Milk_Sheikh

But they know that, which is why healthcare costs have consistently increased higher than inflation.

Healthcare is one of THE MOST demand inelastic commodities or services. People do not say “oooh that’s a lot of money - is there a worse doctor who is cheaper?”, instead they say “100% yes I will remortgage my home and sell assets to pay for the cancer treatment my child needs.” Nobody is at the free clinic by choice, they’re there because they cannot afford or borrow to pay for better care.

Capitalism is incompatible with ‘rational consumer purchasing choices’ that apply to clothes, food, TVs, etc. because when there’s death or life altering negative outcomes, the only rational decision is to pay WHATEVER the price demanded is. Healthcare has a demand wall, not a demand curve.

The lesson he’s trying to teach, is that there is no ‘right’ lock, only ‘better’ locks. Layer your security and have an honest assessment of threats and replaceability. Locks really only:

1. Keep opportunist thieves honest
2. Raise the skill threshold needed to bypass, and
3. Take longer to bypass, risking detection for the attacker

#1 Can be achieved by the most bottom tier vendor-garbage stacked zinc/brass body lock #2 & 3 Is where most lock ratings come from, but nothing is perfect.

This monstrosity is what the military uses on secure ammo dumps, vehicle storage, etc and that thing still gets other dudes with guns protecting it. If the Army left it completely unguarded, things like thermite, oxy-acetylene, or grinding would not have any trouble getting past.

Inversely, your mid-to-good bicycle cable lock outside the corner store only really works because of the risk of exposure as people leave and enter the store. Bolt cutters might be a two-minute job all said and done, but there’s significant risk of discovery mid attempt.

The joy of niche music taste: cheap live tickets to small venues, and cool merch. Multiple times I could have touched their instruments from the floor section.

The pain of niche music taste: Depending upon their genre and your city’s size, they may never come nearby you. New York and LA get everything, Kansas City folk better like country and speed-rap.

No homo stuff, but you can time travel to fuck your mother!

I eye-rolled and went with the “incest doesn’t apply because they’re clones, not actual brother and sister” but the ending… I was searching for a reason why that plot line existed

It may not be much better for us 😅

Really wishing all the boomers had gone the way of Heinlein. Bobby was no saint and some of his views aged terribly (and others weren’t great even at the time) but a free-love humanist hippy who has a ‘realist’ grounding’? A lot better than the Reaganism, “greed is good”, and culture war pearl clutching we did get.

I never understood how that generation could be given so much more than those before, grow up with all that opportunity, and become such cantankerous assholes.

Don’t worry, the IDF will investigate themselves and (yet again) find no deliberate wrongdoing but maybe admit that ‘regrettable mistakes’ were made. This legal fig leaf is required so that an actually independent judiciary cannot enforce international law.

Article 17 of the Rome Statute allows the ICC to step in and exercise jurisdiction where states are unable or unwilling genuinely to investigate or prosecute

As long as there’s some form of judicial action by an Israeli court, the IDF can push everything under the rug and get away with what they please.

Exhausted their forex reserves of yuan, yup.

I can’t imagine why China would be demanding yuan instead of rubles lately…

A maser is a device that produces coherent microwaves, through amplification by stimulated emission. The term is an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation

TIL, thank you friend!

There has been development of smarter jammers that’ll ‘listen’ for the frequency used, and pump out jamming to defeat it, but I haven’t heard of a steerable unit like that - very interesting.

Yup, air burst and lasers are the leading ideas atm. But you’re still dealing with a zone of protection a kilometer or so - not a big deal to defend the main command post or vital supply depots, but spreading that out to industrial areas, grid power stations and substations, seaport complexes, or cities and your ‘blanket’ of protection starts looking too small for the job of covering the ‘want to have’ as well as the ‘need to have’ protected.

As someone who’s been following this fairly closely since the Syrians started toying with it, and the Ukrainians threw it into hyperdrive… There’s no good counter when drones are cheap to make and can be programmed to run on a flight course:

• Jamming has to fight inverse square so the radius is trash (and kills a lot of useful civil RF ranges like WiFi). Something like 200 meters is a strong system currently, and power needs ramp up fast.
• ‘Kinetic hard kill’ like traditional air defense is way too expensive per shot, plus there’s issues with UXO, debris, and limited launching platforms. Legacy air defenses like Tunguska or FlakPanzer with programmable airburst rounds work best, but at very short range and make a lot of secondary fragments by design. Taking the guns out, interceptor missiles start at five figures.
• Laser systems have a lot of promise with none of the explosive downsides whilst being cheaper per shot, but range isn’t great - you’re focusing energy to physically melt the target, and all light suffers from diffraction. It is better than jamming, but far too close for comfort.

That assumes you know the drone is coming, mind you. Piston-engine flying wings aren’t silent, but they are generally made of polymers/laminates that are hard to detect via radar. Thermal cameras and acoustic sensors so far are the best early warning systems, but radar is still a huge help.

And then there’s FPV and quadcopters. While a larger munition like Shaheed can be under $10k, even the more advanced FPV/quads with night vision (or even thermal) cameras frequently run under $1,000, up to a few thousand. Air dropped explosives have been fundamental in changing the course of the civil war in Myanmar for the rebels, it’s like having a budget Air Force and spy satellites on call.

Aaaand now they’re exposed, suddenly they’re “victims”

In a statement on X, Pool said if the indictment was true, he was a “victim” and that he and other personalities were “deceived.”

Johnson said in a statement that he is “disturbed by the allegations in today’s indictment, which make clear that myself and other influencers were victims in this alleged scheme.”

Jesus, why are there so many crybullies on the right? “We got caught with our hands in the Russian money bag, but we’re the ones truly being harmed guys!”