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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (332733)	4/11/2007 6:54:25 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1573908

War = destruction and wasted money yeah we should have never fought Hitler and Japan, think of how clean the world would be now.

To: tejek who wrote (332733)	4/11/2007 7:06:04 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1573908

War = destruction and wasted money Cleaning up the environment = net positive. Neither is necessarily true. Waging war isn't always a net negative. Certainly for example responding to aggression can be positive, if you consider the alternatives. I grant you that war typically causes more destruction and waste then any benefit. The US decision to fight WWII was a net positive despite the enormous costs (if we didn't fight and aid others who fought, perhaps the Axis forces win). If the violence in Iraq ended tomorrow, (and yes I know it won't) then the war would have been a net positive. As for cleaning up the environment being a net positive - Well cleaning up the environment is, when considered in isolation a positive thing, but the direct and indirect costs of a proposed program to clean up the environment can make it a net negative. I'll demonstrate this by showing an extreme case. Lets say that the burning of coal was outlawed tomorrow. That might help the environment but the sudden loss of all the electricity now generated by coal would be disastrous. Or lets say cars where outlawed. Again, perhaps it helps the environment, but the law does more harm than good. In the real world laws are likely not to be quite as harmful as these ideas, but only because the costs are considered. If your idea is "damn the costs, any thing that benefits the environmental situation is automatically a net positive", then your likely to endorse things that are actually net negatives. The costs always have to be considered in the real world. You can ignore them in certain situations where they are negligible, but you have to do at least a minimal consideration to determine that they are negligible.