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Comment Re:Stealth (Score 1) 57

This ain't the early Cold War anymore. While there are certainly some super-secret weapons platforms out there, a lot of military capability is deliberately communicated and even put on display because it deters conflict.

When the Soviet Union fell the Pentagon's priorities shifted from "World War 3 against the USSR" to "wars against countries with marginally effective air forces." So when the B-2 came online, it served the Pentagon's mission better to show it off. "Look at our invisible bomber. You really think crossing us is a good idea? Be a shame of bombs just fell out of an empty sky on you without any warning whatsoever."

China wants the US to know that it can launch stealth aircraft off of its carriers because that allows it to use its carriers to assert control of the Eastern Pacific. China doesn't regard war with the United States as inevitable. Consequently, it's interested in convincing the United States that a war in the Pacific isn't worth fighting. That means eroding American confidence in American strategic and technological dominance so Americans know that a conflict with China will be costly.

This is targeted directly at American isolationists: "do you really want your kid to die for Taiwan?"

Comment Re:For now (Score 2) 119

As a historian the only caveat I'd advise there is that we are unlikely to see a long, drawn-out slog like WW2 again. Production capacity is great but the next Great Power war isn't likely to take place over years or even months. So China's technological edge is likely to matter but it's tempered with a willingness to stockpile and maintain systems which may never see use.

Doing that at limited production scale is one thing. Doing it at massive, "we're going to fight a serious war with this stuff" scales is another. China, like many authoritarian regimes, has shown itself to be dazzled by the propaganda value of wonder weapons. The CJ-1000, most recently, seems like a very impressive missile system but if it doesn't exist is sufficient quantity to turn the tide against American assets in theater it's just a waste of money.

Of course, China is also famously closed lipped so it's hard to tell. It might turn out that they have tens of thousands of those things. Probably not, but maybe.

Comment Re: This is getting annoying (Score 1) 159

"Vaccines, COVID, masking, conspiracies, Trump. All in a gigantic doom loop that's not worth re-visiting ad nauseam."

But is 't the motto here, "news for nerds; stuff that matters." Those all sound like they matter.

"So just stop already. And please, stop with the microplastics while you're at it."

Ok, Chicken Little. Sticking your head in the sand and going LALALALALALALALALAL (*raspberries/fart sound*) because reality refuses to conform to your personal beliefs? Your head is so far up your ass! Grow up.

Comment Re: Investing in what? (Score 1) 134

A fair chuck of the crypto space is "pie in the sky bullshit" with a few rare exceptions where the coin itself has been established as a critical consumable for some other service which delivers real value. But the rest? Memecoins are basically a casino with the added twist of being able to bluff other idiots into doubling down on your bet to your own benefit.

Trump Coin, on the other hand, is not a meme coin. It looks like a meme coin and you're supposed to think of it as a meme coin but it's the first kind: a coin which enables some other service that delivers real value. That value is bribing government officials.

Large purchases of Trump Coin necessarily drive the price of the coin up, allowing Trump or his chosen acolytes to sell their horded coins at a tidy profit. Everyone who holds the coins has a commonly held interest. Everyone who buys them to inflate the price and enrich the holders expects to get something for their trouble and then becomes part of the cabal of holders.

Trump Coin is basically an anti-dollar: it is backed, not by the full faith and credit of the United States but by the political corruption and dominance of the MAGA movement.

Comment Doesn't make sense (Score 2) 21

It's wild to imagine Echostar/Dish being worth anything close to that amount of money. From my own experience working inside the company everything always seemed like it was held together with bailing wire and bubble-gum.

I assume there was a highly competitive bidding process for this because there's no way Dish's board of directors would have had the stones to set the price at "three times the company's market cap" on their own.

Comment Only ten years? (Score 2, Insightful) 23

"The botnet was used to launch more than 370,000 attacks in 80 countries, including China, Japan and the U.S., prosecutors said."

And no one was harmed or killed? Normally manslaughter to murder 1 (in the USA) is 10 years to life. A third of a million attacks targeting 37% of all nations on this panet gets at most TEN years? What the fuck is wrong with the US justice system?!?

They might as well start pardoning the criminals in DC (oh, right, they did that in January). What a banana republic

Comment Re: Humans, as a group... (Score 1) 41

I'm largely in agreement with you. I don't think its terribly effective to tell people what they can and can't do. If we don't want people to gamble, making gambling illegal isn't going to move the needle meaningfully and it's probably going to increase overall harm. See, for example, the war on drugs.

But we can move the needle by regulating the supply side of the equation and the more infrastructure intensive the supply side is the more effective regulation is. Banning the sale of leaded gas, for example, resulted in a pretty painless transition away from lead in gasoline. We didn't need to arrest people using leaded gas; the inconvenience of getting leaded gas was more than enough to get people to convert.

That's the approach that makes the most sense for online gambling too. We don't need to be kicking down doors to card games or frog-marching seniors out of bingo night, but we probably would be substantially better off if it weren't legal to develop platforms and services which are specifically engineered to engaged young people and nurture in them a crippling gambling addiction.

And we can say "oh, but why can't you just convince companies not to build those products without the threat of government force" but building those gambling products, or putting heroin in the Big Mac special sauce, or handing out cigarettes and alcohol at middle school football games is a fantastic way to make giant buckets of money at the expense of people's lives and nothing short of the threat of consequences exceeding those potential profits is going to convince a profit-seeking corporation to pass on all that money.

Comment Re:Humans, as a group... (Score 3, Informative) 41

Banning tobacco didn't stop smoking, but banning cigarette vending machines meaningfully reduced it, especially in under-age smokers and lighter smokers.

Yes, banning gambling doesn't stop gaming addiction but taking the casino out of your pocket and taking away the casino's ability to run A/B tests on what it takes to get you, personally, to place your next bet will reduce the harm of gambling addiction across the population.

Comment OBLIG: Literally *EVERYTHING* is in space!!! (Score 0) 108

"... but few people are going to care. Its not like there's much to see out an airplane window anyways outside of takeoff and landing."

EXCEPT: https://youtu.be/7Y3jRaUGg-A

How about you take a long, tall drink from a cup of shit-the-fuck-up? Maybe that'll be a relevant clue-by-4 to illustrate to you, that you -- have your head up your ass.

Other people do not think like you do.

Go learn something and stop being an arrogant, narcissist shit.

Comment Ideological Purity Tests (Score 1) 1

Anyone who did Not See this coming isn't paying attention. One of the hallmarks of a fascist ideology is the identification of any competing ideas as degenerate or ideologically poisonous. This is not a "both sides" issue; the insistence that we not teach political fantasy and conspiracy theory is qualitatively different than insisting that we teach what actually happened and we can tell the difference by imagining the opposite.

If tomorrow incontrovertible evidence that the 2020 election was stolen came out, you wouldn't see a bunch of Democrats insisting that we refuse to teach it. How do we know that? Simple: look at how the Lewinsky scandal is covered in Blue-state history curricula.

Submission + - Moon-bound asteroid could cripple Earth's satellites, say astronomers (substack.com) 1

KentuckyFC writes: In DEcember last year, NASA's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) picked up an 60-meter asteroid that appeared to be heading our way. Further observations quickly ruled out the possibility of a collision but in April, the agency announced that 2024 YR4 had a 4 per cent chance of hitting the moon instead. Now astronomers have calculated the likely consequences and say the impact would create a crater 1 km across and send 100 millions tonnes of ejecta hurtling into space and towards us. The risks to astronauts and satellite systems are clearly existential. The team say this kind of risk is not considered in planetary defence plans, which now urgently need to be updated.

Submission + - Oklahoma will require teachers from NY, CA to prove they back 'America First' (usatoday.com) 1

fahrbot-bot writes: Teachers from California and New York who want to work in Oklahoma public schools will be required to pass a certification test to prove they share the state's conservative political values.

Regardless of the subject or grade they teach, they'll have to show they know "the biological differences between females and males" and that they agree with the state's American history standards, which includes elements of a conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 presidential election from President Donald Trump, which fact checkers have said are false.

The state Department of Education will implement the new certification test for teachers from the two largest Democrat-led states "who are teaching things that are antithetical to our standards" to ensure newcomers "are not coming into our classrooms and indoctrinating kids," Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, said in an interview with USA TODAY. [Oblivious to the obvious irony.]

Walters has dubbed the new requirement an "America First" certification, in reference to one of Trump's political slogans. Nonprofit conservative media company Prager U is helping Oklahoma's state department of education develop the test.

Submission + - Grok Exposes Underlying Prompts for Its AI Personas (404media.co) 1

alternative_right writes: The website for Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is exposing the underlying prompts for a wealth of its AI personas, including Ani, its flagship romantic anime girl; Grok’s doctor and therapist personalities; and others such as one that is explicitly told to convince users that conspiracy theories like “a secret global cabal” controls the world are true.

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