So did anyone else read the terrible Star wars novel “Darksaber” about the Hutts hiring one of the architects of the death star to build their own in order to hold planets hostage or something, and while the new Republic is trying to rally the gang to go do what they do to death stars the Hutts are so busy cutting corners and embezzling that when they go to turn the thing on for the first time it just fucking explodes?

I don’t know why that’s coming to mind right now.

Xerxes I dug this from scrap metal Mount Athos in a cave 492 BCE!

I wonder why there could be confusion about the chain of command and who actually has what authority. I wonder how that happened, like if this was an easily foreseeable consequence to some kind of earlier action.

The Vatican has been two weeks away from a nulear weapon for the last 20 years, ever since that business with the antimatter bomb at the conclave. It’s a boogeyman they’re using to try and justify continuing the forever war against Italians. I say if they want atomic spaghetti, let em have it.

I mean that’s just the classic realist security paradox, right? The Iranian regime feels, not without reason, like they need to have a lot of military options to keep themselves safe against both internal and external threats. Those options include missile forces, the nuclear program, the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, and a variety of regional proxies that can act in their interest and keep their regional adversaries from stabilizing and forming a real threat. However, having all those different security apparatuses makes other nations that have to interact with them (either because they’re also in the region, or they rely on the Strait of Hormuz, or they would also die in a nuclear apocalypse) more likely to feel the need to increase their own security apparatus, which in turn increases the threat they can pose to Iran. Meanwhile the fact that all this investment is going into the military means that there are fewer resources available and less inclination to try and solve problems by other means, making it increasingly likely that any conflict is going to be resolved kinetically, which in turn further reinforces the need for all that military investment.

Did someone tell him that Perun had cut the “here’s why the US doesn’t have enough boats to escort all the traffic through the strait and would need a coalition to have any chance of success” part from his latest video, or is that just a deeply ironic coincidence.

Given the ubiquity of explosive drones specifically I feel like we need that calendar cartoon with March 2026 being torn off to reveal July 1864

I have never heard of this before and rather than Google it I’m going to decide that if you put 5-10 parallel rail lines to spread the weight you can actually put a whole oil tanker on rollers to drive it across the desert to the other side of the continent.

10/10 no notes

The road is actually in Belgium you don’t know it’s not.

Machines with a lot of precision parts that need to hold up to the kind of wear and tear either a Marine or a maniacal quilter are capable of dishing out. So many layers of fabric…

I mean the Kharkiv offensive of 2023 showed us how effective tractors can be in capturing heavier-armored vehicles in certain situations.

Oh wait, there’s one! How could I miss it when it’s got an RCS as big as a 747! In fact, it looks exactly like a civilian airliner. Huh.

Oh well, still a plane so missile goes bwshhhhhhhhhhh

I mean, if you’re talking specifically in context about people with vaginas instead of women then using the gendered term does exclude both women without vaginas and men with them who are probably a relevant group in that context. But seriously how often does that come up for you? How often is the most important part of the woman you’re referring to her anatomy?

And while “females” is probably just as accurate in most contexts it’s also been poisoned with incel vibes at this point and it’s gonna be some time before it can be salvaged for general use outside of specific biological contexts without sounding like you’re about to unload a whole lot of baggage into the thread instead of getting therapy.

So the guys who have been burning almost as much VC money as they have water and electricity in the name of building AGI have announced that they’re totally gonna do it this time? Just a few more training runs man I swear this time we’re totally gonna turn everyone into paperclips just let me have a few more runs.

Not gonna lie, “enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce” isn’t the sort of thing I’d expect the government to be into, but I guess I’m not mad about it?

Gotta be cheaper than buying new planes which would also have new engines. Generally there needs to be a pretty substantial increase in capability before it’s worth retiring an existing platform, especially in a logistics role where you don’t get as much benefit from the bleeding edge because nobody’s supposed to be shooting at you in the first place.

I think the missing piece here is that B-52 isn’t just a pretty good cargo hauler, it’s a pretty good cargo hauler that we don’t need to buy a whole new airframe to get. Think of it less as “we’re commissioning these B-52s” and more as “hey look we found a way to use all these B-52s we already had” only this just keeps working forever.

I mean a lot of the services that companies are using are cloud-hosted, meaning that especially if you have branch offices or a lot of remote workers a normal firewall in the datacenter introduces an unnecessary bottleneck. Putting the logical edge of your organization’s network in the cloud too makes sense from a performance perspective in that case, and then turning the actual firewalls into SaaS seems much less absurd.

One doesn’t invade the largest country in the world. Ask Afghanistan and Finland how resisting a Soviet invasion went. all that land mass only helps if the enemy is trying to capture it.

This idea that “criminal” is some kind of basic aspect of someone’s being rather than being a status wholly controlled by the government, who can impose or remove it at will, is mind-boggling. And also probably explains a lot of how conservatives keep finding themselves in the jaws of the leopard.