Frezik

A lack of a standing army has implications. It’s a huge drain on an economy that filters resources into tanks and guns rather than schools and healthcare. It also has ripple effects in places that aren’t strictly military.

The US massively overproduces food. The reason is that farms were heavily subsidized during WW2 in order to feed an army where every soldier would potentially need a 3000kcal diet after matching all day, every day. Those farms dropped that money into automation, and that meant they still had the capability to produce that much after the war.

Dropping farm subsidies would have meant plunging that industry back into depression. So the subsidies kept going. You could nationalize the farms, but that doesn’t happen for obvious reasons. Nobody has come up with another idea for getting out of that trap.

Contrary to what MAGA thinks, free school lunches aren’t there to support “moochers”. During the draft for WW1, 1 out of 9 draftees were rejected for reasons related to malnutrition during childhood. Those programs exist to make sure America can draw up an army. MAGA doesn’t remember that lesson and undermine their own objectives in the process.

You need to subsidize heavy industry, too. Car companies become tank companies in times of war. Therefore, you better make sure your car companies survive in “peace” time. Hence all the government financing of those companies. Chrysler (or the company owning it) has been stumbling from one financial boondoggle to the next for my whole life because of this.

Even worse, you want the tank factories to stay tank factories. Which means Congress needs to order new tanks even when they’re not needed otherwise, or else those factories close. Same goes for ships and planes.

None of which used to happen until industrialized warfare forced the issue. If Originalists want things how it was in the first few decades after the Revolution, then the military should have had its funding and staffing at anemic levels for about a decade now. Except that genuinely would be a problem in case of another big war.

A solution to this is to take our ball and go home. As long as Canada and Mexico are friendly, we face no threat on our own continent. An oversea invasion is impossible (I can go over the details of why, but it comes down to logistics). The scaffolding of an army and a navy focused on shore defense would be fine. Keep a few nukes if we really have to.

MAGA would never go for that, either. They’re isolationist in some ways, but still want a giant military for some reason.

The US didn’t have a large standing military or budget for it. This matters.

100k is the number usually cited for this. Not sure how that calculation is done, though.

Having read the memo–which is basically meeting minutes between the DoD and DHS-- it’s seems to be missing an understanding of how much Trump is disliked up and down the ranks. They ultimately did almost nothing in LA. The birthday military parade had clear signs of everyone phoning it in on purpose. Signalgate convinced all but the most diehard MAGA soldiers (not as big a group as you might think) that this leadership is a bunch of clowns.

What this means is that the White House still overestimates how much the military is in their pocket. Good.

From Ur-fascism:

Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

What’s missing from the analysis is that they can’t objectively evaluate their own forces, either. As much as they go on about strength and fighting and war, they’re actually really bad at it.

This and the ballroom are Trump trying to leave a permanent mark on the White House behind. If nothing else, he’ll die of natural causes within the next decade, and he knows his name will be cursed from then on. If you have to call it “The Donald J Trump Ballroom”, then he still has something.

I seem to recall that the White House is considered a historic building, and renovations need to be approved by Congress. It’s actually been a problem, because there’s a lot of wiring and plumbing issues that need to be addressed. Was this somewhere in the Big Murder Bill?

Oh, right, I forgot about what Administration we’re dealing with. Of course he’s going ahead with it.

Our industry has no idea how to hire people. Our interview processes are almost designed to filter out obviously bad candidates while accepting that some good candidates will fail, too. Getting a specifically good candidate is almost luck.

Remember this if you’re bummed about a string of rejections.

For a good 25 years now, the Republican party has treated reality as a messaging problem, not something to grapple with and use in planning. The only surprise is that it took this long to fire people in the federal government who didn’t give the “right” message.

Where are the Republicans that still hate Russia? They’ve been very quiet for the last decade. Wherever they are, I see no reason Trump would care about them.

Giving funding back to Ukraine is concrete action.

Your first paragraph can be true while also having a recent falling out.

Oddly enough, this also coincides with the time when the US military was more explicitly about offence rather than defense. After the Revolution, people mistrusted the federal government having a large standing army. The army was raised up in time of war, and everyone went home when it was over.

Post-WW2 was the first time the US kept a large army in “peace”. Been that way ever since.

16M devices on one network would almost certainly have major scalability problems all its own. SMB chattiness alone . . . shudder.

In fact, it’s so standard that there’s a bunch of shitty code out there that thinks 127.0.0.1 is the only loopback address.

I’m thinking of a networked Chinese laser cutter that we put on our 10.0.0.0/16 network in the makerspace. It seems to think that 10.0.1.1 and 10.0.2.1 are on different networks. Wouldn’t be surprised if it does a similar mistake with loopback addresses.

IPv4 centralization creates far more privacy issues than everyone having a static IP. The solutions are still things like VPNs and onion routing.

Their relationship has changed. I don’t think Trump cares about Putin anymore. The pee tape being released (assuming it does exist) won’t harm him, and Trump no longer relies on Putin’s funding or social media manipulation for elections. Trump got most of his funding for the last election from Elon and people who know Elon, and now Trump can create other ways for foreign influence to launder money to him (such as the Trump cryptocurrency).

Meanwhile, Trump feels directly snubbed that his “deadlines” for a Ukraine ceasefire have been ignored by Putin. That’s why you see renewed funding for Ukraine.

Narcissists can be very deferential to people they see as equal or above them on the social hierarchy, and Trump likely saw Putin that way. But not anymore.

It’s a threat to her. Cooperate, or we’ll do what we did to Jeff.

Since they’re fundamentally predicting the next token, and there isn’t a lot of training data out there that would actually do this, I wouldn’t expect that LLMs are going to start putting in lookalike characters. They only lookalike to humans.

That said, you could probably poison their training datasets this way.

Simple answer is that Unicode is a design by committee attempting to make every single human written language work. It’s more complicated than it needs to be, but we also don’t want to redo all the work it would take to replace it with something more sane. Especially KJC languages. Trying to get those three to agree on anything is for people who deal with frustration better than me.

There is something there, but mostly I think existing net admins try to map their existing IPv4 knowledge onto IPv6. That doesn’t work very well. It needs to be treated as its own thing.

Right, not the only reason, but it’s a sticking point.

You shouldn’t need to connect to your smart thermostat by using the company’s servers as an intermediary. That makes the whole thing slower, less reliable, and a point for the company to sell your personal data (that last one being the ultimate reason why it’s done this way).

That’s nothing that can’t be done with a good set of firewalls on IPv6.