… I feel like you could take out a an A-10 with just shoulder launched AA missiles? I would much prefer to be a helicopter in a high threat environment than an A-10 since you can more easily hide behind terrain as cover. I mean really, the difference between life an death is going to be the couple degrees of cover given by a ridge you get from hovering as absolutely close as you can to the ground as you get ready to launch a TOW… you don’t want to be an airplane in that kind of environment unless you are really fucking fast.

I mean, I could see the A-10 being useful in a near-peer conflict unmanned piloted by a remote drone operator in a swarm of covering/scout drones with purposefully worse radar/heat signatures.

The remote drone operator could fly the A-10 employing a nuanced strategy of “Fuck As Much Shit Up As I Can In The Shortest Amount Of Time Until I Get Blown Up” (not gonna write that acronym out, but trust me it is in plenty of DOD whitepapers) military strategy developed by Henry Kissinger during his time at the Rand Corporation. The idea wouldn’t really be to take too many airframes home, but if it is WW3 than I mean who is worrying about retirement!

idk I think the A-10 is more of a trad-CAS influencer than a genuine warplane suited for near-peer conflicts in contested airspace at this point, it is weird and I am pretty sure it isn’t a good idea but the algorithm likes the brand so shrugs I think the successor to the A-10 needs to lean into the whole influencer lifestyle thing from the get go.

Make it look cool and design an advanced network of escort drones that constantly orbit the aircraft ready to launch into action at the first sign of content and beginning taking selfies of the aircraft.

Maximum impact will be achieved from the pilot having access to a social media avionics suit complete with a state-of-the-art “A-10 Trad-CAS” reply-by-wire guy Automated Post Authoring System customized from software developed by the CIA to help topple vulnerable democratic governments in central and south america.

What? This is true but that’s not my point at all. I simply don’t care if they are military weapons or not. The entire point of the second amendment is for the citizenry to pose a threat against tyranny, which could include the military. Civilian ownership of effective weapons is part and parcel with that.

Do you really think an assault rifle is going to give you that critical edge against an f-16 or armored fighting vehicle vs a hunting style rifle? What kind of war do you think you will be fighting that this would actually make a meaningful difference?

Weapons were entirely different things when the second amendment was made, that is your interpretation of the second amendment that a fully kitted ar-15 with high capacity magazines fits the definition of what the writers of the constitution had in mind when the wrote the second amendment is and frankly it doesn’t matter too much after a certain point if the writers of the constitution wrote this part of the law without ANY of the modern context of how much more violence a single person with a weapon can do in a short time.

You’ve never fired a gun, have you? There is a massive amount of misinformation out there, and that’s not how any modern firearms made for the civilian market (including AR-15s) operate.

Yes I have, save your “civilian ar-15s aren’t automatic or burst fire so they aren’t technically assault rifles or military weapons” nonsense for someone else you can more easily pull the “bro have you even shot a real gun” condescending card on, an assault rifle is more effective and lethal especially in the hands of some panicking chud like Kyle Rittenhouse if it is only capable of single fire except in the case of a driveby style hit. Exhibit A: most modern military doctrines.

I don’t wear gear to the range but I know folks who do, and also go to faire and belong to a group who likes to fight with foam swords. From my perspective, it’s really the same deal.

When was the last time a bunch of rennaisance faire nerds turned on the news and saw that someone else had just murdered 30 kids in a school dressed up in the same kind of costume they all like to wear… with the same brand and model of “foam” sword? … and then just kept on dressing up in that same costume as the bodies of children pile up after school shootings happen over and over again repeatedly to the point that it feels fucking normalized as something that just happens ?

That is the difference, or at least one of them.

It is very different than ren faire people showing up in military gear obsolete for hundreds of years, you can kill an entire crowd of people with an assault rifle in seconds, a person carrying around a murder weapon of that spontaneous ability to catastrophically induce violence isn’t “LARPing” they are normalizing carrying around a murder weapon and being utterly obsessed with it which even if their motivations are innocent provides a nice big smokescreen of normalcy for the Kyle Rittenhouses of the world to hide behind.

I am not even making an argument against guns here, I am just pointing out how much more lame and uncool this is than ren faire or LARPing stuff .

you became general because there was a bright light above the generals cabin next to your hole you normally lurk under beneath the stone at the bend in the river, the general leaned too far over peering down at you while out on a smoke break and fell in and tragically drowned, the peculiar thing was as he was sinking and thrashing about his uniform came off and landed on top of you, the alien enveloping of the sinking garments spooked you and you shot clear out of the water and through the still open door of the cabin right into an austere but plush leather chair behind a monsterously large desk. The next moment the guards rushed in having heard a commotion and were relieved to find the general had clearly only went for an imprompto nightime dip in the river after foolishly slipping and falling… and to hide an embarassment had quickly leaped out and returned inside putting on a blank neutral expression to try to hide it as if they weren’t clearly slimey and dripping wet.

Since then you have been doing a great job honestly shrugs

But I know that no one is PRO genocide.

I mean I understand wanting to see the world that way but whole entire societies of people can become genocidal. That is precisely what causes the atrocity of genocides like the palestinian genocide in gaza to grow out of control.

Once the centrists in a society accept the rightwing framing of the ideology of genocide they will treat it as the status quo and resist anyone who threatens it. This is what is so fucking terrifying about blind centrism, the substance doesn’t matter at all to the ideology, just tracking the most commonly accepted “facts” which inveitably ends up in centrists bandwagoning behind an authoritarian.

This is the stage of fascism Israel is deep into and the US is not far behind in and it quickly obliterates in you any doubt that people actually can be pro-genocide.

We all have the potential to be, it is our choices and our empathy that give us agency to resist becoming so.

You are making a basic framing error here which has been deeply ingrained into us as a narrative justification for hyper individualism and late stage capitalism, prey aren’t at war with predators.

Ever watch a whitetail deer spook and dash away into the underbrush? They flip their tail up to expose a bright white target on their rump.

Why?

Because predators overwhelming target sick and vulnerable prey, predators stabilize prey population swings and keep them from catastrophically exploding. Prey in turn sustain predators.

Whitetail deer display the signal to demonstrate they are healthy. I wouldn’t call it symbiosis, but I also think it is a serious categorical error to conceptualize it as an existential war or arms race. If whitetail deer suddenly evolved to become so fast predators could never catch them even if they counter-evolved to be a bit faster it would either lead to extinction of deer or the extinction of deer and the ecosystems around them, those are the only to possible end states neither of which is good for deer.

The reason I am saying this is that unlike predators, cars have no consistent genetic forcing on deer, car deerkills are essentially random and thus only function to lower the signal-to-noise ratio on other genetic forcings that continously shape deer into well adapted positive contributors to the ecosystems around them. How can you expect a species to adapt to a process of violence that is so chaotic and disconnected from the surrounding ecosystem that it is evolutionarily invisible except as a force of degradation?

I think the reason that deer seem “retarded” in their response to cars is that for their entire evolutionary history there has never been an animal that would hurtle through both the day and night at improbable speeds almost completely silently. No land predator has previously evolved to blind its prey with large powerful sets of lights at night.

Counterintuitively, in my opinion deer seem to so often chaotically run out in front of cars (and growing up somewhere with lots of deer I know how incredibly infuriating and scary this can be) because it is actually the most sensible survival strategy for being ambushed by a fast moving predator with a lot of inertia that may or may not realize they have stumbled upon a meal.

Imagine you weren’t a pathetic, slow human being and could outrun most predators, now imagine chilling inside a bush when you see a a grizzly bear sprinting at 40mph almmmossst but not quite straight at you.

Your impulse is to freeze and then wait for the right moment to bolt, especially because the predator hasn’t seen you yet and likely just caught your scent or is running at something else. However, this predator is scentless, nearly silent and at night blinds you so that the distance they are away from you is very difficult to determine (the opposite of a grizzly bear really), so the right moment to bolt is hard to judge.

At the last second you realize the “grizzly bear” is almost upon you and you panic because it is happening so fast and fall back on your instincts. Your instincts, as a prey animal that can run faster and for longer than predators, are the same as any human who has ever played a sport where they need to rush past a defender… and you erratically cut across the bear’s path of motion after you think it has committed to rushing directly at you. The idea is to hopefully catch the bear with its weight shift committed in the wrong direction so you get just a tinnyyyy bit more of a head start in the chase. In otherwords the deer’s instinct is to try to “juke” the fast moving predator with fancy footwork.

Please see the scientific illustration I have provided, notice that the bear’s path (red) has to switch directions whereas if the deer had decided to just directly run away from their bear the bear wouldn’t have needed to switch directions/accelerate twice, just make a slight turn to reorient itself into an opportunistic chase with the deer.

This doesn’t work on cars, especially because if at first a deer doesn’t succeed at getting the timing right they are dead.

A bridge is a tool for connecting things don’t connect, it is not federation.

The relay layer/app view forces you under the control of a centralized system at a fundamental level with bluesky, the only thing meaningful about that kind of federation is hosting costs for processing and storing post data are offloaded onto the user.

…Which when you think about it is actually pretty fucking insulting to the fediverse and what is trying to be when bluesky pretends it is aiming for true federation and decentralization.

Try going to the home page of instances of accounts you like (or of instances that seem interesting) and browsing their federated feed (tap globe for “live feed” then hit “all”), you can discover tons that way.

As a general mastodon instance mas.to looks good and is a nice size with a good stable history.

https://mas.to/about

You can find established, more established instances on the fediverse by surfing around a bit fedidb

https://fedidb.org/

bluesky does not have functional federation by any reasonable measure.

Curation was made by users.

Right, users not corporations make social networks, so the community not for profit corporations should own those social networks.

Can we not all see this as the same old pattern of predatory rent seeking behavior applied to online communities just seasoned with even more jargon and condescending handwaved half explanations?

Sure but also ugggh

They will break the internet as much as they need to in order to accomplish this.

The third part is youtube keeps implementing more sophisticated ad blocking to the point you can’t block ads…

Watch the recent video of sam seder (Majority Report) going on tim pool’s podcast, he shits on tim pool so bad, tim pool is a pathetic, hateful loser.

lasers are way slower than bullets they are super easy to dodge, have you never even seen star wars?

In order for this to be accurate, the building plans would need to encoded so only the building designers have any clue how the building works and how safe it is.

Also moving around random mundane objects in the building like a picture frame on an office wall not infrequently causes a cascading and horrendous displacement of all the other objects in the building.

To open the breaker box involves operating two sets of panels, first the building tries to get you to use the new updated breaker panel interface but it was designed by the portion of the company that was told to sell more “cloud rooms” which are tiny and full of cameras that monitor residents and serve ads to them over a preinstalled intercom, so the first panel hides all the normal rooms and you have to find a latch and a set of 30 screws that when removed allows you to access the old breaker panel with all the other rooms. Every single time you open the breaker you have to repeat this process.

There is a building supervisor that used to be at least somewhat helpful when residents had questions but they got replaced by a new person. The replacement confusingly advertises nearby chain stores to you when you call them up to ask about a plumbing issue and answers specific questions about the building they are in charge of oddly, as if they were questions about buildings in general all over the world.

I feel like I am missing some key things here, but this is at least a somewhat accurate starting point for a microsoft word building.