Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit before joining the Threadiverse as well.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • I don’t care about what international law says, this is what world war means as I understand it. I said that to begin with. International law is often even more nebulous and open to interpretation than most national law given there isn’t really a universal framework for adjudicating it.

    I’d be curious for a citation, though. I looked for some and found way more instances where international courts and laws held that supplying weapons counted as being involved in a war than the contrary. For example:

    • The law of neutrality (Hague V & XIII of 1907) prohibits neutral states from furnishing “supplies of war” to any belligerent. Violating that duty strips a state of its neutral status and exposes it to lawful countermeasures by the aggrieved party.
    • Under state-responsibility rules (ILC Articles on State Responsibility, Art. 16), a state “aid[ing] or assist[ing]” another in committing an internationally wrongful act—armed force included—is complicit, provided it does so with knowledge of the circumstances.

  • I think you’ve got an overly narrow view of “direct involvement.” If I’m in a war with someone and a country tells me “here, take these weapons” and I say “you know I’m going to use these weapons to kill soldiers of the country I’m at war with” and they say “yes, we know. We actually have some specific conditions about how and where you can use these to kill them, and some satellite photos to help you target them” then I’d call that direct involvement. Flesh-and-blood soldiers are only one small part of a nation’s military these days and not every part of a military needs to be involved for the military overall to be involved.


  • I think we’re already in it. A world war, as I understand it, is basically just a situation where a variety of alliances and tensions build up until when a war erupts in one spot it rapidly spreads around to involve a large number of countries world-wide. That seems to be the case already, you can easily build a Pepe Silvia wall-of-crazy showing all the connections between Russia and China and Iran and Syria and Israel and Hungary and Ukraine and Belarus and the United States and Taiwan and on and on. The actual shooting pew pew warfare is still relatively confined (though bear in mind that literally a million Russian casualties have happened over a thousands-of-kilometers-long front line riddled with trenches and minefields, which is pretty significant) but all these countries are throwing their weight in on those fights and it’s easy to imagine them branching out quite quickly when conditions change.





  • Well, the Germans wouldn’t have because they got defeated long before the Manhattan Project produced a usable weapon. Their own attempt at it failed. Some suspect that Heisenberg actually did sabotage the German project, though it’s also possible that he was just bad at it.

    But the Soviet Union would have done it later on. Or any of a variety of other countries that probably shouldn’t be the first or only countries to have nuclear weapons. Science is not unique to the discoverer, other people can independently discover the same things.








  • You may know IPv6 is ridiculously bigger, but you don’t know it.

    There are enough IPv6 addresses that you could give 10^17 addresses to every square millimeter of Earth’s surface. Or 5×10^28 addresses for every living human being. On a more cosmic scale, you could issue 4×10^15 addresses to every star in the observable universe.

    We’re not going to run out by giving them to lightbulbs.






  • So how are languages lost, and what does that mean for the people who speak them?

    If the language stops being spoken then there are no people who speak them, and asking what something means for those nonexistent people is kind of weird.

    I’m thinking that the loss of distinct languages in active use is not necessarily a bad thing overall. It means more people can communicate with each other more widely. By all means document these disappearing languages as much as possible before they’re gone, but there’s likely a good reason most of them are disappearing.