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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. The short answer is that this is going to be a bigger problem for smaller NATO Allies that have to square off against Russia’s forward deployed mass and stop an initial onslaught. We will be fighting a very different war. We would be foolish not to take notes and adjust but tanks and artillery still have a place. We are also seeing the extreme value of strategic aviation and the ability to disrupt the adversary on their home field, the extreme importance of long-range fires (we need to get better at this) and that artillery remains the Lord of War.
  2. Negative points for using “Czechia,” LOL. This is going to roil the EP and provoke some uncomfortable questions. It’s good to throw a spotlight on this but Russian activities in the gray zone will continue. Budapest and Bratislava are the current safer harbors in the EU.
  3. We announced our own suspension in November, along with other NATO Allies. Russia formally withdrew. Today’s move is just Duda formally codifying that suspension in a law the Sejm sent to him. It’s a big deal but has been in the works for some time and was predicated by Russia’s formal withdrawal.
  4. I am super sympathetic to interviewees especially entry level stuff where the background and resume is all shit from school and service type jobs. It’s hard to flesh something out and stand out. I generally end up hiring based on if they seem smart and together. If someone brought up WoW it would super high-risk/high-reward. Emphasis on risk. It would play better than some bullshit volunteering resume padder though.
  5. I think melding is optimal, but you need to have some bias built in to favor a failure one way or another. If you’re selling underwear or smart TVs or refrigerators— sure, I am fine with the MBA guys winning. If you cheap out too much and build crap, then the market can punish you. If you’re building airliners, or chemical factories, or nuclear reactors then I’m sorry. The engineers need to win over the MBAs. There has to be some balance and optimizing but if it comes to a fundamental disagreement, the engineers need to win. It’s more important for the product to succeed than the company.
  6. Extremely enlightening. The world is certainly lucky that this kind of dehumanizing rhetoric and world-view is confined to Israelis now that the Nazis and Imperial Japanese were defeated. I can’t imagine what the Near East would look like if this kind of radical ethno-religious hatred was held by any other groups! Scary to even think about.
  7. In the Soviet Union, the party put unqualified “workers” in charge of industries based on political purity and stocked government agencies on the same principle. In the United States, we put unqualified business majors in charge of industry and their regulators with similar results. I am only half-kidding that business schools are a menace and should be shut down. An organization chases its values. Once you shift from “make money by building good airplanes” to “make money,” things go to shit. https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/ This excerpt is about the 787 and not 737.
  8. Comments above are dead-on. Making a politcal/sociocultural hot-button comment or charged remark and expecting me to share it or challenge you. Instant “nope” for wanting to get to know you better.
  9. Lots to catch up on here. Miller’s Crossing is amazing, a masterpiece. For me, a single scene puts it behind Goodfellas. The Tommy gun scene. I can live with a thousand round burst as a stylized choice. But the cartoon death where the guy stays standing up firing into the chandelier is just that— a bit of cartoon action that yanks me out of a moody noir. Topo Chico is the shit. It just tastes better and the cold glass bottle adds to the experience.
  10. I can’t think of anything I want to own less than a fancy horse. Maybe an Alfa Romeo or one of those snakes that gets big enough to try and eat you.
  11. Sounds like your wife figured out how to not have to do laundry.
  12. Has anyone checked the alibis of those orcas that were fucking up boats near Spain?
  13. Not an orca but time to tell the story of my phone wallpaper: I took this (no zoom) from a paddleboard in the Laguna Madre in winter 2020. Small pod of three that swam under and around my board and let me have a good look. And dolphins are charismatic and nice and (unless they want sexy time) entirely uninterested in harming you. But they are also a LOT bigger than you think they are, and they swim a LOT faster than you realize and it is much more unnerving to be on top of them on a wobbly board than you’d think. Very much a “they belong here and I do not” moment. I can’t imagine orcas.
  14. I have one hard and fast sports rule for my daughters and that is “no riding lessons.” I saw how my parents went from “trial riding lesson” to owing a horse that cost more than any of our cars that all of a sudden my sister didn’t want.
  15. We have built systems of such size and complexity that they approach forces of nature. Even intelligent and rational people are incapable of giving a full account of how and why a ship the size of the Dali can be loaded with precision and safely sailed out of Baltimore Harbor, under a bridge, and across oceans. Ask a smart, educated non-expert how “GPS” works and you’ll get something like “a set of satellites send messages to receivers on earth.” The ship’s captain is aware of many computers and what their functions are on his vessel. But he is likely quite incapable of explaining how information is placed on a small piece of ultra-pure silicon. Moreover, we have built these complex systems so well that serious malfunctions are rare and usually unnoticed by all of us. It’s a miracle that we EVER sail skyscrapers on their side underneath the Key Bridge. And as a species, we got where we are by closely observing cause and effect and by never accepting that things “just happen.” It is a feature, not a bug, for us to come up with theories. The theories going around about this are no different than “Thag got struck by lightning because he must have angered the Storm God.” We have to actively fight our brains to get to where we can accept “some shit I don’t understand just happened.”
  16. Having any kind of opinion on this if you’re not a harbor pilot or marine engineer or civil engineer or something is just super stupid. It’s just this thing that happened, like things do.
  17. I’ve always been more afraid of tunnels than bridges. Bridges don’t faze me.
  18. New mandatory reading for Maryland DOT officials just dropped.
  19. Are we sure that it’s the breaking bones or getting seriously injured part that’s good for kids and not the playing sports and running around outside part?
  20. “The Burmese junta can’t be doing a genocide of Muslims as bad because they’re not aligned with the U.S. and their military isn’t as good,” thanks for this crystalline distillation of tankie thought and reminder that this isn’t really about Palestinians or lives at at all.
  21. It’s funny, I was actually thinking of Napoleon as my comparison. It does well with costumes and fidelity but the whole movie is dark, drab, muddy. Take a look at these two scenes:
  22. Staying with the crew in a place near the quiet entry to the Great Smoky Mountains national park and decided to show them Last of the Mohicans tonight after a day hiking, since it was filmed not far from here. Besides the general awesomeness of DDL plus Michael Mann and a great source material— just so refreshing to see how this movie LOOKS. - Filmed outside with good lighting and no mood filters. The mountains, rocks, trees, water, sun, light all looks like what we saw today. - Kickass costuming and sets, the Huron village is a Huron village they built for the movie. The costumes have color and bulk. The makeup looks like normal people who have been outside sweating and running around. - The battles and fight scenes are well-choreographed, easy to follow, and yet still manage to look real and chaotic with genuine smoke and fire. - Consistent sound all the way through, you can leave it on one volume and hear every word and never have your ears blown out. Granted this was a major-budget picture with a tier 1 director and the world’s best actor but DAMN. I cannot remember the last time I saw a new movie that looks and feels this good and real. Truly, we reached peak movie magic between about 1990-2000 and it’s been downhill since then.
  23. Dawg, you’re not going to be denying what happened to the Rohingya on an Israel thread are you? They were all forced out of their homes and live in the worlds largest refugee camp, tens of thousands murdered, more raped.
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