We definitely need to start pursuing it, at least researching it. We'll never solve the climate change problem with emissions reduction alone, recapture and sequestration will be essential.

There are some strategies which are pretty cheap, such as planting forests. But the numbers don't add up on that; we'll need more. I think carbon recapture systems may pair fairly naturally with renewable energy generation, though. Renewable variability means that in many cases it makes sense to overprovision. For example, in order to get sufficient power generation from a solar plant on cloudy days, you may install 2X-3X as many panels as you'd need for a sunny day... but that means that on sunny days you have lots of excess production that might be hard to use (I experience that with my rooftop solar; last month I generated just over 1 MWh that I couldn't use and the grid wouldn't pay me for). Using that excess to power carbon recapture would be a good idea.

For that to work, though, we need to arrange some financial reason for people to build and operate carbon recapture systems. That's a big missing piece which only government can solve. The obvious solution (to the entire climate change problem, actually!) is refundable carbon taxes plus carbon tariffs.

If your concern is that a product you use might be discontinued, there are some simple rules that you can apply to decide whether a given Google product is safe from being discontinued:

(1) Is it used by 100M+ people? If it is, it's safe. If the number is 10M+ it's probably good, but there's a risk. If it's less than 10M, it probably won't last. Unless...
(2) Is it a paid service? Paid services rarely get shut down, and if they do Google bends over backwards to make t right.

If it's free and has a small (for Google) userbase? It's all but guaranteed to get shut down. Google is a business. They make a lot of products that are free to use, but only because they can bundle ads with them or otherwise profit from them, but free-to-use products require a large user base to generate much revenue.

Typical. Modded down for making a simple, incontrovertible statement of fact.

Yep.

Even without the ownership issue it would almost certainly have failed because TSG (to distinguish them from SCO) discovered to their shock and amazement that Linux had not, in fact, kifed code from Unix. They clearly went into it assuming that a bunch of volunteer hackers couldn't possibly have built a fully-functional kernel, expecting they could easily prove lots of copyright infringement. Failing to find infringement they hoped they could bluster IBM into settling, but IBM was determined to fight it out and had much better lawyers (heh, we used to call them the Nazgul).

Many of us were disappointed when the ownership issue was revealed. We really wanted Linux to get its day in court. As it turned out that didn't matter; no one else was ever dumb enough to try. Today, of course, the biggest tech companies in the world -- which means the biggest companies in the world! -- almost all use Linux extensively. Even Microsoft would probably stand up to defend Linux these days.

The Democrats also voted overwhelmingly in favor of the PATRIOT ACT.

I take it you're in favor of reparations, then.

If not, you have an inconsistency in your worldview. You apparently believe that guilt is carried by groups across generations, even when none of the current group was alive -- and many didn't even have ancestors involved -- when the bad things were done. Thus, the modern Democrats are stained by the racism and pro-slavery views of the 19th and early 20th-century Democrats. Likewise, white Americans are therefore permanently stained by slavery.

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

Middle-range strike drones are much cheaper than JDAMs (smaller payload, but you don't care about that against trucks), longer range, and let you operate in fully contested airspace or even when the enemy has air superiority.

Aerial bombs are for entirely different purposes; they're for destroying fortified positions. Whether the aircraft should be manned or not is an entirely separate question, but one thing is unambiguous, it needs to be big enough to carry said bomb (aerial bombs are very heavy).

But again, complete overkill for a transport vehicle.

Re, the terrain of Donbas: compare, at the same zoom level:

Donbas

To a stereotypically flat place in the US, like, say:

Kansas

Unless you mean the "Smoky Hills" of Kansas:

Smoky Hills

Though their relief is only about 2/3rds that of that in Donbas. Donbas's relief is more like that of the Piedmont Province (the area west of the Appalachians), the dissected till-plains of southern Iowa / northern Missouri, the Tennessee / Kentucky western highland rim, or the low glaciated plateaus of the northeastern US (NE. Pennsylvania to southern NY).

It's not as forested as it used to be, but still has sizable patches left, such as along the Siversky Donetsk, mainly pine. Maybe the area east of the Appalachians would be a good reference for the mix of farmland with residual forest patches (well more than midwest states like e.g. Kansas). Defensive lines are commonly built in the forested areas, for greater cover.

Oh, and also (re: NERA) worth noting that there would be a brief boost in energy transfer to the generated gas from cell discharge. You wouldn't come close to fully discharging a cell (that requires lithium diffusion), but it can effectively instantaneously discharge the double-layer capacitance at the electrode-electrolyte interfaces, and very rapidly oxidize lithium at the anode surface (such as the SEI) / reduce species at the cathode. So in a way, not an entirely non-reactive armour, and somewhat reminiscent of the reactive-but-not-explosive NERA variants where they mix nitrate salts into the elastomer to make the reaction more energetic and gas-generating.

It seems that the most effective "drone defense" thusfar has been "moving in small groups or individually, at night or in bad weather, and then hiding in a basement until there's enough people / supplies to push further".

It's clear that armoured vehicle design needs to change. But hangar/turtle tanks hardly seem a durable approach either (even in Ukraine their use has fallen off). I'm still very much a believer in hybrid armoured vehicles, where you have a battery pack with several dozen km of range, and one or more generators powering it.

From a direct survivability perspective, if you use a non-flammable li-ion chemistry (there are plenty, it just means sacrificing some energy density - still requires managed venting / air control systems, however) and have cells in parallel connected by multiple busses, spread out across the vehicle's footprint, it becomes almost impossible to take out the entire power supply, just individual cells. Likewise, since electric motors are compact, you can have 1-2 motors on each axle, and again it becomes almost impossible for a drone to get a mobility kill that way (reducing approaches only to trying to disable the tracks themselves). If they take out the generator/generators, the vehicle still has its electric power to fall back on, and while it's not going to be making some deep push anymore, it can still keep fighting, and retreat when needed.

From an indirect survivability perspective, you have the ability to advance silently when needed (no engine noise, greatly reduced thermal signature), and since modern batteries have so much power density, you have the ability to have a higher top speed, which has proven critical for safety in drone-dense environments. You also have a lot of electrical power, for drone-detecting radars, drone jammers, anti-drone weaponry (lasers, microwave, etc), and so forth.

The mass and volume of the battery pack (we're talking maybe ~250kWh for a rugged heavy armoured offroad tracked vehicle, ~60kWh that for a lighter-armoured road-optimized vehicle) isn't wasted. Cell cans are steel, and between the inner plate and outer armour you're basically forming a honeycomb structure (good for dissipating shocks and spray) with a lot of thermal capacity (cells are organics, e.g. generally high specific heats). With a proper design, you might even be able to get it to function as non-explosive reactive armour. Specifically, contrary to misconceptions that NERA requires elasticity, NERA works instead by a vapor pressure-bulging effect: the interlayer vaporizes and expands violently outward, causing bending of the metal plates it's sandwiched between, so the incoming metal jet is constantly hitting a different location as the bending progresses. NERA normally uses, but does not in any way require, elastomers for this role, simply because they're easiest to package between metal layers, but a properly engineered battery pack should be able to serve the same role. In NERA, you want as much gas pressure generated as rapidly as possible; the copper plasma jet effectively instantly converts e.g. ethylene carbonate, graphite, etc to gaseous CO2, H2O, etc (plus vaporized metals along with the vaporized steel). The keys that matters are that cells that (A) cells that are in parallel are distributed throughout the footprint of the vehicle (not concentrated in a single location), (B) shared buses create multiple distinct parallel paths between the cells within a given parallel group, and to the next series group; and (C) (required for any NERA) that generated gases are properly vented / handled.

A number of next-generation armoured vehicle designs are pursuing hybrid propulsion.

. I believe the record for most FPV drone hits survived by a single tank in Ukraine is now thirty-two,

The value of 32 small FPV drones is way less than the value of one tank. And in general you're likely to be talking about "hangar tanks" / "turtle tanks" when talking about things like that, but these take on *massive* disadvantages, including being extremely visible and easily targeted by larger drones or artillery (as well as bogging down easily, difficulty getting through confined areas, poor or no gun maneuverability, etc).

it's mostly flat and open.

Donbas is mostly rolling hills, much of it forested. And much of the combat has been in urban environments, which is about as complex terrain as you can get.

cheap FPV drones don't work if the other guy is on the far side the hill you're hiding behind, for example.

Uh, yes they do? They literally fly.

Small drones are munitions, and need to be thought of as that. Even non-FPV drones generally have quite short lifespans - for the smallest categories, just a few missions before they're shot down, jammed, or otherwise crash. They need to be stockpiled the same way you'd stockpile grenades or artillery shells (with the caveat that you'll have a much faster upgrade cycle on the electronics, and need to enable that). It also means short-cycle-life secondary cells, or even primary cells, as the power supply. E.g., with current tech, lithium metal or lithium sulfur are good candidates.

Middle-range strikes are increasingly proving invaluable as well in Ukraine this year. The ability to affordably take out a fuel or ammunition truck dozens of kilometers behind the front line is key.

It doesn't have to be the way it is, guys. You genuinely can just fix all of the things that are wrong in your system. But the first step is understanding that said things can be a lot better, and are elsewhere.

And I want to be clear, this isn't an "everything in or about the US is wrong" post**. This is about "US infrastructure in general" - the focus being on digital infrastructure, but arguably, it applies to physical infrastructure as well (the US is a laggard on high-speed internet, its electrical grid is famously unreliable, US high speed rail projects have been one disaster after the next, etc etc).

** If you want me to sandwich in a "US thing done right" as a counterpoint: the EU is politically dysfunctional, with any one state being able to veto collective action, allowing rivals to pick us apart one at a time. We have no common defense. Also, each state sets its own contrasting economic policies, yet all are on the same currency, so each one can drag the other down. I want to be clear, this isn't an "everything is perfect in the EU and everything is wrong in the US" post, the EU very much has its own problems! This is a post very specifically about US infrastructure compared to the rest of the world - and it's not simply a problem of funding. It's a problem of the US just running off with incompatible siloed system with hack patches tying them together and never putting forth any meaningful effort to fix things, with most people not even aware that you can do things better, and that most countries do.

US prescriptions are still sent to individual pharmacies. There is no nationwide system where any pharmacy can just look up the prescription of anyone who just walks in, right when they walk in, instantly after the person walks out of the doctor's office

And there is absolutely no need for "24 hours". The medications are all on shelves in the back. All they have to do is grab them and put them in a bag. We're not talking about compounding pharmacies here.