The Glade 4.0

Suitcase may be misleading. I meant a non-warhead mounted nuclear weapon. A shipping container sized device delivered via water/ground transport is more or less what I meant by my statement.

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In that case, it's irrelevant. You're not constrained by the need to make it a size, weight, and shape compatible with a re-entry vehicle or the limitations of the missile carrying it, or the dimensions of a bomb casing, or the load capacity of the hardpoint on the aircraft that has to carry it. A shipping container (I assume you mean a steel box used for bulk transport which is big enough to walk into, not a UPS flat-rate postage box or something that's substantially similar to a suitcase) makes it a lot easier because you need a lot less miniaturization. However, the problem of being able to make enough fissile material to have some to spare for terrorists remains.

Then, however, the problem becomes shipping the damn thing. If all you want to do is put it on a boat and blow it up in a harbor, or on a cargo plane and blow it up at the airport, that's not that hard. If it has to pass customs to get to a target your chance of detection is going way up.

There's also the problem that this is not going to hide Iran from responsibility. It;s quite possible to determine where the fissile material of a nuke came from using plume sampling and other techniques - and really, who else besides Iran and NK would seriously do it anyhow? If a shipping container nuke went off in a U.S. port I'd assrape them both just on general principle.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm honestly not worried about it at all. And if we would adjust our foreign policy, we wouldn't have to consider it, but there are a bunch of guys in a pentagon building paid very high wages to imagine horrible scenarios and inspire corny dramas like 24.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The problem we have with foreign policy is that most U.S. citizens aren't smart enough to figure out that waving our dicks in everybody's faces antagonizes them. By "most U.S. citizens" I do mean to include people in government, people in the military, people who think that they are or should be running the military, and you, in addition to random citizens that aren't you. Whoever you happen to be, as it is an general you in addition to a specific you.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

The biggest problem we have with foreign policy is people who are too stupid to understand that we do not go around "waving our dicks in peoples' faces", why we do the things that we do that they like to categorize as dick-waving, and the fact that if we didn't, we'd have problems just as bad or worse (if possibly different) except that we'd be in a far weaker position to address them.

By "people who are too stupid" I do mean to include those who simplify our actions down to dick-waving because they understand such things on the level of a spoiled 9th grader.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Actually, the United States Federal Government does an insane amount of international dick-waving, and almost all of it is related to money. I hate to break it to you, but at no point in your service history has the United States deployed to its troops to a hostile theatre for any purpose other than economic.

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Indirectly, I'll grant you the truth of that, seeing as Somalia technically happened before I was sworn in. You're not "breaking" anything to me at all; I've made it clear repeatedly that defense of our economic interests is a national security issue and a perfectly legitimate use of military and diplomatic power in my opinion. I don't know why you'd limit it to my term of service either; there's plenty of examples well before that too.

That said, that is not "dick waving." That's defending our economic interests. "Dick waving" is a predjudicial term of exceedingly nebulous meaning, but which implies we're doing it simply because we can and not because it serves any actual purpose.

Coro's complaint amounts to ***** that the American people are not demanding the equivalent of battered woman syndrome as our governing foreign policy doctrine. Yes, some of the things we do antagonize certain people. That, in itself, isn't a problem unless you think it's somehow the job of the United States to avoid antagonizing anyone; mysteriously when people antagonize us that either goes unmentioned or is handwaved away as a reaction to some real or imagined wrong at some point in the past that we supposedly committed, and which somehow justifies any and all aggression against us at any point in time. If a suitable American wrong can't be found, then one is "borrowed" by subtly shifting the supposed source of antagonism to "the West" at which point it's suddenly acceptable for responsibility for past British or French actions to be assigned to America, regardless of our involvement or relationship at that time.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I limited it to your service history, because your experience does not extend beyond that ...

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I can only assume this is an attempt to start an argument, so, whatever.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You have 0 military experience beyond your service history; that statement is a simple, indisputable fact. You can claim any amount of knowledge or understanding beyond that point, but you have no experience beyond your service history. As for starting an argument, you're insulting other posters because they have a different perception of fundamentally abstracted events and interactions between non-person entities. It seems to me that if anyone wanted to start an argument, you did by dismissing the accuracy and applicability of Corolinth's statements.

It doesn't matter what you think about his perceptions, the fact is there exists enough documented to material to demonstrate other people, particularly a large number who are not American citizens, view our foreign policy as international dickwaving.

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Ah, in other words you really are just trying to find an excuse to start an argument with, or about, me personally. Obviously I have no experience beyond my experience. Duh. I can see no reason to point out such an obvious fact in a tone designed to make it seem like some sort of problem except to start a side argument.. and don't try to pretend that tone isn't there; everyone knows exactly what you're doing.

As for the rest, you can give high and mighty lectures about insulting other people when you can, at least, hand them out evenly. Coro basically called everyone but Coro an idiot (yet again), but contradicting Coro's oversimplified nonsense is "insulting" him.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Oh, look ...

Diamondeye's going to tell me what I think and why and illuminate my motivations for posting because he's me ... or something.

Seriously, the only person posting in bad faith is you, Diamondeye.

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You can stop trolling any time you want; I'd respond to your Excel produced demand curve, but I doubt you'd understand the difference between projected and real demand; you obviously didn't in the other thread.

So, why don't you or Diamondeye tell me why it's not dickwaving? You seem to think your perceptions matter more than the observers from outside our particular state; unfortunately for both of you, however, Corolinth wasn't talking about internal perceptions; he was talking about external perceptions.

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You seem to be under the impression that my picture is about you.

As for the demand curve I know that Economics 101 is well beneath someone of your stature and experience but if 100 people will buy @ $1 and you make it free then you've just cut $100 out of the suppliers pocket and giving it freely to 1,000,000 people won't make up that difference.

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Not true. That's actually a horrible proto-Keynesian notion that comes out of the mis-readings of the Long Depression and actual supply-side operations. Not to be to tautological, but unrealized sales are not quantifiable losses. They do not constitute money you would have earned. Likewise, the majority of claims that state piracy creates unrealized sales or increases sales are spurious. There are valid arguments and models for both sides, but these models do not produce the kinds of results being claimed in that thread.

Economics is not mass psychology: abstracting transactional data beyond the local is a foolish enterprise. If we could actually figure out what desire-function a given purchase satisfied at the mass psychology level, well ... it's kind of scary.

Beyond that, I want you and Taskiss to actually concretely define what is being stolen. As I said, I believe in intellectual property rights; I do not, however, feel you two have considered what it is you're arguing fully enough at the moment.

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Dickwaving means the waving of male genitalia, and I know of no instance of the collective male population of this country doing so towards any foreign entity. Was there a protest I missed?

Oh, you meant as an expression! Well, here's the problem. We don't know what the "it" that's supposed to be dickwaving is, we don't know what "dickwaving" means according to Coro. we certainly don't know what it means according to foreigners, we don't even know which foreigners we're talking about. So who gives a ****?

Unfortunately for you, Coro was talking about Coro's perceptions, which he assumes to be the same as those of the aforementioned undefined foreign people. This is done for the sole purpose of claiming everyone else is too stupid to see that it's dickwaving, but Coro does because he's Coro and he just has a colossal ego like that. The problem however, is that Coro does not know what these undefined foreign people think and whether or not it fits his vague, predjudicial slur, and that it has nothing to do with stupidity. It has to do with the fact that simply avoiding antagonism of foreigners is not a policy end in and of itself, and most people are smart enough to realize that we should not make our national policy with the goal of keeping everyone else happy.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

If a container bomb went off I'd nuke two countries to glass just on principle might be considered entertainingly close to flamboyant genital display ;-p

If a product must be produced at a loss, what do rational suppliers do?

What is your definition of a free-market?

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You're not going to get anywhere with your argument unless you show how they're losing anything. Again, unrealized sales are not losses.

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What do you mean by losses?

If a third party (be it Government, pirates or anyone else) enters a market and imposes an artificial price ceiling (in this case free) the losses are area under the curve that gets cut-off by not allowing markets to operate to their maximum efficiency where supply and the demand curve cross. I cannot see how you can advocate free-markets and not draw the immediate correlation between pirates and Government action. Could you help me understand how you reconcile the two?

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Khross, what's your dignity worth? How about your honors and degrees? What value do you place on your piece of mind?

Do you think that if anyone could just get a copy of a doctorate and claim it as their own that you've not lost anything?

Why the hell don't you just give all your students A's? Why sweat it if they cheat?

Nothing lost, right?

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In time, this too shall pass.

You still don't get it Taskiss ...

You're trying to shift the burden of proof onto me, when the positive claim is from you and Hopwin: you keep saying these things are losses. So tell me what exactly is being loss. Quantify it, qualify it, make it tangible. Define the loss you're talking about, because right now ...

All you have is the spurious claim that unrealized sales are losses, and that's just patently invalid and always has been.

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Reading through both threads I cannot see where I ever said anything about losses (other than asking: If a product must be produced at a loss, what does a rational producer do?), that is goal post you've introduced to the discussion. I said it was theft.

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I asked you about twenty times what was being stolen; you still haven't told me. And losses is something you introduced into the argument when discussing things with Taly and her sources. In any case, I still want to know a) what is being stolen and b) why you think these things would be produced at a loss.

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