I mean… you really can’t. Contracts and even people on the ground more or less reveal this real fast (and is what the OSINT community lives off of). The US and even Ukraine do the same. You can keep it a secret exactly how juicy a target is but you can’t really hide that missiles or tanks or whatever are being built somewhere.

For example, a buddy of mine lives near a US facility that is near some REALLY nice climbing areas nearby. Every couple of months the army swings by and tells everyone to go the fuck away. And it does not take much brain power to realize that THAT is when they are moving whatever they don’t want people to know is at that base. But any other time? You can literally watch equipment being moved from warehouse/hanger to warehouse/hanger while giving someone a belay.

Can we? Yes. Immediately sending peacekeeping forces to prevent the IDF from continuing to engage in genocide and coordination with neighboring countries to figure out whether this is a relocation situation or a proper two state solution (and what that would require).

Will we? No. Because if we cared we would have done it decades ago. The US doesn’t care because we decided Israel are our allies in the region and most of NATO falls along those lines. And neighboring countries don’t care because they don’t actually like the Palestinian people (and actively block refugees) and mostly just want to hurt Israel through them.

It is the biggest “problem” of modern warfare. We don’t fight wars of conquest anymore because that tends to actually make other countries care (because those brown people have resources!). So we attack and then leave.

It is similar to why France and England (or China/Japan/Korea) were basically at continuous levels of war for hundreds (?) of years. Because when you roll up and kill a bunch of people and maybe steal a goat? The remaining people want revenge. When you conquer them and either ethnically cleanse them to nonexistence or integrate them into your society? They forget why they were angry after a generation or two.

I very much do NOT believe the world would be a better place with more ethnic cleansing and stealing of land. But we also are in a mess where retaliation between countries just continues with no real consequences to the people who are calling for the attacks. And the civilians just get rightfully angry when their kid is permanently blinded because she was looking the wrong way at the Lebanese equivalent of a Kroger.

And then you get the keyboard warriors who hop in decades (or even centuries) into the conflict, pick a side, and immediately say THESE terrorists are good guys and THOSE terrorists are bad guys.

The pagers were very questionable. Even assuming ONLY hezbollah had the explosive pagers, they were still detonating in public since the point of a pager is to be able to carry it around.

Walkie talkie wise? I still need to reflexively condemn anything that kills children. But… that actually does seem super targeted and would presumably not be something a terrorist “should” carry around in public during their non-terrorist lives.

I mean… none of that actually helps a third party at the presidential level. Or even addresses spoilers. Going to address your points out of order to make my own

If not, the candidates with the fewest first choice is eliminated, and those that voted for them, they move on to their second choice picks.

So… the third party candidates get eliminated in the first round. Because they cannot compete with the two big parties in terms of campaign funding. Assuming it doesn’t end in the first round because…

If a candidate gets the majority vote in the first choices they win outright.

So the republican wins because there is one right wing fascist running against a dozen flavors of Left wing. Or the Democrat wins because all the third parties were a negligible percentage of the vote to begin with.

I HAVE seen proposals that change the ordering so that a third party “can’t” be a spoiler (I forget the specifics but basically it is removing the small percentage votes first and only comparing once you downselect to N candidates where N is usually 2) but…

People confuse the idea of making a third party candidate viable with minimizing how much you are pissing away your vote by voting for a third party in the presidential election. Ranked choice is great for the latter but it still has many of the same spoiler problems without additional changes. And, arguably, would increase the impact of third party spoilers if one party over-splits. I continue to point people toward the mess in France where basically all the Left wing parties had to unite and make a coalition to MAYBE stop the right wing fascists.

Personally? I would much rather we abolish the electoral college and just do a popular vote. That will have a MUCH bigger impact on third party candidates because it suddenly becomes viable to run a national campaign where you convince maybe 15% of the overall populace rather than needing 40% of each county just to end up on the politico map. Because the latter is what really screws over third parties at the presidential level because they just don’t have the money or resources to sway enough counties to get any meaningful electoral college votes. And ranked choice alone has no impact on that.

It depends how you look at it.

Ranked Choice is not going to make a third party viable at the presidential level. Simply because the other two parties have orders of magnitude more funding to campaign and make sure people know and “like” their candidates. And, depending on the implementation of ranked choice, it may still result in splitting the vote.

At the congressional representative level? Ranked choice has a lot of benefits there. But that is also the level where third party candidates are still viable under the current model.

The reality is that most of the things people want out of ranked choice we already have out of the primary system. Wide range of candidates run in the primary on each side. Primaries exist to figure out who The People like and to let the party down select. Done right, you have what would otherwise have been “third party” candidates who suddenly have a LOT of influence within the party (see: Bernie Sanders in 2020… less so in 2016) because they get a lot of influence on the platform in exchange for supporting the candidate who has the majority of the vote and the party backing.

The key is that people need to understand they are still compromising to get some of what they want AND to engage with their local (and even national) parties to make sure their voices are heard.

Supply chains matter a lot and governments, let alone terrorist organizations, fail to protect them.

US centric, but far too much of policy is “Don’t buy Made in China” with no thought beyond that.

For this scenario? My assumption is they ordered from their usual supply sources and nothing was hinky. But Israel (or whoever) compromised a port or fedex center along the way and installed some explosives since the only people buying those pagers were terrorists. And nobody on the hezbollah side even bothered to weigh the packages before handing them out.

That is 95% false and is the nonsense that has mostly been pedaled by the musks of the world to justify privatized space flight.

Like everything with the US military industrial complex, we split everything up to nonsensical degrees. So much of the research and designs NASA uses are based on work and spec by the Army and Air Force. Which, in turn, leads to very specific proposals for companies like Boeing (eep) and the like.

But the actual design and research and even “small scale” testing? That is generally NASA and JPL. JPL in particular being a government research lab (similar model used by the Navy and the DOE) that coordinates with in house talent as well as university groups around the country.

But as spacex and the like basically poached so much of the top talent out of NASA and JPL and universities? It stopped being “Build this rocket to these specs” and more “Hmm. That rocket you are trying to sell us looks REAL familiar but we have been told by congress we can’t design it ourselves so here is your money. Say hi to Fred for us.”

I mean, nationalized spacex is just NASA again. Which I am all for since spacex (and blue origin and the other one) mostly just came out of poaching staff from NASA and JPL in the first place.

Which is a completely different topic.

starlink works… if it isn’t out in the sun for too long. spacex works… for the purposes of what the actual contracts are for.

the issue is musk being highly likely to be compromised and openly calling for the rape and murder of people he doesn’t like. Which gets back to “politics is allowed and you are the intolerant one” level responses.

Yeah… spend some time actually interacting with people with clearances. They are people just like any other so you have some humans and some deranged chuds. And everyone in positions of power are either political appointees (elected or otherwise) or ladder climbers who want to suckle on the teat of those appointees.

So when you point out that someone is actively cheering for russia in a conflict with our allies or is openly calling people slurs? You get told that people are allowed to have political opinions and you are the problem. Because YOU are the reasonable person who will drop it. Whereas they will then bitch and moan that someone in IT has “blue hair” and whine until a local politician runs on that and suddenly everyone has very strict dress codes.

Which, in turn, leads to people leaving in droves which just leaves the shitheads and the appeasers.

It isn’t about being “evergreen”. It is about having historical evidence.

Because maybe someone will do a study in 2030 and want to be able to compare to your UX research in the 2000s. If you wrote your paper properly they can reproduce your experiments (to the degree reasonable) and actually demonstrate progress.

Its the inherent disconnect between “News” and “Science”.

Science requires rigorous study and incremental advancement. A 2023 article based on 2022 data is inherently understood to be… 2022 data (note: I did not actually check but that is the timeline I assume. It is in the study).

But news and social media just want headlines that get people angry and reinforce whatever nonsense people want to Believe.

It is similar to explaining basic concepts. Been a minute since the last time I was properly briefed, but think stuff like “Do NOT say ‘theory’ of evolution. Instead, talk about how evolution is the only accepted justification based on evidence and research”

Vance is immensely unlikable even amongst the republican base. And the past eight years have made it clear that trump can only really get trump elected. The only downside of him going to hell is that it will give republicans a few more years to figure out their post-trump pivot (which seems to be liz cheney).

One can just as easily argue that that is the point of primaries in the US and other countries. You get a wide range of left and right leaning candidates and you downselect based on who the majority wants as well as general election theory to handle moderates.

And… the end result is that people get incredibly pissy when their candidate doesn’t win and disenfranchise themselves. Theoretically, a very strict ranked choice model that requires ALL candidates to be ranked could help with that but you still get into the realm of “protest votes”. See: People who refused to vote for Biden because he had shit stances on genocide and who would have given trump, who is openly genocidal, the win.

The reality is that we need to actually educate people on how governments work to undo decades of “haw haw, douche or a turd sandwich” levels of narrative. But we also need the politicians to actually unite against common threats. The fascists already understand that. But the Left continues to infight at every opportunity.

Why would he need the money?

It isn’t like he pays his lawyers. And you don’t need a great lawyer to appeal a sensitive case indefinitely.

And… it isn’t like he paid his terrorists. He left them hanging out to dry after they failed to murder pence and the entirety of congress a couple years back.

Also, I have a strong suspicion that he’ll end up pushing for some blatantly illegal “charity” where True Believers can donate to The Real President Of The United States.

And lastly: Money is not a cure for novichok.

Good on the workers. But my worry is that Boeing is a sinking ship and this will end up as anti-union propaganda when they (not the doors that fall off mid-flight) are what is blamed for Boeing collapsing.

Not gonna lie. The bar is so incredibly low that, at the risk of invoking dril, at least Child Fucker In Chief acknowledges those are some pretty evil beliefs about immigrants.

Not sure on ApeLegs but they have increasingly been disabling linux “support” for the Battlefields because of their anti-cheat.

I don’t know how popular ApeLegs actually is. But for a lot of live games? Those are making MASSIVE bank and anything that can hurt the economy can kill the game. So a lot of studios actively just disable/block linux support because the added effort of making sure everything works in Proton is too big of a risk. Because nothing would increase Linux marketshare quite like free vdollars in Fortnite.

It really fucking sucks. But I find that many studios (like Digital Extremes) are really good about making it clear that even though they don’t officially support Linux, they are very much fans of Proton (and Warframe has had a lot of bugfixes specifically FOR Proton support). Whereas EA has spent the past few months systematically disabling Linux “support” for every game they develop.

No. I expect them to have figured that out during the prep for my surgery. Even a surgeon who does that exact procedure every week should be reviewing the steps before they scrub up. Same with the team.