netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
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User ID: 647
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Right. I remember the stress over possible consequences in what must have been Trump I: their population, their tenacity…none of that materialized. We have absolutely outperformed expectations.
But we still haven’t gained anything.
Like some of the other commenters, I’m not opposed to efficient intervention. I also think the current situation would be preferable to, say, letting Iran do whatever they want with the strait. If they’d started this off by closing it, I’d be impressed that we got back up to 2/3 transit!
What I don’t see are reasons to prefer it to, well, 3/3 transit.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
All of the following can be true:
- Iran has no ability to force the U.S. out of the strait.
- Iran has minimal ability to threaten traffic through the strait.
- Iran is gradually losing control over oil flows.
- Iran has significant domestic unrest.
- The U.S. has killed, and will continue to kill, any Iranian leadership which gets too aggressive.
- The U.S. can keep this up for longer than a third-rate military.
In fact, all of the following were true before we attacked. We have spent six months and who knows how many weapons—for what? Delaying a nuclear program? Stimulating defense spending? Getting Republicans out of office?
If Trump expected a special operation, in and out in a couple weeks, he was wrong. If he thought Iran would concede after this level of ass-blasting, he was wrong. If he thought another Middle Eastern slog would boost his approval, he was wrong. If he thought oil prices would go back down, he was wrong. Iran had and has zero chance of winning this war on any conceivable metric. That doesn’t mean it was a good deal.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Maybe she’s a diehard Nixon fan?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
More common than you might expect.
The Japanese learned this the hard way over WW2. Coral Sea, maybe Leyte Gulf—tactical draws and even victories are disastrous if the initial conditions are stacked against you.
Since the RN had such a numeric advantage over the Hochseeflotte, a status quo with everyone held up for repairs favored them.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
broke with him
God, I can only hope. I have been perpetually disappointed by the durability of Trump’s coalition. We’ll find out in November.
The coworkers I know who were shocked and appalled at the initial airstrikes almost immediately started saying things like “well, we should have done it in 1980.” You could hear them trying to convince themselves. Then again, our industry directly benefits, so…
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
It was actually a different procedure.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
General Dynamics should have stuck with vanilla Minecraft instead of jumping into GregTech.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
No, speech intended to incite violence was not protected. Making it racist was a shortcut.
are there fighting words for white people?
Uh, yeah. Most of the classic cases are white-on-white. Stuff like “god damned fascist” is obviously outdated, but “fucking pig” still counts. This Montana case has some of the more recent examples. Here’s one from South Carolina. I don’t actually know who (if anyone’s in this scenario was white, but the fighting words consisted of insulting a man’s mother to his and her faces.
Fighting words have to thread a needle. Start with all the times that someone talked shit with the intent of provoking a fight. Remove all the ones which didn’t result in any arrest. Now take out those which turned into assault because the speaker took a swing first. And the ones where he made a “true threat” and ran into a different law. And the ones where he was drunk or high in public. All of those get their own charges, making the speech beside the point.
We’re left with a handful of cases from, like, public nuisance laws. They don’t usually make it to the Supreme Court.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
You’re telling me that we can fix our corrupt, inefficient corporate incentives by…imitating Russia?
But only the good parts, I assume. The ones where you jail your businessmen if they don’t meet quotas set in 1991. Also, all of them need to be engineers, because having too much knowledge of finance turns you into a greedy trickster.
Yeah, the Soviets had a long history with this management style. Ours is better.
Consider that the Army did, in fact, decide its 155mm production was fine until the shooting started in Ukraine. Could they have been, and I know this is outlandish, right? If turning up production went as smoothly as you expected, would it actually have been “responsible” to demand 80s level production for 30 years of low-intensity conflicts?
Or maybe they knew it would be hard. Maybe they, as serious America-haters, decided to cripple an essential war industry. If only there were a strong, patriotic individual with the foresight to demand more 155mm. Need drones? Nope, the law says 155. Pivot to naval production? Nope, I’m not going to prison for that.
It’s a batshit insane model of procurement which would have avoided this problem at tremendous cost. I don’t think you understand procurement, project management, or engineering. As dumb as this Turkish contractor was, I expect you’d have done worse.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
The stinger at the beginning of the article, which wasn't quoted, is
It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
I’m inclined to agree, with a caveat that nobody at the Army probably expected consequences. So far, they’ve been correct.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
Probably true, but not really applicable to this plant. The experimental Turkish machinery seems to have been the sticking point.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
A Texas defense contracting operation moving fast and breaking shit? I guess this is pretty relevant to me.
I started your post thinking most of your observations were correct, but the more I read, the more convinced I was that you’ve missed the forest for the trees. I’m going to argue that our MIC has been too disciplined over the last twenty-odd years. What we’re seeing now is whiplash.
But first, a few comments.
non-engineering finance guy…running [the] business
If you find this surprising or disqualifying, you don’t understand corporate structure. No matter who comes up with an idea, at some point, finance has to sign off on this kind of expansion. This is more a matter of pragmatism than regulation: most engineers do not want to spend their time on budgets and accounting. We hire specialists.
Turkish name btw
If you want to suggest that he hired a Turkish contractor out of racial kinship bias, say it. Then put in the work to actually defend it, because this mealy-mouthed aside isn’t enough. I guess the source article does the same thing. But I digress.
no proper oversight or competition
Slashing the red tape, skipping the wait times, greenlighting lenient deals—none of that inspired any competition? No, the Army was authorized to throw money around without a competitive process. There’s the first problem.
[laundry list of industrial fuckups]
Setting aside any journalistic bias (though I do wonder if ProPublica is as credible here as on abortion), these are embarrassing. Inexcusable. People lose their jobs over less. They might well have lost some here; I don’t think we’d hear about it below Gezen’s level.
My conclusion is that much of US industry and especially the US MIC/govt sector is seriously undisciplined.
You’ve got it backwards. Clusterfucks like this factory exist because the MIC has been obsessed with discipline. Since the war in Iraq, we’ve favored low-volume, high-tech “exquisite” solutions with long development cycles. It wasn’t like the Afghans were going to leapfrog us, right? Low-rate production fit our low-intensity conflicts.
Trying to scale that to the levels needed for Ukraine, let alone China, led the government to wildly overcorrect. Letting the Army issue UCAs is a high-variance strategy. Spend too much money and hope that some of it pays off.
ProPublica says it’s still in effect. I agree. Our business development teams get excited about OTAs and follow-on contracts. If we pitched something that could be assembled in a year, no matter how stupid, I suspect we’d see funding. The whole industry is operating with a sort of frenzied growth mindset. Build it and they will come.
the competent facets of US industry are working elsewhere on rocketry, AI, chips, cars, aircraft
Ahahahahahahahahahaa! Every one of these fields is also full of grifters and incompetents. There’s more competition, so sometimes the rentiers get forced out. But GD is an aircraft and tank producer, too. It is vast, it contains multitudes.
So how do we fix it? Arguably, we don’t: this will at some point get us more military production, if not from this assembly line. I think that’s dumb and inefficient, and we have a duty to handle it better. For pure production, that probably means monopoly-busting. Running a high-variance strategy with one competitor is stupid. GD needs to feel like a rival will eat their lunch.
I also agree that there should be serious consequences for this particular incident. Gezen’s possible forced retirement isn’t enough. If nothing else, switching to an AI buzzword startup should have lost them the contract. I have no way of knowing if GD bought the hype, if the government did, or if nobody actually wants AI artillery shells but it’s too expensive to fire them. It sucks.
But in reality everyone pays lawyers a lot of money for abstract legalistic box-ticking/form-filling that yields little justice.
This may be true, but I suspect we’re closer to justice than anarchy. I’m not convinced that there’s some weird hack which only keeps the useful parts of law.
It’s also why I disfavour free-marketism... Genuine patriotism needs little binding or regulation.
I…what? Which is it? Do you want a command economy or not? I get the impression you’re envisioning a sort of Randian nationalism, where the patriots Just Do Things and everybody else recognizes their innate greatness. Kind of like you mentioned in the Afghanistan section, where
Patriotic US generals should’ve leaked the secret reports showing that the war was a complete disaster
Jesus Christ. How would that have helped at all? More importantly, how do you distinguish between the patriotic, the misled, the stupid?
If your theory relies on hindsight, it’s not a workable theory.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
Yeah, I originally included a sentence about how a leftist murdered Kirk, and the left was way too fucking enthusiastic about it. I absolutely hate the responses that flooded social media. I will stand by the distinction, but it doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.
My wife is one of the most empathetic people I know. I don’t even think she would shoot someone in self-defense. But she will say, with a worried expression, that she wishes Trump had died at that rally. It’s unbelievable. Ingroup, outgroup, fargroup.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
Maybe the web should be purely static again. Web 2.0 was a mistake.
I’m not exactly sure how you envision the blockchain helping, here.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
Was Kirk actually that load-bearing? This is one of those bubble things, maybe, but I never thought he was all that influential. Jordan Peterson seemed to have more pull. The big church groups had more sway than anyone. This was in the Midwest.
Bubble or not, I really disagree that “the left, broadly” did either of those things. A leftist murdered Kirk; a random asshole tried to kill Trump. Blaming “the left” is about as solid as hand-wringing about stochastic terrorism. I believe in individual responsibility.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
gattsuru post
Oh boy! Time to be disappointed in society, maybe a little stressed out.
legal formalist
I’m not really sure that’s the problem here. Thiessen was the bar to clear. If the Post had booted him, or if Attiah had been obviously more extreme, I expect the arbitrator would have gone the other way. See the rejection of the union’s claim of pretextuality.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
Sorry, I’m not trying to be glib.
I think people like the PM recognize that something like this is unworkable, but expect that the benefit of posturing outweighs the costs/risks. Is that “not meaning what they say?” Only if we exclude the middle. There is a continuum between opposing and endorsing a policy, and signaling approval falls somewhere in between endorsement and neutrality.
I also think you captured that sentiment when you said it was an applause light. Talk is cheap, and talking about how one’s government is very sad, totally going to start another investigation, any day now? Business as usual.
But then you dismiss the perfectly good explanation. Why? What makes incompetence more likely than strategy?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
I don’t know who that is and, after reading the replies, I am thankful for that fact.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
8d ago
Not quite. War goals have gotten more abstract, but this is a side effect of the underlying cost/benefit analysis.
When most humans were right on the edge of subsistence farming, you could pay for conquest by extracting tribute, taxes, or slaves. As technology got more complex, the value of a conquered peasant’s labor went down, but you still needed raw materials and food.
Now the first world has basically all the unskilled labor and cheap goods it could want. It produces unbelievable amounts of food. Its most successful businesses are three, four, five steps removed from actually manufacturing stuff out of normal, boring materials. So how are you supposed to monetize a conquest?
National security. When everything your country does has a better rate of return than fighting, you only fight to get back to the other stuff. Hence “making the world safe for democracy.” Hence the Cold War. Now it’s counterterrorism and FONOPs. We slogged through the War on Terror because we had a war goal of never letting anybody try that shit again. Wanton destruction didn’t actually bring that any closer to fruition.
So yeah, we’re setting stupid, impractical war goals. All the old-fashioned ones are economic non-starters. What’s left is power projection supporting our other, more valuable activities.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
10d ago
Good God. It was bad enough to suggest that some sorts of outrage only come from people lying about their beliefs. Now you’ve found a group who must be developmentally disabled?
I’m unreasonably annoyed by this, because it looks like you considered the whole alternative answer I’d have given. Signing the petition is an applause light. These guys aren’t expending the mental effort to flesh out a viable plan. They’re showing up to beat their chests and holler at the other team.
But no, they must “lack the imaginative capacity”? Why? What’s wrong with the first answer? You’re watching people play soccer and insisting that their arms must have been crippled.
It’s not like I disagree on the object level! No shit, the petition is stupid, and I’m sure the free-speech norms which got us to this site are better. Ha ha, point and laugh at the Limeys.
As the kids say: many such cases.
Our customers are signaling the same thing. Visible lack of interest in existing R&D contracts. It’s always “what can you demo within a year?” or “how fast does this enter production?” If someone, even a sketchy startup, gave them a pitch for X units starting in 8 months, I suspect they’d throw money at it.
That hasn’t been very effective for something as complex as my product. Apparently, it’s not even that effective on shells, which are harder than the OP thinks, but at least have clearly defined requirements. I bet there are a couple dozen other contractors in various states of panic as they try to make good on promising the moon.
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