Maybe your remote control warfare doesn't provide you with enough actual understanding of the situation and just deciding to bomb something without really knowing what you're doing is a bad idea?
'Collateral Damage' is military speak for "we don't actually care who we kill, but we'll pretend it's not a war crime".
There is never a zero percent chance of collateral damage, regardless of the weapon or soldier involved. It's important to set a high threshold of confidence, but that threshold will never be perfection, so from time to time you'll kill someone you didn't mean to. That's still quite a bit different from the terrorist's strategy which is to do 100% collateral damage ON PURPOSE.
Oh, and they all understand fractions
Well, if they graduated high school and still don't grasp fractions then something is seriously wrong.
The internet existed in 1983, and was spreading quickly in 1986.
Perhaps, but it wasn't available outside of a small number of specialists. I was a heavy computer user at that time I can guarantee you if it had been widely available I would have been all over that. Instead, for home users, the mid-1980s were mostly about BBS services, which while kind of similar, were by no means the huge interconnected thing that the internet has since become.
Fighting cancer is fighting evolution itself.
Good, Americans like a war we can really sink our teeth into.
we are in control of the state. the people. at least we should be, we're not to the extent to which the plutocrats corrupted it
Should be in control and actually are in control are not the same thing.
static well-established commodities would be abandoned to the state to manage
Only if those who benefit most from that switch are the ones in control of the state. A more likely result is that investment just moves elsewhere and a lot of people are out of luck.
It would be nice if we could use this transition to develop an economic model that would be more widely equitable than Capitalism has turned out to be.
Figure out one that doesn't suck or run on pipe dreams and you can count me in, for the moment there is no alternative.
if you had a great machine that automated all means of resource extraction, refining, assembly, and distribution, all powered by automated energy sources or just solar, then i'm sorry, the cost is negligible enough to be called zero
There would still be limitations on the quantity of raw materials, land, and the total energy production capacity. It would certainly be vastly different than things are now, but that doesn't mean everything would be free.
the goal of the company as a whole is to make money: sell lots of good stuff at a reasonable profit.
Replace the word "reasonable" with "maximum" and you're closer to the truth.
Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags. -- Sidney Paternoster, "The Folly of the Wise"