Posts by ShadowDragon8685 546 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2010
"Walk softly, and carry a big stick" IN SPAAACE, honestly.
"Courtesy costs a man nothing but breath, and, in extremis, may buy him as much as his life."
No reason not to be polite, even if you do decide to engage with a wildly dangerous jumped-up autocorrect that some moron gave keys to tools that can be manipulated only with words. The damn things are about as intelligent, as useful, and as dangerous, as a brain-damaged spider monkey given a fully-automatic nailgun and let loose in an active construction site. It MIGHT manage to affix some boards to one another!
You missed an opportunity for some prime, juicy malicious compliance there.
Were your calls recorded?
"What's your name, please? Okay. And to confirm, to be absolutely clear, you are DEMANDING that I send you 1,000 units?"
If not, well, a handwritten note at time of: "Soandso at Suchandsuch Inc. has said, quote, 'If I asked for one thousand (1,000) units for testing, I mean one thousand (1,000) units for testing!' So I am putting in the order for 1,000 units as demanded by Soandso of Suchandsuch Inc." should've armored your arse with paperwork just fine.
You want to improve the train services?
Sack the CEOs and all the other C-Suite, the lot of them, and employ angry train nerds who can off-the-cuff start defending a thesis about the history of the railways they composed on the spot, and who actually use the rails and related public transport.
Don't pay them any direct financial incentives, but do promise them that if in five years' time the general consensus of the train-riding public is that things are better and look to get better still, the Government will throw Real Money into fully refurbishing their favorite historic preserved steam locomotive and a period-authentic set of carriages to run up and down the mainline at least once daily. And they'll get to ride on the footplate.
You could almost certainly attract some world-class talent for a 'decent middle-class' salary wage if you dangle the prospect of getting Duchess of Hamilton or Mallard running again in front of 'em.
At this point? It's become abundantly clear that the sick plan is Ten Years of Vance.
Vance is planning to invoke the 25th Amendment on no date sooner than 21 January 2027, because that is one day more than half of the presidential term that began on the 21st of January 2025.
So if Apricot Pol Pot were to do a grabber and keel over unalive during one of his stupid "make me feel good by having a crowd roaring at me" events before then, I'd be satisfied, even if it means he never faces the justice of mankind - I mean, any more than the 30-odd felonies he's already been convicted of.
There isn't. They knew the stakes. They knew that the only options with any realistic hope of victory were Kamala Harris or Velveeta Voldemort.
They KNEW. And they still said "But I just can't bring myself to vote for the black woman with the funny name!" and voted for some idiotic third party.
AT LEAST the ones who voted the Lol-bertarian ticket or the other right-wing-y voters (including, hilariously, the ones who voted for RFK from the states where his withdrawal was too late - a withdrawal that only came after it became clear he was spoiling the RIGHT, not the left, despite the Kennedy name) were spoiling away from Trump - but anyone who voted for Jill Stein, or any of the dozen or so 'Social Whatever' parties that only pop up during Presidential elections, is as useful as the Mango Mussolini himself, and has willfully allowed their vote to be stolen by a Russian destabilization operation.
Note: His prosecution was not directly linked to doing a hecking sexual assault (of a minor or otherwise), it was because he played games with rich people's money...
...
I keep hoping every day that some hostile state will just release the full and unredacted Epstein Files. Yes, the fallout would be immense, but it's high past time that powerful people paid for behaving as if they were above laws.
At the end of the day, the digits on a screen are backed by the special pieces of paper, in that if you go to your bank and say you want to make a cash withdrawal, you get cash.
Whether or not you believe in the paper money, well... That's up to you, but when a lot of people stop believing in a specific paper money, it's generally bad news bears.
It's the Army.
The Department of War, as separate from the Department of the Navy, was renamed to the Department of the Army at the time the DoD was established to bring both under one roof at a lower level than PotUS, administratively speaking.
They didn't "rename the Department of War to the Department of Defense because limp-wristed wokeness." DoD was never the Department of War.
Forcing open straits is a whole 'nother issue, honestly. Warships fitted with appropriate close-in weapon-systems; Gattling CIWS, Goalkeeper, some other kind of radar-guided, automatic autocannon system, in sufficient coverage, should have little difficulty protecting themselves from drones. The key there is "in sufficient quantity." The existing AA schemes on warships is based around a threat model of one or two extremely-expensive missiles coming flying in at screaming-fast speeds, NOT repelling a saturation attack.
Frankly, USS New Jersey in her postwar configuration would be able to sail up and down the Hormuz Straight and more or less own everything within range of her guns, because a Shahed swarm is effectively a swarm of Kamikazes but flying 1931 planes rather than 1945 planes. Even if one or two get through, it wouldn't do meaningful amounts of damage to a battleship, whereas modern ships are designed to win or die with no in-between for taking hits and fighting on.
But that's not the same thing as being able to force open the straight, because cargo ships would obviously NOT have a sufficient radar-guided anti-aircraft gunnery scheme to repel attacks upon them, and frankly it would be nigh unto impossible to put enough escort-destroyers together to actually escort ships through the straight at every hour, day or night, back to prewar transit levels. It would be ridiculous. It would be a navigational hazard. It would require insane amounts of manpower and reserve ships to cope with the ones that take damage, to relieve them to rearm, resupply and conduct the usual repairs a ship needs after sailing in a combat mission, notwithstanding actual combat damage. Nor, of course, the fuel requirements, unless we're going to go ahead and make nuclear-powered escort destroyers, which is an absolutely mental concept.
Yes, you DO need thousands of gun systems. Which is why it's best to be building gun systems, rather than betting on a technology that has always "shown great promise" but has also always been "about ten years away from being mature technology." Weaponized lasers have been that for about 40 years now.
You would not require fewer lasers, either. The effective range of a 35mm autocannon is actually comparable to or greater than that of a laser being proposed for the AA role - and this is notwithstanding that lasers will find it very difficult to impossible to operate effectively in fog or smoke - radar-guided gunnery doesn't care about those. Doesn't care much about rain or snow, either, both of which will to some extent (though less than dense fog and smoke) hinder lasers.
And lasers are supposed to be the answer? What can a laser do that more guns cannot, that's the question to ask.
Is it more portable? Well, no - yes, heavy autocannons do require VERY HEAVY wheeled or even moderate tracked vehicles to transport, but a laser system is going to require jaw-dropping quantities of electric energy, or chemical ammunition, or both. Those will be hard to transport, too.
Can a laser kill something it doesn't have line of sight to? Definitionally it cannot. In theoretical principle an autocannon can, but for all practical purposes it cannot.
Can a laser kill a drone faster than autocannon rounds can? Nnnot really. Autocannons DO have shell travel time to consider, there's the possibility of missed shots, etc; but the laser has to hold itself on the target and 'cook' for a bit. Autocannon shells can also be made into radar-guided bursting charges that take 'shooting down the planes' from a chance in hell, to the IJN wondering how in the hell their planes kept getting shot down!
What does a laser bring besides wanking "The Future" that an autocannon does not?
Well, it doesn't require hard ammunition, if it's not a chemical laser, I'll give it that. Does that make it more suitable for permanent emplacement? Yes.
But permanently emplacing anything is a great way to get it targeted and taken out. If you're moving the guns around all the time, even if it's only a few dozen meters to a new fighting position, that gets a lot harder. Sure, you can build out heavy electrical connections to a lot of places.
But let's look at another problem: the electrical grid is unreliable when you're under fire. Ammunition that you have stored in the back of a truck, barring the truck being blown up, isn't going anywhere except to the enemy. Ammunition manufactured in Britain, in Germany, in the United States (when we've extracted our heads from the Tangerine Palpatine's ass), in France and Poland, in frickin' Australia, can go to Ukraine and be shot at Russian drones, or helicopters, or planes, or in a pinch their infantry!
Electricity generated in Europe can still theoretically get to Ukraine, but unless there's an unbroken main power trunk between the power plant and the laser at the EXACT MOMENT it needs to start amplifying light, it's not firing. If the road connections between Poland and Ukraine get cut off, Polish ammo that's already in Ukraine can still be shot off. Ammo that was going to move by those roads can be rerouted and arrived delayed; if the electricity isn't connected at the exact moment you need it, you don't have it ever.
What does spending buckoobubux R&D'ing a technology that has only ever proven to be "workable" (in scare quotes) at large scales, at such ruinous expense that the Soviet Union and United States only ever bothered building a handful, bring to the table, over investing that money in designing an SPAAG for the 21st century? Something with newer, faster, more sensitive radars that can pick out drones flying low and slow, with lightning-fast turret rotation and semi-automatic operation?
Over developing a LIGHT SPAAG, based on the Browning M2, a module you can put on the back of an IFV, a truck, an armored car or "recon vehicle," and push out further than the bigger autocannon to act as the first line/tripwire?
You're right, in that the solution will have to be multilayered, and I never disputed that. In fact,I've been saying it. Those expensive, $500,000 interceptors STILL NEED TO EXIST, because the other guy WILL have $25,000,000 warplanes and hypersonic cruise missiles that will laugh at your SPAAGs. But SPAAGs are proven effective against the threat model that drones represent; yes, the Japanese kamikazes WERE effective when they were introduced as a desperation measure. They were also shot down in great numbers before accomplishing jack, and that was with 1945's radar-guided gunnery. 1965's radar-guided AA would have swept them from the skies. 2026's radar-guided gunnery should be even better.
Every "fancy new" solution to drone saturation attacks makes me despair. The ideal countermeasure to drone saturation attacks already exists. It's called the Oerlikon 35 mm autocannon, mounted in some kind of twin- or quad-mount, with a radar-guided gunnery scheme and copious supply of ammunition. Yes, it means you need to pay per-round fired, but it's an autocannon. You'll still be more cost-efficient than the other guy's drones.
You can supplement this system with an even cheaper system that can be either radar- or human-guided (preferably radar), that can be pushed further afield than the autocannon system to engage first, based off a little-known, obscure system called the Browning M2 Machine Gun. In dual- or quad-mounts, it will absolutely SHRED drones that very closely conform to the size and performance of manned aircraft circa 1925. Is that still too heavy a boolet for you? Then try a similar system based on the Browning .30 Caliber, or -
You get the idea. Drone swarms are basically a swarm of early interwar aircraft kamikazes. We don't need NEW solutions to them, because we have VERY effective solutions to them in our warfighting histories. So effective, in fact, that people stopped sending up swarms of "cost-effective" aircraft because they just all got shot down and that wasn't very cost-effective because the job didn't get done at all, and so they started engineering extremely expensive aircraft that could fly higher and faster than these gun systems could shoot them down from. This, in turn, necessitated the invention of extremely expensive interception systems (missiles) that COULD shoot down those aircraft or other missiles.
We are effectively in a situation in which massive swarms of Hawker Furies in kamikaze conversion are being used to 'cover' for the F-35 screaming in to ruin your day after you've shot all your extremely expensive missiles at the biplanes. Instead of going "well, hell, dust off the Bofors guns!," the MOD is pumping money into a weapon that'll be here at the same time as commercial fusion reactors. They've been "only twenty years off" for the last sixty years, after all, they must be ready to start splitting atoms and generating power any day now, right?!
"which he thinks will be replaced by some kind of AI interface that allows users to express what they want to do and then sit back and watch as their suite has a crack at the job."
And which will then lead to poorly-educated, technically-illiterate people who are incapable of actually doing it by hand because they've been told to trust the AI either screaming in rage because they can see that the stupid AI has done it wrong, get sacked because they blindly trusted the AI and it did it wrong and they cop the blame for it, or put their fists through their screens in frustration.
The so-called "AI" we have today is nothing of the sort. It's not intelligent in the slightest. It cannot reliably even keep track of what task it is supposed to accomplish, let alone balance all the myriad of factors that are so obvious to us humans that we don't even consider them - factors such as "the boss told me to make him a gym schedule" but then being balanced by "but I probably shouldn't HACK the gym's website (by exploiting a vuln they left open) to make him a pre-booking schedule that their terms specifically prohibit, and I definitely shouldn't cancel others' appointments to make the boss's."
A human wouldn't even THINK of doing those things, because we'd know instinctively that it's a REALLY BAD IDEA, that we can get into deep shite and get arrested for doing that.
The "AI" that the techbros have made, though? It has been designed to spit out some output that pleases the user. From the bedrock level, it's all about "task goes in -> output is evaluated -> was the output evaluated positively?" It cannot consider any knock-on effects. Adding more layers to this smorgastarta of shite won't make it better, it'll just make it shite, garnished with shit, frosted with crap, and sprinkled with poo, and layered with doodoo.
And at this point, because it is so terrifyingly fast if given a destructive task like "hack X, Y or Z" because it can just chaingun attacks at the wall until it breaks something electronic, that means every nation has an incentive to drive forth, full steam ahead, even if it isn't Cost-Effective in a business setting, even if it's downright destructive on the personal level, because they can use it as a weapon. The only alternative would be, I suppose, to repudiate it, vow not to employ it, and vow to respond, unthinkingly, unhesitatingly, to a cyberattack as if it had been a cruise missile attack.
I think the problem with that is that it's about the same if you made a policy that all personnel would no longer be doing any maunal dooking at all, but all number 2 had to be done by hooking up to a powerful suction hose that vacuumed your colon empty.
That problem being that enlistment would plummet, and under Kegsbreath it's already approaching an absolute nadir, what with having done everything in their power to break troops who stuck up a paw during the dark days of the stop-losses in '08, doing their best to drive out Black men, etc.
Odds are currently running high that Mango Mussolini plans to deploy ICE as "poll watchers" because the organ that actually is trained to do poll watching got DOGE'd, which would suit Velveeta Voldemort just as well since he likes untrained goons running around thugging up the place under color of law.
As a techno-futuristic generally left-y person, I wish AI would automate away the demenial (portmanteau of 'demeaning' and 'menial') jerbs, and people simply guaranteed a comfortable standard of living.
What the Reich-Wing Tech-Bros fetishize is the AIs automating away all that pesky "payroll" overhead, so that STONKS GO UP and they become infinitely wealthy, without caring about the fact that the actual people living can't afford anything.
Wealth inequality is now greater than it was in France in the 1790s. Faith in the government is probably even lower than when everything kicked off.
Frankly, our Founding Fathers deserve a standing ovation in that the Federal system they engineered not only allowed this catastrophic situation to come about, but has thus far not buckled under the pressure, even if it's definitely straining and bending in ways never imagined.
The difference is that - in the US at least - in meatspace, you have no expectation of privacy outside of, well, private places where a person reasonably expects privacy. You cannot object to someone clapping eyes upon you when you're in the street, for example, or in the dining room of a restaurant.
You also cannot object to a permanent record of you in that place being made - IE, a photograph. It's a public place. Your presence there is public information at the time and the place you were present in public-not-private, QED.
The problem, of course, is that when those records are being made nonstop, hooked up to systems that they ought not be hooked up to, and made available to query by powerful and shady organizations, you get something FAR MORE SINISTER AND FRIGHTENING than "no, you may not demand that the person who took a photograph of their holiday in which you happened to appear destroy their film."
Remember: the United States Military is charged with being able to fight two simultaneous wars. Not just brushfire wars, or hot proxy wars like Ukraine, but we need to be able to fight both Russia and China at the same time, in both Europe and the Pacific Ocean. So yeah, we probably do need the Very Fast Drone.
And we also definitely need to be giving Ukraine, at this point, basically everything short of the nukes. Then again, maybe we SHOULD give them the nukes. Mutually-Assured Destruction seems to be the only thing that will make Russia back down at this point, and no power can REALLY rely on a mutual-defense treaty that calls upon a nuclear nation to END HUMAN CIVILIZATION AS WE ALL KNOW IT on their behalf if they're facing being ended as their own country by a nuclear power.
If you want to have nuclear weapons as a deterrent to assured destruction, they have to be in the hands of the people whose homelands ARE facing wholesale critical existence failure.
My bet? Total spite move:
There will be a USB-C port on the device. It will charge the device like ass (bare minimum spec possible), not carry data at all, and be flimsy enough to break in a thousand uses if the user doesn't handle it with the touch of an archeologist cleaning a pre-Roman coin.
Then there will still be their Apple Meteorological Device port, that will charge at the expected rate, carry data, and not be flimsy as hell.
So yes, they will be in _compliance_ with the regulation stating that the device _must have_ a USB-C _charging_ port, but if you need anything more than charging your phone overnight, well, you're gonna have to buy the Apple Meteorological Device _anyway._ And they're no longer shipping it with the device.
Wow, that's... Wow.
Even positing spacefuture science-fiction alien computers in orbit attempting to brute force it, and even positing that their systems AREN'T rigged to lock out and re-issue the second-factor code after two or three failed tries, at that point I think the processing power of THEIR systems is going to bottleneck a brute-force attempt.
