No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
11d ago
It's sometimes used but I have doubts about the 'a lot's. SpaceX disables access for the ones in Russia. They're easily capable of preventing Russians from using them.
No_one
11d ago
How is the ease with which a modern military could impose a police state 'assuming the conclusion ' ?
You're going to need to explain that because it seems erroneous.
will take a substantial period of time
You sure? Simply grabbing the cell phone operator's admins by the throat, sending in your own experts and the network disconnecting devices whose IMEIs aren't registered as using the app would get most everyone who uses the phones to do so.
Alternative is not having any comms.
No_one
11d ago
Expecting Iranians not to be able to build compact, boosted fission warheads 70 years after such were first built is unreasonable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosted_fission_weapon
Note that they do have an interest in lithium 6 separation.
More importantly, to play MAD, you have to have launch-ready nuclear weapons.
Chinese spent decades with hydrogen bombs and a definitely not launch ready posture.
Neither India nor Pakistan have MAD capability, yet their weapons are still deemed useful.
For the purposes of scaring away carrier groups, fission warheads are entirely sufficient. While you may think glassing cities after the enemy blew up a carrier or military base of yours is a proportional response, most of the world wouldn't think so.
No_one
12d ago
...until you get outside of the cities with the infrastructure to support a constant surveillance system. Which is to say, most of any given country, including China.
Seeing as drones are proliferating on the battlefield, in 20 years a platoon is going to have an APC with a server rack with more intelligence than an small office building of west pointers and a dozen recon drones in the air at all times.
Between everyone having a phone which can be easily turned into a snitch that keeps track of where you go and military drones, keeping the population surveilled and preventing it from feeding or aiding guerrillas is going to be a lot easier.
They were doing this in Xinyang. Every single person had to use a phone with a tracking app, they were also checking in arrivals at every single building, probably noting who was in close proximity. This isn't even SF, this is present day counter-insurgency
global support flows from cyber attacks / satellite communication support operations.
Tell me, how are there going to be 'cyber attacks' when the army will go around methodically securing or destroying all satellite comms on the grounds of them being security risks ? And the national fiber network is of course not going to be left in place, it's going to be severed from the internet and any channels going in or out are going to be approved by some paranoid AI system ?
still requires you to set up a nation-wide panopticon
Setting up a nation-wide panopticon is only as hard as is forcing the population, at gunpoint, to install the right brand of spyware app onto their phone.
Not very hard at all. They need the phones for most financial operations and they use either android or apple, so you need two kinds of apps to use lol. Verrry difficult. I'm sure there's going to be 3-4 Chinese vendors of such apps fiercely competing with each other over features.
With global IQ of 90 and AI, spyware apps are probably going to come into fashion to prevent silicon mischief.
No_one
12d ago
I dare say that militaries are not going to 'vibe code' their networks, or if they do that they're going to continually run automated AI hacking attempts at it in order to find all possible exploits and patch them.
EDIT: i should read more carefully and post not as late at night.
You don't remember the congressional baseball match shootout? Just 8 yrs ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shooting
Perp was an abusive asshole if you read about his background, strongly political but not a schizo.
The only reason it wasn't a mass murder is luck and maybe the perp not being that great a shot?
No_one
13d ago
Warheads on missiles are removable. All they'd need to do to launch a nuke is replace the warhead in one of their missiles with a nuclear one.
They know that Israel has invested a ton in missile defense and would probably gamble on being able to shoot down a lone surviving ballistic missile or two.
Israeli ABM consistently fails to intercept fast missiles that evade. It's simply too hard a problem. You need to track them exactly and guide interceptors, which have guidance issues bc of aerodynamic heating onto the incoming stuff.
They can intercept ballistic missiles all right, but not the more modern, faster ones that glide ..
No_one
13d ago
Total informational blackout, facial ID systems and military drones are going to make occupations much less painful. If you can conduct head counts, track every single person with with cameras or transponders and run AIs to spot suspicious activity, anomalous food use or insurgent activity, war of conquest gets a lot easier.
Also, the age of hobbyist level drones being militarily useful against China or Chinese friendly states ends 5 years from now, at worst.
No_one
13d ago
Don't worry about Taiwan war.
American magazines of anti-missile interceptors are so low they'd never even get carriers in range to help Taiwan.
The war would be, perhaps, a blockade of Malacca straits and some posturing/cyber warfare etc.
No_one
13d ago
They provided blueprints and a couple thousand, so maybe (gasp) $30,000,000 in crappy drones. That's less than a single jet.
Russians are now making Geran-2 drones wholly on their own.
No_one
13d ago
Israel isn't a NPT member state.
The actual impetus appears to be the stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, but 60% enriched uranium isn't itself a violation of the NPT.
With modern centrifuges that's a few days away from material for efficient uranium bombs.
No_one
13d ago
Aren't Israelis guaranteed to blow up the Kharg island oil terminal and any other terminals if Iran refuses to hand over the uranium?
No_one
13d ago
It's not possible for a MOAP to destroy a facility 100m deep in rock. It's intended to strike bunkers 40m deep in soils.
You would need a lot of successive strikes, possibly with something in between else to remove rubble and allow deeper penetration.
No_one
13d ago
These are not really comparable, method or cohort wise. Postal survey is probably biased towards bored old people..
Also it's strongly suggestive that on the link paper claims length of exposure to finasteride was correlated with the ED..
No_one
14d ago
So it's a show that selects for lolcows and then allows them to humiliate themselves by their unwise actions?
No_one
14d ago
Okay, it might be noting, but here's some keywords you can look up.
No_one
14d ago
the absolute risk is not so high that you need to run away screaming
You suggest this ED is some sort of lizardman finding and if you examined the health database you'd find 1.5% 15-42 male are getting ED that lasts 5 years even even if they don't use finasteride?
No_one
14d ago
Even if you're in the unlucky 1-2% that gets significant side effects, they usually wear off in weeks or months from cessation.
Papers on that say something completely different.
1.4% (167 men) developed persistent erectile dysfunction lasting a median of 1348 days.
No_one
14d ago
...you didn't hear there's some new molecule that apparently revives dormant hair roots and in tests, bald men grew their hair back?
It's nothing hormonal and doesn't have the dire risk profile of finasteride etc.
No_one
14d ago
Living on the top floor of an apartment building I've come to appreciate heat waves intimately. The building is well insulated and barely needs heating if it's >10°C, but the roof volume is not ventilated at all, so during heat waves, that whole part of the building accumulates heat and temperature in my apartment gets to slightly above shade temperature and barely dips during the night.
I am now wondering if 2 months of slightly uncomfortable temperatures (27-29°C) and, on average, one week of really uncomfortable (32-38°C) are worth installing AC.
Or how much difference ventilating the building roof thoroughly could do. A single 100W fan would exchange all the air in the attic twice in an hour. That should be vastly cheaper than AC and depending on how much it'd cut the need for AC, neighbors might even help with funding that.
Yeah, skin deep writing. Pretty much. The concepts are fine, but the quests and the unit lore is just .. ugh. Just not to my taste. Almost tempted to rewrite that stuff to be less cringe. Starsector has relatively decent writing that doesn't feel insulting, but that's probably because the game devs are clearly SF readers.
Couple more annoying things: I feel like planes should have fuel / require bases like in SMACX and I just plain dislike titans. Logistically they're just kind of dumb and conceptually don't make that much sense either. And what is even the point where e.g. Praetorians kill various titans without much issue and are air-mobile?
Wonder how hard modding it is.
If roads were cheaper/could be built automatically and supplies were not automatically delivered but depended on accessibility and supply depots/convoys, the game would get a fair amount of depth.
If you could make formations out of units and move them at once, that'd be very good too.
Also, it's nice that each unit has a specific weapon because swapping out those weapons for others same way heroes swap out items would make it much more interesting. I don't get why weapon selection isn't already in the game. Endless Legend had unit builds and it added some depth to the combat..
Nothing revolutionary at all, but it works well enough.
Tbh the combat is a fair bit deeper than in ordinary 4x games, or at least could be with some more options.
Good, interesting write up.
However:
Were the claims by Sanders supporters that DNC essentially sabotaged his chances to win primaries in '16 plain lies?
I have a hard time believing in 'neutral' institutions in the first place.
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