aaronI'll share a troubling fact with you if you share one with me
There are about 20 supervolcanoes on earth which each have the capacity to kill billions should they erupt.
NOT_RICKI know about the Yellowstone Caldera but I didn’t realize there were that many more
I found this article interesting on Caldera systems…
And suppress global warming for a long time in the process. Yeah, bring it on!
Blocking out the sun is good for us only in very specific doses.
If a nuclear missile is launched at the United States the President has just 6 minutes to come to terms with that and decide to launch a counter attack.
If that counter attack is headed to North Korea, any land based missiles will head over the arctic circle, over Russian airspace where similar shoot/no shoot decisions will have to be made.
Basically why it’s called MAD (mutually assured destruction). You’ll either get the first shot for free, or everyone kills everyone.
That is why subs with nukes are hidding someplace. If the president is wrong and now the us doesn't exist the captan will finish ending the world
r00tyMost nuclear enabled countries have nuclear subs. I believe here in the UK our entire nuclear deterrent is based on trident missiles fired from submarines.
You are probably right, russia is just the only other country I'm sure of.
talIf a nuclear missile is launched at the United States the President has just 6 minutes to come to terms with that and decide to launch a counter attack or not.
US nuclear deterrence in 2024 doesn’t rely on launch-on-warning, but on the expectation that no hostile power has the ability to locate and destroy the US ballistic missile submarine fleet prior to them performing their counterlaunches.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_strike
In nuclear strategy, a retaliatory strike or second-strike capability is a country’s assured ability to respond to a nuclear attack with powerful nuclear retaliation against the attacker. To have such an ability (and to convince an opponent of its viability) is considered vital in nuclear deterrence, as otherwise the other side might attempt to try to win a nuclear war in one massive first strike against its opponent’s own nuclear forces.
Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are the traditional, but very expensive, method of providing a second strike capability, though they need to be supported by a reliable method of identifying who the attacker is.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_on_warning
Launch on warning (LOW), or fire on warning, is a strategy of nuclear weapon retaliation where a retaliatory strike is launched upon warning of enemy nuclear attack and while its missiles are still in the air, before detonation occurs.
In 1997, a US official stated that the US had the technical capability for launch on warning but did not intend to use a launch on warning posture and that the position had not changed in the 1997 presidential decision directive on nuclear weapon doctrine.
This non-reliance on launch-on-warning is also true of the French and British nuclear deterrents – the British don’t even maintain a nuclear arsenal other than on subs, so they haven’t even bothered with maintaining the option to do so, and the French only use tactical ALCMs in addition to the strategic sub-launched weapons; those weapons probably would be poorly-suited for such a role.
The Brits rather famously have the “letter of last resort”.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort
The letters of last resort are four identically worded handwritten letters from the prime minister of the United Kingdom to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines and stored on board of each. They contain orders on what action to take if an enemy nuclear strike has both destroyed the British government and has also killed or otherwise incapacitated both the prime minister and their designated “second person” of responsibility, typically a high-ranking member of the Cabinet such as the deputy prime minister or the first secretary of state. If the orders are carried out, the action taken could be the last official act of His Majesty’s Government.
If the letters are not used during the term of the prime minister who wrote them, they are destroyed unopened after that person leaves office, so that their content remains unknown to anyone except the issuer.
Process
A new prime minister writes a set of letters immediately after taking office and being told by the Chief of the Defence Staff “precisely what damage a Trident missile could cause”. The documents are then delivered to the submarines in sealed envelopes, and the previous prime minister’s letters are destroyed without being opened.
In the event of the deaths of both the prime minister and the designated alternative decision-maker as a result of a nuclear strike, the commander(s) of any nuclear submarine(s) on patrol at the time would use a series of checks to ascertain whether the letters of last resort must be opened.
According to Peter Hennessy’s book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, the process by which a Vanguard-class submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes, amongst other checks, establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting.
In 1983, the procedure for Polaris submarines was to open the envelopes if there was an evident nuclear attack, or if all UK naval broadcasts had ceased for four hours.
Options
While the contents of these letters are secret, according to the December 2008 BBC Radio 4 documentary The Human Button, there were four known options given to the prime minister to include in the letters. The prime minister might instruct the submarine commander to:
-
retaliate with nuclear weapons;
-
not retaliate;
-
use their own judgement; or,
-
place the submarine under an allied country’s command, if possible. The documentary mentions Australia and the United States.
The Guardian reported in 2016 that the options are said to include: “Put yourself under the command of the United States, if it is still there”, “Go to Australia”, “Retaliate”, or “Use your own judgement”. The actual option chosen remains known only to the writer of the letter.
"Put yourself under the command of the United States, if it is still there"
JFC nuclear weapons are horrifying
Here’s a tad bit of reassurance: We don’t have enough nukes to kill every human. Just most of them. We can’t eliminate all of us even if we wanted to :)
Also, I’d say that odds also favour places that nobody really gives a shit about, like sure, US, UK, China, Russia, large parts of Europe, and North Korea are probably guaranteed to be nuclear craters, but I doubt that any of the missiles are pointed at Africa or most of South America
There’s an anecdote about a U2 naming a song “One Minute Warning” if I recall correctly: many years ago, when a UK prime minister learned the US got 6 minutes, they asked how long the UK would have. The response: “I suppose we’d have about a minute.”
Zos_KiaDid you listen to that hardcore history episode? It was crazy
Yeah I did! I’m hoping my library get the book. Hell I might buy it, read it and donate it after
The McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem proves that, if an electorate is presented with a series of proposed policy changes and everyone votes according to their honest preference, the proposals can be fashioned and ordered in such a way that any policy can be made to win—even one that no voter prefers to the starting point.
Wonderful. Ruined my day.
AatubeCould you source the "even one that no voter prefers to the starting point" part?
en.wikipedia.org/…/McKelvey–Schofield_chaos_theor…
There will in most cases be no Condorcet winner and any policy can be enacted through a sequence of votes, regardless of the original policy. This means that adding more policies and changing the order of votes (“agenda manipulation”) can be used to arbitrarily pick the winner.
The article doesn’t explicitly say that this includes policies not preferred by any single voter, but it’s implied by “any” and “arbitrary” (and can be verified by the original theorems).
I'm not too familiar in the field, but doesn't a policy have to appeal more to a specific base than its appeal to another base to cause a Cordocet tie?
Yeah, the Condorcet criterion is a lot more restrictive in the space of policies (where you can make incremental changes in any direction) than in elections for a discrete set of candidates. (Which is why they say that in most cases there won’t be one.)
Yeah, so in my understanding of that, doesn’t that mean the winning policy has to appeal more to a voter base than one that appeals to another voter base?
That’s true for any pairwise vote, but not for the entire sequence.
As in the Condorcet paradox, voter preferences are intransitive: voters preferring A to B and B to C doesn’t imply that voters will prefer A to C. But where the Condorcet paradox shows how this can lead to a cyclical subset of candidates where no candidate can beat all other members of the subset, the chaos theorem shows how this can lead to a series of votes that ends absolutely anywhere.
But if it is a paradox, then every proposal that still stands has to have beaten another proposal at least once. Thus I don't see how it could be one nobody has preferred at the start.
It’s not like Condorcet’s scenario where every candidate has a pairwise election against every other candidate—it assumes a subversive agenda-setter who presents each new proposal as a yes-or-no alternative to the existing status quo (the previously-accepted proposal). Once a policy is rejected, it isn’t re-introduced.
Meanwhile here I am washing before and after, just because I saw it on House.
(Despite the fact that he makes a big deal about it in the first episode and in the numerous times we see him go to the bathroom following that he never once does it again. (Yes. I checked.))
My name is Aaron
Hi Aaron, how quickly did you get sick of people deliberately mispronouncing your name?
Also, I think your name is very fun to write in cursive.
eightpixHeres two:
The ratio between cells of your body that belong to you vs. cells on or in your body that are microorganisms is about 1:1 — slightly favouring the bacteria.
If the Sun were destroyed, we would not know about it until more than 8 minutes after it happened.
I claim ownership of the microorganisms in and on my body. I am not merely human; I am a glorious amalgamation of trillions of distinct beings, working in harmony to bring you shitposts!
This is one of the larger plot holes in the 1980s remake of The Fly, in my opinion.
Cronenberg is a countryman. I’ll hand him a pass on that one.
I actually thought we had way more microorganisms vs are cells because they are so small.
In 2016, the number of bacteria was reviewed, and the estimate reduced from 300 trillion to about 38 trillion microorganisms.
thanks. I hate this kind of thing because im sitting there like. why did I think that. hopefully this whole thing will burn the more up to date info into my brain.
bizarrolandI don't think I'm ever going to forget, I went on a road trip and when I was in Arizona stopped at a rest stop and took a leak and washed my hands afterwards.
This native guy walked in, and I only call him out for being native because I'm native also so it's kind of cool to see another one in the wild, and he immediately said, "Get some poop on your hands? I only wash my hands when I get poop on them."
So yeah, I never touch anything in a bathroom without like at least a paper towel between me if I can avoid it
StalinwolfHate when that happens…
Or the dude was fucking with you and you took it so hard it impacted you permanently
that’s so funny
FenrirIIII always heard it from Marines mocking the other services because Marines don’t need to wash their hands because they didn’t pee on them.
At least half of men don’t wash their hands before leaving a public restroom.
How does this work in the US? I’m assuming with the amount of gigantic pickup trucks and guns, they require tweezers and magnifying glasses to find their dicks
Do they wash the tweezers?
Really well done. Creative and informed. Yes, we have tweezer-washing stations and very few men use them. Good question.
and very few men use them.
Brave of them to behave like they have modern healthcare rights lol
Would this be a good time to bring up prions?
What if proteins were jerks? Prions.
So you know how you have dna? Well dna converts into amino acids and long chains of amino acids are called proteins. Proteins are the real workers in our body.
But you might think, if you knew the dna sequence, you know it all, correct? Not really. You see, dna is only 1 dimensional data. A lot of the information about the functions of a protein comes from its structure.
So really, if you have a correct dna converted into amino acid chain (a protein), it still needs to be in the correct shape or folding in order for it to function.
Prions are incorrect foldings of amino acid which obviously do not work. But whats more is that, when these folded structures come in contact with other functioning proteins, they can turn them into incorrect folding as well.
Since these proteins are still your own (ie they still came from your dna) the immune system doesn’t quite work on them like it would on a foreign substance like bacteria or virus.
KrustyI actually read it as “priSons” and I read all the answer wondering how it would get to prisons lol
I’m glad someone put the prions in here. As a biology student, there was only one thing more terrifying than retroviruses — prions.
To add to how scary prions are, you can’t really cure them, and when the prions get on a surface, it’s extremely difficult to sanitize that surface in a way that will destroy the prions. A lot of techniques that kill bacteria or even viruses like alcohol won’t work on them. Heat works but you have to make it extremely hot, much hotter than what’s needed to kill something like a bacteria.
Alternatively, UV light and a some heat should do it pretty quick!! Radical reactions are dope like that
Neuroscience shows that rulers will always become evil.
Getting more power actually changes your brain, suppressing your ability to use empathy. The very powerful will always struggle to remember that others are human and don't want to be hurt.
Humane behavior and hierarchy are mutually exclusive. Heirarchical organization encourages humans to hurt each other.
This is why the US needs to switch to metric.
Eyeing my geometry set suspiciously
The data is skewed. All of the functioning systems we use reward concentrations of power.
Thereby, systems of rule must distribute power and contest the concentration of power. It literally takes a village to save us from ourselves.
David Graeber and David Wengrow introduced me to historical examples of non-hierarchical societies in The Dawn of Everything.
The fact that power results in antisocial behavior has been understood for millenia.
Lots of societies have had cultural infrastructure of equality that attempts to mitigate this weakness in our biology and prevent harmful levels of power accumulation. The basque village layouts that Davids Graeber & Wengrove talk about, or the practise of 'insulting the meat' of successful hunters.
Which is why I feel that for humanity to succeed we will eventually need an entirely new form of societal governance to replace capitalism & communism, just as those systems replaced feudalism and tribalism. Something like technoism where decisions are made and enacted by machines, incapable of self motivation; or geneticism where leaders’ selfish impulses are either bred or edited out of them. We are still many, many years off from technology being able to accomplish this, but the only way to overcome the human factor is to… well… remove the human factor.
I think part of it is that when good people gain power they realize that they have also taken on responsibility. And when you are shouldering a lot of responsibility, and the people around you are not, it’s easy to see them as childish or selfish, or not thinking things through thoroughly (because let’s face it: they’re not). Plus as a responsible party you have to be responsible for everyone and this can mean limiting your beholden-ness to any one party. That can look like distancing or lack of empathy for that person.
If you’ve ever been in charge of something you know what I’m saying. And when I see people blindly bitching about people in power I know they’ve never been responsible for anything bigger than a shopping cart.
ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠You have fewer male ancestors than females ones. Think about it for a moment… there it is. Yes. Now you know.