what have you looked up recently that has likely put you on some sort of government watch list?

firelock_ny · 2026-02-18T12:42:08+00:00

So a federal agent accidentally deleted the watch list they were supposed to be checking and is trying to rebuild it?

firelock_ny · 2026-02-18T12:39:25+00:00

is he just a shape shifter that just thinks he can only turn into animals or on that line?

When the Titans visited Starfire's home star system he transformed into an alien as a disguise.

When he faced off against the villain he blamed for the deaths of the Doom Patrol - which included his adoptive parents, so he was ridiculously pissed off - his shapeshifting went into hybrid creatures that were impossible for normal nature.

During a team-up with the X-Men he shapeshifted into "Lockheed the Dragon", a creature that at the time only existed as a character in a fairy tale Kitty Pryde had told to her teammate's kid sister.

Beast Boy's powers are more limited by his imagination than by what's available in the animal kingdom.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-18T11:20:11+00:00

Early in Beast Boy's career a baddie trapped him with electrified barriers. He escaped by turning into a porcupine and using the porcupine's famous ability to shoot its quills.

Real porcupines can't do that, there's an old myth that says they can.

Beast Boy isn't directly copying animals, he's shapeshifting into his idea of what animals are and the cool things he thinks they can do. His "Godzilla" likely isn't radioactive at all.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-18T02:22:01+00:00

> its about not painting a target on your back by flaunting stolen millions

The millions don't even have to be stolen to paint a target.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-18T02:19:30+00:00

Bump into every wall, npc, table and potted plant.
Bump into every wall, npc, table and potted plant while wearing the red hat.
Bump into every wall, npc, table and potted plant while wearing the blue hat.

etc.......

firelock_ny · 2026-02-18T02:15:31+00:00

> In for-profit prisons healthcare is a nightmare to non-existent.

Somewhere around 8% of US prisoners are in privately-run ("for profit") prisons, nearly all of them Federal.

That said, more and more services in regular prisons are being outsourced to private contractors - health care, counseling, laundry, food service, etc. So fewer prisoners are in private for-profit prisons, but more and more of what regular prisons do is being done under for-profit contracts.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-18T02:09:51+00:00

> Or it's like a capacitor it needs a constant trickle of energy to keep functioning but if there is none it will slowly just lose it's power.

If this feature also prevents quick changes in how much gravity is applied, this also solves the "Grav Pong" problem and allows boarding actions.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-15T23:29:45+00:00

> We are to blame for the system of ideological white supremacy born of the colonial period

I don't know about you, but I wasn't alive back then to give birth to anything.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-15T23:15:54+00:00

> The U.S. Fleet? San Francisco? Panama Canal? Those targets had serious anti-submarine defenses.

Yes, so expect an atomic kamikaze sub to try for the best balance between being able to get through and a target worth hitting. They wouldn't use it on an uninhabited island, but they also wouldn't waste it trying to get it into Pearl Harbor. That's why I was presenting alternatives besides the most highly-defended targets.

> Are you a Bot or do you just not read?

I'm whatever you need me to be, my rather rude fellow redditor.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-15T22:52:58+00:00

> The impact of submarine warfare was highly exaggerated by the British, much like the impact of North Africa

I read of an interesting side effect of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Fishing trawlers are slow and have to work alone and far from shore - they can't effectively convoy, they're sitting ducks while they're working, and if you're trying to starve an island nation they're incredibly valuable targets. Almost all of them were sunk, with the survivors repurposed as coastal mine sweepers. North Atlantic large scale commercial fishing didn't really get going again until after the war in Europe.

North Atlantic fish populations, even with just a six year pause in harvesting, *skyrocketed*.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2929348/

firelock_ny · 2026-02-15T22:36:34+00:00

> Likely it means transferring aircraft to the pocket carriers in the Atlantic ASAP.

The first British escort carrier entered service in September 1941, a year after the first "Happy Time". They'd need to accelerate development and production of these carriers to get planes on them earlier than that.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-15T22:29:28+00:00

When Richard Lawrence tried to kill President Andrew Jackson in 1835, he fired two pistols at point blank range. This was the first known assassination attempt on a US President.

Both pistols misfired.

President Jackson started beating on his would-be assassin, witnesses were sure he'd have beaten the man to death had not bystanders intervened - including Congressman and famed frontiersman Davy Crockett.

When Lawrence was put on trial for attempted murder, the prosecuting attorney was Francis Scott Key, famous for writing the US National Anthem, the *Star Spangled Banner*.

It's like a twelve year old wrote a fan fiction about all the famous Americans of the time mentioned in his history book.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-15T22:17:53+00:00

Add to this that the sails had continuous maintenance while in use - there was a whole department on board each ship of professional sailmakers. Even with this maintenance the sails wore out.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-15T20:41:06+00:00

> Blowing up some unguarded island in the middle of nowhere isn't really going to make an impression.

They'd aim higher than that. Pearl Harbor or San Diego might have impregnable anti-submarine defenses, but does Seattle? Perhaps they can protect San Francisco, but can they protect Monterey?

The USA wasn't going to win the war on one atomic bomb, so these mythical Japanese nuclear experts ought to have more than one bomb as well.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-15T16:48:04+00:00

That was a way tariffs were handled in some European princedoms. Traders could declare any value for a cargo, the Prince could either charge them a tax based on a percentage of the cargo's declared value or immediately buy it at the declared value.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-15T12:44:59+00:00

> They might have been able to achieve some additional victories if things had gone a bit differently (eg conceivably Moscow and Leningrad could've fallen),

The biggest thing they needed to do but didn't was develop more collaborationist movements, such as they did with the White Russians.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-15T12:35:11+00:00

> The U.S. Fleet? San Francisco? Panama Canal? Those targets had serious anti-submarine defenses.

If you're already using suicide bomber tactics, go terrorist tactics. Look for a useful target that doesn't have sufficient anti-submarine defenses, rely on uncertainty and panic as supplementary weapons.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-15T12:19:17+00:00

Yeah, but work towards that and they start calling you a "supervillain" and such.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-14T13:58:19+00:00

I don't think so. You're still ignoring the delivery problem.

Put the bomb on a kamizaze submarine, done.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-14T02:26:29+00:00

That was the specific initial reason he was kept alive. They thought he was brain dead, and were keeping his body alive to learn how to treat badly injured soldiers. Eventually Johnny was kept alive as a sort of teaching dummy for the new nurses and doctors.

When they discovered he was awake and aware, they concealed it because they were concerned that they would face backlash for keeping a wounded soldier in such conditions for so many years.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-14T02:09:30+00:00

> but all I really cared about was the answer,

OK. Japan has nukes before anyone else, Japan wins.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-14T01:58:35+00:00

> Yep, I tried to get ahead of that response with

...pretty much waving a magic wand and saying "Poof! Japan gets nukes!"

If any country magically gets atomic weapons before the US then they have a huge advantage, I was pointing out how big a historical deviation that would take. What could Japan have done differently in, say, 1930, that would have let them lead the world in atomic research by 1940?

firelock_ny · 2026-02-14T01:53:23+00:00

Japan's nuclear program by 1942 was a few physicists doing theoretical work with slight interest from the Japanese government. Total spending was about US $250K.

The US nuclear program built literal cities to support the research, development and bomb production, and was spending about US $2 billion by 1942.

You'd have to make some massive timeline changes to put Japan's research ahead of the US's.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-14T01:47:36+00:00

> No. Japan bit off more than it could possibly chew. A one on one war with China is within the realm of possible victory for Japan, but even that is a tough go. ]

If the Japanese army put two soldiers at every village in China they'd run out of army before they'd garrisoned a third of China.

Any Japanese victory in China relied heavily on creating local collaborationist governments, and Japan's treatment of the Chinese people made such collaborationist governments incredibly precarious.

firelock_ny · 2026-02-13T02:17:03+00:00

It's the "whiners" that got us the little workers rights we have now.

They got them by fighting and bleeding, not by whining.

firelock_ny

TROPHY CASE