I knew a guy who lived to almost 94 who smoked virtually his whole life. Used to remember buying cigarettes in big round packages of 200 with paper tape around them. Born in 1897. Had a picture of him in WWI uniform. He died of bladder cancer. It was attributed to smoking. I don't know whether that is objectively true or not, but on the one hand living to 94 is just fine and him living another 10 or 15 years would have been less than appealing to me due to quality of life issues. He had bad cataracts, needed cornea transplants, no teeth and had a peptic ulcer that might have been curable in another 5-10 years, but highly constrained his diet and left him in pain a lot. But on the other hand he was a working carpenter until he was 6 months from death and went on hospice, and could do hand stands on barstools at 90+. Used to drive in 10 penny nails with a tiny tap to set and then whack, one shot into the wood. Weighed about 130 soaking wet.

On the other hand I had a grandfather who died at 69 as a result of lung cancer. It was awful, wasted away from 180 to under 90 pounds in a relatively short time. Ironically he had quit smoking for about 20 years - from WWII through to the early 70s, but the heavy smoking during the war and later in life got him.

His wife was a nonsmoker who died of lung cancer herself. But, she was a cocktail waitress who was around a lot of smoke, and lived next to a Maxwell House coffee plant. There's some kind of cancer cluster in that area, apparently breathing in coal dust and grounds isn't great for you.

My stepfather had severe COPD and when associated with his leukemia, that helped take him out at 84. He had quit smoking about 20 years before his death, but it didn't save him from the symptoms.

I quit in my 40s and had been off and on since my 20s. Hopefully I make out better than they did. I'm 56.

Price increases = inflation. Reducing the value of your currency.

The wealthy aren't the problem with inflation. Giving money to them (or not taxing it away from them, same thing) isn't inflationary, they'll more or less invest the money to increase their wealth. Rich people always want more money.

Cutting checks to people on the street, that's inflationary because they spend the money on goods. Improving people's standard of living has little to do with giving them money. You need more goods, which then become relatively cheaper within the existing money supply because of the lack of scarcity. That means producing said goods, whether we're talking about consumer stuff or housing.

Tolerating scarcity is the main issue with standard of living, at least in the US.

The power of propaganda is strong in this one.

You should read alternative sources and compare.

This requires a book rather than a paragraph. Maybe a couple salient points:

1) Lethal weaponry is never tied to an authentication mechanism, aside from nuclear weapons. Use considerations. No one wants to die (or to lose effectives) due to no auth. Also, someone should be able to pick up your rifle and use it, or grenade, or machine gun, or...you get the idea. Comms are a totally different ball of wax. Anything secure has a 'zeroize' button so you can clear keys at a moment's notice. If you aren't likely to be able to zeroize, there's always thermite. I'm not kidding, thermite grenades are the electronics destruction go-to.

2) AD is used because of the skill level of people out there. A brigade (up to 8k soldiers) has roughly 4 people with a modicum of skills, who basically have a "6 months at DeVry" education via Ft. Gordon. One of them might be talented. Might. So we use what people can understand and use easily.

Probably not either.

The usual way this is done is via a CRADA. No company with a private use technology is going to sign a CRADA. They have to give up too much, and it facilitates espionage by competitors. So you end up with shit technology via that route, at a low TRL (technical readiness level), which wastes everyone's time.

In terms of support, most companies want to provide it themselves. I worked for MSFT, and we were trying to sell Azure Stacks into the Army for use in command posts (TOCs). We wanted to send our own Premier people into theater to flip bad hard drives. Needless to say, that went nowhere.

The real problem with military contracting is that you sell something in as an ONS purchase (operational needs statement) and it offers you next to nothing in terms of what will happen next time. The whole process repeats. This is like someone paying for a software license out of the petty cash fund. If you want to make a small amount of money on a one time only basis, this can work.

If you want to sell something to the "whole Army" or any other service, you get it into a program of record. But programs of record are line item funded by Congress, and have to pass operational tests. The tests are expensive and take forever. Then you have other companies and by extension, associated Beltway Bandit lobbying firms attacking your pot of funds. This amounts to a PhD type being paid to nitpick your program, attacking its viability on a purely scholarly basis. Their objective is to convince people in Congress to cut off your funding in favor of another firm.

I've been involved with programs every step of the way, including sitting in the aforementioned PhD's offices somewhere in Fairfax County, VA, being plied for information to attack particular programs, while being paid by my own company.

An example of one program that hasn't gone anywhere in 7 years, despite vigorous service advocacy, consider IVAS.

I feel for this guy but nothing is going to fix that system.

I wish them luck.

In the Roman Republic, the Senate was populated with the wealthiest class in Rome. Invariably they had business interests, but they weren't supposed to conduct business (other than agriculture) while serving. This was worked around by using agents and such. The wealthiest man in Rome during Julius Caesar's time was his triumvir partner Crassus, who was so corrupt that he organized fire brigades in Rome. When an insula (apartment building) caught fire, his agent would show up with the fire brigade and offer to buy the burning building. If the owner sold, they would put out the fire. If not, they'd move on to another building whose owner was more tractable.

When Augustus became Emperor, he was the largest "corporation" and landowner in the Empire. The Emperors had procurators (agents) handling their business in every province, and they were sometimes unified with the office of 'prefect', which was a governor with the imperium to command troops. This is what some think Pontius Pilate was during his time in office in Judea. The Emperor was wealthier than the state itself and Augustus would often 'donate' to the state to finance its operations.

I'm recalling this just to make the point that the founders of the US knew all this and designed the system to try to work around this, and the Greek abuses known from Athens, etc. I don't think they expected it to work forever, and it hasn't.

Do you think the people using TikTok were even paying much attention to that?

You can't block it without pissing of the people who use it. Them remaining oblivious is the goal here.

The attackers are using underwater vehicles of some sort to make these cuts. That is the point. These aren't anchor draggings, as I experienced when I was in the Middle East. To stop them, you'll have to be able to detect the underwater craft.

Blocking it would activate an element they don't want to activate. A lot of pissed off people would ensue. They just want to control it.

The Chinese government isn't going to go quietly and sell. So this is an issue.

Exactly the point - if shareware was so great, why'd they move on to different routes for commercial success? Because it sucked as a revenue generating mechanism.

What does that mean? U-boats in the WWI and WW2 sense were not undersea boats, they were diving boats that operated primarily on a diesel engine on the surface. Even their snorkels - basically an above-water exhaust port - were detectable on the primitive radars of the day. Most were located using directional finding of radio broadcasts from the boats.

Modern passive sonar has good points, but it is not a slam dunk to find stuff underwater. There are chokepoint seabed sensors - the relatively well known SOSUS line in the North Atlantic is an example, but even there it's very far from perfect.

Especially when dealing with small remote controlled underwater craft that do not have the depth constraints a submarine does...I don't envy the task.