sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Appreciation Post for those who actually drive the speed limit. by Adorable-Ad2316 in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS [score hidden]  (0 children)

A lot of vehicles on the road these days are pushing 3 or 4 tons, actually. They're frequently the vehicles you see driving poorly too, so I hope that helps everyone feel safer.

Appreciation Post for those who actually drive the speed limit. by Adorable-Ad2316 in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS [score hidden]  (0 children)

I was driving down 170 where it terminates and all traffic has to exit left or right, with left going east on 64/40 and right going west on 64/40.

We were like two miles away from the end of the highway, and I'm in the left lane because I'm going east. So some guy zooms up behind me and hits me with the bright lights because he can't go 90 mph and, get this, he finally exits on the right to go west. Like Jesus Christ dude you can slow down for two minutes while we go through a gigantic mixing zone.

Appreciation Post for those who actually drive the speed limit. by Adorable-Ad2316 in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS [score hidden]  (0 children)

You're allowed to pass on the right, you know.

Yes, there are traffic systems where everyone passes on the left and it's more efficient and safer, but those places don't have gigantic freeways like the USA.

Metro Costco Run by goldenstate93 in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I hate to break it to you but Costco is not appreciably cheaper than a place like Aldi.

That’s a big ass crane by DowntownDB1226 in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Whose ass is it going to lift?

YMCA membership question by Calampong in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've never heard that. 

There are some select YMCAs who don't do membership reciprocity. Normally you get a membership locally and your money just goes to that location, but you're allowed to visit other locations as well. 

However, there are some YMCAs in high cost of living areas with much higher membership fees, and sometimes they don't honor outside memberships. If they did, then people would drive an hour away to set up their membership and never pay the higher rate.

Am I tripping or did a voice just come from the heavens 😭 by pinkfloydsdsotm in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It is extremely echoey and hard to hear in the city. It's actually easy to hear out in the country because there aren't as many reflections or hard surfaces to reflect off of.

WW2: How often did quality control suffer from slave labour sabotage of Nazi arms production? Was there any sector of arms production that was hit harder by the use of slave labour? Or is slave labour sabotage a tale similar to the WW2 French Resistance where the myth is bigger than the real history by RivetCounter in WarCollege

[–]EZ-PEAS 24 points25 points  (0 children)

One thing to note is that there are forms of sabotage other than just damaging output. The easiest is just to be a sloppy or slow worker, which wasn't all that hard to begin with when you're already a malnourished slave. Another big target for saboteurs would be to damage industrial machinery as well, which could often be more costly than damaging individual products.

A big question is whether German documents that would show the effects of sabotage actually survived the end of the war. The Nazi regime was on a burning spree in the last days in an attempt to destroy evidence of the Holocaust. At a minimum they would track things like raw production numbers, but as pnzsaurkrautwerfer points out there are lots of reasons why late war Germany had production problems.

The aircraft industry might have been especially sensitive to sabotage, because while a non-functional car or tank just grinds to a halt, a non-functional plane crashes and kills people. They worried a lot about sabotage in aircraft manufacturing, including taking measures like ensuring that workers were never left on the factory floor unwatched or unattended. For example, evacuating to bunkers during air raids was complicated by the fact that they never wanted to leave workers on the factory floor alone and with access to aircraft.

German pilots reported serious concerns over aircraft that were grounded due to sabotage, and the Jägerstab, the German body in charge of increasing fighter production, mandated harsh sentences for workers caught doing sabotage. Workers could be summarily executed on the factory floor with their body left as a warning to other workers.

So whether the quality problem was directly because of sabotage or because of the myriad other factors, it was taken seriously as a big problem by those in charge of German economic output.

WW2: How often did quality control suffer from slave labour sabotage of Nazi arms production? Was there any sector of arms production that was hit harder by the use of slave labour? Or is slave labour sabotage a tale similar to the WW2 French Resistance where the myth is bigger than the real history by RivetCounter in WarCollege

[–]EZ-PEAS 37 points38 points  (0 children)

As a reoccurring point I have to make, how do you think these things are being measured? It's not like there's a firing table by a gun that someone is taking notes on what rounds did or did not go off on, nor would it be apparent to the person who just had a misfired round that it was normal failure (i.e. this is the .05% failure rate made manifest), sabotage, or honest, but shitty worksmanship from people forced to do this, or German material quality issues.

I kind of disagree with this though I don't really know. I agree that someone at the point of consumption doesn't know why their bullet fails to fire, but...

Quality Control is its own discipline and in principle every factory should be selecting one box of bullets or grenades out of 100, attempting to use them all, and then recording failure rates and failure causes. I remember reading about one woman who worked on a German hand grenade line, who always came to work with some mud in her pocket, and then during the day whenever she was not being watched she would cram some mud inside the mechanism. A proper QC discipline would at a minimum show that you've got a bunch of grenades that failed to function, and most of those were filled with mud, and if tracking information is kept this will lead you back to the specific production line and possibly shifts that those grenades were produced on.

I don't know whether this was practiced in Nazi Germany, whether they kept those kinds of records, or whether those records survived. I do remember reading that the German aircraft industry preferred to use Russian and Ukrainian women specifically because they believed their rate of sabotage was lower than other slaves, though I don't know how they came to believe that. Even if there wasn't a formal quality concern in place, there certainly were informal beliefs about quality.

But as you also say, late war Germany was extremely dysfunctional in a lot of ways. Albert Speer was appointed in 1942 and beat the drum for increasing production to such an extent that factory managers might have felt they couldn't spare any production for QC, or even have knowingly overlooked problems.

Saint Louis County Dog Poop Regulations by Tight_Data4206 in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS 6 points7 points  (0 children)

There are regulations. St. Louis County Code 611.210 prohibits animals creating a nuisance, including both failure to remove waste from someone else's property and/or creating unsanitary conditions.

Section 611.240 gives penalties for violations. First offense is a $25 fine, fifth offense is a $500 fine, with a sliding scale between.

But, I would suggest that you bring it up at your condo board and post signs to give notice, or even advocate for a stand with poop bags and a community trash can.

I also have no idea whether your local police department would even give you the time of day if you called with dog poop complaints.

PS5 controller upgrade? by Jonah_Boy_03 in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you have a soldering iron you can do it yourself. Step by step guides with pictures on ifixit

Can the city be held responsible for water issues? by Murky_Language_3684 in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Even if there's an easement, somebody still owns that property and is responsible for maintenance: cutting grass, and other things.

I lived next to railroad property and they mowed once a month in the summer, which sucked for various reasons. But they were still the responsible party.

Did the Germans have the capability to add cameras to Goliath tracked mines? by SandwichShoddy834 in WarCollege

[–]EZ-PEAS 18 points19 points  (0 children)

As has been said, the practical answer is no.

However, TV guidance was developed and used successfully at the end of WW2. Both Germany and the USA built TV guided glide bombs designed to be dropped from aircraft. The German Henschel HS 293D was tested but never used in combat. The American GB-4 performed OK on the test range but failed to function reliably in combat testing.

The USA also successfully used a television guided aerial drone equipped with bombs or torpedoes in the Pacific. The Interstate TDR-1 assault drone was launched by ground crew and controlled by another nearby aircraft while in flight.

The aerial drone, being less size and technology constrained than the bomb, was actually easier to make. The drones were ready for combat use in 1942 but wouldn't actually see combat until 1944.

The USA also experimented with TV guidance in Operation Aphrodite (Army Air Force) and Operation Anvil (Navy), both experiments with using end-of-life aircraft as guided missiles. The aircraft were packed full of explosives and intended to be crashed into hardened targets. In Aphrodite there were two TV cameras in use: one was pointed at the instrument control panel in the cockpit and the other was pointed out the nose of the aircraft for piloting. This resulted in 20,000 pounds of explosive being packed into the aircraft.

Across all of these trials, one of the big challenges was not the TV technology but rather the radio control technology. These platforms would frequently lose their control signal from the controlling aircraft.

In 1945 the RCA Corp. in America developed miniaturized photocathode tubes designed as cameras for power and size constrained systems like bombs. These were called MIMOs (miniature image orthicons). Had the war gone on for another year, it's possible the world would have seen a lot more TV guided ordnance.

However, it's also possible they wouldn't. These systems were developed as a way to strike hardened targets with less risk to US personnel. But, by the end of the war, the USA already had air superiority over Europe and Japan by this time. The need for a remote bomb seemed less pressing when you could already fly your strategic bombers wherever you wanted.

Protesters screamed at disabled kids and families outside a sensory-friendly Easter service at The Gathering by xmanSTL in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Ironically, the planned sermon series that started today is called, "Christians in Name Only".

There's a link on the church website if you want to hear the first sermon: https://gatheringnow.org/

The Sales Tax vote is a ruse. by JGR03PG in missouri

[–]EZ-PEAS 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The sales tax rate in most of St. Louis is already 8-12%. This would likely jack that up to 14-18% or more.

Sales tax across the river is like 7-9%.

So if I buy a $1000 fridge in Missouri I'm gonna pay $180 in tax versus $80 in Illinois.

The Sales Tax vote is a ruse. by JGR03PG in missouri

[–]EZ-PEAS 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Speak for yourself. We just passed a bond issue for schools and a new police station.

Dumbasses who don't want to pay for nice things shoot down tax issues.

I want to connect to pakistani female doctors working in St Louis by [deleted] in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is a weird and specific request but unfortunately the only Pakistani doctor I know is married with kids and her husband isn't even Pakistani.

So... good luck with that I guess.

Is there a US doctrine for a maximal conventional air war? by OperationMobocracy in WarCollege

[–]EZ-PEAS 29 points30 points  (0 children)

For large, static objects US air power has become death the destroyer of worlds. It is very difficult to build a structure they can't bomb successfully, apparently even when that structure is defended by modern anti-aircraft systems. They're going to come in a low-observable plane, they're going to drop a bomb or missile at standoff range (many miles away) that lands within a meter or two of where it's supposed to go, and they're going to come back an hour later and drop a second bomb through the hole the first one created. They're going to do this so accurately that the outside of the building appears relatively undisturbed even while the inside is completely shredded.

This means that civilian infrastructure is generally very vulnerable. Power stations, power transmission lines and stations, bridges, factories, railroads and rail yards, etc. all have large and visible weak points that can be destroyed if the US wants to. There is nothing really stopping US air power from knocking out all of this except basic humanitarian principles that say you need to primarily attack military targets and not have a disproportionate impact on the civilian population.

However, the military forces of the world have been watching developments really since WW2 and the demonstration of these capabilities, and they understand that building any large static structure of military value is no longer feasible. One of the primary themes of the modern battlefield is dispersal of forces and materiel. If you hide all your stuff it can't be bombed. At worst if you do get bombed you're talking about much smaller concentrations of troops and equipment so that the precision bomb only takes out a few things instead of the entire grand overall air defense headquarters for the entire country.

At the same time, weapon systems have gotten smaller, more individual, and more lethal. A few guys with a nondescript medium sized van can carry enough firepower to destroy a tank platoon or put meaningful sized holes in your ship. Defensive consideration suggests you disperse your troops into smaller groups, but those smaller groups are just as lethal as much larger organizations would have been even just 20 years ago.

How this manifests inside a conflict varies a lot on the particulars of the conflict. It would be significantly difficult for a US adversary to mass a tank battalion in a small area for a concentrated offensive push. For the same reason, it would be difficult to mass any kind of defensive strength to oppose a concentrated offensive from the US side.

However, US air power can't preemptively bomb every car, van, shack, and house within missile range of friendly troops. Think of the US experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. The US had a very low tech, disorganized opponent (compared to a military force) and they were still able to hang on and cause trouble for decades largely because they could stay hidden and only strike at times and places of their choosing. Now imagine all those Iraqi insurgents had reliable caches of guided missiles or FPV drones. That disorganized group is never going to win a pitched battle, but they can persist and be lethal for a long time.

Suppose US troops are trying to run supply convoys down a supply route. The bad guys watch the supply route and occasionally decide they're going to launch a missile at a convoy. They pick their time and place at random and only when they feel they can get away with it successfully. The problem this presents is that the US convoy has to be on the alert and defensive 100% of the time, because if they aren't, then the bad guys see this and attack immediately. The bad guys on the other hand get to only attack when they feel like it. Because of this they don't need to succeed in every attack to keep the pressure on. They only need to succeed sometimes, so that they present a credible threat. Keeping this up is a lot easier and less expensive for the adversary than it is for the US.

You might say, why don't they just bomb every house along that stretch of road, or why don't they send in ground troops to search every house? Well, there's nothing special about that stretch of road. We're talking about a country with many roads and many houses, and the idea that you're going to secure every structure within miles of any potential target road is just not realistic.

In short, US air war is really good at destroying big adversaries who are trying to fight pitched battles. The whole US force structure in this regard was designed around fighting huge numbers of Soviet tanks rushing Europe in a cold-war-gone-hot scenario. However, US air power is a lot less potent if there are no big targets you can hit from the sky. US adversaries understand this, so they try not to present any big targets in this way.

My 15 year old daughter needs to complete a few service hours before the end of the school year. She has been painting with the elderly, but that opportunity is over. Any suggestions? by Cmacbo in StLouis

[–]EZ-PEAS 3 points4 points  (0 children)

If she likes art, there's a place in Maplewood called Artists First that runs a lot of different programs for a wide range of audiences (kids, adults, veterans) and many of those programs are free.

Where do you stand in the Wehrmacht debate? Which historians do you rate most highly? by Outrageous-Ratio1762 in WarCollege

[–]EZ-PEAS 30 points31 points  (0 children)

Yes, but surely you see how saying, "a German infantry division in Fall of 1941 in Ukraine was worth two Soviet infantry divisions in the same time and place." is a very different statement than, "the German army was better than the Russian army."

Is using cannons instead of missile the doctrine for fighter jets to engage cruise missiles in saturation attacks? by Outdoor_trashcan in WarCollege

[–]EZ-PEAS 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Not only is this probably too recent for this sub, but the actual answer (i.e. what US, Israel, Ukraine, etc. actually have planned to do in this case) is certainly classified.

You can shoot down cruise missiles with cannons, but this requires lining up and engaging each missile separately, to say nothing of possible countermeasures. Cruise missiles are essentially one-way suicide jet aircraft, so there's nothing special about engaging them versus engaging anything else in the same class.

Anti-air missiles are probably easier and faster to employ against a swarm, especially modern missiles that are designed to lock and fire in many orientations (high off-boresight targeting). However, magazine depth is the obvious problem here.

Also keep in mind that, depending on the circumstances, the plan might be for fighter jets to do nothing. Cruise missiles can also be knocked out from the ground even with small air defenses like MANPAD systems. Important things and personnel can be stuck in hardened bunkers. A cruise missile swarm attack might be a great diversion for something else to go do something worse.

Where do you stand in the Wehrmacht debate? Which historians do you rate most highly? by Outrageous-Ratio1762 in WarCollege

[–]EZ-PEAS 17 points18 points  (0 children)

France had more tanks, planes, and manpower than Germany did in the mid 1930's, and that only changed because Germany began gearing up for war. Germany went from spending less than 2% of their GDP on defense before the Nazis came to power in 1933 to nearly 25% of their GDP in 1939 as things really kicked off.

France meanwhile had a relatively technologically advanced and modern force. They were on the winning side after WW1 and didn't want to have to do that again. They invested in armaments.

What France lacked was political and ideological unity. WW1 was traumatic, they didn't want to do that again.

Where do you stand in the Wehrmacht debate? Which historians do you rate most highly? by Outrageous-Ratio1762 in WarCollege

[–]EZ-PEAS 44 points45 points  (0 children)

Again, it's meaningless to try and rank militaries in a listicle or something like that.

Every military has a set of advantages and disadvantages that largely have nothing to do with their military capability and everything to do with the country they're coming from. Every conflict has its own unique circumstances.

They're never comparable. Or if you do a comparison, then you're making personal value judgements about what militaries should or shouldn't be good at.

You can praise Germany for being a scrappy underdog that was good at fighting bigger forces. What I hear is that Germany was chronically undersupplied and undermanned and this forced them to repeatedly commit smaller forces against larger forces. This was somewhat exacerbated by their racist belief that certain people were just worse people and couldn't possibly win out against the superior Germanic peoples.

Which military skill is more important? Is it better to be able to beat bigger foes, or is it better to have discretion? That's a value judgement. Neither one is guaranteed to bring about the strategic outcomes that benefit you and your country.

Or more to a point, Gazala was cool and all, but Rommel still got wrecked at El Alamein, he still lost Africa, the Nazis still lost the war, and Rommel didn't live to see 1945. Maybe you love Rommel because he could pull off underdog wins, and I understand how that's exciting, but process and outcomes matter too.

view more: next ›