It’s like half of NASA’s entire budget.

From a risk mitigation perspective, this is a case of fighting the last war. We know the war that is coming: it’s climate collapse. We don’t need faster rockets, we need high speed rail.

$41M per missile? And 300 of them?

Sheeet. That’s over ten billion dollars?

Am I mathing right? That’s a lotta dough.

This article doesn’t really live up to the headline.

I read to see why it’s worse than it seems, and the reason given is that Tesla isn’t competitive or popular.

That’s not really worse than it appears. That’s just as bad as it appears.

Which is really bad. But there’s no second shoe in the article. I want my two minutes back.

The same ones listed in the article. Property ownership, speech, privacy, etc.

I feel like the rise of corporate personhood is the elephant in the room this article seems to avoid acknowledging.

Ah today’s batch of fresh horrors has arrived.

Fucking hell. The courage of this person. That poem at the end nearly broke me.

Yeah: a failure to get away with it.

Last year the army arrested guards who raped Palestinian prisoners and protesters that included members of the Keneset rioted and stormed the prison (Sde Tieman).

There is no way anyone is getting held criminally accountable for this.

I specifically said I wasn’t.

I’m not prescriptive in the order, but I would imagine they’re most likely to occur in tandem over a period of years.

I find this surprising, because frankly I agree.

I don’t know much about Dorsey, but in Musk’s case, I think this is another case of him espousing a good idea he’d never actually honor.

I think that anyone should be able to make movies with Mickey Mouse and no one should need to license code. But I suspect that like with free expression, these are values most proponents only like when it’s benefiting them.

Also, as for the alternatives to support creatives, I would say start with universal services. Universal housing, universal healthcare, universal education, universal food. We would have so much more art if we recognized that no one should have to “earn” their survival. Once that’s guaranteed – and abolish billionaires and extreme wealth inequality too – I think discussions over how to support creatives would take place from a much more favorable starting point.

Wow!

That’s good world building.

Yeah. I went to a friend’s birthday hangout at a local pizzeria, and there were five of us around a table, and one guy was a city council member. The good ones are not that inaccessible.

This isn’t a question most of us have had in the shower. I think that transferring guardianship of children for profit is largely considered unethical. I believe it is legal in some circumstances. I’ve been told that orphanages can sell orphans to other orphanages. I’m not really sure what context you’re asking about, though.

There is so much about the reporting on this story that is driving me bananas.

If we take the IDF narrative at face value, they’re asserting that they caught half a dozen militants who were unarmed and embedded with 9 medics. They then ambushed and killed some number and detained all the remaining unarmed personnel. They identified 6 as captured prisoners of war and 9 as non combatants and summarily executed all survivors and defiled their bodies.

And the coverage is like… ‘Israel was caught lying about how many medics they executed. Chat are we cooked 🤪?’

The framing of the coverage should be that as Israel’s genocide in Gaza moves into a new era in which the US president is no longer subtle in their embrace of extermination of innocent civilians, the army begins to experiment with open defiance of internationally recognized laws against war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.

That’s the story. This is like Elon’s sieg heil. The mainstream news is trained to find bullet casings and hold the poor accountable. But they have no idea how to react when the most powerful people in the world start spree-shooting in Times Square cackling.

There’s no mystery to solve! The story you’re covering is how other people with power are reacting and responding to naked attrocities, but the NYTimes is staffed by fucking Westworld robots! It’s maddening!

Ulgh it hurts so much to read this shit. Wtf.

I didn’t really understand the premise of the article. What concrete actions should Hamas have taken according to this author?

I’m sorry, but that seems like BS.

I recall very clearly that Biden and Blinken maintained that they were refusing to open any negotiations with Russia. Maybe Russia would’ve refused. But I distinctly recall Biden taking a hard line stance, and anyone who suggested that he, Blinken, and Zelinsky accepting that they weren’t likely to recover full territorial control being basically tarred and feathered as MAGA puppets.

I just don’t see the point. So many lives were spent to defend the country. Will it mean anything? We’ll see.

This is really sad.

Yet again, I can’t help but look back towards Biden, who overall seems to have employed a practice of making no plans to safeguard any of his work against an election loss.

I wish he would’ve negotiated an end to this while Ukraine still had some leverage. I feel like that’s been treated as a shocking proposal for the last three years. But it always seemed obvious to me: if Trump wins, you could lose any and everything. He could simply withhold weapons and invite Russia to complete full conquest. He could issue Zelinsky an ultimatum to surrender and live in exile or face a firing squad in St. Petersburg.

Ukraine will be lucky to simply survive these peace talks. Why they didn’t negotiate this before the election seems to be another in an endless catalog of hubristic decisions.

I feel like it’s the other way around.

Dracula can at least fit into polite society.

No, you’re very mistaken. Let me explain.

In the past, the US has stationed supporting troops off of Israel, in battleships far away. It’s meant to provide support while keeping things calm.

The reason that putting any soldiers IN Israel is significant is that it means that if Iran tries to kill any Israeli soldiers, they can’t do it without risking killing Americans. And if they kill an American, it is understood that we will retaliate and they will be at war with the United States of America.

That’s the point of sending 100 troops to offer “tech support”. It’s to deliberately create conditions that could start a war. If you ask a general, they’ll claim that it’s just shrewd tactics, because letting Iran know all this means that good judgment will prevent them from attacking Israel. But every war in history is preceded by people making those claims (even when they don’t believe them) before going to war.

This is foreplay. This is how you flirt when you’re a NatSec pervert thinking of going to war against someone.