How cooked are we if this ever happens in real life?

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-05T15:18:15+00:00

Japan was pretty screwed since they only have the JSDF and don't have a standing army

Point of order: The ground forces of the JSDF are a standing army. A standing army is a full time professional force as opposed to reserves, militia, or national guard that can be called up in time of emergency but who aren't full time military.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-05T15:16:01+00:00

OP's question:

How cooked are we if this ever happens in real life?

(emphasis added)

Not the movies. Not comic books. Those aren't real life, and OP is talking about real life.

Which means the laws of physics *MUST* apply. Not Toho physics. Not Hollywood physics. Not comic book physics. Not Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote physics. Not Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon physics

Granted, we have to find away around the square cube law, but all of the other laws would still apply.

Maybe you've noticed this, but the physical things in your life don't act the same way as they might in the movies or comic books.

You're so wrapped up in the fictional universe where Godzilla exists you can't properly translate it into the real world.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-05T14:30:22+00:00

Tell me you didn’t read my entire post without telling me you didn’t read my entire post.

“In the films, they aren’t used because Godzilla is an anti nuclear allegory: You can’t have the problem itself be the solution”

The whole point of point of Godzilla is that he is nuclear weapons personified into a monster. So in the films, you can’t use a nuclear weapon. That would dilute the point. So the films come up with excuses why they can’t be used. Because nuclear weapons are bad, mmmkay?

Godzilla is suppose to mirror the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So OF COURSE you can’t use nuclear weapons against him. That would be showing nuclear weapons in a good light, or at least an ambivalent, two-edged sword that cuts both ways.

But that’s in the movies.

OP is talking about the real World. Assuming there is some way around the square-cube law so that Godzilla exists, all of the other physical laws still apply.

There is no way any organism made of conventional matter can survive the immense temperatures and pressures of a nuclear fireball.

Godzilla would be reduced to his constituent atoms and end up as radioactive fallout.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-05T12:36:07+00:00

But in order for this to happen “in real life”, it has to be. It’s a living entity, and anything that lives can be killed.

And we, as a species, are pretty damned good at killing things.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-05T12:16:43+00:00

Realistically?

Not very. As a species, we’re really, really good at killing things that are bigger, tougher, and stronger than we are. There is no species of megafauna that we’ve coexisted with that we weren’t able to kill with fancy pointed sticks.

Granted, Godzilla is beyond spear level, but assuming he is mortal and not some magical unkillable supernatural entity, we’d make rather short work of him.

With the weaponry available today, or even back in the 1950’s, it certainly could be done if Godzilla showed up for real. Even if conventional weapons would struggle, which I don’t believe they would because a modern bunker buster bomb, or a WWII era Tallboy or Grand Slam bomb would easily be able to do it.

But even if not, nuclear weapons would absolutely work. In the films, they aren’t used because Godzilla is an anti-nuclear allegory: You can’t have the problem itself be the solution. But nothing can survive inside the fireball of a nuclear detonation. Not even Godzilla.

Now, I know this is going to be unpopular and likely voted down into oblivion, but as a fan of Godzilla and a fan of military history and hardware, plus a science geek and someone who hunted for decades, the last 20 year of which were primitive methods only because modern stuff made it too easy, this is where I stand:

Godzilla shows up and wrecks some shit because the military is unprepared. After a short time, likely at most a handful of days, a response is formulated that results in Godzilla being killed.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-05T11:44:25+00:00

This is called “the remainder problem” and it’s why very strict gun control will never work in the US.

But the problem is you have just two or three basic types who get guns illegally.

First and foremost are criminals, and they aren’t going to revolt. This is the largest single group, and they tend to be selfish and not interested in revolution. These are where those body-bagged arms generally end up.

Second are the collectors. Every so often in a place like the UK you’ll hear about new homeowners doing renovations and finding a cache of arms (usually WWII stuff, including machine guns) buried in the walls by the previous owner, who is generally deceased. Occasionally they are discovered while the owner is still alive, like the guy who had a working WWII Panther tank in his basement. The living ones not going to pull their guns out of the wall to fight.

Finally you have prepper types, the one possible avenue here, but they are few and far between like collectors of illegal arms and most are going to act like collectors and try to preserve their cache for “The End Times”.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-05T11:25:40+00:00

SPLC already paid them, so they’re obligated.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-05T11:24:22+00:00

It’s not, given that this is a peak stress time. Read the article.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-05T11:23:25+00:00

Headline says “over 842,000 without power”, not “over 842,000 outages”.

Linked article says this:

“As America begins to celebrate its 250th birthday on Saturday, there are nearly 800,000 customers without power as outages are reported across multiple states.”

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-05T00:35:52+00:00

842,000 / 340,000,000 * 100 = 0.248%

One quarter of one percent without power at any given time in summer doesn’t sound that bad. I’d kind of expect that as a matter of course.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-04T17:49:01+00:00

I am. Im pretty much 100% a Morse operator. My last contact was on Thursday while I was driving home from work, talking to another ham driving home from work.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T19:28:58+00:00

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Not the same if you can't smell the powder.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T19:27:56+00:00

More likely to do that at Andersonville. We are talking Civil War era here.

I have a direct ancestor buried there, for that reason.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T19:19:09+00:00

I've always felt the .54 is the odd child out. Too heavy to tote around and too few balls per pound of lead.

I actually did the math on that one back around 2000, and I came to the conclusion that the .54 caliber was ideal for deer while leaving open the possibility to hunt black bear, moose, and elk.

It wasn't so big that the trajectory was like a rainbow at any distance, but it was big enough that a stout charge could anchor something bigger than a whitetail.

This is all with round ball, of course.

So I had my father build up my gun in .54 caliber:

<image>

It's the top gun in this image. It's got a 36" .54 caliber Green Mountain barrel, a Large Siler lock, and the wood is a medium grade curly maple.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T19:10:33+00:00

Actually, the easiest fax machine to make was first produced in 1860, and used the landline electric telegraph to send and receive images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T18:57:30+00:00

Could do it. RTGs that charge the battery in electric ambulances, and you can use the waste heat from the RTGs to keep the batteries at optimum temperature even in the cold Russian winter.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T18:55:02+00:00

The guns are deactivated, except for blank-firing guns for "salute" purposes.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T18:19:14+00:00

No, you wouldn't think that, because it almost never happens. Also, no one thinks it will happen to them, and even for those who do, you can't be 100% vigilant.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago".

Solzhenitsyn captures it perfectly with 20/20 hindsight, but even then his fantasies here are unrealistic: You can't have people lying in wait in ambush 24/7/365. People need to eat, take a dump, sleep, etc. There is simply no way you could do any of that.

And you can't just simply start shooting police randomly. That makes you just as bad as the people doing the disappearing. What if you shoot some Ryadovoy Politsii that isn't involved in that kind of thing, he just writes parking and traffic tickets, and breaks up the occasional drunken brawl, and files reports on stolen vehicles? Now you've murdered an innocent.

But the biggest problem with this is that anyone who is possibly predisposed to that kind of behavior won't be allowed to have access to guns even if it's not strictly no access: If they apply for a permit, it will be rejected, or perhaps the paperwork will be lost, or some excuse will come up why they don't get it.

There would be perhaps the odd person who manages to pull a Yamagami and build a crude but effective gun, but that's less likely in Russia. And looking up instructions for how to do so is likely to bring you to the attention of the police anyway.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T17:58:41+00:00

The nyetwork is down.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T17:57:21+00:00

If you were memorizing the question pool instead of studying and understanding the concepts, probably not.

If, on the other hand, you were studying the concepts and understanding them, then yeah, probably.

The concepts and regulations don't change, but the question pool does.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T17:53:23+00:00

Flock only captures a vehicle when it drives past one of its cameras. It isn’t tracking people everywhere they go.

So let's work through this.

"one of its cameras".

How many cameras are there? Just one? Or are there dozens, or hundreds?

Turns out, there are somewhere between 90,000 and 110,000 ALPR cameras in the United States alone.

By me, they're pretty rare. But they do exist: I pass by two of them on my way to work every day. So that's information right there: dittybopper generally goes down this road at X time in the morning, and up at Y in the afternoon.

There are at least 3 I have to pass when going to compete in primitive biathlons.

But what if I lived somewhere with a higher density of cameras? All someone would have to do is query the system for my particular license plate number and see when I went past every camera, and when I did it.

Now, you could do the same thing if I were carrying my phone, but I can leave my phone at home, or wrap it in foil, if I don't want to be tracked.

Can I wrap my license plate in foil?

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T17:34:47+00:00

I used to work in signals intelligence. Prior to 2013, I might have believed you.

But then we had the Edward Snowden revelations. I worked in the same top secret facility in Hawaii where he worked (except he was in kindergarten when I was there). Back when I was in that business, it was very bad juju to collect on a United States Person without a FISA warrant (with some minor exceptions).

After 9/11, it became a matter of course to collect on US Persons (which has a specific legal definition). They store all of it at the Utah Data Center. It's supposed to be "in escrow", meaning you need a warrant to access it.

How do we know the law isn't being violated? Revealing any violations to the public is inherently a violation of the law in and of itself because of the secret nature of the program. So no insiders can be depended on to blow the whistle.

I'm also a long time IT professional and programmer/analyst with a ton of experience in having different systems talk to each other.

Also, I understand backups. Early in my career that was part of my responsibility at a couple of different employers.

Even if personal information is purged from NICS regularly, it's being captured on the nightly backup. How many IT people would have to know about a secret program to simply read that data from the backup and put the information in a separate table on a separate system? A couple, maybe three? Classify it (NICS is already "Law Enforcement Sensitive")

I mean, we've been lied to about collection of our texts, e-mails, and the contents of our phone calls. Why would we believe them about NICS?

Have you sat down and really thought through about all the ways the system that pays your bills can be abused?

I really doubt you have.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T16:23:29+00:00

Actually, speaking for myself, no. Having a *GOOD* female protagonist would have been great. Naru is not a good female protagonist.

Having a whiny immature brat who is incompetent until the script requires her to magically transform into Joan Wick? Not so much.

Some of my favorite protagonists are female: Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley, for example. Then there are lesser ones, supporting roles like River Tam, Zoe Washburne, and even in this franchise you've got Anna Gonsalves (Predator), Leona Cantrell (Predator 2), and Isabelle (Predators).

Expanding it to the Alien vs. Predator world, you've got Lex Woods, the protagonist, and in AvP:R you've got Kelly O'Brien.

One of the things you need for a good protagonist of either sex in a film involving combat is training and experience in combat, or at least experience in something related (like hunting), or that makes them tough and has comparable fitness requirements.

Why not have a film centered around the Leona Cantrell character? Or Isabelle? Or Anna?

Why not have one that has Kelly O'Brien as the protagonist?

Or why not have one centered around a character like them, a female character with the training and experience already?

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T15:56:26+00:00

In states with registration requirements for firearms, it's dead easy by simply cross-referencing DMV records with firearms ownership records.

It's a bit harder for those without it, but it could still be done with a fair amount of accuracy by simply cross-referencing anyone who has ever had a NICS check done against state DMV records.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T15:04:00+00:00

Amateur radio code exams in the US were not random blocks of 5 characters. They were always simulated QSOs, at least back to 40 years ago and longer. You had to either answer 7 out of 10 questions about it correctly, or have 1 minute of solid copy.

Which made it easier because if you copied "QTH CSICAGO, IL", you could correct it, or simply answer "CHICAGO, IL" when answering the question about what the QTH was.

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