Alright, now, who wants to come up with a ‘good enough’ generative AI tool to generate fake irises on a smartphone screen, and what do you think would be necessary (if anything) to convince the orb-shaped device that it’s a real iris?
That is the goal of this project, right?
I would argue that we are, as a planetary civilization, almost past the point where a war of that sort is even possible.
On the other hand, if China were to ever shun NK, I would bet that their government would likely collapse in less than a decade.
Sadly, China has a ton of reasons to want to prevent that, one of the bigger ones being the border with NK where many, many refugees would try to cross into China.
I could however see, someday, China agreeing to a massive backroom deal on a scale that would be unprecedented:
China abruptly works to ensure a complete collapse of the NK government, without any NK nuclear weapons either coming into play or any NK nuclear weapons going missing (except to China itself, if it wants them).
And SK along with a good chunk of the Western world agrees to immediately conduct one of the largest humanitarian missions in history, to ensure that nobody is fleeing NK into China unless they have tons of assets and they want to avoid repercussions for their actions.
There are, sadly, a lot of reasons why China wouldn’t want the western powers capable of pulling that off to have control of territory that close to China though.
SK would be their safest bet, but SK doesn’t have the resources to pull of that kind of a humanitarian effort.
And the chances that someone like the US wouldn’t take the chance to plop a military base in what is currently NK seems awfully slim.
From the comments, I think that the general answer is: We all recognize it, because a lot of different places used a logo sorta like this in the 90s.
And we can’t pin it down exactly, because a lot of different places used a logo sorta like this in the 90s.
And being the 90s, a lot of that was never on the internet in the first place.
It rings very strong bells for me, and I don’t think the reason is one that (at the time of this comment) has already been posted… But I can’t for the life of me remember what it was for.
I think that it matters a great deal.
One side wants entire groups to not exist. We have seen that play out, time after time after time. We have seen that carried to the point of concentration camps, and the systematic extermination of entire groups of people.
We know where that road ends, and it ends is more blood than anyone should have the slightest desire to ever see spilled in their lifetime.
The other side might not be perfect, but it isn’t out to exterminate people.
That’s not a small difference. It’s not a subtle difference. It’s the difference between one side thinking that the holocaust didn’t go far enough, didn’t succeed enough, and the other side seeing it as an absolutely horrific event, something so horrible that it should never be allowed to happen again.
And make no mistake, when the far right is literally copying propaganda from the Nazis, and they are, they damn well know what they are doing.
On the contrary, Russia using nuclear weapons would do a great deal.
It would ensure that every sane nation on the planet start working to remove the very real threat of Russia using nuclear weapons in other settings.
Depending on exactly how it was taken, that could pretty easily mean almost anything from a long range, decade long effort by most of the world to slowly strangle Russia with sanctions, without any exceptions, to an immediate set of strikes on every single known Russian location with nuclear weapons.
And make no mistake, ‘known location’ is going to include a lot of places that are only ‘known’ at whatever the equivalent is for various countries of top secret, code word classified material, known only to a very small select few.
It would definitely include every single Russian nuclear submarine that any country on earth has a lock on.
It’s pretty much impossible to say how likely that immediate strike would be under those conditions, in large part because the world at large has no idea how much of Russia’s nuclear arsenal has been located with enough precision to carry out such an attack, let alone how much is believed to be known with such precision.
I really, really hope that we don’t go there, because that would be the kickoff for World War 3, without any question.
The only question would be how many Russian nuclear weapons would get launched before their launch platforms were eliminated.
Practically speaking, I sure as hell wouldn’t bet on the number being 0. But others very well might.
I definitely wouldn’t bet on it being anywhere close to the number of weapons that Russia claims to have ready to launch. Intelligence and strike capabilities are far better than that. Even assuming that every single launch platform actually works the way it’s supposed to.
But Russia doing something that even had the potential to lead to a world wide nuclear exchange would most definitely result in actions far greater than anything we have seen so far.