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[Grek]

It takes 100 square meters to build a solar greenhouse sufficient to sustain one person in perpetuity. It takes 5000$ to save a single life through disease prevention. Power is harder to quantify and more variable in its worth, but none could say that good governance leads to just as much misery as bad governance. If a soldier lays down his life to gain a patch of land thirty paces by thirty paces across for the benefit of feeding the hungry, to give even a modest sum of money over to humanitarian efforts and to shift even a minor point of policy from bad to good, he has already made good on his sacrifice three times over. The problem is not that land and money and power are worth so little, but that our use of these resources is so incredibly poor, and that the weak have no way to correct the errors of the strong.

[Culise]

Are you saying that war and diplomacy are more intertwined than a "Step 1, Step 2" process? I think the other posters might already agree on that ...

Well, I was initially just denouncing the notion that that particular line from Clausewitz is a "politicians (sic) saying", but I ended up wandering a bit off-topic.  jrrocks05 clearly disagrees with it as well, given his distaste for career politicians and his willingness to attribute the quote to them instead of the actual source, so I'm not sure.

It takes 100 square meters to build a solar greenhouse sufficient to sustain one person in perpetuity. It takes 5000$ to save a single life through disease prevention. Power is harder to quantify and more variable in its worth, but none could say that good governance leads to just as much misery as bad governance. If a soldier lays down his life to gain a patch of land thirty paces by thirty paces across for the benefit of feeding the hungry, to give even a modest sum of money over to humanitarian efforts and to shift even a minor point of policy from bad to good, he has already made good on his sacrifice three times over. The problem is not that land and money and power are worth so little, but that our use of these resources is so incredibly poor, and that the weak have no way to correct the errors of the strong.

I would love to see the sources for those numbers, because they seem all sorts of small.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

He might be referencing this guy who intensively farms in a greenhouse, with interlinked systems like water treatment, tilapia ponds, hanging baskets, etc. That environment would be difficult to sustain without occasional crashes - which would be fine because neighbors can help each other clean up the mess and start over, and feed each other while they wait for the unfortunate to get his farm back up to speed.

But it's also using well-developed land, that is, the greenhouse and plumbing etc. There's a lot of infrastructure. You're going to get a lot less food per square meter of land space if it's a plain covered by wheat, or an orchard.