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[Shadowlord]

Some of that you could argue, of course, that Bad Things were necessary for us to Learn Lessons.

[mainiac]

Yes and they are fools or drunks so I'm glad none of them are here.

[Reelya]

Some of that you could argue, of course, that Bad Things were necessary for us to Learn Lessons.

But if the Bad Things never happened, then what would be the purpose in Learning The Lessons?

[Orange Wizard]

You can also learn lessons from close calls where something almost blows up and nobody dies horribly.

[Helgoland]

Yes and they are fools or drunks so I'm glad none of them are here.

*enters thread*

You can also learn lessons from close calls where something almost blows up and nobody dies horribly.

People tend not to, though. 'It worked out fiiiiiiine the last time, remember? It can't be all that risky.'

[Frumple]

You can also learn lessons from close calls where something almost blows up and nobody dies horribly.

S'also that weird thing they've been having luck with where you learn to keep doing good things instead of stop doing bad ones. Positive reenforcement, I think they're calling it. It's like learning without suffering, as amazing as that apparently seems to some people. There's the occasional fellow that just can't seem to wrap their head around the general concept of, "Holy shit that went well, let's do it again!"

I hear* it's actually real damn effective on non-human animals, too. Better than most alternatives, even, in at the very least the long run (and usually in the short, too). Turns out you're a lot less likely to end up with a dog that bites when you're not occasionally beating it when it does something stupid, and instead encouraging it when it does something smart, just as an example. Weird stuff.

*And by hear, I mean I was an idiot child that believed you'd get better results out of occasionally swatting an animal you're trying to train at the appropriate time rather than not. You don't. Basically ever! Odd how that works out, it's almost like pairing a lesson with fear, pain, or suffering in general can teach the wrong lessons or dilute the ones you're aiming for.

[Zangi]

You can also learn lessons from close calls where something almost blows up and nobody dies horribly.

This is highly debatable.  We are talking about Humans.

Not everyone is going to get the same lessons from a near-miss. 
Not everyone is going to even remember the near-miss lesson because it may not have the bad-things-happened impact that would likely burn the event into a Human's memory.
It'll be much easier for Humans to rationalize doing the things that led up to the near-miss... because nothing bad happened.
Humans are poor gamblers.

It is unlikely to have the knowledgeable-rational-smarter Humans making the actual decisions all the time.  Because Humans are social creatures who tend to build at least some semblance of a hierarchy, which means the knowledgeable-rational-smarter Humans also need the social skills to become a decision maker.  Though, Human decision makers may have knowledgeable-rational-smarter Humans advising them... but they are still only advisers in the end.
Also, Humans that are knowledgeable-rational-smarter are not so in every discipline.  Bad advisers are also a thing.

... Humanity fuck yay!

[Loud Whispers]

US is a superpower. Reasonable arguments can be made for Russia, China, India, Brasil, and the EU as superpowers as well. Great/major powers would include that list, plus the UK, France, Germany, and Japan.

USA is a superpower in every sense of the word, China in every economic sense of the word, not in this world are Russia, India or Brazil superpowers, the EU is not a state and in the list of Great Powers, UK, France, Germany and Japan are more powerful than Russia, India and Brazil. India and Brazil could potentially be rising superpowers but are held back by a hell of a lot of corruption, in that same sense Indonesia could become very powerful overnight if it managed to rid itself of corruption. To that sense none of the Great Powers have waged war against one another since WWII (barring a few skirmishes or post-colonial conflicts).

The war we've seen involving major powers hasn't been against other major powers; closest I can think of would be where the opposing side was supported by another major power but not actually fighting, like the Vietnam/Indochina wars (I'm not sure if that actually counts given the date), or the current clusterfuck in the Levant.

Ones that were clashes between world powers since WWII:
1950 - Korean war evolved into a major clash between  S.Korea, USA, UK, PRC, USSR, N.Korea and loads more, even Turkey
1956 - Suez Crisis greatly accelerates the decline of the French and British Empires, notably the world superpowers intervened to force an end to the conflict without committing troops themselves, using financial dominance to force withdrawal without military warfare
1961 - India annexes Goa from Portugal, the war lasts a day and a half
1962 - India and China clash over their Himalayan border
1963 - Indonesian-Malayan war starts, fought between Malaya, Australia, UK, Indonesia, with support from Canada, India, USA, USSR and PRC
1965 - Indo-Pakistani war happens after India responds to Pakistani insurgents with full-scale military assault, ensuing in the largest tank battle since WWII
1967 - Six-Day War happens, in which loads of Arab armies get rekt by Israel
1967 - After the Six-Day War didn't really resolve much, the War of Attrition follows thereafter with much the same pattern and outcome
1970 - Football War happens. Though El Salvador and Honduras hardly count as Great Powers, if they have a war called the Football war it has to be mentioned
1971 - Another Indo-Pakistani war happens, this time as a result of East Pakistan becoming Bangladesh
1974 - Turkish invasion of Cyprus
1982 - Argentinians invade the Falklands, sparking the Falklands War vs UK. Notable because the world superpowers didn't step in, and the Argentinians felt proud for attacking a nuclear power - conventional rules stopped applying when Galtieri was wrongly fed information by sympathetic MPs guessing that the UK would not respond. So a very, very specific circumstance
1984 - Another Indo-Pakistani war happens, this time over Kashmir
1987 - Indo-Sino skirmish over northeastern India
1990 - Iraq war 1: Classic Gulf edition
1991 - Russo-Georgian war
2003 - Iraq war 2: The Refreedoming edition
2014 - Russia drops the donbass (with the caveat being though this is a clash of great powers, none of their troops ever clashed directly)

Some of those I had to stretch the definition to be conflicts between regional powers, everything else was pretty much proxy wars, or civil wars, or wars fought against non-state militant entities

IMO the UN has done fuckall to prevent wars, though to be fair I don't really expect anyone to be able to prevent war short of Christ descending from heaven.
I'd say the institution is irrelevant but it does have a certain air of legitimacy around it, which is better than nothing. Plus all the extra-political stuff they do is pretty useful.

Such useful extra-politically stuff being?

[Shadowlord]

IMO the UN has done fuckall to prevent wars, though to be fair I don't really expect anyone to be able to prevent war short of Christ descending from heaven.
I'd say the institution is irrelevant but it does have a certain air of legitimacy around it, which is better than nothing. Plus all the extra-political stuff they do is pretty useful.

Such useful extra-politically stuff being?

Maybe he is thinking of these people?

[Loud Whispers]

IMO the UN has done fuckall to prevent wars, though to be fair I don't really expect anyone to be able to prevent war short of Christ descending from heaven.
I'd say the institution is irrelevant but it does have a certain air of legitimacy around it, which is better than nothing. Plus all the extra-political stuff they do is pretty useful.

Such useful extra-politically stuff being?

Maybe he is thinking of these people?

Well it certainly helps advance the careers of the already powerful but I don't see much else point, I merely feel aghast at the sheer amount of Turkish robots we could be building with the money the UN wastes

[Orange Wizard]

Such useful extra-politically stuff being?

A bunch of stuff

IMO the UN has done fuckall to prevent wars, though to be fair I don't really expect anyone to be able to prevent war short of Christ descending from heaven.

Eh, I'm pretty sure that would actually make wars likelier if it actually did happen.

In the short term, probably, but not once all the heathens have been eradicated

[MrRoboto75]

You mention the great Football wars, but not when Australia declared war on Emus and lost.

[mainiac]

Dont say that!  It was a tie!

[Loud Whispers]

You mention the great Football wars, but not when Australia declared war on Emus and lost.

I said I would mention wars, not crushing defeats

[Orange Wizard]

"If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world... They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks. They are like Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop."