As my dad would say, “A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.” Boats are cool and fun if you like to sail, but between maintenance costs, mooring fees, the cost to take it out of the water and store it at a boat yard once the season is over, scrape the barnacles off, repaint it, etc. it’s not a cheap endeavor.
The War Thunder community has entered the chat and leaked a classified document
There’s a good reason that Hitler’s concentration camps and Final Solution were inspired by America’s campaign against the native nations.
Massachusetts has a little bit of that as well, though in my experience, it only really means that the tribe members have more relaxed rules around regulated hunting/fishing seasons. Being able to fish out of season and harvest in closed shellfish beds, that sort of thing.
I don’t even work in tech and that was my first thought.
We’re also surprisingly resilient compared to many other species. We can recover from wounds that would be lethal for other animals in weeks or months - such as broken or even lost limbs. We grow scar tissue at a pretty rapid pace as well, allowing us to heal wounds quickly. And our pain tolerance is high enough that other animals would drop dead of shock from some of these things. We invented surgery at least 200 years before painkillers, and things that we consider minor surgery would outright kill other animals. Hell, we were punching holes in our skulls to “let the bad light out” in the Neolithic era. Our mouths grow too many teeth, so we rip them out and graft metal onto the rest to force them to grow in alignment.
Our endurance is so high that the only other species that can keep up with us is dogs, and even then, they can only sort of keep up. We used to have a hunting strategy where we’d follow an animal at a walking pace for hours on end, never letting them rest, until they eventually couldn’t run anymore or simply dropped dead from exhaustion. We have a pretty wide range of temperatures and climates that we can survive in thanks to our ability to sweat off heat and shiver to burn extra calories for warmth. We can go 3 days without any food or water, and a full week with only water to sustain us.
There was a great sci-fi short story somebody wrote once about how humans were some of the most beloved crew members for spaceships because while we may not be the strongest, fastest, or most intelligent species out there, our ability to pack-bond with literally anything - including inanimate objects - and crazy endurance meant that we were the most dependable and capable species in a crisis. A human would jump into Hell itself in order to save a crewmate and simply walk it off like it was nothing afterward.
The biggest “snowflakes” have always been conservatives. So afraid of anyone who doesn’t look or act like them.
My first thought had been along the same lines. I thought of the word anemoia from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:
anemoia - n. nostalgia for a time you’ve never known
youtube.com/watch?v=wH6ZClRjl14
Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins - and live in a completely different world.
Vaporwave is inherently about a time that never existed, as it’s a re-interpretation of very specific parts of a time period into an aesthetic. A nostalgia for dial-up modems, corporate ad jingles, and hold music all rolled up in that one pattern every paper cup had in the 90s with classical era statues, southern California palm trees in the sunset, and dolphins. A tourist’s view of the nascent internet and the corporate tech world of the time.
Fuck that and the fuck the ADL. There is no unity to be had with fascists.
It was also so fast because it was using a pair of repurposed cruise missile engines that had to be completely replaced after about 100 hours of flight time because they were designed to be single use.
That’s fair. Not everyone is good at Little League, after all. 😉
Are you a friend of Dorothy?
If we’re gonna get nitpicky on this (which we might as well), we should include the cost of bandwidth when talking about the cloud. They offer the storage for free (theoretically), but it still costs you money to upload and download that data.
I was just having a similar conversation with some people about the rapidly increasing size demands from video games, and somebody brought up the point of bandwidth as an issue as important as the size on disk. If you have to download multi-gig patches for a 100+ gig game, that’s going to very quickly eat through monthly data caps.
Having played War Thunder, I can say with complete certainty that the Ratte would move at a respectable 2 km/h, be unable to deal with anything more extreme than a 3 degree incline, and would’ve seen combat against Leopard 2s and Abrams while only having access to HE rounds.
Unfortunately, nobody would be able to take him out that quickly. Russia still has plenty of nukes, and they could fire them all before anybody has time to react. If that nuke is an ICBM, though, as soon as it leaves the silo the world would know, and the counter barrage of nukes would be firing up before it even lands.
I originally meant that dropping a nuke would have the entire world declare war on Russia, even his former allies because no one wants to rule over a pile of radioactive rocks, but thinking about it, his allies would probably be the ones most likely to try to have him assassinated in that situation. A maniac with a big stick is only useful so long as you don’t have to worry about him smacking you with it, too.
Mutually assured destruction is still a thing. We may not be at Cold War levels of insanity, where between the US and Russia there were enough nukes to glass the planet like 150 times over, but plenty of nations have arsenals (especially in Europe), and the best way to make enemies of the entirety of the world would be to be the first one to launch a nuke. Dropping a nuke would signal to every leader in the world that no country is safe from becoming an irradiated wasteland.
I think if Putin dropped a nuke, his allies would drop him faster than it would take NATO to declare all out war with Russia.
throw a parachute on it so it’s aligned vertically, make it detonate when it lands, make it blow straight down as opposed to all over the place, and try to get that thing to land on a tank
You’ve basically just described a HEAT round without the melted copper penetrator.
Life, uh, finds a way.
The 30mm “Barrett” Pattern bolter, created by MARS, Inc. and Barrett, is currently undergoing evaluations by the US Army.
Everything old is new again.
I used to work at a fish market, and one of the fishermen we dealt with once won a large sum of money from a big fishing tournament. When they asked him what he was gonna do with the money, his response was, “Keep fishing until it’s all gone.”