busdriver

One year ago, the DNC/Clinton campaign paid $113k to the FEC for violating campaign finance laws. The violation was paying Christopher Steele to conduct opposition research on the Trump campaign and then documenting those payments as legal services (familiar sounding..). In the grand scheme of campaign finance violations, that's a trivial sum considering millions of fines are handed out annually. All of that is to say, that is the precedent that has been set on the level of "seriousness" of these types of charges. Which makes the current charade in NYC seem a little out of proportion. The inevitable tit-for-tat that will come is going to be bad. The internet troll case is far worse however.

If Peter Zeihan is to be believed (the first bullet is his point, he has explicitly said what follows is what he's heard from some folks), here's the calculus at the strategic level: -Russia will not stop with Ukraine, they will continue expanding till they have secured defensible borders. They view it as an existential problem. -The Russian military has proven to be awful and would get monkey stomped by the western/NATO coalition that would meet them. Which means there is almost no way to avoid a nuclear exchange. -So the Russian military needs to be attritted in Ukraine. Win, lose, or draw, what remains needs to be incapable of continued offense. If that is actually what is going on in the head-shed. I'd imagine this is a blank check.

Yes. It has always been a case of roll the dice on where the needs of the Air Force sit when your time comes. Also who your commanders are at that point in time, current command climate, etc. etc. It has always been a gamble, the odds have just swung back in the other direction.

Masked when I was a LT, unmasked as a captain, then remasked as a major, then retired last spring, now unmasked again.

Ballistic tolerance to 7.62 is built in to modern military helicopter designs (at least UH-60 and AH-64), and the skin material has nothing to do with it. Fixing a composite structure isn't super hard, just different and requires different tools. People have been building composite planes in their garages since the 70s. Nerd Stuff: Everything VTOL has severe weight penalties to performance, so whether aluminum or composite the skin is very thin and provides no ballistic tolerance benefit. Armor plating inside is more about keeping rounds from hitting occupants than protecting the airframe. Instead, the components themselves are designed to be damage tolerant (keep functioning after taking a round), systems are redundant, and less critical systems are used to shield more critical systems.

To be fair. Twitter hasn't looked good from a financial perspective, ever. It simply isn't a profitable business, and its "valuation" has always been nonsense. Also, characterizing a muzzle loading pistol (alongside a picture of Washington crossing the Delaware) and a sci-fi video game prop (from a game in which totalitarian corporations rule the world) as a picture of "handguns" is well, missing the point I guess.

Modern social media is the youtube comments section, without the videos.

Link Per the Gazette, the coaches who broke the rules were fired, and USAFA self reported to the NCAA.

Double stack 1911. So yeah, kind of. Except the design is from the '90s.

I suspect that one is gonna take some tinkering or a trip to a smith (that's familiar with competition guns) to get running correctly. At least the 5 inch one, that's a lot of mass for "normal" 9mm. Or go with Bul Armory, Staccato, Masterpiece Arms, Atlas Gunworks, Infinity. In increasing cost.

Friends don't let friends buy plastic guns. At least not as range toys. Just commit to the real deal, buy a 2011. You'll never look at tupperware the same again.

Agreed. The point that I missed was basically: Russian tech industry sucks, and they can't build anything advanced without access to intermediate goods. So they can't replace their advanced military systems.

I like Matt Yglesias mainly since he's 100% lefty but generally sees past the polemic BS that's ever present in our modern politics. He also just wrote an interesting piece on how badly Russia screwed this thing up. Most interesting to me was that I missed the impact of sanctions removing Russian access to intermediate production products (chips as an example). https://www.slowboring.com/p/russias-military-and-economic-strategy

And reads nothing like what Rand produces.

I think what you're alluding to is the so called small, modular reactors. In my estimation, the primary advantage of these is less their size, and more the standardized safety design(s). In other words, a 300Mw reactor could have 1-4 pre-approved configurations (# of reactors in the facility), which would hopefully make the regulatory approval process shorter, and allow new facilities to get started in a reasonable timeline. In any event. Agreed.

I'm watching Aptera as well. I actually think their manufacturing techniques/ideas are more interesting than the car. Honestly: Elon. He made electric vehicles cool and up-market. Everything previously was an over priced econo-box. I suspect the weight/cost penalty doesn't work out well. A single train car carries something like 4 semi-trailers worth of stuff. You can amortize a lot when you're carrying that much, and weight is effectively irrelevant on a train. I'm confident that the battery tech will be much better in the not-too distant future. There's a shit load of money to be made in that sector. What gives me pause is the energy levels needed to charge an electric semi. Megawatt level charging, for one truck, is insane. Now multiply that by however many charging stations at a truck-stop, and they'll have to hang out for 30 minutes while charging. I keep coming back to the electricity demand increase if our species dropped all fossil fuels, and I can't wrap my head around it without nuclear power.

Nope. There's about 5-6 kwh worth of space on top of a big rig. Volvo's prototype (link) has a battery capacity of 540 kwh. The efficiency numbers in that article don't match their range numbers, and their average speed was 50mph, but regardless you're talking a ~4% increase in energy over a four hour drive range. To put the energy needed for a truck into perspective: the average home solar installation is about 8.5kwh. Electric truck stops are looking to be at megawatt levels to get a charge done over lunch.

A lot of people underestimate how cheap fossil fuels are, and how much that influences industrialization. Hydroelectric dams are good, but limited by geography. Nuclear has been historically laden with political problems, but I agree that renewed development into nuclear power is an actual path forward. But developing the level of new technology, with the inherent risks makes for a pricey proposition. Solar is not tenable at the moment. Without grid level storage, it's a non-starter. With grid level storage, it is still limited by geography and subsequent long distance transmission requirements. All of which makes it expensive. Although it may be big business for sub-Saharan Africa to sell energy to Europe. Wind has the same problems. There are hopeful potentials, but anything new is 10-20 years away. Modernized countries don't use less energy, they use a lot more. On a per capita basis, China emits about half of what the US does, but about double on an out-right level (that's all 2018 data). That's not because their shit is so good. It because there are still shit loads of Chinese folks living in non-modern conditions. The global energy demand is going to be gargantuan in the future. There are a bunch of industrial processes that become extremely energy intensive (or not currently possible) if you attempt to move them from fossil fuels to electricity. Smelting ores, firing concrete kilns, etc.

I'm tracking your sarcasm right to the last sentence. And then, I'm confused. I'll assume sarcasm and just say I agree.

It isn't a moral matter of China, or Africa, or India. They don't have a choice. Industrial development and modernization requires the use of fossil fuels. At least right now. Saying the developing world needs to cut CO2 emissions is functionally no different than saying you want them to not modernize (and lose out on all of the quality of life improvements).

The non-good faith, polarized, monkey's flinging poop at one another nature of modern American politics plays a large role. It's also suspicious when a politician points to a crisis and then claims the solution is what they've always wanted. Anyways... Here's the thing with climate change, if you don't do a fair amount of digging, it's hard to sort out what comes from politics and what comes from actual scientific work. Anyone with a decent grasp of basic physics can pretty easily understand the basic concept of adding CO2 to the atmosphere will make the average temp go up. It's also not hard to verify it with a little research. It's a very well published topic. It's also not hard to grasp that overall, an increase in global temp will be bad for humanity. But after that it gets harder. You hear 1.5 degrees C a lot in various environmental pushes. Where did that number come from? Politicians asked the IPCC to tell them what would be required to limit the global average increase to that number at the end of the century. Here's the thing, we're already 90% of the way there as far as emissions. So hitting that number is basically impossible. It would require annual reductions that start with COVID lockdown level (~7-9%) to start and then further reductions of that same percentage every year there-after. How does that happen while also allowing the developing world to continue to develop? It's preposterous. The reality is, it is too late. To whatever degree that various models and estimates show potential outcomes of a global temp increase; those things are coming. Dealing with, mitigating, limiting, and potentially reversing it will be the actual challenge.

In April, four rural Chinese banks froze ~$6B in retail deposits. A housing development bond crash just wiped out $90B. Real estate is used as backing for financial assets, and the whole thing is propped up by massive debt. Three state owned corporations (PetroChina Ltd, China Life Insurance Ltd and China Petroleum & Chemical Co) just de-listed from the NYSE over company audit concerns. Somehow I doubt this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, but the cracks are becoming very obvious. (How's that for mixed metaphors?)

Everyone is going to pay for the war in Ukraine. One way or another. Goods are traded on an international market. Ukraine exports global rankings: #5 wheat, #4 corn, #4 iron ore, #1 seed oils, Russia is the #1 exporter of fertilizers and wheat, China is #2 fertilizer exporter and just reduced the max allowable export quota. Shit is gonna get even more expensive.

That will be the argument from the bureaucrats. The hick-up will be POTUS' plenary powers with respect to classification. The bureaucrats will have to argue that their process, whose authority is derived from POTUS, can also limit POTUS authority.

What are the odds this turns into a queep discussion about whether or not paperwork was done correctly after Trump declared a bunch of shit de-classified?