rocket_surgeron

>If this is the case, then I guess Zelensky doesn't need any western weapons, and yet he's asking every day for more.

In January 2022 the armed forces of Ukraine fielded equipment that, depending on type, amounted to numbers 1/5th to 1/10th that of Russia.

With western support, which in the case of the United States has amounted to approximately 1% of annual federal spending last year, they defeated the initial advance and have fought their numerically superior adversary to a standstill.

Approximately 1% is factual and verifiable. Three rounds of aid were appropriated in FY2022 amounting to less than $68 billion. $68 billion is 1.08% of the government's 2022 spending of 6.27 trillion, so "less than $68 billion" is less than 1%-- and not all of the allocated money has actually been spent so the percentage is even lower.

What Ukraine is doing is nothing short of amazing. There is irrefutable documentary evidence that the Armed Forces of Ukraine has destroyed over 1,500 Russian main battle tanks and over 8,000 other armored vehicles.

There is irrefutable, unquestionable, documentary evidence that Russia is reactivating Soviet-era weapons systems to replace the equipment lost so far, equipment equipment losses that exceed the total amount prepared for the initial invasion.

The clear, publicly stated, unquestionable, goal of Russia is the genocide of the Ukrainian people.

If you do not believe the previous factual statement I can supply sources including but not limited to publicly-televised statements made by both government officials and state-run media.

Genocide must not be allowed to happen.

If Ukraine had possessed the weapons systems that are now being provided to Ukraine, on which Ukrainians are being trained on in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States as I write this comment, prior to the invasion, the invasion would have been defeated months ago.

The best thing the world can do to ensure peace in Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere around the world to to present a united front against totalitarian expansion, which is what many countries are doing.

Spare me your "butwhaddabouts" I care little about the past and greatly about the present and future.

I have almost completely eliminated single-use plastics from my life to the point that my only non-recyclable waste output is a single half-full 20-gallon bag set out for collection approximately every three weeks.

The very few remaining items are typically cleaning supplies such as bleach and hazardous cleaning agents but for safety and hygiene purposes I do not consider those a high priority for finding non-plastic alternatives.

Please note that I do not include the several-microns-thick coating of plastic that coats the insides of some cardboard boxes and aluminum cans as "plastic output" due to its total annual weight (in my case) being less than that of a single bottle of shampoo.

For shaving I use a safety razor, whose blades come in cardboard. For shaving cream I use a puck that comes in cardboard packaging. My toothpaste comes in compressed pellets and all of my soap, even shampoo, comes in bar form. There are currently no plastic single-use items in my bathroom. Even my toilet paper is purchased in bulk, 80 rolls at a time, and comes in a large cardboard box with each roll packaged in paper. It is a recognizable brand's "Industrial" product line.

Rather than paying for water most of my cleaning products are purchased in powder form, usually under a recognizable brand's "Industrial" product line, in bulk. This means that yes, I do buy a 5-gallon bucket of laundry detergent but in over a year after I have finally used it all I have a reusable 5-gallon bucket that does not go into the waste stream. You can also buy items like that in cardboard boxes lined with a plastic liner but even then the volume of plastic is, after many years, less than that of a single plastic laundry detergent container which only lasts months.

Even cleaning products that, again for health and safety reasons, come in plastic containers I buy them in bulk, dispensing them into reusable (and much higher quality) applicators. This means that the (realistically) unavoidable use of plastics is minimized. The amount of plastic used in a single 128-ounce bulk "industrial" cleaning bottle is less than that used in 4 32-ounce (typical sized) bottles and the reusable (again, "industrial") spray bottles I use to apply the product last for years if not decades.

For food items I typically do not buy anything that comes in plastic with the main exception being sliced bread, but again that volume of plastic is so low it is almost irrelevant. When I realized that I was throwing away ~30 plastic yogurt containers per month I started making yogurt myself in an instant pot and storing the yogurt in glass jars. Doing so requires almost no effort-- the instant pot does it for you. I've been doing this since 2011 with the same jars, which will probably last another 100 years, so I have not thrown away over 4,000 yogurt containers.

In your example, the rubber bands and stickers are irrelevant. Years, if not decades, of rubber (assuming you mean synthetic rubber, natural rubber is fine and will biodegrade) bands and stickers add up to a single bottle of dish soap's worth of plastic.

Plastic is a wonderful material but it is immoral, to me, to use it without foresight of its impact and costs.

It requires effort, but is not "hard". Effort does not equal "hard".

My anti-plastic crusade started because I live on the Chesapeake Bay and became involved in Bay cleanup initiatives about a decade ago. I'd say 9 out of every 10 items I recovered were plastic items, some from as far away as New York State, having floated for hundreds of miles down the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers.

LOL

The red lines are lines where (PRIMARILY) skilled labor is required for products and services essential to human life.

The blue lines are lines where unskilled labor in Shenzhen factories in pump out unnecessary consumer goods.

Medical costs are rising because people like him are pumping money into hedge funds and they are squeezing every red cent out of the systems they have captured-- not because doctors have to have licenses.

Housing costs are rising because people like him are pumping money into hedge funds and they are robo-buying every property they can while simultaneously lobbying state and local governments to restrict building-- not because you need to follow safety standards.

>In 2022, Andreessen advocated against the construction of 131 multifamily housing units in their affluent Atherton, California town. In a letter, Andreessen and his wife wrote that they opposed permitting more than one house on a single acre of land.

What the fuck is wrong with libertarian tech bros? Were they dropped on their heads as children?

Strategic Objective 3.3 is my dream.

If a building collapses due to poor design the civil engineer who stamped off on the design is liable. If it collapses due to poor construction the contractor is liable.

When doctors screw up they may get sued, lose their license, and/or go to jail. When civil engineers screw up they may get sued, lose their license, and/or go to jail. When truck drivers screw up they may get sued, lose their license, and/or go to jail.

If a hair dresser screws up and nicks a customer's ear, he or she can lose their ability to ever cut hair again. If a liquor store sells to minors they can lose their liquor license and/or go to jail.

For some reason when programmers screw up they point at the EULA and say "lol get fucked" and then complain about how "programming is sooooooo hard and complicated" when any form of professional liability is proposed.

With software and related services, if an engineer uploads everyone's information to a publicly accessible S3 bucket and everyone's shit gets stolen "LoL our bad here's three months of credit monitoring and a settlement check for $22.43 two years after the fact".

"Your negligence and utter disregard for industry standard best practices led to tens of thousands of dollars in damages..." THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND... "but you fucked up the lives of hundreds of thousands of people" THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.. "you can't just keep repeating that like a magical incantation" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED... here's a check for $20 go away.

Too bad 3.3 will never happen in a million years...

Who was cancelled?

Trolling is making an assertion and then running away when the handwaving doesn't work.

Asking a question isn't trolling.

Please. I'm begging you. I'm down on my hands and knees, genuflecting: who was cancelled?

My assertion is that "the woke mob" is a boogeyman made up by liars to deflect any and all criticism of their terrible positions.

Kind of like how they spread "virtue signaling" around like manure before that phrase lost its outrage generation steam.

I will 100% change my mind if anyone can provide a single person cancelled for this.

> I think her account is back now though.

https://twitter.com/DrLiMengYAN1

So... not cancelled?

I was promised cancellation...

>Do you think a Chinese born scientist is a white nationalist?

Lol looked her up, she's steve bannon's protege so who knows? Stranger things have happened.

The first things hip urban europeans do when they can afford it is buy an Audi wagon and move to the suburbs.

I worked in Mainz for many years and one of my German coworkers was so happy the day he finally had moved up enough and saved up enough to move out of town. Bought an M5 Wagon and a cute little Haus with a yard and a shed. He was so excited to be able to go to the hardware store to buy garden tools to fill up his shed and furniture that wasn't apartment-sized. He was finally living the American dream.

Name any country, any country WHATSOEVER, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, with more than 500,000 residents (small pacific island nations don't count lol) and I will find you an America-style suburban neighborhood full of station wagons and SUVs and single-family homes. Europe is easy. I lived in them. South America is easy. Asia is easy. Even Africa experiences this phenomenon.

You don't believe me. I know you don't.

Here's a suburban neighborhood consisting of fenced-in single family homes with manicured lawns and (most likely) a Range Rover in every driveway in Bujumbura, Burundi. The poorest country on earth: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Burundi/@-3.3707605,29.392...

Living somewhere where you can't smell your neighbors is what nearly every single human being who can afford it wants.

I'm an American who has lived in Germany, Nigeria, Kenya, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and Ecuador. They are all connected by the same thread: you got the choice, you get the fuck out of the cities.

The cult of urbanism has brainwashed you.

>The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those who perpetrated them. The final report came out on October 3, 1995, the same day as the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, when much of the media's attention was directed elsewhere." [0]

Even if the verdict had not been announced that day, the visit of the Pope would have overshadowed the release of a 1,000 page advisory committee report which itself was only a slightly expanded investigation of an incident that had already been covered by a congressional committee report nine years earlier.

Some people use the coincidence to imply that the administration tried to bury it, but it was actually an open-government initiative by the Clinton Administration meant to highlight their pursuit of injustice and had been on the calendar for weeks, with the printing of hundreds of copies of a 1,000 page book, the scheduling of a White House ceremony, and guests having been flown in from all over the country.

The president even gave a 20-minute speech about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StId27Dmx78

Whereas it was impossible to predict when the OJ Simpson verdict would be announced.

>Why avoid talking about Randian ideas except to criticise them?

Oh. You're a cultist. Nevermind. Rand is as relevant as Time Cube.

>It's all interpretation in light of contemporary political norms - and of a very narrow range of contemporary political thought at that.

Unless you are in possession of a time machine, that is the only practical form of interpretation for an undergraduate English literature student.

I did not fear the satanic panic of the 80s, I do not fear the marxist panic of today. I note that the panics seem to emanate from the same kind of person, separated by time.

Also, neither feminists nor transgender folk scare me so discussing them in an academic setting is not likely to warp my delicate little brain.

Charles Dickens, a foundational pillar of of English Literature, was writing ceaselessly about class struggle well over century ago.

Hamlet deals with class struggle.

Jack and the fucking Beanstalk is, along with the vast majority of fables derived from oral history, about class struggle as are vast swaths of the Bible.

The round table of King Arthur's court? Literally all of Robin Hood?

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? To Kill a Mockingbird?

Someone is politicizing English literature and it ain't university professors.

Gender studies is just "class stuggle from a gender perspective".

So you can be marketed to.

If you have a problem, do not partake.

Crypto solves no problems for ordinary users.

Literally and actually, with no exceptions, no consumer cares about a public ledger or any of its other features. They do care about being able to dispute a transaction if they are scammed or unhappy.

Crypto solves tons of problems for paranoiac techbros and get-rich-quick schemers.

If you believe a handful of cases of overzealous cops/social workers questioning the decisions of parents occuring sporadically over decades spread wide and far across the land in a country of 332,000,000 is indicative of a widespread problem, you have fallen for the social media outrage-generation agitprop trick.

Golf clap.

Articles about this rehash the same three cases endlessly and wikipedia articles about media and organizations related to childhood independence are so devoid of citations and examples that if they were about any other subject they would be deleted.

Focuses on, not focuses exclusively on…

>Look at all the stuff this generation of workers have built in big tech — the amazing devices in all areas of the market, the progress in electric cars, the massive scale in compute infrastructure that enables most smaller companies to easily spin up entire regions rather than run their own hardware…

The number of people working on these is insignificantly irrelevant compared to the number of people working on the bad stuff.

It's good that the people you highlight exist because they maintain my faith in humanity, but for every engineer that worked on Webb, there are a thousand working on privacy-destroying addiction engines.

My employer can't find people to work on space-based synthetic aperture radar that will be used to monitor and potentially combat global climate change through detecting sea level rise, coastal erosion, and foliage cover (and health) because you can make more money working on an app. We can't pay more because we're funded through grants and apps are funded either through VCs or intrusive ad revenue and intrusive ads generate more revenue than university partnerships and piecemeal contracts from various international departments of the environment.

It's ridiculous because I make so much that I am the cause of gentrification, i.e. "Enough".

But it's not as much as an engineer at Facebook.

Even your comment focuses on the financial incentives....

>Yes, as computers don't really get faster anymore

This was true from the late 2000s to about 2017 but in the last four years or so computers have gotten much, much faster.

Obviously, it is workload dependent. If all you use is a web browser then you may not notice. If you use a computer for any sort of parallelizable processing work the last four years have been transformative.

For workstations, performance has doubled in single-threaded applications since 2019 and since more cores are standard you can see up to a 10x increase in performance. For servers the performance improvement is even greater.

I do synthetic aperture radar processing and image generation and can get through 10x the amount of data in a day than I could in 2019. That's just CPU stuff, for GPU stuff it's even more-- I can do stuff now that was impossible in 2019 due to VRAM limitations.

There have also been specialized accelerations included in CPUs like the JavaScript optimizations Apple baked into the M1, which definitely do make a noticeable difference if all you use a computer for is web browsing.

This is probably true but in my experience most libertarians are just bigots who think wrapping themselves in a freedom cloak shields their bigotry from criticism.

Thinking more there is probably a great deal of overlap between the people who fit my definition of libertarianism and those who fit yours.

>The idea that we can create some sort of libertarian utopia seems blind to the fact that humans are inherently social.

Attempting to explain this irrefutable, unquestionable fact to a libertarian is like trying to explain sports to me: they ain't interested and can't understand.

I am skeptical of the utility on an PC-class machine of an OS that uses 1013KB sitting idle.

If someone created a PDF of that article and attached it to an email and sent it to a US Government information system, by classification guide standards it is now a classified email.

In fact, this comment would be considered classified, as would yours.

The article you linked to seems to indicate that the emails were considered classified based on the assertions I just made.

The sentence "The United States of America has conducted drone strikes in Pakistan" was, and likely still is, top secret information protected by a special access program and email containing any sentence conveying that information in any form that is not properly marked and handled is a violation of security procedures.

It is impossible to know the context of what they are investigating without seeing the emails, and neither you nor I have seen them.

The only SF-86s that should be outside of eQIP are hardcopies printed by investigators and copies saved by the submitters who emailed them to themselves for some reason.

Of course, this is the Pentagon so there's probably dozens of ancient generals who don't know how to use a mouse who had an aide fill it out and email it to another aide to be put into eQIP.

edit: lol nevermind it's SOCOM, those meatheads can't be trusted to not write a thousand books spilling the (mostly embellished) details of every little thing they did in the military as soon as they get out in the hopes that Tatum Channing will play them in a movie or amazon series so this isn't a surprise.

I hope the conservatives get what they want.

What they think will happen is that ISPs will stop removing content for violating their terms of service, a belief based on some kind of faulty understanding of reality that makes sovereign citizens look sane.

What will happen is that ISPs will start removing even more content because they will become civilly and maybe criminally liable in ten thousand different jurisdictions every time someone suggests a basement sex dungeon exists beneath a pizza parlor.

>locations in the middle of desolate suburbia,

I love the constant description of suburbia as being desolate.

My suburban neighborhood is pretty typical and we have a vibrant community, including little free libraries, bike trails, conservation clubs, birdwatching orgs, garden clubs, needlecraft clubs, kids running lemonade stands, teens hustling to shovel driveways in the winter, a community pool, bake sales, plant sales, strawberry festivals, and more.

We even all banded together and got rid of a lot of the streetlights so now I live in a Bortle 3 (or VERY low Bortle 4) dark sky. And because I have a yard I have a huge-ass amateur radio antenna farm and a fire pit where people come over to chill out.

I raised three daughters here and they turned out fantastic, and spent their youth doing some real Stranger Things stuff without all of the upside-down bits.

If I want to feel hip and urbane I drive the 20 minutes to the train station and go into town, pay my $20 for a cocktail, see an overpriced show, and then retire to my awesome house.

I'm beginning to think that people who think suburbia is desolate are miserable shitheads who a: people don't want to be around, or b: don't want to be around other people.

Lenovo's anti-consumer behavior makes Apple look like a charity with a perfect rating on www.charitynavigator.org.

It doesn't matter that he's running Pop!.

Strong aftermarket sales lead to value retention which drives new sales, and Lenovo's 2023 position seems to be to generate as much ewaste as possible, especially in their workstation and server lines.

Between secure boot "oopsies", rampant (and ongoing) GPL violations, constant spyware campaigns, and vendor locks for CPUs every time I see someone at a FOSS conference with a Lenovo festooned in stickers I chuckle inside because they're oiling the same machine they're raging against.

>If I'm in reverse for example I lose all ability to adjust the temperature, fan, or seat temperature

For every single millisecond after you check your backup camera to make sure there's no kid in the blind spot behind your car, your whole-ass body should be rotated with you head looking over your shoulder and out the rear window.

Unless you have a monster SUV that you can't see out of anyways, in which case use the screen.

In either case the driver should be spending an exact and precise 0.0% of the time a vehicle is in reverse manipulating any control not related to steering and acceleration.

"But what if the passeng.." Don't. Please don't.

I don't know if I would characterize them as having monopoly control of the market because nearly 100% of all of my purchases are made online and 0.0% of my purchases have been made using amazon.com (or walmart.com).

Generally speaking I prefer to buy a product directly, or from a specialized retailer.

Last week I purchased a stethoscope from an online stethoscope retailer. A benefit of doing this is that they offer laser engraving-- something that Amazon, with its warehouses of robots and robot-like employees, cannot easily do.

The specialty retailer also carries a wider array of color and finish combinations, because that's their product niche.

Using a specialist retailer has allowed me to flex on my fellow volunteer EMTs with a personalized Technicolor stethoscope, which is dumb but nice.

Hemp isn't any more or less sustainable than any other crop.

This isn't about marijuana. Marijuana should and will eventually be legal.

This is about the cargo cult that has surrounded hemp.

Hemp is in the C3 photosynthesis category, as are million of other plants.

Generally speaking, switchgrass or any other C4 grass will produce more biomass in identical conditions, than hemp.

If your goal is biomass, switchgrass also has the benefit of not being an invasive, non-native, species in North America.

A dust bowl isn't just brought about by drought but by both drought and intensive tillage.

According to the USDA 2017 Census of Agriculture no-till acreage increased from 96.5 million in 2012 to 104.5 million in 2017. Reduced-tillage increased from 76.6 million to 97.8 million. Intensive tillage decreased from 105.7 million to 80.0 million.

So 202.3 million acres are now no- or reduced-tillage and 97.8 million acres are intensive-tillage.

The 2022 Census of Agriculture is being drafted and I imagine the intensive-tillage numbers will decrease even more.

Overall, tillage conservation practices have increased by 2-3% every year since the 1970s.

I have believed this since 1993.

I was a student in high school and did interviews for both a local newspaper and television station.

In both instances they misrepresented what I said, editing or rearranging my words to construct a different narrative, or in the case of the newspaper they just made up things.

The stories weren't even about anything serious, just local hometown feel-good filler stories and the actual, literal, lies that the journalists willfully constructed were inconsequential and actually made me look good.

But I figured if are willing to lie about something so trivial as what they lied about, then it was highly likely the entire system is a sham.