I generally take the word "conquest" to mean some outside force coming in and taking over. That didn't happen in either Vietnam or Korea. You could argue that the USSR used conquest to take over territories for the soviet union. However, that's not something really arguable about Vietnam or Korea. Vietnam, in particular, was the native population overthrowing their conquerors, the french, and then deciding they wanted to be communists. They got support from both the USSR and China, but they weren't ultimately under the umbrella of either regime.
Now, I'd agree that Vietnam and Korea both had civil wars supercharged by the US, China, and Russia. But I disagree that these were wars where the US was stopping conquest. We see that in the modern state of Vietnam and North Korea. Vietnam, funnily, became a closer ally to the US than China after the war.
Cuba is very much the same way. It wasn't conquered by an outside force. Yet they did ally with the USSR once the dust settled. They were still an independent nation from the USSR.
The Communists. Would you rather live in North or South Korea?
Vietnam is interesting in that they're still politically authoritarian but willing to be more economically open; see also China. (Just don't say the wrong thing about the wrong people.)
Today obviously the South. In 1950, probably the North. Throughout the Korean war, it's a wash. The US obliterated the north, but the south was completely insane towards their own civilian population. The ROK was not a "nice" government to live under during the korean war.
If you lived in the north there was a good possibility that you were getting bombed. It was best to live near china.
If you live in the south, there was a good chance you would be conscripted and sent to the meat grinder as a man.
The subsequent cease fire, the south has rebuilt and become the better place to live. The north has mostly struggled due to international sanctions. They have never fully recovered.
"The Communist" were a faction in a civil war, that's not an invasion. And the split in both cases (Vietnam and Korea) was recent and artificial, in the sense of no tradition of there being two countries. It wasn't one country invading another country, but two halves engaged in a civil war.
Where one wants to live is irrelevant. It wasn't about stopping an invasion, which was the initial claim. The US was meddling.
> Vietnam and Korea were technically wars to stop conquest, no?
No.
For example, the US got involved in Vietnam to help the colonizer (France) stop an independence movement. Yes, because they feared the resulting Vietnam may become communist and USSR aligned (something they helped happen, since Ho Chi Minh quite admired the US and expected them to help him at first), but even if this was the case, it's still not about stopping an invasion, because commie Vietnamese are still Vietnamese.
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
Isn't the obvious answer yes for everyone that sells their labor?
If I gave you the choice between being an employee in an economy where it is more difficult to land a job, but you could be sure that job would last, or an economy where it is easier to find a job, but it was completely insecure, I think most would choose the former. No? Worring about finding work while looking, or worrying about it all the time? Seems obvious.
I guess the issue with the first one would be actually getting the job. If jobs were that valuable, I'd expect other factors not necessarily related to job performance to be reasons in getting a job, especially knowing (or being related to) the right person.
Technological advancement is speeding up. When you don't have to worry about selling your labor, it is an increasingly powerful source of comfort. When you do have to sell your labor, it is an increasingly powerful source of insecurity.
I think a lot of the demographics that the article points to overlap strongly with technological diffusion, with social media exposure being a strong proxy.
From looking at the sources below, it looks like Ukraine still has about 1/3 of the fighter aircraft it started the war with, though it started with many non-serviceable units (seems that at least 20 aircraft were non-operational), and received many parts from abroad:
I am not sure what is meant by 'a significant number of', and I'm not sure if all commenters have a common definition of that phrase, so I'm unable to judge the veracity of the comments above.
No there are still tens of original UAF jets that by now clocked thousands of sorties. Sometimes they get shot down or otherwise lost and we get photographic evidence (tail number, sometimes even pre-war colors) that it's one of the OGs.
At a consistent amount of usage, datacenters are at least an order of magnitude more hardware efficient. I'm sure Nvidia and AMD would be fine fighting for B2C if it meant volume would be 10+x.
Now, given they can't satisfy current volume, they are forced to settle for just having crazy margins.
The problem with B2C is that you need to have leverage of some kind (more demanding applications, planned obsolescence, ...) in order to get people to keep on buying your product. The average consumer may simply consider themselves satisfied with their old product they already own and only replace it when it breaks down. On the contrary, with the cloud you can keep people hooked on getting the latest product whether they need it or not, and get artificial demand from datacentres and such.
I think businesses running datacenters are much less likely to frivolously buy the latest GPUs with no functional incentive than general consumers are...
Future upgrade cycles on phones and laptops, PCs, will be driven by SOCs that embed some type of ASIC that run a specific model. Every 6 months there will be a new, better version to upgrade to, which will require a new device. This is how Apple will be able to reduce cycles from 3 years to 6-12 months.
Urbanization has separated far more families than suburbanization, so the isolation argument, as if suburbanization is the core cause, doesn't make sense to me.
The fundamental challenge of AI is preventing unprompted creativity. I can spin up a random initialization and call all of it's output avante garde if we want to get creative.
I recently fell down the rabbithole of AI-generated videos, and realised that many of the "flaws" that make them distinctive, such as objects morphing and doing unusual things, would've been nearly impossible or require very advanced CGI to create.
Median earnings in 1970 were closer to 56k in today's dollars. 1970-1980 was a recessionary period, followed by stagflation in the 80s. I hate when people use that time period as an anchor to show growth. It's like using 2009 as an anchor.
I didn't choose 1975. That's the year the parent comment claimed median earnings have dropped from in comparison, so that's the year I have to use to refute the claim.
Estimated median earnings for full-time male workers peaked in 1973 in the chart, until surpassing it in the 2010s. It's hard to find directly comparable data for earlier decades, but estimates put wages significantly lower. If you anchored to the 1920s, 30s, 40s or 50s instead, you'd just show even more growth in median wage. If you're saying we shouldn't compare to the 70s or 80s either, then what's left? Just years after 1990?
What data are you using? It is hard to get solid numbers pre 1975. I looked at SSA Wage index which has 1970 at $6,186. Adjust using PCE, that is only $42,808 in present dollars.
In either case, IMO, +-10% over 60 years should just be considered flat. Calling it flat is probably generous considering how inflation has affected durable goods vs necessities. We can buy more appliances now, but places to put them have never been more expensive relative to income.
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