Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much:
* Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement."
* Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them."
In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.
A useful framing for other systems as well: Our modern system of chemical/material manufacturing has been hugely influenced by "can we use this leftover junk somehow?"
For that matter, it also applies to the relentless swarming horde of nanobots known as biological life.
A libertarian society doesn't coddle you, but it still accepts that the state has monopoly of force, and it accepts that the state needs to be fair and predictable.
I think the author's fear would be that we currently live in an informational vortex that threatens to destabilize and consume our democracies and societies, and remove even the possibility of a fair and predictable state.
And I would argue that that is hardly an outlandish fear. It's barely an extrapolation at all.
Thermodynamic efficiency (which is what turbine blades enable) has increased from ~30 to 55% over the last 50-60 years. The book estimates that the practical limit of for thermodynamic efficiency is in the 65-70% range.
All other things equal, range varies proportionately with efficiency. Ie, if you have 500km range at 50% overall efficiency, then at 65% overall efficiency, you have 650km range.
This is a phys.org "article". They're usually just rehashed press releases, and this one is particularly bad - it's literally just the NASA press release with the last 2 paragraphs chopped off. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/nisar/us-indian-space-mission-...
Uhhh... editor/author/LLM was asleep here. There are 4 sentinel-1 sats in orbit, but one of them has been decommissioned because of system failure... as the article itself states.
There is a generalized military response in place (CTF-151 via UN). The insurance based scheme tends to work because it's basically dealing with "leakers".
UNCLOS permits any country to intervene in case of piracy. Because piracy attacks the public good of assured, consistent, low cost maritime transit and commerce (which the entire developed world is addicted to), and successful piracy begets piracy, there are a lot of countries with a lot of resources deeply interested with intervening.
As other people have noted, Somali piracy is not "new". It's been happening since the 90s (Somali Civil war and failed international interventions). There were, and still are multinational (basically chartered by the UN) naval task forces operating in the area, to deter and interdict pirates. See CTF-151 (https://combinedmaritimeforces.com/ctf-151-counter-piracy/)
These types of actions are not perfect, they cannot stop everything, so you still see successful attacks happen.
And no one wants to try to intervene in Somalia itself. The world tried that in the 90s and got completely burned.
So the answer is that "other countries are not allowing it" in the same way that no country allows murder, and yet it still happens.
There are two broad reasons why the US has troops in Germany (and in Europe overall).
1. Because the Europeans wanted them there. NATO was a big security blanket, and certainly since the end of the cold war, up to say... 2014, America -wanted- a compliant Europe.
2. Because Europe is an amazing springboard into the middle east, and America just can't help but get itself involved in dropping bombs on the middle east.
1 ties into 2. A compliant Europe is less likely to raise objections to being used as a forward base for bombing Iraqis and Iranians. It's only in the last 10-15 years that the US realized that perhaps it was/had squandered it's lead to China, and dropped the ball (Europe at fault too) on properly containing (or addressing) Russia, and it would sure be nice if it could focus on the Pacific.
The articles mention withdrawing a BCT (which is ~4000 people) form Germany.
The US currently has 2 BCTs "fully" in Germany. The 2nd Cav Regiment (a Stryker unit.. so infantry mounted on 8x8 APCs) and an Armoured BCT on 9 month rotation (so tanks and IFVs).
There have been a bunch of studies indicating that the rotational ABCT costs more than even a truly forward deployed ABCT. My bet is that it's the ABCT that is going to get withdrawn. It's both the flashier unit, and likely has the highest impact on freeing up money. This also lines up with the withdrawal timelines... since the unit is rotational, they just need to wait for the end of rotation, and just... not send another. Much less disruption.
While the timing was obviously conjunction with current events, this draw down was likely to happen at some point in this term, even in absence of Iran things. Trump literally tried to do this at the end of his last term.
The total energy supply figure is a primary energy mix - for the fossil fuels it represents the thermal energy of the fuel. You can look at the final energy consumption section a bit lower to get a different picture taking into account conversion losses.
https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-bru...
https://www.hertie-school.org/en/news/detail/content/why-ord...
Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much:
* Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement."
* Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them."
In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.
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