3 ms·

Yes, refinery mismatch vulnerability something that can be built around, ~10-15 year horizon. US can also bring down oil as % of energy mix and distribute renew

Yes, refinery mismatch vulnerability something that can be built around, ~10-15 year horizon. US can also bring down oil as % of energy mix and distribute renewables. If US smart they would do this. But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). Refineries just most immediately very high value targets that happens to be closest to missile range. But the assumption is less about US adaptability/smartness, as the way commodity conventional strikes is trending, CONUS _ will _ be vulnerable eventually. Fortress America is as much function of geography as technology. Just like how 20 years ago Iran couldn't hit Israel or many GCC companies even if it wanted to... now it can. The natural outcome of longer and longer range strikes is at some point US becomes in range of Monroe neighbours who doesnt want to be Monroed.

AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
> But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). Hyperscalers are probably not a great example because a) they don't really benefit that much from being physically centralized (especially at the building level rather than the regional level) and b) data is one of the easiest things to keep redundant, and then even if you destroy a large facility, backups get restored to another facility or distributed set of facilities with no downtime at all if the target is well-prepared and only a short period of time if they've done even minimum diligence. The critical ones can also do the "build it on the inside of a mountain" thing and then your capacity to take down grandpa's WordPress is mainly useful to the target for rallying opposition against you. > whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). If "energy" turns into solar panels on the roof of every house and widely distributed low density wind farms etc., that's pretty hard to target. In general centralization is often done because it has economies of scale, but those same economies of scale have diminishing returns. One huge facility reduces certain fixed costs by a million to one (i.e. 99.9999%) over having a million small facilities, but a thousand medium facilities are much harder to target while still reducing them by 99.9% and the remaining 0.0999% is negligible because you're long since already dominated by unit costs. The target can also choose where to take the trade off based on how likely they expect to be targeted. And that's a broadly applicable principle rather than something that only applies to any specific industry.
- maxglute 7mo ago
  Hyperscale/data just one example, f35 manufacturing, specialty feed stock production, transformers, gas compression etc, the list of currently centralized (as in have large target profiles) that will remain soft for decades is long with varying degree of disruption/dislocation, i.e. you don't restore hardware with multi year lead times. Those are ridiculous / absurd economies of scale numbers, splitting piles up 20-50% per duplication inefficiency, especially in US context (expensive regulatory/physical buildout), splitting 1 hyper to 1000 medium is not marginal more cost, it's magnitudes / 1000%s more cost - costs private or public will not go for, and is prematurely self defeating because others can always build cheaper missiles than US can build infra (hence goldendome theatrics). In principle, US can preempt CONUS physical vulnerabilities, where 100+ years of built up over assumption of CONUS not being vulnerable. In practice the chance of that happening approaches 0. Didn't even harden CENTCOM air shelters and planners have been noting vulnerability for years. Not just economies scale, but JIT and all other aggregate downstream optimizations US likes to make in name of efficiency. US simply not culturally PRC who does not mind (and is optimized for) some extra concrete for physical security. Not that PRC does not have huge vulnerabilities, just development has been made with mainland strikes in mind.
  - AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
    > splitting 1 hyper to 1000 medium is not marginal more cost, it's magnitudes / 1000%s more cost It isn't. The primary costs of both the medium and enormous facility are the same: Server hardware and electricity, and server equipment and electricity don't have significantly lower unit costs when you're buying a million instead of a thousand. Also, you can still buy a million servers and then put them in a thousand different buildings. It's only when you get down to very small facilities that things like staffing start to become significantly different, because amortizing tens of thousands of employees over millions of servers results in a similar unit cost as amortizing tens of employees over thousands of servers. It's only when you get to the point that you have only tens or hundreds of physical servers that you get scale problems, because it's hard to hire one tenth of one employee and on top of that you want to have more than one so the one person doesn't have to be on call 24/7/365. Although even there you could split the facilities up and then have multiple employees who spend different days in different locations. > especially in US context (expensive regulatory/physical buildout) This is another reason that "hyper economies of scale" don't actually do you any good. Which costs less, having dozens or hundreds of suppliers for the various parts of an aircraft, or one single Lockheed that should nominally capture all of these great economies of scale from being a single company? It's the first one, because then it's a competitive market and the competitive pressure is dramatically more effective at keeping costs under control than a single hyper-scale monopolist that should be able to do it more efficiently on paper until the reality arrives that they then have no incentive to, because a monopoly is the only one who can actually bid on the contract and a duopoly or similarly concentrated market can too easily explicitly or implicitly coordinate to divide up the market. At which point they can be as inefficient as they like with no consequences. This does mean you have to address the regulatory environment that tends to produce concentrated markets, but we need to fix that anyway because it's a huge problem even outside of this context. > where 100+ years of built up over assumption of CONUS not being vulnerable That's not true, there was a significant push during the Cold War to decentralize things to make them less vulnerable to nuclear strikes. The government pushed people into the suburbs on purpose: https://www.wagingpeace.org/nuclear-weapons-and-american-urban-planning-in-postwar-america-bombed-out-cities/ https://www.wagingpeace.org/nuclear-weapons-and-american-urb... There are obviously significant costs to that but Americans were willing pay them when there was a reason to and much of the landscape is still shaped by those decisions even now. You also see this in the design of the internet, which came out of the same era and has a design that facilitates the elimination of single points of failure, and that sort of thing is as close as we've seen to an unmitigated good.

AnthonyMouse 7mo ago

> But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). Hyperscalers are probably not a great example because a) they don't really benefit that much from being physically centralized (especially at the building level rather than the regional level) and b) data is one of the easiest things to keep redundant, and then even if you destroy a large facility, backups get restored to another facility or distributed set of facilities with no downtime at all if the target is well-prepared and only a short period of time if they've done even minimum diligence. The critical ones can also do the "build it on the inside of a mountain" thing and then your capacity to take down grandpa's WordPress is mainly useful to the target for rallying opposition against you. > whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). If "energy" turns into solar panels on the roof of every house and widely distributed low density wind farms etc., that's pretty hard to target. In general centralization is often done because it has economies of scale, but those same economies of scale have diminishing returns. One huge facility reduces certain fixed costs by a million to one (i.e. 99.9999%) over having a million small facilities, but a thousand medium facilities are much harder to target while still reducing them by 99.9% and the remaining 0.0999% is negligible because you're long since already dominated by unit costs. The target can also choose where to take the trade off based on how likely they expect to be targeted. And that's a broadly applicable principle rather than something that only applies to any specific industry.

maxglute 7mo ago
Hyperscale/data just one example, f35 manufacturing, specialty feed stock production, transformers, gas compression etc, the list of currently centralized (as in have large target profiles) that will remain soft for decades is long with varying degree of disruption/dislocation, i.e. you don't restore hardware with multi year lead times. Those are ridiculous / absurd economies of scale numbers, splitting piles up 20-50% per duplication inefficiency, especially in US context (expensive regulatory/physical buildout), splitting 1 hyper to 1000 medium is not marginal more cost, it's magnitudes / 1000%s more cost - costs private or public will not go for, and is prematurely self defeating because others can always build cheaper missiles than US can build infra (hence goldendome theatrics). In principle, US can preempt CONUS physical vulnerabilities, where 100+ years of built up over assumption of CONUS not being vulnerable. In practice the chance of that happening approaches 0. Didn't even harden CENTCOM air shelters and planners have been noting vulnerability for years. Not just economies scale, but JIT and all other aggregate downstream optimizations US likes to make in name of efficiency. US simply not culturally PRC who does not mind (and is optimized for) some extra concrete for physical security. Not that PRC does not have huge vulnerabilities, just development has been made with mainland strikes in mind.
- AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
  > splitting 1 hyper to 1000 medium is not marginal more cost, it's magnitudes / 1000%s more cost It isn't. The primary costs of both the medium and enormous facility are the same: Server hardware and electricity, and server equipment and electricity don't have significantly lower unit costs when you're buying a million instead of a thousand. Also, you can still buy a million servers and then put them in a thousand different buildings. It's only when you get down to very small facilities that things like staffing start to become significantly different, because amortizing tens of thousands of employees over millions of servers results in a similar unit cost as amortizing tens of employees over thousands of servers. It's only when you get to the point that you have only tens or hundreds of physical servers that you get scale problems, because it's hard to hire one tenth of one employee and on top of that you want to have more than one so the one person doesn't have to be on call 24/7/365. Although even there you could split the facilities up and then have multiple employees who spend different days in different locations. > especially in US context (expensive regulatory/physical buildout) This is another reason that "hyper economies of scale" don't actually do you any good. Which costs less, having dozens or hundreds of suppliers for the various parts of an aircraft, or one single Lockheed that should nominally capture all of these great economies of scale from being a single company? It's the first one, because then it's a competitive market and the competitive pressure is dramatically more effective at keeping costs under control than a single hyper-scale monopolist that should be able to do it more efficiently on paper until the reality arrives that they then have no incentive to, because a monopoly is the only one who can actually bid on the contract and a duopoly or similarly concentrated market can too easily explicitly or implicitly coordinate to divide up the market. At which point they can be as inefficient as they like with no consequences. This does mean you have to address the regulatory environment that tends to produce concentrated markets, but we need to fix that anyway because it's a huge problem even outside of this context. > where 100+ years of built up over assumption of CONUS not being vulnerable That's not true, there was a significant push during the Cold War to decentralize things to make them less vulnerable to nuclear strikes. The government pushed people into the suburbs on purpose: https://www.wagingpeace.org/nuclear-weapons-and-american-urban-planning-in-postwar-america-bombed-out-cities/ https://www.wagingpeace.org/nuclear-weapons-and-american-urb... There are obviously significant costs to that but Americans were willing pay them when there was a reason to and much of the landscape is still shaped by those decisions even now. You also see this in the design of the internet, which came out of the same era and has a design that facilitates the elimination of single points of failure, and that sort of thing is as close as we've seen to an unmitigated good.