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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. Bad news, although on this one— airframe manufacturers don’t make engines. But people will just see Boeing 747.
  2. Yeah, that’s one I wonder about too. I fully support legalization/decriminalization. But I think we need a pretty big stigmatization campaign like we did with cigarettes and public drunkenness. Getting baked all the time in public is not conducive to social cohesion and probably will have a lot of negative effects on the individual level. You can responsibly partake in alcohol and cigarettes while still pushing for some social restraint around their use in public and we should be doing that with weed, too.
  3. It is going to be “interesting” to see the long term effects of vaping and the societal shift on weed smoking (formerly done socially/in private) becoming a thing people do basically all the time, everywhere.
  4. Say it again, Boeing becoming an MBA company and not an airplane company is how we got here: https://americancompass.org/airbuss-industrial-flight-plan/ “An airplane company making new airplanes is bad for business,” is such a crystalline distillation of the MBA mindset. It’s atrocious to think about how much human capital is tied up in PowerPoint formatting and delivery at American companies.
  5. Bibi is such a piece of ass and it really rubs me the wrong way that he is so willing to publicly rub our nose in his mess. Trying to imagine the howls if Zelenskyy acted this way. I’d honestly be fine if we just went neutral at this point, although that would paradoxically make things even worse for non-Hamas civilians.
  6. Always was the play. Vivek’s entire candidacy was to do two things: 1. Help siphon away votes and attention to kneecap any real Trump competitor 2. Shift the GOP debate onto Kremlin-friendly terms. I will let the board connect the dots as to who he is and what is happening with the GOP.
  7. Bibi is a different animal. It’s been pretty well documented that he’s more concerned with prosecuting this extremely brutal offensive. Hamas made a serious miscalculation on the hostage front, as Israel appears to want to reset expectations and make sure the hostage taking calculus changes for Palestinian militants.
  8. Let me visualize what is going on here: I was in Pak when they launched the Pakistan Super League of cricket. The security situation there was so dire that all the games were played in UAE. The mass purge of social media and the realization that I was free to tell people that cricket sucks were two cathartic moments for me.
  9. Fuck, I’m getting flashbacks to my time in Karachi. I had to do an extensive social media purge because of the insanity of Pakistani online discourse. That “friendship ended” meme is pretty much what it’s like all the time.
  10. To me though the technology is earth shattering, especially when it comes to being a kid and interacting. Take 1985-1995: Toss aside the superficial stuff like clothes and music and haircuts. Kids were doing the same shit: Hanging out at malls or movie theaters, house parties, culture spread by TV and physical media (renting a DVD or VHS is the same thing), social circles largely defined by geography, communications were by the same methods. The biggest obstacle to socialization and engagement remained mobility so getting a DL was the goal to work towards. The trappings were different, but your way of existing was the same. The biggest difference might be the rise of video games as a hobby but that was still physical media that required in-person interaction beyond the single player mode. The shift to an online smartphone is paradigm changing in an entire different way. A HS junior in 1985 or 1995 or 2000 would be bewildered at the idea of having thousands of peers from across the country or beyond following their own activities and photographs or the idea you could see a cute girl in her swimsuit from across the state and just shoot her a compliment at that moment from your phone. That completely changes the way you socialize and what you value and pursue.
  11. Xennnial here (81) and all we fucking talked about in high school was cars, girls, and football. I think it shifted a bit because it was all about modified trucks and to a lesser degree import tuning or pony cars but cars were for sure a major fucking thing. Just not necessarily American muscle. For movies, I’d say American Pie, Can’t Hardly Wait, and Varsity Blues are the touchstones. But Xennials’ experience relates way more to the Breakfast Club generation than to Gen Z or even younger millennials. If you never had a school assigned email address or submitted a paper via internet then you had a totally different way of life.
  12. We do this song and dance around everything. These are complicated systems. It’s good to have critical eyes on them to keep us honest, that is the difference between the crap wunderwaffe vapor ware the Russians build and what we can deliver. Our capacity and procurement rate is a different question. The peace dividend is over. We need to be on a footing to produce far more high-end systems and we need to shift our recruiting to get people to man them.
  13. Every objection you are raising is incredibly, almost boringly, explainable. They’ve been able to geolocate the survelliance balloon and the base and from that we know a few things: - The object is at about 1800-2000 feet, its direction of travel, its approximate size, its approximate ground speed. - We are viewing it through FLIR, from above. - A second geolocated video shows a similar but different object miles away. So on to the objections. Have you even viewed what balloons look like when being pushed by the wind at height? No, and neither have any of us. That said, they aren’t going to look like what we are used to seeing balloons look like from the ground. Especially in a very brief video. Looking down on an aircraft from above, a short snapshot, it’s very hard to tell what it is doing or whether it’s rising or flying level. Balloons are doing so even more slowly. Balloons in Iraq? Least problematic element. Balloons can and do travel miles and miles and Iraq in 2018 was hardly a desolate war zone everywhere. Iraqis can and do release balloons at parties and weddings. The balloons do what they do everywhere, which is drift in the direction of the wind and rise until they either burst or equalize depending on weather and what they might have tied to them and how full they were inflated. And the military will not be able to get in the business of giving the public a firm answer of what they are based on a grainy FLIR image. Nor do they just gun down anything that they don’t recognize. So yeah, you’re left with saying “is this thing that is balloon bunch size and drifting like balloons like balloons? Or extra planetary intelligence, or a top secret wild probe that’s been reverse engineered or whatever. The extensive records of this are a bit of a sharpshooter fallacy; there’s a surprisingly lot of stuff floating and/or flying about that is extremely terrestrial in origin. The military has the best sensors and watches the sky more than anyone else. Sensitive spaces are especially well surveilled. It’s no surprise at all— the least surprising thing— that we see these phenomena most often in the areas we are watching; especially factoring in that they are the spaces our very terrestrial adversaries most want to see. I don’t know what to tell you about ESP and remote viewing man. The CIA defunded that program and declassified it because it produced nothing of relevance. I don’t know how you retcon that into amazing success; and the two people you mention are two individuals who made a living by claiming they could do it. I thought we left Uri Gellar behind.
  14. Also wanna drop here that Dave Grusch is on record saying that remote viewing/ESP is real.
  15. Update: Probably balloons. No cloaking just the entire camera adjusting. When confronted with blurry images always reach for the prosaic explanation first.
  16. Yes, and they treat their air operations as more like flying artillery than owning the sky. There is also a major skill gap between Russian and Western pilots; the Russians just don’t fly as much and don’t practice complex air operations. They steer their jets as onesies or twosies.
  17. Strategically it is absolutely a sideshow. Politically we live in a place where that sideshow gets 400K people to protest in DC, unfortunately.
  18. That A-50 AWACS is (was) a super valuable asset. Russia likely only has something like 10 or so flying. And maybe fewer given the absolute state of the the VKS.
  19. Anyway, this whole Houthi shit tracks so well with Russian justifications for their shit. “We have to shoot ballistic missiles at civilian vessels because we are mad at America and Israel”’ is up there with “you let Estonia into NATO ergo we must destroy Ukraine.” It’s fine to write journal articles analyzing this but eventually trying to untangle the mix of an hostile’s stew of grievance and excuses is a less relevant question than what ordnance to drop on them. Unfortunately for the Houthis they are a bit behind the Russians in ICBM and associated technology so they get Tomahawks.
  20. Well, that was not my argument. My argument is that the opinion of the “Arab or Middle East street” matters rather less than keeping global shipping going.
  21. Oh. How surprising we have these takes. Almost like this was never about Palestine at all.
  22. Did some more digging on this out of curiosity and it turns out that a few years back we practiced flying Apaches off of a Mobile Expeditionary Base specifically to send a message to Iran; and that the Brits and Aussies are deeper into testing the Apache for their carriers and amphibious assault ships. But the typical U.S. answer is the AH-1Z that the Marines fly that was procured for maritime operations and transportation. They take up much less space.
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