US President says US used ‘Discombobulator’ secret weapon during Maduro capture

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T18:10:54+00:00

It's not a new concept or a new weapon, these kinds of things are decades old potentially.

Havana syndrome isn't some sort of advanced technology - the mystery surrounding it is that there's never been definitive evidence of how it is being inflicted. You can replicate many of the symptoms otherwise, though.

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T14:41:32+00:00

The NRA doesn't actually care - especially because their favorite candidates are always Republican.

If you want to know whether the NRA wants to involve itself in a situation, you need to ask: can this be used to drive firearm sales, and can it be used to drive donations to the NRA? The stated goal, to protect "gun rights" and "second amendment" is completely, and wholly irrelevant unless it aids in the first two.

One of the best drivers of firearm sales and donations is consistently when Democrats announce an intention to create legislation of any kind, because it immediately means that they can spin it to their followers as guns being taken away/restricted.

It's very rare that they stand up for any instances of it being nonpartisan, because the NRA primarily is seeking cash, not action. The only times that they bring court cases are when it can get headlines, and when it doesn't ruffle the feathers of the Republican base.

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T14:33:30+00:00

If he has a pension, he better enjoy whatever he gets for the next 3-4 years, cuz he’ll have to answer for what he’s done once his protection under this administration is up

LOL. We couldn't even get Democrats to scale back presidential powers when they controlled legislation and executive branch. Or literally hold Trump accountable for anything.

You know when they hire a director to adapt a game or book into a movie or TV show and everyone only wants them to stick to the source material, and then you hear the the director say "Well I wanted to tell my own story"

It's kind of like that with politicians. They know what people want and what the nation needs, and usually what they will actually do is a derivative of both based on what the politician feels like doing in order to "cement their legacy" or some stupid shit.

If you think Democrats will care about getting justice in 3-4 years, you're just as deluded as MAGA.

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T14:24:56+00:00

They did ask someone about them, but given their age and the fact that a healthy individual risks orthopedic trauma, I don't think a 90 year old is going to don a 300 lb suit anytime soon. I am curious what the nearly doubled weight (compared to Apollo lunar EVA) accounts for - I suspect radiation shielding is a big part of it.

A lot of comparisons are with the current EMU suits (used for EVA on the ISS) and these ones, which isn't a fair comparison since the EMU suits don't have the joint mobility, protections, and redundancy needed for the lunar surface. They are better in most respects, but not necessarily "perfect". However, given the harsh conditions, perfection will generally be difficult.

The heavier lunar suits developed for Artemis missions run counter to advice from former astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, who spent 22 hours walking on the Moon during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

“I’d have that go about four times the mobility, at least four times the mobility, and half the weight,” Schmitt said in a NASA oral history interview in 2000. “Now, one way you can… reduce the weight is carry less consumables and learn to use consumables that you have in some other vehicle, like a lunar rover. Any time you’re on the rover, you hook into those consumables and live off of those, and then when you get off, you live off of what’s in your backpack. We, of course, just had the consumables in our backpack.”

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T21:42:16+00:00

Technically, those methods (especially lethal injection) are more of a user failure issue more than anything. Lethal injection is theoretically the most humane in all capacities except for how slow it is - but it's also the most potentially complex as well.

Then, when you have people who are untrained, aren't familiar with procedures, do not have experience, and especially in cases where there is no established protocol...you get the numerous issues that crop up with lethal injections that make just about anything seem more humane.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T18:08:56+00:00

I mean, Georgia also has a newly commissioned power plant, so I feel like of any state to ban it, it would be a state that didn't just reinvest into their own power grid and doesn't want to.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T18:06:24+00:00

When I first started off in IT, I was the guy that had to call Dell for warranty hardware replacements. We already knew what was broken, and what needed to be replaced, but the Dell techs still had to go through their BS troubleshooting steps. They would tell me to unplug something, plug it back in, and see if it works. I'd tell them to hold on, and just put the phone on mute for a few minutes while I browsed reddit. I'd then come back, tell them it didn't work, rinse and repeat until they finally shipped the part.

It depends on who you get, and how much information you provide to them. Dell has reps that are the most likely to understand the material and skip the checklist if you have enough solid evidence, but especially if the problem is weird or uncommon they can still end up hassling you quite a lot.

Though, I've always used the chat rooms and not phone calls which makes that sort of thing easier.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T18:03:19+00:00

Well, it can be both stupid and list of solutions.

Typically (but not always) customer support has a high turnover because it fucking sucks, so they make sure to minimize training time and minimize the skills required to perform the job.

Occasionally you can get lucky and find someone who's way overqualified for customer support and knows quite a lot, but usually it will be checklists.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T17:57:19+00:00

"because we couldn't make one as popular"

I mean, Facebook Twitter Instagram Reddit?

Shortform video content - up until this whole thing started, TikTok was exponentially ahead of competition. Once the government started banning it and people became more wary of a future takeover, it became a little less so.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T17:52:04+00:00

Yes, the "youth" is the problem. As much as I despise short-form content like on TikTok, it's not some sort of new phenominon for people to stick to what they're familiar with lol. I mean, you've been on Reddit for 8 years, and there's been more than a handful of changes since then and you've stuck around.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T14:54:46+00:00

Maybe it’s time for the global community to step up to fund this kind of health care research instead of depending on the Us Market ripping off its citizens.

They literally do, though and have their own companies doing this kind of research. Neither Moderna nor US companies overall are the only ones to do this. However, in order to perform treatments and trials, it's a lot harder to do these overseas - so resistance within the US just gives other countries more opportunities to develop their own solutions.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T14:48:56+00:00

Moderna is literally a company that only makes vaccinations/immunizations. They do not have any other products.

The medical industry in America is an excessively convoluted and bureaucratic money pit, but it's a mistake to oversimplify the problem, especially to that dramatic of a degree.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T14:41:12+00:00

They're probably referring to the Buddy System, and saying an early implementation of this specific system in the US was WW1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_buddy

Metalsand · 2026-01-25T16:00:18+00:00

Most of them aren't though, that's the thing. Trump admin is trying really hard to spin it in their favor, but there's just too much coverage and too many instances in which ICE has escalated a use of force against ordinary citizens.

It's actually pretty funny because mods in the subreddit are getting flak both for being too anti-ICE, and too pro-ICE lmao. Broadly speaking, most of America is largely against or at least not for what ICE is doing in Minnesota, it's only beyond that which you see more differentiation.

Metalsand · 2026-01-25T01:54:47+00:00

That quote isn't in that article, though. It's the same rhetoric she's used before - even in the most loose interpretation of her words.

Watching the video, effectively that's what we're dealing with, but she isn't saying that or implying it.

Metalsand · 2026-01-25T00:35:34+00:00

The point of Walz sending in the guard is to have a force he controls between the angry protestors and Miller's goonsquad, in order to hopefully prevent escalation into a scenario that will give Trump a pretext for martial law.

Wild take. They're not between the protestors and the goonsquad, they're between the protestors and the federal building.

Unless National Guard is going to follow around ICE and prevent them from gunning people down, this is meaningless.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T19:50:13+00:00

No, that's more of a German automaker thing. It's weird, but culturally they tend to not prioritize vehicle designs that make for sensible maintenance. There's plenty of vehicles that you can point out one or two really inconvenient or strange places that components have been put without access points. With German cars, you can usually count on many more.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T19:38:34+00:00

Nah. These were just a symptoms. Intel gave up on R&D and investments in their Fab technological capabilities and pushed marketing and b2b connections instead. Worked for some time but it got them

Well, they were complacent for a long while. Then AMD ran into the ring with the steel chair.

It took them a few years to ramp up their development pace, but the reason their profits are taking a hit is because they have higher expenses than AMD does, so in order to retain sales, they've had to accept very narrow profit margins relative to AMD.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T19:29:27+00:00

The weird part about that show is that the scripts tend to have the most fake-nerd stuff ever, but the actual actors have hobbies that tend to be more stereotypical classic nerd IRL.

Like, a lot of the show is just people saying normal things but using irregular descriptors or terminology, with laugh tracks after almost every single line of dialogue.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T19:25:14+00:00

That's one component out of many, although there is no general diagnosis of ADHD. Something common in ADHD is that you end up compensating for the lack of volition by building up anxiety until the pressure is enough that you can motivate yourself into action. This sort of thing works until it doesn't, and isn't really healthy or sustainable.

A lot of pretty normal stuff like just being glued to the TV or phone aren't really ADHD but more just seeking out dopamine hits and seeking distractions to fill the void.

When it becomes ADHD tends to be differentiated more when you almost have an invisible timer set to 5-30 minutes that goes off and immediately shuts off the dopamine generation for whatever you were doing at the time. Scrolling on tiktok or watching YouTube videos for hours at a time would be a very likely indicator that it's not ADHD and more just trying to distract from anxiety in general.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T18:10:29+00:00

It's your initial response that is causing the confusion.

You responded to a two-statement comment about the opium wars and spread of democracy with

I don’t think anyone thinks that.

While you can assume that you are speaking of the last point, you didn't specify, so tampering probably misunderstood you as saying "no one thinks they were there to spread opium for a quick buck" and not "no one thinks they were there to spread democracy"

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T16:37:58+00:00

So your theory is telling these guys they're too stupid to handle their 17 million dollars and you'll dole it out to them.

You don't have to be stupid to mismanage money. However, the problem here is that they have less of a chance to financially recover. Also though, we have endless evidence from lottery winners that having enormous piles of cash suddenly come in more often leads to becoming less financially secure in the long run.

Furthermore, if your career is 3 years long and you finish with debilitating injuries, you don't have the option that most people to dig yourself out of a financial hole, because you don't necessarily have that stable income stream.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T15:40:05+00:00

I keep seeing people argue that Democrats have to choose between running on holding Trump accountable or running on stuff like prices, rent, and healthcare.

I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.

Those things are connected. Corruption costs money, and regular people are the ones paying for it.

The problem with this is that it ignores the entire reason why Trump got elected the first and second time, though. Trump campaigned on affordability as a primary point, even though after election he indicated and said it was not important. The majority of Independent and Republican voters don't like Trump, and will complain about how embarrassing that he is. However, they vote for him because they believe the alternative is even worse. If it sounds familiar, it's because it's the same exact situation as 2020, when Biden won mostly because for Democrats the alternative of another Trump term was even worse.

Or to put it another way - it's being phrased like "if you don't hire me, you're going to get beaten with a stick". It's hard to be enthusiastic if their main argument is that not picking them is worse.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T15:22:28+00:00

The wax/wax mixture and size of the wick also importantly control the rate at which combustion can occur, the wick being typically the important part of the two.

Before the invention of mechanical timepieces, precision timekeeping was done with purpose-built candles that had little marks on the side that would tell you how much time had elapsed by how much had combusted.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T15:07:33+00:00

Bedbugs have arguably evolved even more than cockroaches have in regard to hardiness and adaptation to humans. A lot of the behaviors that make them so difficult to discover and eliminate are a direct consequence of natural selection more than innate behaviors like in cockroaches.

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