
Imagine there's no Army (2010) - dsr12
http://www.diplomatmagazine.co.uk/issues/2010/september/321-imagine-theres-no-army-v15-321.html
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ctdonath
Deep in the article:

 _it should be noted that since the first half of the twentieth century, Costa
Rica has entrusted its defence to the United States, directly or indirectly._

Easy to give up spending money on defense when someone else is willing to
spend a LOT of money to defend you.

~~~
kylemaxwell
Perhaps even more true in the case of Panama.

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throwaway_yy2Di
_There are other advantages, too. Colombia spends 3.7 per cent and Guatemala
0.4 per cent of their GDP on their militaries. That money could be put to use
elsewhere, in development, education, tourism, conservation._

I suppose the large, organized communist insurgency that's trying to overthrow
the Colombian government, that issue would sort itself out?

~~~
brazzy
Given that much of the support for that insurgency stems from heavy-handed
anti-civilian actions by the Colombian army and associated paramilitaries, it
actually might.

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AYBABTME
Resources exceeded:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.dip...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.diplomatmagazine.co.uk/issues/2010/september/321-imagine-
theres-no-army-v15-321.html)

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benologist
Costa Rica's lack of an army is one of my favorite things about it, along with
almost entirely renewable energy.

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waps
And imagine no country on the planet has an army. And then someone comes up
with the idea. I hope you like the guy.

It has the same problem so many other idealisms have : it's not a Nash-
equilibrium and thus certainly not Pareto-efficient. Good ideas in politics
are things that are Nash equilibria, or very close to them, and don't exist
yet. Great ideas are Pareto-efficient, but don't exist yet.

Any idea that doesn't have the Nash-equilibrium property should be fought
tooth and nail because it will, by necessity, blow up really really really
badly for everyone. They cannot exist for any length of time since it only
takes one non-cooperative person to blow them up.

Like stopping climate change by law, for example, which is an idea that's
obviously not a Nash-equilibrium for the economies involved (it is, however,
Pareto-efficient for the politicians involved, which is why it's getting
pushed through). One country can blow up the whole arrangement, and profit
from the fact. Hell, one large company could do it. And they can profit by
doing just that, which means that one of two things will happen : 1) that
country/company grows until it, by itself, is so big it blows up the balance
by itself (will never happen) 2) every other company is adopts it's practices.

And exactly what you'd expect happens : politicians get better from pushing
through those laws, but the economies behind them spend untold amounts of
money to get around those laws, and they do it successfully (for example by
threatening those politicians in giving them the carbon tax back as subsidies
or leave regions of production, which will leave an economic mess and lots of
unemployed). The net-effect of the effort, you might think, is good : it slows
down the progress, or at least, doesn't speed it up. Well, not quite. Once a
company finds such a loophole, it has a limited window to exploit it. And
because the company cannot just use the direct approach, they generally have
to make use of less efficient methods to unload their byproducts, which means
more energy is needed, which means more byproduct, and because the loopholes
will get closed, it means they have to use them as fast as possible, so they
have to dump it quicker.

But of course, nobody wants to hear the anti-idealists message. It's not bad
news per se, but it's also not good news. Pushing through a 99% drop in fossil
fuel usage is simple, but it cannot be done in Washington or at the UN. It
requires finding an energy production scheme that blows fossil fuel out of the
water. Fossil fuels have 3 big advantages : 1) energy density is liquid fossil
fuels is bigger than any technology we have. Sure, it doesn't beat currently-
in-the-lab technologies by that much anymore, but it still beats production
technologies by a factor 2 easily.

A Tesla electric car has to carry a battery pack of 450 kg, for a range of
roughly half what you'd get with 55kg of fossil fuels. Not the most efficient
battery technology available, but within 20% of what you can achieve in the
lab.

Needless to say, this gives fossil fuels a massive advantage. Lugging around
Tesla batteries for power would not be economical. But you can transport
fossil fuels once around the globe by burning ~ 0.2% of their weight (by
ship). The Tesla battery equivalent would be ~30%.

2) Fossil fuels do not require infrastructure. For example, one energy source
that beats the living hell out of fossil fuels for density, is uranium-235.
There is just no contest. If you took a graph listing the energy density of a
Tesla car at 1cm from the axis. You'd see fossil fuels at about 20cm, and
you'd see uranium at about a kilometer.

Problem is that the smallest nuclear reactor (just like a car is a fossil-fuel
reactor), is about the size of a 2-bedroom apartment. You can make them
smaller, but not without accepting serious disadvantages.

So fossil fuels have a massive advantage in infrastructure required. I once
saw a 35% efficient kerosine engine core, for a model plane, that was 5x4x2 cm
in dimensions. The fuel tank was double the size of that engine, weighed a few
hundred grams, and kept the propellor going for ~1.5 hours with more power
than you'd ever need for the plane.

Of course electricity can be transported through cables, which are much
simpler than pipelines, but that requires infrastructure. We would not be able
to operate mines in inland Indonesia, or many parts of Africa with
electricity, for example. Just can't be done.

3) Efficiency of production. Even with the above things, there's still a few
substances that could potentially beat fossil fuels : liquid hydrogen is one,
there's a few others. I doubt you would like the accidents that can occur with
them any better than you like nuclear meltdowns (although that's true of
pretty much any energy-dense material for obvious reasons). But there's
another, more important economic consideration : making them has negative ROI
(in fact less than 0.25, and practical methods, less than 0.1).

Making liquid hydrogen costs a LOT more energy than you're ever going to get
back out of them. Of course, technically that's true of fossil fuels as well,
but not in practice. In practice producing oil had, until 2000, an ROI of
about 9. For every kw of energy invested you'd get 9kw burnable fuel. Right
now it's about 3, and dropping fast (which is why the oil rig count everywhere
is going up to such insane levels. It takes ~4 pumps today to get the amount
of oil that 1 pump would provide just 10 years ago. That number goes up
exponentially, and so far we've followed the exponential curve. That's going
to stop of course, and soon).

So stopping global warming is easy. You have to find a fuel that's energy
dense (so not batteries), easy to collect from somewhere, and can be
transported, without infrastructure, around the globe for a tiny percentage of
the energy it contains. If you also want to not find out what happens to our
world when available energy drops of a cliff, you have ~6-7 years left (best
guess, could be 15 years, could be 1), to find it.

Please keep in mind that keeping people alive during winter at any latitude
above halfway between florida and newyork requires heating them up, so please
do not say "we'll just wait for oil to run out", because you'll have to
relocate all of Canada to Texas in 15-20 years to go with that option, and of
course, lots and lots of people will not move but die. Without using to much
energy for building new buildlings, of course.

That would be the Pareto-efficient way to do it. And if you do it that way,
there's very good news : it can't fail. There's also the Nash-equilibrium way
to do it : conquer the middle east, not like before, but actually destroying
it's population and really stealing the oil. The Nash-equilibrium way can be
seen as the "default" option. Barring a Pareto-efficient solution, one way or
another, it will happen, just the details of when and how are in doubt (I'm
not saying exactly this will happen, but something along those lines must
happen).

~~~
dreamfactory
Wasn't Nash's game theory formed whilst he was mentally ill and suffering from
a persecution complex. Hasn't he renounced this as delusional thinking since?

~~~
waps
He has, actually. Declared all of it a big mistake. He's also declared it a
CIA conspiracy several times.

Watch the movie "A beautiful mind".

Unfortunately, the theory was analysed by mathematicians and, under certain
assumptions, was proven correct. In a system with many independent actors
pursuing their own interest, anything that isn't a Nash-equilibrium cannot
exist for a long time. Anything that isn't Pareto-efficient will be very, very
bad for 99% of those independent actors.

