...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

Oh, I neglected to add...

"Because blowing shit up in any orbit, is so self-defeating a child could see it."

You're correct. And your complaint is also with the CCP. But war is always a gamble - can you win something worth more than the costs? Or can you defeat the aggressor with acceptable costs? Look carefully at the Ukraine conflict. While it seems that Ukraine is somehow succeeding at assymetrical warfare, listen to reporters on the ground. The mainstream is publishing propaganda, nothing new there. And it may seem this is illustrating the 'future of warfare'. Or it's smoke and mirrors, and a different game is truly afoot. Starlink could be destroyed, perhaps, with a Kessler attack, kill enough birds to cause fratricide. Destroy the geostationary birds? That's more damaging and gets a different response. Kill the surveillance birds in polar orbit? A different response. The CCP would be playing the long game I think. We would play the retaliatory game, I think. The mid powers are all spectators, and they are beginning to hate that, but they can't afford to play. The US must only match capability for now. There are alternatives to on-orbit destruction. We'll develop those.

Oh, so you mean. 'China deployed a weapon in space and *used* it'?

Then again, after a Kessler event, first the lost resources need to be replaced, even marginally, so that life is not too unbearable /s. Then the debris cleanup must begin. It will have to be done.

Then whoever gets up there first will mostly win. And I would put good money on knowing who gets up there first, unless the NWO offs them and destroys their industrial advantage.

And I want MY nation to be the winner. Obviously. Your wishing me and my nation ill is only 'me win' in disguise.

Your comment is pants.

Surely you know that's an absurdly dismissive opinion? North Korea has the capacity to gain access to anything anyone else does, especially if it comes from China.

Correct. The proper response is "I don't answer questions". And if they detain you, "I don't answer questions without a lawyer present".

The proper question is why should you be required to answer such a question if it's not related to a traffic stop. Your response is riddled with assumptions that first, the officer is investigating another crime, in which case indeed they may have questions to ask. A robbery? Do they have a description of the vehicle? Does it match yours, even minimally? If not, they really don't have any evidence on which to base a further expansion of the stop. Nonetheless, if you go to trial, you're not going to be required to say yes, that was my car. Let them prove it was your car. And in this case at the stop, all of what you're describing is more or less entirely inadequate for detention. Innocent until proven guilty is part of this. If they have reasonable suspicion, of course they can expand on the stop. If they're just fishing around, where you're coming from, where you're going, no.

Consider:

Traffic stop. Officer is making 'small talk'. "Where ya goin?". Where ya comin from?".

These are generally not 'small talk'. They are fishing questions, cop asking for info that could lead to suspicion, and detention while they dig for more.

And these sorts of questions can generally be answered by, simply, "None of your business, officer".

Every subsequent question, such as "I'm just making small talk", or "Hey, no big deal", or "What's the problem, you have something to hide?" are all just follow up fishing questions. And deserve no answer.

During a traffic stop, Flock gives officers information they would normally be lawfully denied, like "Where ya coming from?". Flock sidesteps your right to constitutionally refuse such information (and in the absence of reasonably articulable suspicion or other evidence, during a traffic stop, denies the officer the right to demand such information) and as such is a blight on constitutional protections. Flock must be better controlled, or abandoned.

And officers using Flock to look up the plates of their ex, former landlord, or the random guy who gave them a dirty look at a stop light are plainly violating these individuals' rights, and must be sanctioned. And the supervision of the abuses systems similarly sanctioned. Meaningful sanctions, every incident.

The Government rarely surrenders access to information. They seek power at every opportunity. In America, only the Constitution, and adherence to law, can nominally restrict this.

The arrogance is insane. What a fucking waste of time to argue this when your business model is exactly the fucking same.

China is burning and mining more coal than the rest of the world put together.

Its emitting about 12 billion metric tons of CO2 annually. That is a bit under one third of the global total.

It is financing and building coal fired generation plants all over the world.

The US is emitting 5 billion metric tons of CO2 annually.

That is less than half what the Chinese are emitting.

Wake up!

"The results are a wake-up call, and its imperative that they be included in the next generation of climate policies," he added. "Failure to do so will make meeting the worlds climate goals less and less likely."

The world has no climate goals nor any policies either. You have the COPs, which most of the high emitting and fastest growing emitters attend with the sole purpose of preventing them from reaching any agreement on stopping growing or reducing. In which they have been very successful over the years.

Then you have some Western countries adopting what they try and position as national action plans. However these plans never address the total of even national emissions - the only thing they propose is to build wind and solar generation of electricity, which is a minority of emissions. The proposals also, while they are sold as net zero, in fact do not go near eliminating even all local emissions from power generation.

And even if they did, the countries doing this only account for a tiny percentage of total global emissions.

I read these pieces containing comments like the one quoted at the head of this comment and shake my head. These people are living in a dream world - the world in which sending tens of thousands of people to the COPs every couple of years to decide nothing is supposed to be making some difference to the worlds climate and weather.

In the real world the furthest advanced on thee national plan of moving to an electric society powered by wind and solar is the UK, and its failing. They are incurring huge costs to bring the generated wind power from the north coast of Scotland to where demand is, in the south and Midlands. They have no plans for dealing with intermittency of the resulting supply other than gas plants. The cost estimates for the transmission are rising ominously. People are not buying heat pumps anyway. Their latest effort to deal with the so called migration is to allow for the electricity companies to do rolling blackouts. Its beoming an election issue and net zero will not survive the next couple of elections.

As I keep saying, people need to wake up. If its really true that human emissions are going to bring about a climate crisis, get ready, because its coming. There is no realistic prospect of the world reducing its emissions. China etc are growing their economies as fast as they can, and letting the emissions go where they may. The UK is demonstrating that the plan of moving to wind and solar, and to EVs and heat pumps, will not happen and is anyway not affordable, and even were it to be afforded and done, it would only drop global emissions by a fraction of 1% - an amount China makes up by a couple months of growth.

The usual suspects will mark this post as trolling, but its not, its just the view any rational person will come to when looking at the facts of this matter. I am not persuaded there is any existential climate crisis from emissions. But suppose there is, there is certainly no rational global plan to lower them, and this is the point people need to start from. If you cannot get the Chinese to commit to lowering their emissions by 80%, which you cannot, then start preparing for whatever you think continuously rising emissions will lead to. Because its coming, and expensive programs which are no more than feelgoodery will not help.

It will strike everyone as very puzzling. After all, everyone on slashdot and Ars Technica knows that wind and solar are far cheaper than nuclear and just as reliable. So why on earth is Google looking into nukes? Why do they not just build a huge wind farm, throw in a few batteries, and get unlimited cheap power?

Because the wind and the sun are free, after all. But instead they seem to be resorting to a ridiculously expensive nuke, and then on top of that, where you have to pay for the fuel, I mean, someone has to dig the stuff up and refine it. Whereas the wind just blows and the sun just shines, so they obviously are cheaper.

They have accountants and lots of MBAa, so they must see this, so the question is why they are going against what their analyses must show them. If it was coal or gas we would know, they were in thrall to the fossil fuel industry. But is there a nuke lobby, and are they not bigger than it anyway.

Help me understand this! Its a great mystery. Unless I have missed something. But what could that be? I mean, it cannot be that wind and solar plus a few batteries are actually more expensive, could it?

It's not.