, then and now, used either plutonium or uranium. At the same time, you had thorium reactors in development until 1973, when research into them was shut down by the US government on the basis that uranium reactors were more efficient, was a proven technology, and could have its byproducts cycled back into nuclear weapons.

You then had accidents such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island which played deeply into the publics fears, especially since everyone at the time lived in the shadow of the cold war. Fear and ignorance held a huge sway over opinion. I doubt many people aside from the experts knew that Chernobyl was an outdated design that was being horribly mismanaged, or that three mile island was as bad as it was made out to be.

Nuclear power has obviously advanced since then. Newer and better designs are out there, one's that don't explode, one's that fail safe, lovely thorium reactors that produce waste that lasts only a tenth as long as older uranium based reactors do. Recent accidents like Fukushima certainly stoke those old embers of fear, but that was an old design built in an earthquake prone region that was hit by a tsunami... kinda hard for the thing not to break.

What most greenies have is a lack of education on modern nuclear power generation and efforts into producing energy positive fusion power, though there are those out there who would love nothing more than to remove all things nuclear from our society because reasons. SJW crazies tend to come from tumblr, which is notorious for producing echo chambers and extreme opinions, so I'd say that the causes are in fact different if we're discussing the two groups in aggregate, though I won't say that there isn't some overlap nor will I say that there aren't those subsets within those groups, just that I doubt they're the mainstream.

So... basically, the anti-nuclear movement within the green movement was co-opted from the anti-nuclear lobby in the 60's, and the decision to go with a nuclear industry that promoted the use of nuclear weapons only exacerbated the situation. If Thorium power research hadn't been killed in 1973, then you may have had a split within the green movement or a complete revolution such that there would be an anti-uranium movement and a pro-thorium bent. I think its still possible to get this result, but it's going to be an uphill battle as individuals are easy to convince, but groups aren't.
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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by Sweforce »

A problem is that we have an insane green movement that want to close down anything remotely nuclear even if that lead to more relience on fossil fuel burnig. In their minds burning brown coal is still bettrr ghen using a thorium plant.

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Re: The importance of skill in ever more advanced wars.

Post by Suederwind »

Especially since this debacle, everything Thorium related is, where I live, a big no go.
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