Maggie's Farm

Anon: Caesar choose to gallantly fight back rather than give in to the overwhelming forces against him.

Caesar had been consolidating more and more power unto himself, when, in 44 BCE, he ordered the Senate to make him dictator for life.

Anon: I see a lot of similarities between Caesar and Trump.

Caesar was the enemy of republican government, wherein power can never be held by one person. Caesar’s adversary was Cicero, whom both Adams and Jefferson considered the most important classical philosopher of politics and natural rights. The founders saw Caesar’s one-person rule as tyranny and antithetical to liberty.

Before Caesar was proclaimed dictator for life, he was a ‘temporary’ dictator, during which time he consolidated his power by packing the government with loyalists. You know what a dictator for a day is called? A dictator.

Anon: after his death the state of Rome declined rapidly and was over run by alien invaders.

The Roman Empire lasted for centuries after the fall of the Republic, including the two centuries known as Pax Romana.

ruralcounsel: What is their life cycle?

Residential solar panels emit about 41 grams of CO2 equivalent emissions per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, mostly due to manufacturing.

ruralcounsel: What kind of tax breaks did you get buying your EVs? Or installing your solar panels?

Much of the cost of new products encourages early adoption, leading to lower prices and more advanced technology. The Chinese are rapidly expanding their EV production, so the costs are dropping rapidly.

B. Hammer: The last issue I read, early 90’s, was devoted in its entirety to how missile defense will never work.

This may be the article you read.

Even today, there is no technology which can successfully defend against a large-scale ICBM attack. Even shooting down a single ICBM is uncertain, much less a hypersonic nuclear missile.

ruralcounsel: Oh, so now it has to be a "large-scale ICBM attack?"

That was the question in the late twentieth century, starting with Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, and as discussed in the article in Scientific American you had mentioned. But even a single ICBM can't reliably be shot down forty years after Reagan's original proposal.

ruralcounsel: As missile tech improves, so does anti-missile tech.

Sure, but offense has an inherent advantage with regards to nuclear missiles. There are many ways to overwhelm any defensive systems, such as launching multiple missiles, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV), hypersonics, or simple decoys. It only takes one missile getting through to destroy a city.

That doesn't mean national missile defense will never be possible. Indeed, missile defense works reasonably well against conventional short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles. And it is possible that one day a workable defense against a large-scale nuclear attack will be possible. But the article you cited was largely correct based on any reasonable understanding of the technology available at the time.