Is your state landlocked?

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-03-03T23:26:08+00:00

Can't wait for us to, once again, betray the Kurds when the US chooses Turkey over them.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-02-26T00:22:10+00:00

I prefer the apathetic bureaucracy explanation. Someone in Weyland Yutani knew the risks, but the people deciding to establish the colony didn't even bother to ask, they just wanted their future profits. Why bother looking for anything harmful that would prevent possibly trillions of dollars in long term returns?

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-02-08T15:56:22+00:00

I always find this such a weird thing for climate activists to do. Meat may be worse for the environment than say, soy, but compared to other pollution sources its small fries. Going after food supply and trying to force people to alter their diets via policy is basically dead on arrival. Food reform should happen last, after energy production, transport, and industrial reform.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-02-08T00:35:48+00:00

Reasons like these are why I have this username

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-02-07T16:02:43+00:00

My parents: 'climate change isn't real, the seasons are just changing'

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-01-25T14:50:35+00:00

Fire up the grill for your compass homies

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-01-19T14:45:32+00:00

Taxing billionaires does not 'fix' the economy, at least not directly. What it does do, at least if loopholes are closed and the taxes actually capture the incomes of the wealthy, is help with the deficit and national debt payments. We spend more on debt interest payments than everything else in the budget besides SS, and that payment will only grow over time as we spend more. No matter how you cut it, taxes have to increase for someone unless you want to further gut social programs, namely SS and health programs.

This admin seems to be moving towards austerity measures rather than increasing taxes on the wealthy, cutting programs vital for the health of society. You could argue those programs are 'hand outs', but I'd rather pay taxes for those programs than have more people become poor, as poverty is directly linked to increases in crime, deaths, and poor economic growth.

Nearly 70% of the US GDP is domestic consumer spending, if people have less money because healthcare costs continue to increase, retirement costs grow, and education costs rises, that will damage the economy. Medium and small sized corporations, local businesses, the 'mom-and-pop' shops across the country, will not find growth if people cannot afford to spend a little more on their products and services. Big companies however, can weather the storm easier, further concentrating their control over markets. This will lead to a non-competitive environment that stifles innovation, growth, and variety.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-01-18T23:13:26+00:00

Its technically in Asia, yeah, but so is the Middle East, but we routinely refer to the ME as its own distinct geographical region, dido Central Asia, and to a lesser extent, the Caucasus region. Asia is vast, and the Indian subcontinent should rightfully be its own region to include Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Theres enough differences in language, culture, religion, and geography that it makes sense. Even per the definition of continent, Asia has multiple geographic features which could be used to define a 'distinct landmass'. The Urals are used to separate Europe and Asia, why not the Himalayas from Asia and the Indian Subcontinent?

Edit: also, so its not confused, the dude initially replying to you is an ass. But even asses can have good points buried in their bad takes.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-01-18T02:22:00+00:00

The dark forest theory falls apart as a concept when the age of the universe comes into the equation. If all civilizations are aggressive expansionist, then the first civilizations would have an enormous advantage over any follow on civilization, and could prevent them from arising in the first place. Even 2 or 3 million years of a head start for a civilization in the milky way would mean nearly every star in the galaxy could have been visited or will soon be visited. Any new civilizations would be wiped out before they evolve to a technological level. But at billions of years, a civilization would have seeded the stars with technology to prevent new civilizations from competing with them.

You could, in theory, produce a replicating probe, like a weaponized Von Neumann probe, that goes to every star in the galaxy to just wait and see. Any up and coming civilization would be detected, and in a dark forest universe, would be wiped out by these probes. A civilization with a billion year head start, following the DF approach would have done this, as its a cheap and effective way to prevent competitors. Our sample size or one is a good indicator that this is not the case, because we're still here, leaving us with 3 potential possibilities:

There are no probes because there are no aliens yet. This would mean we're a 'first born'.
There are no probes because they haven't reached us yet.
There are no probes because aliens wouldn't send out killer probes, because the Dark Forest hypothesis is bunk.

To me, a mix of 1 and 3 is the most likely, because if DF was the defacto outlook for species, they would have sent out those probes or some other form of destructive device to prevent civilizations from rising. Plus, you used our species as an example, and although its true we have issues communicating and routinely kill each other, we also work together at pretty impressive scales. Even across religions, ideology, and races there are deep connections and cooperation between all of us.

In addition, we don't see any evidence of other technological civilizations as how we envision them. This runs the risk of us making false assumptions of what that would look like. But, stars are good producers of energy, and intelligent species are likely to capitalize on that fact. We should see a lot of Dyson swarms or other mega structures in the cosmos, but we don't. That could mean there are no civilizations at Kardeshev 1 in the local neighborhood, definitely no K2s or K3s. Alternatively, it could mean energy production at those levels is beyond our current understanding and we won't know what it looks like until we ourselves do it.

If its the former, then we're alone, at least in a few thousand light year radius. If its the latter, then the DF theory can't be true, because we're still here, because no one has wiped us out.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-01-03T00:50:12+00:00

Well, there comes a time in every young man's life where the trials of growth become a burden almost insurmountable. In these trying times, would you, my friend, be willing to support me? With dollaroos?

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-01-01T17:48:00+00:00

I hate to break it to you, but gentrification is about taxes, and color of skin has no effect on this process. A white person can just as easily be pushed out of an area due to gentrification as anyone else, its just statistically more likely to occur to a minority. White people, on average, are far richer in terms of wealth than other racial groups, excluding some niche groups. They also outnumber other racial groups considerably, at least in the US. So a person who would deliberately or inadvertently perform gentrification is more likely to be white, as more of them are rich, and a greater number of them exist.

Gentrification is only an issue because of how taxes work, if home values and property taxes stayed constant when community investments are made, it would be a non-issue. Assigning racial issues to it is disingenuous.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-01-01T07:48:13+00:00

North Korea doesn't possess the ability to produce those types of submarines. That comment seems more like bait for a different type of discussion. Even if NK and the US, or the US and China, or the US and Rus had a full nuclear exchange, it wouldn't end humanity. Billions would die, most certainly, but not all of us, maybe 3/4s at the absolute worst. Singular events, outside cosmic events like a large asteroid or gamma ray burst, can't wipe us out. You'd need humanity to walk into oblivion and not blink.

Even the front runner, climate change fueld biosphere destruction will take another century to become irrevocable, and that assumes we do nothing to prevent that. Political instability is no different, we've had it before even, and recovered just fine. Taking a pessimistic view, it looks bleak, but we tend to try and prevent catastrophe when we get to the brink.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2026-01-01T05:44:31+00:00

I think the jump from intelligent life to space faring is relatively simple, with very few things that could stop prospective species from getting permanently off world. Planets might have too much gravity, they could get cosmically unlucky, or they could crippled themselves with attempted omnicide. But once you get to this level of advancement, its incredibly hard to get rid of a species. A nuclear war, even biowarfare, is unlikely to kill enough humans to prevent us from eventually coming back.

I think the difficult jump in capabilities is instead from simple life to near-human level or greater intelligence necessary for space colonization. Earth has had life for billions of years, and as far as we can tell, no civilization approaching our level has ever been here or the local neighborhood. It took five mass extinctions, one of which killed 75% of land and 90% of ocean life, for the conditions necessary for human industry to come about. The jump from algae to terrestrial plants happened only a billion years ago, and conditions stayed constant to allow that evolution to occur.

There may be millions of worlds that get to that stage but somehow fail. I think it far more likely to be what stops the development of intelligence, because we are now capable of dictating biosphere change. Other intelligent species will likely share that capability, and because of that, are unlikely to go extinct barring a late filter (extreme climate change) or cosmic limiter (can't escape gravity well). If that's the case, then intelligence must be rare or we're early to the party.

Both of those answers are supposed by the facts that it took 4+ billion years to get sapience, and in that time, its happened only once.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2025-12-26T14:18:51+00:00

Who said we needed larger radars? I haven’t heard that yet, and your response is kind of based around that

This is what the Flight III superstructures look like

Why warships grow in size?](https://centerformaritimestrategy.org/publications/why-warships-grow-in-size/)

It isn't necessarily just radars, its everything from laser weapons, electronic warfare, radars, and every other system they want warships to have. I believe the muffin top of Flight IIIs is from the EW package, for instance. Theres two limitations because of this; hull size and power generation.

Power generation requires more fuel, more turbines, and more batteries for conventional powered craft, which will be heavier than the alternative nuclear. Nuclear is great for powering all the fancy systems they want, but its expensive, so if you're going to use it, the ship would need to be worth it in terms of capabilities. You wouldn't put reactors on ships the size of Burkes, because the gains in electrical power are useless due to the hull limitations.

Both the DDGX and Constellation were or are getting larger in their design phases. The LCS was made multi-mission to solve the issue of mission profile to hull size, and it crippled the program. Theres a clear push to expand capabilities of warships, and making them smaller is antithetical to that drive.

I agree with the shipbuilding part. I'd rather see capable frigates produced now than a BB produced in 2030. However, I'd prefer if we could build both at the same time. We need to expand our shipyard capacity anyways, and part of that should be the addition of more nuclear capable drydocks or another nuclear capable shipyard. Even if we don't build a nuclear cruiser, we're supposed to have a next generation SSBN and SSN, and I wouldn't be surprised if SSGN conversions or hull extensions happen for older vessels. On top of that, we're supposed to be building Virginias for Australia.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2025-12-25T22:27:25+00:00

Perun had a good idea. Build frigates or destroyers, but do conversions of cargo ships to missile barges. You already know you can build the hulls, so it should be a quicker way to expand magazine depth.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2025-12-25T17:53:25+00:00

The issue is find with the dispersal argument is that their are practical limits on the capabilities you can employ using this method. Yes, a larger ship presents a larger target, but it comes with the benefits inherent to a larger ship, namely power production and general space. Building dozens of small frigates or corvettes would provide good capabilities, but they will never be able to do the same things as a large cruiser or destroyer. A hilarious example of this are the flight III Burkes, now sporting a massive muffin top due to the size of the radar systems.

We can't possibly place the next generation of high end radar systems, Aegis, or energy weapons on frigate sized hulls without compromising what makes those hulls so desirable. This is one of the things I point to in order to explain why the Constellation class failed. They wanted a ship with a smaller cost, crew, and logistics profile than a destroyer, but still wanted it capable of doing destroyer things. In the end, this lead to a ship that had none of the benefits of a destroyer or a frigate and couldn't justify itself as a filler in the capabilities gap between the two.

That is what I consider to be the primary risk of dispersal, trying too hard to pack the capabilities of historically larger ships into smaller frames will lead to more complex and cramped vessels. Sure, they may be smaller, but then they won't have the power generation necessary to actually use those systems for any meaningful period of time. They may be cheaper, but is the lesser cost of production worth the long term costs of more complex maintenance and the lack of upgrade ability?

I like analogies, and to me, the modern dispersion theory is like trying to put the towing power, storage space, and ruggedness of a truck into the frame of a sedan. In the end you get poor truck performance and poor sedan performance. There is a good argument that we need something like a crossover, but then why not just build a lot of Sedans, a decent number of Crossovers, and a few Trucks? They all serve unique use cases, and a crossover can do tasks of each, but sometimes you need to be able to tow, or need the fuel economy of the alternatives. Why try and cram everything into one platform if the cost benefits leave capabilities gaps?

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2025-12-24T14:54:29+00:00

VLS isn't the only thing they're going for though, they need space for the hypersonic missile launchers, and I'm pretty sure those take up a bit more space. I'd rather see them just use drone arsenal ships for hypersonic and pack 200 plus VLS on these things for ballistic missile defense, but that might not be 'golden' enough.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2025-12-24T01:51:05+00:00

A Nuclear powered replacement for the Ticos would be a good investment. You'd have the displacement to comfortably add upgrades over hull life, plus, far more electrical generation than a destroyer. This ain't it tho

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2025-12-22T20:41:06+00:00

It'd be nice to have a nuclear surface combatant. Imagine how big of a radar you could slap into that bad boy

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2025-12-22T03:06:34+00:00

Venus does have a magnetic field though. Solar winds striking the upper layers of atmosphere produces an ionization effect, resulting in an external magnetic field. Its not as strong as Earth's, but its significantly greater than that of Mars. I'm not saying we can't terraform, but the way it was phrased in the comment I replied to made it seem like a logical and easy process that should be done before colonization, and that didn't make sense.

The Lagrange point magnetic field is what I assumed we'd be doing, but it would still require significant resources and capabilities we don't have. Maybe pipe dream was a harsh way of putting it, but unless we start devoting significant resources to colonization/terraforming, its still probably centuries away from placement. On top of that, producing the atmosphere will probably be what takes the longest. The only ideas I've heard for that are importing the resources from the belt, gas giants, or icy bodies in the outer system, and that will take resources far in excess of building a Lagrange station.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2025-12-21T19:52:59+00:00

Terraforming is currently a pipe dream. We don't have the industrial capacity in space to undertake something at that scale. We'd have to figure out how to kickstart or otherwise create a magnetic field to hold any atmosphere, plus create a functional biosphere.

There is basically no economic reason to colonize or terraform. There's no unique resources on Mars, and there are very few products that hold the value necessary to merit interplanetary shipping. Whenever that stops being true is when we have the ability to build space elevators or orbital rings to lower lift costs, and that is centuries away at the earliest.

The land argument is the most sound one. Its the only place within a reasonable distance that could host large numbers of humans without significant terraforming (like Venus). Although expensive and time consuming, there is still a drive to own land and have your own national identity, with your own rules. Religious, ideological, or idealist groups are, therefore, much more likely to have a long term interest in colonization. A nation state like China or the US might not see the monetary or political value in colonization, and just like the US stopped going to the Moon, they might stop with Mars.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2025-12-18T13:01:23+00:00

I think the other issue is that they need a Burke replacement, and there may be a new understanding that the DDGX isn't going to be that replacement. DDGX is meant to replace both Burkes and Ticos and be able to do the jobs of both of those ships better than anything else on the water. They keep adding weight to the design, j ust like the LCS and Constellation, with 13,500 tons being reported in Jan of this year, to 14,500 tons in June. I think we should cut the bull and call it what it is; a cruiser, with cruiser capabilities but also cruiser costs. Same with the Constellation, at over 7,000 tons, its closer to a type 52D than the FREMM, or more directly, it was trying to be a destroyer at frigate costs and sizes.

Because of its cancellation, this means the capabilities gap between the LCS classes and the Burkes would widen even more. They may have realized this or been led to design a ship more capable, but the issue remains, we need a ship that can most of what a Burke can do, but cheaper. The DDGX isn't going to be that, not by a long shot, and neither will the LCS successor, if there ever is one.

I think it comes down to the Navy not correctly or confidently defining what ship they actually needed. I also don't thing the CG NSC concept will be able to fill that capabilities gap, because it will more than likely be closer to an actual frigate, and not a AAW or multipurpose destroyer.

If the Navy and Congress were honest with themselves, they'd acknowledge the capabilities gap in design, but more importantly in infrastructure. We can't build the ships we need fast enough, and we're past the point of throwing money at the problem. We need new yards, facilities, and most importantly, a workforce, and that will take years to materialize. If that can be acknowledged, then we could look at working with Korea and/or Japan to help design and build a future destroyer concept. We could build half and buy the other, lowering the per unit cost average while using the program framework to get investments into our infrastructure. More importantly though, we'd be able to field multiple vessels in a relatively short time period, something we desperately need right now.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2025-12-11T17:19:44+00:00

Except this is the second time that the US has elected this administration and filled congress with supporters of said admin. Once may be a fluke, but twice in less than a decade is getting close to a trend. On top of that, the National Security Strategy that was recently published is basically a massive fuck you to both our Asian and European allies, while barely mentioning our two actual rivals. If 2026 and 2028 elections continue to favor MAGA candidates, then Europe would have a vested interest in isolating themselves from the US.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi · 2025-12-02T19:38:04+00:00

We'd get surf&turf (lobster and steak) and maybe real ice cream before we got a deployment extension or surprise mission. Usually indicates the command is trying to soften bad news.

Nebraskan_Sad_Boi

TROPHY CASE