field activity

$400 Billion in coastal defences for the US alone, what else could $400B buy? https://blog.plangrid.com/2019/11/seawall-construction-projects/ This reminded me of the latest edition of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History . In the opening stages of World War II, the Royal Navy was dedicated to supremacy of the battleship. 30+ years of technical development had produced fighting ships with unparalleled lethality. That is, unparalleled lethality when compared to other surface ships. They had limited anti-aircraft capabilities of their own and there were very few land-based planes in the area. Taking the Prince of Wales and Repulse into action without air cover proved to be virtually suicidal. They were quickly overwhelmed by a relatively small number of Japanese aircraft. 18 aviators for 840 sailors' lives. At the very same time, a slow and painful fighting retreat along the Malay peninsula  was delaying the Japanese occupation of that area. One was an utterly fruitless waste ...

I caught wind of  Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration  by Caplan and Weinersmith via Tyler Cowen's  Marginal Revolution blog. A detailed critique is well beyond my abilities. However, one passage from page 8 of the preview currently available on Amazon lists this Q&A: "The country is full. We no longer have room for mass immigration" "There's ample room left. If the continental U.S. were as packed as a low-density city like Los Angeles, everyone on earth would fit." Going to the notes on p. 217: "According to the last Census (United States Census Bureau 2018a), Los Angeles County has a population density of 2,419 people per square miles. Since the continental United States is 3,119,885 square miles in area, this are would contain about 7.6 billion people, the current world population." This is a horrifying simplification of a massively complex question and it has been bothering me for quite a while. The idea that t...