Guess the MegaTons of This Nuke

[heydaralon]

How long did it take you to get your company off the ground, if you don't mind me asking? Website looks good.

Creating the product and sourcing materials from various manufacturers took about 5 months. The website took about a day.
Solo venture.

eCommerce is fairly easy to get into if you have a product idea and a little time to learn the various pieces you have to put in place to go live.

We just don’t teach folks how to do it for some reason.

Was this a pet peeve of yours (ie: sulfates in shampoos) that you created a personal solution to, and then decided to market, or did you set out to sell the shampoo from the start?

Eventually, when I get more money together, I would like to start a small business of my own. This is a goal that is probably at least 5 years out.

[Smitty-48]

Dangerous war profiteers like Smitty only want to keep America weak and open to attack.

You have more than enough weaponry to fight a war against North Korea, so when it comes to war profiteering, I jump on the "Russia! Russia!! Russia!!!" bandwagon with the Democrats, and throw a little "China! China!! China!!!" in there too, because when it comes to arms sales, North Korea is not going to be much of a profit center, more than enough on hand already to deal with them, if you chose to do so.

Preparing for asymmetrical threats is not going to pay the bills, you don't get to the big bucks without a superpower threat, inflation adjusted, the Reagan Cold War build up would be a budget of $2 trillion in current dollars, the current budget would only be $200 billion in 1980 dollars, so absent a Cold War, your military budget is down 90% from its peak.

[DBTrek]

Was this a pet peeve of yours (ie: sulfates in shampoos) that you created a personal solution to, and then decided to market, or did you set out to sell the shampoo from the start?

Eventually, when I get more money together, I would like to start a small business of my own. This is a goal that is probably at least 5 years out.

Nah, just walked through the grocery aisles and noticed men had about three choices for shampoo - Head and shoulders, bargain citrus, bargain apple.
Seemed like there was room there for competition.

[heydaralon]

Dangerous war profiteers like Smitty only want to keep America weak and open to attack.

You have more than enough weaponry to fight a war against North Korea, so when it comes to war profiteering, I jump on the "Russia! Russia!! Russia!!!" bandwagon with the Democrats, and throw a little "China! China!! China!!!" in there too, because when it comes to arms sales, North Korea is not going to be much of a profit center, more than enough on hand already to deal with them, if you chose to do so.

Preparing for asymmetrical threats is not going to pay the bills, you don't get to the big bucks without a superpower threat, inflation adjusted, the Reagan Cold War build up would be a budget of $2 trillion in current dollars, the current budget would only be $200 billion in 1980 dollars, so absent a Cold War, your military budget is down 90% from its peak.

We are spending 10% of what we did in the 80's? If that's true, holy shit.

[Smitty-48]

Dangerous war profiteers like Smitty only want to keep America weak and open to attack.

You have more than enough weaponry to fight a war against North Korea, so when it comes to war profiteering, I jump on the "Russia! Russia!! Russia!!!" bandwagon with the Democrats, and throw a little "China! China!! China!!!" in there too, because when it comes to arms sales, North Korea is not going to be much of a profit center, more than enough on hand already to deal with them, if you chose to do so.

Preparing for asymmetrical threats is not going to pay the bills, you don't get to the big bucks without a superpower threat, inflation adjusted, the Reagan Cold War build up would be a budget of $2 trillion in current dollars, the current budget would only be $200 billion in 1980 dollars, so absent a Cold War, your military budget is down 90% from its peak.

We are spending 10% of what we did in the 80's? If that's true, holy shit.

Inflation adjusted, $600 billion in the 1980's is $2 trillion now, $600 billion now is only $200 billion in 1980;
$200 billion is 10% of $2 trillion.

[heydaralon]

You have more than enough weaponry to fight a war against North Korea, so when it comes to war profiteering, I jump on the "Russia! Russia!! Russia!!!" bandwagon with the Democrats, and throw a little "China! China!! China!!!" in there too, because when it comes to arms sales, North Korea is not going to be much of a profit center, more than enough on hand already to deal with them, if you chose to do so.

Preparing for asymmetrical threats is not going to pay the bills, you don't get to the big bucks without a superpower threat, inflation adjusted, the Reagan Cold War build up would be a budget of $2 trillion in current dollars, the current budget would only be $200 billion in 1980 dollars, so absent a Cold War, your military budget is down 90% from its peak.

We are spending 10% of what we did in the 80's? If that's true, holy shit.

Inflation adjusted, $600 billion in the 1980's is $2 trillion now, $600 billion now is only $200 billion in 1980;
$200 billion is 10% of $2 trillion.

What percentage of that was on Star Wars? Reagan gets a lot of praise or shit depending on who you ask for that. Was that project a monetary blackhole as is sometimes claimed?

[Smitty-48]

We are spending 10% of what we did in the 80's? If that's true, holy shit.

Inflation adjusted, $600 billion in the 1980's is $2 trillion now, $600 billion now is only $200 billion in 1980;
$200 billion is 10% of $2 trillion.

What percentage of that was on Star Wars? Reagan gets a lot of praise or shit depending on who you ask for that. Was that project a monetary blackhole as is sometimes claimed?

SDI never really got past the seed funding for research stage before the Cold War came to an end, I think they peaked at a $6 billion dollar budget request in 1986, so that's like $2 billion in 2017 dollars, about the price of a single B-2 bomber.

The assertion that it was a "blackhole" was based on the argument that it wouldn't work and it would just force the Soviets to counter it with ever more massive overkill to overwhelm the defenses, then the Soviets went broke trying to do that, so Reagan gets credit for that.

The Soviets didn't really have a budget in American terms, but their spending in the 1980's was calculated to be equivalent to $128 billion USD/year, which was 50% of their GDP, so America was spending almost 6 times as much, at about 5% GDP, so the Soviets simply collapsed trying to keep up, hastened by the collapse of the oil price, as they were relying on oil exports to acquire US dollars in order to pay their bills.

When OPEC drove the oil price up, the Soviets were flush and so went on a massive spending spree, in which they rapidly closed the gap with America, but when the oil price came back down, they were caught in an economic bubble collapse.

Unlike North Korea, the Soviet Union was not such a deeply entrenched totalitarian system as to maintain its military efforts in the face of mass famine, North Korea of course, shaking that off in the 1990s like it ain't no thang.

In the end, the Soviet Union turned out to be a de facto democracy, because when the bread lines ran out of bread, they basically voted with their feet, whereas the North Koreans on the other hand, have demonstrated that they are resolved to commit mass suicide for Juche.

[DBTrek]

I think it would do damage, but the scenario being invoked here; "12 high yield hydrogen bombs delivered to the CONUS" evenly spaced out over the territory in order to generate comprehensive EMP effect; if you can do that, you can do anything, and so there's no reason to stop there,

Quite true. Not to mention, I doubt even 12 evenly spaced nukes would EMP out every last power grid in the nation. But once you’re eating twelve nukes power is probably the least of your worries. I only scanned the first few paragraphs about the report and already huge logical inconsistencies were leaping off the page at me.

Like - it would take at least a year to start restoring major power systems.
By year three 90% of Americans have starved or succumbed to illness or violence.

Say what? I thought power was coming online again after year one? How are we still starving and murdering each other two years after getting our shit back together?
Guess that’s why they’re de-funded.

[Speaker to Animals]

Or .... or ... maybe one centrally located blast won’t actually destroy all power infrastructure from coast to coast.

Given that we’ve set nukes off above ground in this country without even knocking out the power infrastructure for a city block, I’m inclined to lean toward the historical record.

Actually we did by accident. I think it happened to one of the islands in the Pacific. That's how we figured out it was possible.

A bomb designed for EMP is not the same thing we tested either. If you are going to test something like that, in any case, you'd probably want to test it underground..

Also, you would need a pretty high-altitude blast for this. Smitty is not exactly being honest when he demands some experiment as proof that it's possible, since just doing it would cause a lot of problems for people. We know it happens on a small scale with every single nuclear blast in the atmosphere. Shaping the blast so you get an even wave on the surface of the Earth is not easy but not impossible either. I am sure the Norks can figure it out. I suspect they've received plenty of help as it is.

[Smitty-48]

I think it would do damage, but the scenario being invoked here; "12 high yield hydrogen bombs delivered to the CONUS" evenly spaced out over the territory in order to generate comprehensive EMP effect; if you can do that, you can do anything, and so there's no reason to stop there,

Quite true. Not to mention, I doubt even 12 evenly spaced nukes would EMP out every last power grid in the nation. But once you’re eating twelve nukes power is probably the least of your worries. I only scanned the first few paragraphs about the report and already huge logical inconsistencies were leaping off the page at me.

Like - it would take at least a year to start restoring major power systems.
By year three 90% of Americans have starved or succumbed to illness or violence.

Say what? I thought power was coming online again after year one? How are we still starving and murdering each other two years after getting our shit back together?
Guess that’s why they’re de-funded.

Indeed. I categorically reject that Americans would succumb and turn on each other in the event of, such a situation would be a binding force not a dividing force, in a situation like that is where you're gonna see Americans rally around the colours and go all Lee Greenwood to the max, even the sociopaths would rally in the face of such an attack from an external source.

Moreover, it wouldn't be happening in a vacuum, the rest of the world would come to America's aid, everybody is far too invested in America to simply leave her to her fate in such a situation, so it might take some time for America to be fulling back up and running again, but certainly mass famine and the like could be staved off.