I can't speak to that. But nearly 50 years ago I did a deep dive into what would likely happen in the event of a nuclear "accident" (a term of art) in a Navy ship's reactor in port. This was when I was doing the Navy's prep course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of sea duty running aircraft-carrier reactors. Current-design civilian reactors are much larger, so the effects of a missile-strike meltdown would be correspondingly worse. If I had to guess, it'd be far worse than even the missile strike you postulate.

Footnote: AFAIK there has never been a nuclear accident aboard a Navy ship, submarine or otherwise. That's something in which nukes take immense pride. It's largely because of the zero-defect, second-checking culture ferociously instilled by Admiral Hyman Rickover during his decades in charge of "The Program."

Back to non-missile dangers: Human error is what I've always worried about for nuclear power plants. From what's been made public, both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl could easily have been averted — had it not been for cascades of operator errors. Can we confidently say that such errors are less likely today? To be sure, many civilian nuclear plants in the U.S. are run by Navy veterans. But my guess is that working in such plants doesn't provide the same motivations and incentives as "the Fleet." (And a flock of suicide drones won't care either way.)

Relatedly: I was just reading an account of Air France Flight 447, which flew itself into the middle of the South Atlantic — killing all aboard — because of cascades of egregious pilot error that defeated all the autopilot systems.

Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW.

(See: Fukushima and Chernobyl.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47767079

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front — e.g., https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-pre...

The question facing obstetrics was this: Is medicine a craft or an industry?

If medicine is a craft, then you focus on teaching obstetricians to acquire a set of artisanal skills—the Woods corkscrew maneuver for the baby with a shoulder stuck, the Lovset maneuver for the breech baby, the feel of a forceps for a baby whose head is too big.

You do research to find new techniques.

You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands.

But if medicine is an industry, responsible for the safest possible delivery of millions of babies each year, then the focus shifts.

You seek reliability.

You begin to wonder whether forty-two thousand obstetricians in the U.S. could really master all these techniques.

You notice the steady reports of terrible forceps injuries to babies and mothers, despite the training that clinicians have received.

After Apgar, obstetricians decided that they needed a simpler, more predictable way to intervene when a laboring mother ran into trouble.

They found it in the Cesarean section. [0]

(Formatting edited.)

† Surgeon, Rhodes scholar, MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient, professor at Harvard Medical School, author of The Checklist Manifesto among many other things.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/09/the-score

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591250

Points: 13

# Comments: 3

Um, not quite, if read with one possible interpretation. (IP lawyer here.)

The patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US12536233B1/en — see the claims, which are in the right-hand column of this Web page.

The patent means only that Google can sue people who practice the claimed subject matter without Google's permission.

That doesn't mean there wouldn't be other prohibitions and restrictions.

Example: Suppose you were to invent a drug that boosted IQ by 50 points, and body strenth and endurance by 80%, for 12 hours. You might be legally entitled to a patent for it. But you'd still have to get FDA approval to market the drug. (And your patent might be sidelined before issuance under a secrecy order because of the potential military applications — see, e.g., "The Rush to Patent the Atomic Bomb" (NPR.org 2008). https://www.npr.org/2008/03/28/89127786/the-rush-to-patent-t....)

And as others are pointing out, practicing the claimed method might constitute copyright infringement.

I've lived in military on-base housing. It can be just fine ... or sometimes not.

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/why-did-the-beatles-stop-tourin...

That was the theme of the third "act" of one of my favorite novels, 1978's The Vicar of Christ by Walter F. Murphy.

Act 1: The protagonist — a young Catholic, son of a U.S. diplomat, and U.S. Marine Corps junior officer, is wounded at Iwo Jima in WWII. After becoming a law professor, he's recalled to active duty for the Korean War, where he's awarded the Medal of Honor for valor as a battalion commander in combat. (The author was himself a decorated Marine officer in Korea.)

Act 2: Years later, the protagonist is a longtime law school dean. He's appointed Chief Justice of the United States because of political deal-making between the President and a couple of different senators who have agendas.

Years after that, after a personal tragedy, the protagonist resigns and joins a monastery.

Act 3: Having been a monk for just a couple of years, the protagonist is elected pope by the College of Cardinals as a compromise candidate after a long deadlock between the two front-runners. He takes the name "Francis" (after Francis of Assisi) and immediately begins shaking things up both institutionally and doctrinally — to the displeasure of traditionalists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicar_of_Christ

The comment to which you're responding includes a note at the end that the commenter is being sarcastic. Perhaps that wasn't in the comment when you responded to it.

Like "alternative facts"?

That gets tricky: To the extent that an AI is just a tool — along the lines of a trained pair of hands executing a human prompter's specific, detailed instructions — the human prompter might qualify as an "author."

From the U.S. Copyright Office in January 2025:

"The Office affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements.

"This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.

"The Office confirms that the use of AI to assist in the process of creation or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work does not bar copyrightability.

"It also finds that the case has not been made for changes to existing law to provide additional protection for AI-generated outputs."

https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).

So: What a symbol means to the writer (or speaker) is supposedly more important than what the symbol means to readers — who (according to the writer) must accommodate themselves to the writer's mindset instead of vice versa. This sender-oriented approach is in contrast to the writer's seeking to serve his readers — and the writer's intended message — by using the readers' language, if you will.

(I'm curious whether you've found the sender-oriented approach to work when writing a legal brief for a court or agency — in our joint line of work, the received wisdom is that it's decidedly suboptimal.)

It's an analogy: If the relationship isn't self-evident, then I chose a poor analogy.

> They were simply born into particular circumstances by random chance, just like everyone else in the world. ...

Would it be unfair to summarize this position as — ultimately — "yeah, it sucks to be you, but that's a problem for you and your family, not for me and mine"? (Perhaps we even leave out families, so that in life it's sauve qui peut, every man for himself?) The societal group-selection disadvantages of that position are obvious, I'd think — most military organizations recognize that sauve qui peut is a hallmark of defeat by others who have better unit cohesion, which comes in part by putting your shipmate's welfare on at least an equal footing with your own.

The short YouTube video I linked to is worth the time. TL;DR (paraphrasing Barry Switzer): Some people like to think that they hit a triple in life but conveniently forget that they were born and raised on second base, while some other people's antecedents were forced to bat with balsa wood yardsticks and to run with 50-pound weight vests — that is, if they were allowed to step up to the plate at all.

For people who grew up in the south in the 1960s (me, mostly), the Confederate battle flag was indisputably and unambiguously a symbol of white supremacy and keeping "the coloreds" in their supposedly-proper place. I really don't think it changed that much in the 1980s and 1990s.

There's such a thing as generational wealth — financial, cultural — that seems to pay compound interest to successive generations. When prior generations are deprived due to racism, classism, etc., it's not unlike someone who doesn't save for retirement because s/he was repeatedly robbed at gunpoint in earlier years and so was deprived of both those savings and of the compounding effect.

See the famous YouTube video about the starting line of life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K5fbQ1-zps

It's a charming thought. But it can't possibly survive the brute reality that the world is full of people with guns, planes, drones, boats/ships, missiles, etc., who feel entitled to call the shots, and sometimes to take whatever they can from whomever they can.