I've heard stories about the high gearing of military vehicles before After the end of WWII there were a lot of army surplus tanks around, and some farmers bought them to use as tractors... unfortunately, as I heard it, they didn't work that well.

Firstly they were geared far too high, those tanks had gear ratios like cars, but normally a tractor will have first gear around walking pace or less in some cases, like a Deutz-Fahr my Dad used to have that would really creep along slowly.

Second problem is that they were really heavy.

By the time you'd cut off the armour, and had the gear ratios modified, it wasn't a cheap tractor any more.

@radx

Nothing really new I can say again in response.

It's natural that France and Germany being major decision makers in the eurozone will suggest bailouts that also help their own banks, no surprise at all. Witness the US's about turn post WWII from rebuilding Germany into a de-industrialised agricultural state to an industrial powerhouse to counter Soviet influence in about a year.

I think you have to look, not at Troika funding with or without pension cuts and the like, but with or without the funding. See my post above for what I think would happen in a disorderly collapse. I think honestly we can both be certain that the effect on output and unemployment would have been far worse in a disorderly collapse.

Like I said to oritteropo, I'm not debating that the IMF estimates were correct or even that the IMF has a particularly good history of reform (although you could certainly argue that Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia economically at least were successes). As far as low/middle class Greeks suffering, yes I agree it sucks. Most who risk being indicted for corruption are sure to have emigrated permanently to their vacation homes purchased on stolen money, but that doesn't unfortunately change the reality.

The well-funded campaign to cast doubt on climate change science has very little imagination. They simply accuse scientists of what they do - distorting data for financial gain to please some powerful interests. The fossil fuel industry does this every day. The expanding global community of scientists, in many disciplines, with ~100,000 research projects, does not. The effects of climate change are already being felt. For example, tens of thousands are dying in Bangladesh from increased flooding and storms. The difference now is that leaders in Bangladesh, and people around the world, are blaming this on the history of greenhouse gas emissions - dominated by the US. (China is a new contributor, most of the historical emissions have come from the US.) Bangladesh is now expecting numbers of climate refugees in the 10s of millions in coming decades. Around the world, the refugee crisis could easily exceed that of the 50M during WWII. And they will know who to blame.

I think I can explain the democrat hate: pure romanticism

Lincoln was a Republican, arguably our best president in history. I think people still try to attach to that and ignore the fact that the parties basically flipped because of the Southern Strategy after the Civil Rights Act. That and Republicans weren't always hijacked by the crazies. I think too many people don't want to admit their party has changed. It's also indoctrination. I've met plenty of people that agree with me point by point, yet they still manage to do these crazy mental gymnastics to rationalize to themselves that they HAVE to vote Republican. It's how they were brought up. Hell it almost happened to me, as a kid, long before I had any political identity. I always assumed I was Republican simply because I believed what everyone told me "Republicans are good with money, Democrats waste it" It wasn't until much later that I realized how untrue that was. Hell, even my first presidential vote in 2000, I listened too much to a Republican friend of mine ( one of the people I mentioned before that agreed with me on most everything, but still voted Republican) and because of his influence, I did vote for Bush in 2000 (so so sorry...not that it mattered in my red non-swing state)

One of my best friends is like this. he doesn't vote purely along party lines, and we agree on most political points, yet he still identifies as a Republican when in my opinion, he's an Independent like me. I think it's mainly because he was brought up by a military family and he was brought up to believe that the dems were the devil...despite how much he tends to agree with them.

its totally dysfunctional.

Its also part of the human condition IMO. There is a human need to have an enemy. Back in WWII we were pretty much united because we had to defeat the Axis. In the Cold War we were mostly united because we had to defeat the Russkies. America kinda stands alone now. No other military on earth can really challenge us. Sure the Taliban and ISIS are a source of terrorism, but they're still not a real threat, they could never invade or occupy us.

So there just aren't any real big threats out there...and when that happens...that's when infighting begins. People need an enemy, and when you can't find one without, you find one within.

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So many holes in your argument.

You're cherry picking the parts of Nazism to fit your anti-religious views. You even made the argument that Russia was dogmatically atheist, which isn't a true characterization of Russia then, either.

The simple fact of the matter is racial supremacy had what was seen as extremely scientific underpinnings with a foundation of Darwin, which then was applied to Social Darwinism, etc.

You had Nazi scientists who were going around the world literally measuring people's skulls, with the assumption that Germans had bigger brain pans, and that must explain why they're the master race.

Those ideas sure as hell weren't religious.

The simple fact of the matter is that there were secular and religious arguments against Nazism, as there also were secular and religious arguments in favor of it at the time.

It's very difficult to argue that the evil of Nazi Germany rose due to the level of dogmatic behavior within Germany. Prior to Hitler's rise, Germany was considered a Western European modernized, industrialized country, and for the time well educated, as was France and Britain. It was far more like Britain and France than it was to Russia.

An even better counterargument - who was the most modernized, secular, educated people in Southeast Asia, and therefore should have been the least likely to instigate war according to your logic? Japan, yet they became an imperial, aggressive power.

The rise of Nazi Germany is something I studied quite a bit of, and boiling it down to how dogmatic the people were is not only overly simplistic, it's not remotely historically accurate. It completely factors out the god awful mistake the Treaty of Versailles from WWI was, the common particular disdain for Jews at the time (some due to religious conflict, for Nazis it was more about race), the dependency of Germany on US loans, which dried up when the Great Depression began, the scientific trends in thought at the time, etc.

Those all converged.

And the reality is that "Muslim" countries are more likely to subject women to numerous horrors simply because more Muslim countries have not modernized their economies yet. Hey, just like every other religion. The reason we treat women well is we've had an industrialized economy far longer, and even then, the speed of it was often circumstantial. Women's rights in the US took a quantum leap forward because of women being needed for labor in WWII (same reason the Civil Rights Movement started so relatively soon after WWII as well).

I love how the progressives got together and created the UN, and all the progressives cheered, and the UN created Israel, and Israel said "let's treat this like it's real", and had a democracy and invited everyone in to participate, but the poverty pimps said they wanted to be in charge, so the progressives sent them money, which they used to buy hookahs and rockets and decided to aim them at the Jews, who decided enough is enough and fought back, something they didn't do in WWII.

Now the progressives have their panties in a wad again and blame Israel for defending themselves.

@SDGundamX

Thanks!

@shveddy

Bit confused since you say there's a point of no return at the end, but yes your argument is not really about that.

People not meeting their nutritional needs right now is not due to an under supply but due to general poverty. If sufficient employment and income existed in impoverished countries the world supply of food would be able to cope. As far as a lack of balance, see my earlier point about bringing people out of poverty, closing global income gaps and all sharing the available resources.

I don't think you could characterise any of the global conflicts in the past 100 years as being primarily due to resource scarcity. Perhaps Japan's aggression in SE Asia around WWII because of its lack of energy resources but that's an isolated case in the post-Depression era brought about by misguided isolationist economic policies. If you really want to prevent resource wars, your best bet is to be a staunch advocate of free trade.

Large countries have gone to war because of personalities, territorial ambitions and a general desire for power, not out of necessity because of scarcity.

As far as a point of population balance, that's entirely subjective. Like I said before, his bandying around of exponential is completely unfounded. Population growth is rising at a much reduced rate, proportionate growth relative to current levels is much smaller than in the 1950s during the baby boomer period.

When you say 20Bn as an example, I don't think you appreciate how much we're going to plateau. Have a read of:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/06/daily-chart-10

9.6Bn by 2050
10.9Bn by 2100

There is a good chance we will never hit anywhere close to 20Bn short of life enhancing technology which at this point doesn't exist. If we do, then I could equally argue we will invent technology that will reduce our individual resource needs dramatically.

Do I wish population growth was lower and there were more for each of us? Sure. Louis CK has a great bit on it. Agreed on women's rights and education, but as with everything it's correlated to societal poverty. You may as well kill two birds with one stone by just focussing on that. Every policy action has an opportunity cost, given what I've said, I would rather focus on something more pressing.

@shveddy

I don't buy his overstretched ticking time bomb analogy or the idea of a point of no return. Countless people have predicted peak oil, global resource wars and the like for decades with none of significance eventuating.

Historically this argument would have been even more credible looking around the baby boomer growth of post WWII, because relative population growth was much higher and families were much larger even in developed countries.

Nevertheless, (taking food as an example) agricultural yields multiplied while (taking the US as an example) agricultural employment fell from ~35% in 1900 to <3% today.

Again, pre-GFC, both general food and oil prices were reaching near historic highs. We've since seen moves towards expanding oil/gas supply through fraking and more aggressive and widespread use of GM to enhance yields as well as purely enhancing supply in response to high prices. Both have stayed more or less flat since 08.

The point is, it will be a gradual change, one that society will respond to automatically through price rises, and incentives to create more efficient use of the resources that are available.

Also as far as how to achieve a reduced population as you alluded to, people don't respond to vague global threats that don't immediately impact them currently. Like global warming. Anything other than financial incentives or legal coercion won't have an impact.

Also, a little bit of trivia... Donald Pleasance -- who plays the forger who eventually escapes with Charles Bronson -- actually spent time in a similar POW camp during WWII.

I dispute that last part. Just tally up those killed in the 20th century alone in WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam, China's Cultural Revolution, etc. and I think it becomes readily apparent that nationalism by far breeds violent fanaticism on a scale that positively dwarfs religion.

There were a few similar stories from the second world war, none from a spitfire that I know of, but all incredible:

http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?173042-Amazing-Parachute-Survival-Falls-of-WWII

This is really crap.

This imperialist fuck's argument amounts to this:

1) The US will need to defeat Japan through military means
2) The US wants to avoid "another Okinawa" (with a quote from Truman)
3) The US needed to drop the atomic bomb

So, lets look first at that Okinawa analogy. Okinawa, as with other pacific islands, were particularly brutal because of both their strategic importance to the Pacific front as well as their terrain. Both because of they needed to be seized in order to cutoff mainland Japan (and isolate it) and their small, heavily dense terrain caused warfare to be at times hand-to-hand, the battles here were desperate and ugly.

This leads us to the next point: the whole presupposition with the imperialist fuck's argument is that there was no other way but occupation, in the form of Okinawa, to end Japan's empire.

This is false. The US had other options to end the war. Occupation of Japan wasn't a strategic necessity in the way occupation of the pacific islands was. The US could have maintained a bombing campaign while getting the rest of the world to pursue political/diplomatic talks with Japan.

The reason the US dropped the bombs wasn't to end the war (which was already war, de jure shit aside). It was to a) ensure supremacy over Japan (which isn't the same thing as ending a war) and b) to ensure global imperialist hegemony.

Amerikkka doesnt give a shit about saving lives. What about all the people firebombed in Dresden? What about all the imperialist adventures before and after WWII? Don't give me some ethical crap about a country, at least 1/4 of which was still under apartheid conditions, that wants to save lives because it respects human life so it drops atomic bombs on an already defeated people.

2 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

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