Doesn’t surprise me. If you can shell out once for a GPU/NPU and not have to keep paying for tokens, that is an easy sell for a great many. And if the human has to review the output anyway getting output that’s a little worse but a lot cheaper is an attractive offer.

The thing that bugs me about Trump and the administration is how little planning and forethought seems to go into things of worldwide significance. Ready-Fire-Aim is a joke it should not be how the nation (formerly) leading the free world operates. And worse is the mindset it represents.

Our government employs a great many experts on Islamic extremism, and I can promise you that not one of them is too busy to meet with the Secretary of Defense.

And yet either these experts weren’t consulted, or their advice was ignored. The announcement went out anyway. And now there’s probably room fulls of experts all screaming that this will cause far more problems than it’ll solve, so there’s backpedaling.

So I ask, if I was Hegseth what would create this situation? And the most likely answer I come up with, like an awful lot of Trump decisions, is that I just assume everyone is either like me or like a stereotype and act accordingly. I don’t need to study or consult because It’s My Job To Make The Decision and I Made The Decision.
The result of that is decisions are made off the cuff, without consideration or forethought, which leads to problems that are both easily predicted and easily prevented.

Iran is another perfect example. We want to get rid of Iran, so we go in, fire a fuckton of guided missiles (which cost $1.5 million each, and apparently we have no way to replace them), blow up the leader and some buildings, then step back and do nothing to manage the resulting aftermath. The religious council naturally appoints the leader’s son as new supreme leader, and whoops seems they still have a functional military and by deploying it to a tiny patch of water can grind worldwide trade to a fucking halt. Now they’re organized again and they’re pissed, and we’re almost out of missiles so we don’t want to start another war. So we’re negotiating with the guy whose dad we just killed begging him to stop killing the global economy.

Did nobody consider this possibility ahead of time?

I’m NOT an expert on Iran. But from what little I learned on Wikipedia, I can tell you with near certainty that if you want to ‘stop’ Iran you have to kill or capture not just the supreme leader but the religious council who appoints him, and many high ranking members of the IRGC also. Do that and install a temporary puppet government with a promise of free elections in a year, or find whoever’s the current 'heir to the throne and install them as Shah under the old governmental structure. Then leave enough forces behind to keep the remainder of IRGC loyalists from causing trouble. This requires more than missiles, it requires a bunch of ‘wet work’ (think spy movies / assassinations). It requires boots on the ground. It requires putting Americans in harm’s way. Overall it will take years and cost $billions. But the result, if done correctly, could be the secularization of Iran- undoing our evils when we helped depose the Shah.
Shooting off a bunch of missiles and expecting the problem to go away doesn’t make the problem go away.

A few thoughts on this.

I’m strongly against capital punishment. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty who deserve to die and the world is better off without. But our criminal justice system, while good, has made too many mistakes. Plus, given all the appeals and whatnot, it’s actually cheaper to keep someone in jail for life than to execute them.

The problem with our society is when it comes to violence, we live in a state of almost childlike innocence. The vast majority of Americans have NO exposure to real violence and death. The vast majority of Americans have never seen another human die, in real life or on video. The vast majority of Americans have never even seen a real dead body. We censor any death or gore on news, and call ourselves civilized.

Even our ‘violent’ movies and TV are nonsense- the bad guy gets shot, a squib goes off under his shirt, and he falls down. Meanwhile the hero is taking blow after blow that (in reality) would each cause life-altering injuries. It’s almost cartoonish.

So with this innocent ignorance, we then debate things like war, gang violence, and capital punishment as abstract academic concepts, as we have no frame of reference to ground them in reality.

Personally I think more Americans should acquaint themselves with the reality of the world we inhabit. The reality is that human bodies are fragile as hell, it doesn’t take a lot to seriously wreck one in all kinds of ways, and when that happens it’s NOT funny or pretty.

So for that reason, I would like to see at least the recordings of executions be made public. If the American people are going to discuss a policy, they should see what they are actually discussing. I suspect one video of an electric chair execution would be enough to end capital punishment in the USA for good. But even still with firing squad, I think people should see the reality of turning a living human into a dead human.

With that all said- this is NOT the place to do that.

This is not about domestic policy. This is about international peacekeeping. To the Islamic extremists, this guy is a hero. Shoot him live on TV and you turn him into a martyr. The extremist people WANT to die in service of their cause. Death is not a feared consequence, it’s the expected end of martyring themselves. You think someone who goes to shoot up a mall expects to live through to retirement? No, they understand that’s the end, they just want to take out others at the same time.
This video would not ‘strike fear in their hearts’, it would be a recruitment tool! This is something anyone with even the most basic understanding of Islamic extremism understands. I don’t understand why the so-called experts are ignoring it.

That’s fair. You’re basically saying that they’re promoting college interns to the director’s table because they happen to support the CEO and that doesn’t mean they’ll be good directors or anything other than loyal to the CEO. It’s a valid argument.

I’m only saying that the whole narrative of old=bad isn’t necessarily always right.

Yup. If Congress was all people with the fortitude of ‘old guys’ like Bernie Sanders (even ignoring his politics if you don’t like them) the USA would be a much better place.

I say fortitude because the guy’s been pushing the exact same positions for like 30 years. There’s NO question of Bernie flip-flopping on an issue because whatever he’s pushing today is usually the exact same thing he was pushing a decade or three ago and will probably be what he’s pushing until he dies.

The concern is valid, but isn’t this one of those things that we’ve been arguing for? That is, having government people like representatives and judges shouldn’t all be old geezers with little grasp on modern life?

I was able to disable but not uninstall it…

That’s fun. I’m really glad to know that. Thank you. :\

Jokes aside- while I realize there’s lots of safety systems in place, this seems like a dangerous culture that’s long due for some change. In aviation, an awful lot of our regulations are written in blood, and we’ve gotten rid of a lot of the ‘we’ve always done it that way’ and ‘Captain always knows best no matter what’ / ‘Always listen to authority’ stuff because it literally kills people.

I’m curious, if you’re willing to share, why we’ve not seen a major accident due to this sort of culture?

Also in exchange for this fun information you’ve provided, I have some more fun knowledge…

Pools. Everybody knows the chlorine kills germs.
Thing is, chlorine has relatively little odor. When chlorine binds with organic materials it produces chloramine, which has a very distinctive chlorine-y smell. This happens very quickly with urine. In a properly maintained pool, ‘shock’ treatment is regularly done to burn off the chloramine.

So when you visit a pool and you smell the chlorine, all that means is the pool is badly maintained and/or someone recently peed in it.

Have a nice day :D

Given that the oversight and operation of nuclear reactors is a fairly simple and straightforward process with few consequences for mistakes and benign failure modes, I’m sure that operator error incidents due to sleep deprivation would have few consequences and are generally not worth preventing.

I’d be up all night and in the morning we couldn’t go to bed until after quarters and the XOs inspection of berthing, which was like 11am.

Seems like a command staff seriously out to lunch. A good commander would recognize that letting your people get sleep they need is more important than making sure every bed is made correctly.

The problem is the procurement for many of these munitions.

We haven’t been in an active hot shooting war in some time. So things like interceptors we order a couple dozen a year at most just to keep the pipeline active and our allies restocked. The manufacturers are making them on a slow-line process- think hand machining parts, processes that don’t scale up easily.

Then we go from needing 50 a year to 500 tomorrow, another 500 next month, another 1000 the month after that, etc. The companies making them are simply not set up for bulk assembly-line production.
They can start, but it takes quite some time to set that up. Especially when the missile itself was not engineered for mass production.

It’s a similar deal with more mundane munitions like 155mm shells. Things like the propellant are only made by a tiny handful of companies as it’s a dangerous business with low product demand. So with Ukraine and other wars we suddenly want 100,000 shells per month, and we’re literally building assembly lines from scratch.

Fighting an uphill battle with the biggest opponents being their own party. :\

Oh I have no hopes at all. I’d hope that Dems might press it but they seem consistently determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by ignoring their voters’ calls for reform and nominating boring, status-quo candidates like Kamala Harris while actively sidelining more energetic reform-minded candidates. Not to mention half the shit GW Bush did was actively unconstitutional if not actively classifiable as a war crime, IE torture memos, warrantless wiretapping, etc, and the Dems did fuck all about it when they took power.

Assuming what’s happening is what we all think/know is happening I would really love to see someone go to jail over this.

There’s like 20 things he could do all the way from a public appearance down to simply releasing medical records. He’s doing none of them.

When evaluating such things, I look at motivation. I put myself in the other person’s shoes, and ask what set of circumstances or motivations would cause me to act as I am?

Take for example the lot of people who make outlandish claims about hover propulsion, free energy from drinking water, etc.
I put myself in those shoes, and I say ‘okay, I just built a device that turns water into power. What do I do?’
Most likely I patent the thing, build 50 of them, and send them off to research labs for evaluation. When everyone concludes my thing works, I start licensing the patents for $billions and I retire.

On the other hand, let’s say I invent a water-to-power machine but it doesn’t work. What do I do? I act sketchy, try to appeal to people without much sense, try to get their money.

Which one more matches the behavior of the person advertising the free energy machine? The second one? Then I guess it’s probably bullshit.

Same deal here. If I was McConnell or his staff and I was alive and was going to return to the Senate, I’d post a video, I’d release medical records, I’d do something to reassure my constituents that I will continue to represent them.
On the other hand if I was a political director for a dead or brain-dead or almost-dead Senator, and I didn’t want the opposing Governor to appoint a successor, I’d do whatever it took to delay the world realizing that the Senator won’t be returning ever. Delay, Deny, Defend. Then once the deadline passes, we announce the Senator has ‘made an unfortunate turn for the worse’ and no longer is able to return. And our defense against fraud is someone we pay off to swear that when our brain-dead comatose Senator was asked if he’d return, his eyelids twitched twice for yes.

Honestly at this point I think the governor should just declare Mitch to be either deceased or unable to serve and start the process of appointing a successor. Then if Mitch’s team challenges him, say look I want to be wrong please produce the Senator for an in person visit or appearance of any kind, or shut up.

Because if you strip away the politics, McConnell is there to represent the interests of his constituents. If he is unwilling or unable to do so then he should be replaced.