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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. It turns out that filming rapes and murders and bragging about them, and acting like assholes to people just going about their day is ineffective at garnering sympathy from lots of Americans. What I find fascinating is that you blame people for noticing.
  2. I was able to get the full article in the tweet. Needless to say, I fully support. There is something approaching half a trillion dollars of Russian money sloshing about in Western institutions and there’s no reason that taxpayer support for Ukraine shouldn’t be supplemented by Russian money. There’s a push to get this done by the second anniversary.
  3. 36 throwing a birthday party for a 17 year old kid. I bet she is also real popular with the teenage boys as a different kind of sparring partner.
  4. More likely just straight sanctions evasion, it’s a game of cat and mouse to get around them and it’s much easier for us to intervene in dollar denominated transactions. The question will be what then happens, Iran doesn’t want to be holding Russian rubles so how do they convert them into something they can use?
  5. Great read on how Russia is looking to solve a pilot shortage: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russias-new-jet-trainer-design-is-a-1990s-throwback Of interest farther down in the article is some discussion of how Russia struggles to replace and maintain its Czechoslovak (now Czech) built L-39 trainers. That platform has been updated and is still in service and a good option for export customers looking for a well-made trainer. A lot of times we focus in NATO on the interop problems faced by former Warsaw Pact Allies saddled with Soviet era equipment, especially expensive ones. But that defense-industrial ecosystem was built to support all the members and so it impacts Russia in unexpected places as well.
  6. There is some chatter that Ukraine got a Tu-22 as it was preparing to launch. I am not going to link until a good source confirms. To recap how these attacks go, Russia does not use strategic aviation over Ukrainian territory. They have been flying them inside Russia and launching their Kh-22s and Kinzhals from there. So that means they shot it down in Russia if it happened and if they can do it more, this would have a serious impact on Russian strategy.
  7. No, not stupid at all. This is one of, if not the largest, single attacks Russia has made over the course of the war. They used a mix of platforms and made sure that AD was engaged with things like Shaheds and saturated the air space.
  8. Big investigation by the NYT reveals systematic sexual violence by Hamas on October 7. You can get a free gift link below. Be forewarned that it is extraordinarily gruesome.
  9. It has high and low altitude trajectories but in the past AFU has complained about their speed. Most likely it’s because they don’t have full Patriot coverage and the Russians use them where they know the Patriots aren’t.
  10. Several of the missiles that got through were Kh-22s, which was developed as an anti-ship missile. They’re inaccurate but pack a wallop and blow up all the shit around them. AFU has not shot one down yet. Worth tracking for us because it’s a weapon that was designed exactly against us. I think we will see more infrastructure strikes, but my gut is that this was retaliation for the losses of jets and the Feodosia attack.
  11. Comparing services we pay for to frigid wives and crack dealers ain’t exactly a ringing defense though? Another example is cars and service subscriptions. Some of the worst of this has been walked back like BMW’s plan to charge a fee to unlock seat heating. Now, there have always been stripper models and this may just seem like a new way to charge for premium features. But it’s a bit more insidious and worse for us all— in the past, you just didn’t have the power windows on the car installed. But with the new model, everyone gets the same bloated car with the same resources pumped in, but only some get actually used. Pure resource waste. This is top-Surly, well done.
  12. I view that as a different thing. Loss leader is all about your own willpower to not buy more shit. Enshitifficattion is more like if they sold you a sub to get a chicken every week, then one week you show up and it’s missing a drumstick and they say “it’s in our terms and conditions we can do this. Also we own all the chickens.”
  13. Yeah, I’ll put this under shitification. Theatres are different as they are venues and not creators, whereas streaming combines both. It will just be getting worse. @Dbeasy called out the consolidation and that bites into creative endeavors. We will soon be seeing lots of AI generated scripts, songs, etc. The big entertainment giants can’t wait to all boot out writers and instead pay indentured editors to clean up AI created plots. And we are still not past the uncanny valley, the stuff will get worse. AI is already writing lots of copy that is designed to get into Google results and nothing else. A while ago there was a lot of tumult over algorithm driven kids content that was disturbing and bizarre and junk but was crack for young eyeballs. That’s going to be the experience for most of us from ads to movies to TV.
  14. This may be related to how you use it. Google maps is pretty good at turn by turn car directions. It’s much shittier at being an actual map, which I use a lot as a frequent walker in cities that aren’t always familiar. Screenshots below, one Google and one Apple. I don’t see any comparison: Apple has more street names, less clutter, and a simple search returned only things directly related to what I wanted and not unrelated shit. Apple is shit in a lot of other places so I am not stanning Just pointing out that Google maps has gotten worse at being an actual, readable map.
  15. Social media to me is a different category, as it has long been obvious that if there’s no obvious product being sold, then the product is you. And social media sites were the quickest to go to shit. I am looking more at the places where things have been “disrupted” but it does seem like you’re engaging in a straightforward exchange. Amazon was like a store, just bigger and online, for example. And it’s core business has gotten shittier— the search results are shittier, the reviews are shittier and also-driven, the products are across the board shittier. And that’s because it’s just acting like a store and because eventually you do have to pay the piper; but psychologically humans react worse to having something degrade as opposed to just staying in stasis.
  16. This is great for proving my point, that streaming services started as a “better than DVD” and “better than TV” option for watching movies and content and now rapidly moved to a “worse than DVD” experience, rapidly approaching “worse than TV. The draw was to get ad-free content on demand in exchange for a fee to the provider. That includes adding ads to an experience you pay for to dropping titles and content that was there when you signed up. And it is no coincidence that the switch happened after consumers mostly stopped buying new players as the switch to cloud-based media came along. Commercials playing before the show time are neither a negative or a positive. There are a few more previews, but the rest of the experience— from service to options to quality— is better.
  17. Should probably take this to the Prosperity Guardian thread, but it’s less far-fetched than you think given the way Iran exploits gray-zone techniques and our extremely defensive posture. We could have easily inflicted enough damage on the Houthis to make this stop, but we made a choice not to. A few days ago, Iran—not the Houthis—launched a one-way drone attack against a ship about 200 miles off the coast of India. Now think a bit about th capability they demonstrated there. Iran has thus far paid no price for that even as we announced they did it. You do not need to set up a blockade to turn off shipping, you just need to make it dangerous and risky enough that insurers either jack prices sky high or just say “no.” Consider an IRGC-owned merchant vessel (they have them) launching a few drone attacks at ships transiting Gibraltar. They don’t even have to succeed, just demonstrate they can, and all of a sudden they are closer to doing this than you think. Who is going to sink that vessel? Are we? Have we given any reason to make Iran believe we would? We aren’t willing to target their proxies in Yemen.
  18. I can’t disagree more. This isn’t about inflation causing prices to rise, it’s about services and platforms getting objectively shittier. The movies are a good example. It’s more expensive, but the movie-watching experience is objectively BETTER. - More choices of movies - Air conditioning - More comfortable chairs - Beer and food options - Seat selection in advance - Sound and image is better You can say it’s too expensive, but you can’t argue that overall, you have more choice and a better experience and inflation just “is.” Not so with the great Enshittening: Prime streaming is made worse by inserting ads. And then charging you to take them away. That’s a new business model, to charge the same amount and keep pace with inflation and then just announce that you’re flint to make things suck more. Ditto with Google maps. The point of a map and navigation is to help you find things you need and get there. Google made it shittier- clogging the map with things you AREN’T looking for.
  19. Iran is upping the rhetoric game and will likely be upping the Red Sea game based on the U.S. response thus far. I keep hammering this point, but that campaign is going fantastic for them. We have publicly announced that we are happy to just patrol the sea and respond to ships in aid and expend interceptors on cheap drones. The other side is accomplishing nearly all of its goals: making transit expensive and dangerous, making the United States look weak and toothless, and letting us spend tons of money to do so. I am not exaggerating about this, we have announced publicly that the goal of Prosperity Guardian is to “deter and de-escalate.” You cannot announce your intention to de-escalate, you’re telling the adversary that you are determined to let him get away with shit. Deterrence, almost axiomatically, depends on the threat of escalation.
  20. Part of this thread was inspired by the griping about Surly. I actually still think Surly is a great site and the headwinds to growth are mostly external, caused by the way people use the internet as driven by enshitification.
  21. Inspired by news and different threads here, starting a place to track and chronicle the Great Enshittening of the internet. Basically, how the internet (and other industries) are getting terrible, usually because of this process: We are all familiar with Facebook, and I don’t count Twitter which was made shitty on purpose with no economic rationale. But there is enshittification creep. A few examples: 1. Amazon Prime: Starting in January, you get ads with Prime. And unlike Netflix (also shittified), they aren’t rolling out a discount “ads” package, they will just upsell you for ad-free. Not just streaming. Anyone else notice the frequent “Get it tomorrow” bait that changes to a different date once it’s in your cart? 2. Google: Google’s search decline is well chronicled, but it’s creeping to other aspects. Google Maps is more and more crap. There’s all the irrelevant paid ads that return hotels and restaurants even when not searching, cluttering the screen. And the photo pins, which don’t tell you about a business but use a worthless photo. Apple Maps is actually better now. I’m going to be super interested in watching AI platforms. I already think they’re getting enshittified in real time.
  22. Ron Johnson is not delaying this because of the border. He’s stopping any more aid to Ukraine. That’s what this is about.
  23. DT has some of the very best threads not just on the site, but the internet— Ukraine updates and the dog thread. CR is not going to be hampering sponsors. And plenty if not most CFB and sports sites have a sub to keep political discussion contained. The What is the motivation to come on here and whine about it.
  24. There are two, it seems a mom and maybe daughter? The funny part is when the mom says “oh, it’s hot here”. She asks if someone is filming, expressions of amazement and astonishment.
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