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Eastwood

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Eastwood

  1. 7 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    I am not a drone spotter/expert—but I don’t have a hard time believing that this Moscow attack is a AFU operation.  I really doubt that they were targeting civilian targets explicitly, it’s more likely they were interferes with and shot down by RU air defenses. But I don’t see hitting military targets as their primary benefit, nor do I see the psychological impact as most important. What’s most important is that Russia is going to have to reassess and redeploy EW and AD around Moscow and other internal sites, and they’re going to have to dedicate the people trained to operate it as well. Anything that degrades or impacts their ability to use these systems in Ukraine is a W. 
     

    For what it’s worth, I think the main reason Russia keeps using these Iranian drone swarm attacks is to use up as much AFU AD capacity, too. With the added benefit (to Orcs) of psychological terror.

     

    I don’t know a whole lot about the drones used, but they looked low and slow and loud. The drones were either traversing the Russian countryside for 10 minutes and their defenses couldn’t get ready or Ukraine got all the necessary equipment up to the Moscow city limits under Russia’s nose like a damn sight gag from a Harold Ramis or John Hughes movie.

    Either way, just another embarrassing display of Russian military capability. A sad state of affairs for Putin where an inside job would be the least embarrassing explanation of how that happened. 

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  2. 13 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:

    I'm not some rah-rah Government guy, but I fucking hate when people try to make the "benefitting from government" argument and simplify it down to "roads and social services".   I can't tell if the folks making that argument are being disingenuous or if they are just too stupid to contemplate how many places the government is interwoven into the fabric of things they benefit from.  

    You are some 50something dude pulling a couple to three hundred K a year working a job in some industry that is heavily regulated and high barriers to entry make it tough for competition to enter your market place thereby making it easier for the company you work for to pay you what they pay you and not forcing you to sweat....yea you just benefitted financially from the work of the government.

    You refinanced your mortgage in 2020 and got a sweet 2.5% interest rate, saving you 40 thousand dollars in interest over the life of your loan. Yea, when Covid hit and most of the private money in the market shit its pants and ran for the hills that was Fannie, Freddie, FHA, and their government mandate/implicit guarantee standing in there making that possible.  Unless you really think you get the rates you get because of just how fucking awesome you are.

    I could go on and on, but the idea that one is only benefitting from the government by using the roads, or drawing social services etc is just so fucking bad. 

     

    Well, that and their argument ignores simple economics. They whine about people benefiting off of social services without "paying" but don't realize that the business that they own/pay them large salaries requires, to various degrees, a lower wage-earning populace that needs to use those roads to get to those jobs and use those services to subsidize their low wages that benefit those companies. The analogy of the renter down the street who pays $900 a month benefiting from the same services as the home owner the other side of the street, even though they don't pay property taxes, is ignoring that the person who owns the real estate that is being rented to... wait for it... earn a profit. So, take that gripe up with the owner of the rental, not the poor person renting it.

  3. 4 hours ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    That’s rich

    I always hated that argument. “They have access to the same resources as everyone else! Why are they so poor?” The answer is that it is systematic wealth and poverty. 
     

    An analogy that I use for this has two 18 year olds. One grew up as a carpenter’s son and the other grew up without any exposure to carpentry. You take them to a workshop, give them all the same exact tools, materials, and working conditions. If you were to tell them “you have one week to build me a canoe. The one who can build the best canoe gets $250k for college,” who in the hell do you think is going to win that competition? The carpenter’s son is the odds-on favorite by a long shot. Sure, the other kid might win, but it would only be in absolute fluke scenarios. 99 times out of 100, the carpenter’s son wins that purely based on his exposure to carpentry growing up. 
     

    The point is that mere exposure to households that have college graduates or hard working people or business owners sets a particular tone for a person as they go out into the world. So, what do we do with the people who grow up in abject poverty? The ones who grow up with a single parent on welfare? The ones who have deadbeat parents? Do we just toss them to the trash heap or do we give them an opportunity to compete with everyone that didn’t have to struggle growing up? 

    The cynic in me says that the real answer is traced back to the haves and the have-nots. Those who have benefited from their institutional advantages don’t want to share. “I worked hard for this! Why do I need to help lazy poor people?” Well, you didn’t have to work as hard as that poor person would to get where you are. You had advantages that you can’t even perceive because they were so embedded in your upbringing. Something that is just every day for you would be absolutely life changing for a truly poor person. Take food security, for example. There are millions of children and teenagers that won’t know where their meals will come from over the summer. How in the world are they supposed to even think about their future when they don’t even know if they can eat in the present? 
     

    There’s more than enough resources to go around. Progressive tax is one mechanism to spread those resources out. I’m not going to slap my paystub down on the table, but I do very well. I enjoy a lot of creature comforts and my kids enjoy a way better lifestyle than I did growing up. A flat tax would have me paying less, but I have no problems paying more with the hopes that the extra I pay will go towards bettering society. “Society grows great when old men plant trees knowing they will never enjoy their shade.” 

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  4. 14 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

    No, it did not. But they responded as protocols post Columbine were developed. You do not always see evil, you have to react to it. 

    I guess you have never been in a situation where evil presents. See them run past the kid in the hallway? They had to move, find and react. That is what they did. 

    That image got compartmentalized so they could finish the job, but they will be unpacking it for the rest of their lives at great expense to their mental health and wellbeing. 

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  5. 6 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

    And they are going to build it along the Colorado river.  Why do I think they will fuck with the river somehow.

    And I'm sure it's being sold as this:

    07_Houses-of-the-future-dome-house.jpg?1

    When it'll be more like a bunch of shipping containers like this:

    il_1588xN.4240497810_bjxw.jpg

    Think Devolution by Max Brooks, but instead of Bigfoot, it’s Bastrop hillbillies. 

  6. That’s always the dream, isn’t it? Ground floor of a startup using other people’s money to build an acreage position, get a couple of wells flowing so you can show PDP and advertise some PUDs, then ride off into the sunset after acquisition until you get bored and do it all over again. 

  7. The US home front is weak, but not with regards to China. China is one of the few issues where there is a majority consensus. Human rights abuses, environmental destruction, and how they handled COVID has created a unified front against China in the US for at least another 10 years. 
     

    China may even have more bad will in the US than Russia currently has and that’s saying something. 

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