It’s really a question of scale. You don’t make the majority of your draftees political draftees. Imagine if only one in twenty soldiers is drafted due to their political activities. You’re not trying to draft every single person in the country that would want to vote against you. Rather, you draft people who start up resistance movements or alternative political parties. You don’t draft everyone who attends the protest. But you do draft all the protest leaders. You start with the most prominent and go down the line until you’ve filled up as many of your political drafts as you feel comfortable.

It can be a very useful tool for a despot to target their political opposition. And it also has a silencing effect. It won’t take long for people to notice and to prove that the draft board is politically biased. But then the courts OK it for some bullshit reason. Now you live in a country with a draft board that is politically motivated and not even trying to hide it. Imagine what effect that has on people’s willingness to resist the regime.

But yeah, imagine being one of those political draftees. You’re one in twenty. And everyone is told you’re a political draftee, so no one wants to trust you. They know even being near you could cast suspicion on them. The vast majority of those around you are just poor unlucky bastards whose number came up. They tried their best to remain outside of politics, but politics came for them anyway. They just want to quietly do their time, keep their head down, and do their best to survive. Imagine being one of those one in twenty and trying to organize a coup. Maybe it would work. But history shows such rebellions are quite rare.

Oh, they’ll draft him. In fact, they’ll draft him, and he’ll rise up the ranks with record speed! All his assignments will be positions like “Army Special Liaison to Customs and Border Patrol.” Any role they can find that can puff up his resume while putting him in absolutely zero direct physical danger and requiring next to no actual skills or duties. He’ll do photoshoots in uniform. And Trump will solemnly say, “I’m sorry we have to bring back the draft. But I believe this is so necessary that I have drafted my own son into this conflict.” Or they’ll find a way to fabricate a story of military heroism around him.

Be careful what you wish for. That’s what Baron being drafted would actually look like. The only way Barron would actually be drafted and treated as a common conscript would be if he miraculously developed a conscience and publicly denounced his father. That might get him drafted for real.

I wonder how much this actually happens though. Does no one ask, “wait…should we really be giving our political opposition access to and training with heavy weaponry?”

Setting up a meat grinder can also be a great way to target your political opposition. A corrupt draft board can draft members of their political opposition. And once in uniform, they can be given the suicide assignments.

Exactly. Is there sexism in the electorate? Sure. But those folks are unlikely to vote for a Democratic candidate anyway. Maybe there are a handful of people that are deeply sexist but still want to vote for Democrats, but it kind of goes against the entire core brand message of the party. Just how many people are there that would never want to vote for a woman president, but also want to protect immigrant rights, queer rights, black and brown rights, etc?

And we should also not ignore positive sexism. Are there some people that would vote for a male Democratic candidate but not a female one? Probably. But there are probably even more people that would be persuaded to go from non-voter to Democratic voter simply to see the first woman elected president.

The example I always keep coming back to is Margaret Thatcher, curse her bones. She was elected prime minister of Britain…in the 1980s! Britain has a very similar political culture to the US. And she won while running as a conservative! Left of center voters, the people most likely to support a female candidate, opposed her. And rightly so because of her policies. But she was able to win over conservatives. If a conservative woman can become the leader of the UK in the 1980s, there is zero reason a liberal woman can’t do so in the US in the 2020s.

And yet, Biden barely won in 2020. He only won in 2020 because of Covid. And polls at the time he dropped out indicated he was on track to losing far worse than Kamala did. I think you’re just projecting your sexism onto the electorate.

The point is, in a country of 330 million people, we have no shortage of extremely competent and qualified people to serve at the highest levels of office. Sure you might vote in someone bad, but at least this keeps the bad incumbents from sticking around forever.

I think you’re just projecting your own sexism onto the electorate as a whole.

I’ve listened to him a bit in the past, but I’m not familiar with any recent work he’s put out.

All that’s needed is military supremacy.

Are you familiar with what an asymptote is?

They’re stupid simple devices though. There’s not even any circuitry in a solar panel. There’s nothing to slip a backdoor inside. There’s caution, and then there’s just xenophobic paranoia.

There’s a limit to the gains from pooling insurance risk. Sure, you gain a lot by going from 1000 people in a pool fo 10000. But 10 million to 20 million? You reach a point where the law of large numbers takes over and adding more people doesn’t produce further gains.

In the novel Star’s Reach, in a post-collapse society, one of the main characters is a ‘miner.’ Their mining guild basically tears apart old concrete buildings, by hand, with sledge hammers to extract the old rebar from them.

OP said neolithic! You going to forge some rocks?

The world can support less than 1% of its current population if everyone reverted to a neolithic lifestyle. And countless species would be hunted to extinction during the collapse.

So in short, the answer to what I would do? Like nearly everyone else, just die. The folks from Sentinel Island will inherit the Earth.

That makes zero mathematical sense.

Meanwhile, the necromancer is standing on shore saying, “I really don’t want to get my robes wet. Take your time, bring me the kid, and I’ll take care of it.”

Why would the cost of insuring human-driven cars increase? It’s not like the risk of a human drivers will suddenly go up with driverless cars on the road. In fact, driverless cars, if they worked, would lower the claims rate of human-driven cars.

And the insurance companies won’t pressure owners to switch to driverless vehicles. True self-driving vehicles won’t require insurance at all. If the manufacturer is completely responsible for any risk, then it’s the manufacturer that has all the liability. Your self-driving car would just have a lifetime worth of insurance coverage built into the purchase price. A world of only self driving cars is a world where car insurance companies don’t exist.

Who cares if most of the panels are made in China? Panels last for decades. If China decides to embargo the EU and cut off the supply of panels, it would be a decade before that embargo really started to hurt. Enough time for Europe to spin up and entire PV supply chain from scratch.

You can’t apply the logic of petrostates to electrostates.