It’s a relevant point to make, because we still have barely started to fix the actual massive problems and people are already bored and looking for distractions in the noise.

Of the two things, coal plants are so hilariously worse and larger in scale that satellites may as well not exist at all for all the difference it makes. When you have people going “yeah yeah coal whatever, let’s look into these satellites though!” it takes up mind space, airtime, political capital, and manpower that could be used on far more impactful things.

And in this case it sure seems like the motive is “ugh corporations,” not genuine concern for the environment.

It's a lot for sure. Huge number. It's just kind of less than you would have thought. And keep in mind that the category of "smokers" has both those who smoke a pack a week and those who smoke 5 packs per day.

Even if you smoke a pack a day for 20 years, your risk of getting lung cancer - while way higher than someone who has never smoked, is still surprisingly low in an absolute sense. I would have thought it'd be like 80% or something. Not the case. It turns out that as far as smokers go, a pack a day is "light."

All of the other health effects, however, are honestly a much more compelling reason to quit. It's easy to brush off an elevated but still unlikely death by cancer. But it's not like you're fine and then you just up and die one day when you're 85. That honestly wouldn't be so bad at all. Much more common is that you'll live much of your life with weird chest pains, coughing every morning, getting out of breath going on walks, etc. Planning your life around smoke breaks and not smelling like smoke before going to the office or on a date, keeping your car/house from smelling like smoke, etc. Your QOL goes way down long before you get cancer - if you ever even do.

That was what motivated me to quit smoking when I was 26. And uh...again when I was 32 (though I quit for 2 years in the middle). I could feel that I was a smoker, and that was scary. You're not supposed to feel sick when you take a deep breath.

Some downsides for engineers. Not many downsides for users.

You’re describing an alternate reality. Don’t know what else to say to you.

> Numbers alone are overwhelming.

This isn’t WW2. Ask the Desert Storm era Iraqi army how useful their overwhelming numbers were.

Ah, good article. Let me summarize for those who don’t feel like reading.

If every single tiny shred of CCP propaganda is true, and every missile works perfectly, and their ballistic missiles can reliably acquire, track, and destroy moving targets hundreds to thousands of miles away, and they leapfrog the US in operational experience (because they “learned from watching closely” after all!), and the entire killchain for these super-missiles remains intact and unmolested, oh and also they bomb Japan, Guam, and the US mainland with ballistic missiles (LOL), and if the US has no countermeasures to any of this so decides to just use carriers to Zerg-rush the Chinese coastline while holding their heads in their hands and crying…

…then the US military is toast! They’ll take Taiwan without a scratch for sure. You know this is true because an MIT professor and some loosely affiliated physicists in academia said so.

The US military fretting about new threats isn’t some slam dunk admission of helplessness. It kind of works the opposite way: rival announces new terrifying technology (e.g. impenetrable Russian cyborg armor), US panics and spends billions of dollars to develop, test, and field a countermeasure (e.g. the new MegaDeath 7000 Armor Annihilator rifle). Then it turns out that the scary rival technology was vaporware, and now the US has even more of an advantage. Rinse and repeat.

China isn’t Russia and is way better at building things. Presumably far less stupid and corrupt as well. But all of this is hypothetical and far too heavily weighted on comparing stats as if they’re the final arbiter. Yeah China is pumping out ships…and yet they don’t have enough trained fighter pilots to fill a single aircraft carrier. That’s cool they have 2000 hypersonic missiles. How many satellites or other assets do they have that are capable of tracking a warship in real-time to course-correct the missile during its flight? Etc. etc.

Nevermind that they have absolutely zero modern combat experience whatsoever. They’re good at oppressing their own population though, but look how that strategy worked out for Russia. Comparing trading cards stats is not especially informative here.

And this “general consensus” you keep mentioning. According to who? A few professors and a (likely) out of context quote from a war game? Pretty sure there was a war game where a Dutch fishing boat sunk every US carrier group too. (Paraphrasing but it was something similarly absurd). Wargames are not CS:GO matches where the goal is to see who is the most better. They have specific purposes to examine specific scenarios, and cycle through various hypotheticals to see what happens, often involving unrealistic constraints because they can result in interesting outcomes. The point is to learn, not to go “USA numbah one.” They should not be taken as proof of anything. Not least of all because all of the most interesting conclusions - as well as potential counters to hypothetical rival tactics - are usually classified. Therefore unavailable to trash-tier internet news sites.

The Chinese hypersonic missiles are like the F-35 all over again, but in reverse.