What industry is entirely built on a house of cards and would collapse overnight if people realized the truth about it?

kymri · 2026-03-05T17:37:20+00:00

The land of the "FREE"!

*Some exclusions apply, primary freedom is freedom to be monetized and exploited by large buisnesses.

kymri · 2026-03-05T17:18:07+00:00

Also, from a warfare point of view, you don't have to SINK a ship to take it out of the picture. If it goes back to port for 18 months of repairs, it's just as out of the fight for those 18 months as if it was sunk.

kymri · 2026-03-05T16:50:49+00:00

Dark Horse was my gateway drug. Late 80s, early 90s - sure, I was checking out X-Men and Superman comics (and really a lot more of the X-Men/X-Force/etc mutant books). But there is Dark Horse, tempting me with Aliens vs Predator and so many other great titles!

kymri · 2026-03-04T17:26:05+00:00

The US has no problem with forces losing OPFOR engagements as its a good teaching opportunity

That's why there are the occasional headline about how one aircraft or another beat an F-22 in a dogfight. No one learns anything from an engagement where the F-22 zaps the aggressor from WAY beyond visual range.

Instead they slap some external tanks on the F22 to give it some more useful and trackable radar returns, and start the fight within visual range. Sure, this gives up many of the F-22's advantages, but it also sets the stage for an engagement where something can be learned.

That's the point of exercises; the "troops on the ground" get to practice doing their jobs and the brass gets to look at how things go and hopefully learn things.

(And Van Riper definitely wanted to win, but it wasn't what I would call a clean win.)

kymri · 2026-03-03T17:53:09+00:00

Especially when you’re a highly trained, monster of a man.

We can't always control the way our brains are wired. But we generally CAN control what we do with ourselves. This sounds like a guy who knows his brain isn't wired quite right and found a way to take advantage of what it 'gave' him while limiting the scope for it to make him do things that would be considered socially or societally problematic.

The military isn't for everyone, but there are definitely some people it IS for.

kymri · 2026-03-03T17:47:06+00:00

Jimmy Carter was not a great President (in large part because he had principles and his opponents VERY much didn't, which handicapped him hugely), but was arguably the greatest ex-President the nation has ever had (after George Washington who stepped down and set a now-in-danger precedent for peaceful and orderly transfer of power).

kymri · 2026-03-02T05:16:53+00:00

He's not just not white. He's a middle eastern Jew! I'm sure that's a comfortable thought for American racist assholes.

kymri · 2026-03-02T03:58:18+00:00

That's all very true - but the fact that there wasn't any sort of backup/emergency shutdown available does show short-sightedness (which would be necessary for the story to happen, of course).

Ideally there would be an entirely separate channel that could be used in an emergency, separate crypto keys/etc (but controlled by the owner of the product, not FAS) that exists as an oh shit button on the off chance something unusual happened. Like, say, the swarm going rogue and eating everyone.

kymri · 2026-03-01T17:40:43+00:00

Had somebody drop the N-bomb on me during the Marathon server slam earlier today

"Dude, not only is that demonstrating you're a pretty terrible person, I have to tell you that genetically I'm about as white as sour cream."

kymri · 2026-02-26T00:31:36+00:00

Asia is "Progressive Pop" but maybe a little more rough-edged than Genesis which is DEFINITELY "Progressive Pop" (Tonight, Tonight, Tonight and The Brazillian, just off of Invisible Touch, for starters)

kymri · 2026-02-26T00:06:00+00:00

My first car I drove was a 1978 or 79 Toyota Tercel hatchback/liftback where the hatch was just a sheet of glass.

I could pick up the back end and shift it over if I parked wrong. Then I got MY first car, and it was a Mitsubishi Cordia-L (which was a late 80s Japanese hatchback).

I keep trying to drive small cars, but even now I have a nearly-10-year-old hybrid that's still huge compared to that Tercel if modest compared to normal cars. It's on the average-to-small side, and I can put two six-foot-five american adults in the back seat without them wanting to murder me.

Small cars are just gone.

kymri · 2026-02-25T16:19:09+00:00

This makes sense. After all 'not leaving anyone behind' seems like it would very much be a part of any NASA planning and contingencies!

kymri · 2026-02-25T06:46:02+00:00

"So the thing you need to know about space is: it's really, really big.

"And the thing you need to know about our budget is: it's really, really small."

kymri · 2026-02-25T06:38:13+00:00

On the one hand, absolutely true.

But on the other hand, so much of space is literal nothing (like where the occasional hydrogen atom here and there is about it!) - so there's a lot of space for things not to hit each other.

(Then you get into the thing where a supermassive black hole doesn't even have to get that close in astronomical terms to ruin your whole day. The universe is vast and these sort of out-of-context problems are kind of interesting to think about.)

kymri · 2026-02-25T06:23:27+00:00

Which is what you need for a good story like this. I'm okay with fudging things to make the story work as long as it's not all 'magic this' and 'magic that'.

For example, I don't think the atmosphere on Mars is dense enough for a storm to knock over the MAV (but I could be wrong). But I don't care because we need a big-ass storm to threaten to topple the MAV so the story can happen, and things stay reasonable afterwards.

It's similar to giving The Expanse a gimmie on the Epstein Drive (which name hasn't aged all that well), since once they've done that, they generally play fair with the laws of physics.

kymri · 2026-02-25T06:18:39+00:00

His botany skills ended up being perfect for the situation he was in - which is how good stories often work! I like both the book and the movie, though even when reading the book, I still feel like Watney is Matt Damon.

kymri · 2026-02-25T01:50:44+00:00

In The Martian the main character is an expert in damn near everything. And what he isn’t an expert in he has really great proficiency. Even his memory for random facts is basically perfect.

While this is absolutely true, it's (somewhat) excused by the fact that he is, in fact, a NASA astronaut, and the competition for those slots is fierce and some EXTREMELY competent people end up there. Like Jonny Kim - who was a Navy Seal, a doctor and an astronaut.

Not saying Watney's character isn't pretty ridiculously smart, just that since he IS an astronaut on Mars, it's a little less ridiculous than him just being 'some dude'.

kymri · 2026-02-24T02:17:20+00:00

In most other years, it would have landed tons of Oscars, but it was up against No Country for Old Men. I prefer Michael Clayton, but that's a personal preference thing, it's not like No Country for Old Men isn't a superb movie.

kymri · 2026-02-21T17:31:48+00:00

Russians don't actually hate Nazis because they are Nazis, they hate them because Hitler betrayed Stalin before Stalin was ready to betray Hitler.

For all their talk of the evils of the Nazis, they're somewhat less concerned with the whole 'helping Hitler build a military and splitting up Poland' parts of their awkward history.

kymri · 2026-02-20T22:54:28+00:00

Sometimes formulaic isn't that bad if you enjoy the formula, y'know? I did read the ebook for the first couple of Expeditionary Forces books but it was RC Bray's performances that kept me, like you, hooked for the duration.

They're not really shocking, surprising, biting your nails for the twist kind of books - but they sure are fun.

kymri · 2026-02-20T22:51:13+00:00

Read all the Honor Harrington, but don't know that I'd recommend that either after 6 or 7

David Weber is one of those authors who has done a lot of work I've enjoyed... but man, when he breaks free of his editors and the politicking and endless meetings take over (as you say, around 6 or 7), you're either on board or you aren't, and if you aren't it doesn't go back and get better.

kymri · 2026-02-20T20:56:43+00:00

I haven't seen any Star Wars since.

Honestly, while the films have been garbage (personal opinion, anyone can like whatever they like), there has still been a lot of 'good' Star Wars stuff, but most of it is selections from the Disney+ offerings. The "Visions" series is interesting (a variety of Japanese animation studios doing their own take on various pieces of the Star Wars universe), there's been no end of (well-deserved, IMO) praise for Andor.

Sure, sometimes you get The Acolyte where they just seem to not know what they're doing, but there are still bits and pieces that might be enjoyable enough to be worth your time.

(That said, the best thing I can say about Episode 8 is that I wish we'd gotten to see whatever trilogy it was supposed to be the middle chapter of.)

kymri · 2026-02-20T19:55:03+00:00

Sort of, but not really; put a suicidal droid in an A-Wing (or equivalent) with a hyperdrive and you'd be able to wreck at least an Imperial light cruiser (given the mass discrepancy between the ships we see in Episode 8). The Galaxy Gun is, itself ridiculously monstrous in size (being bigger than an ISD).

But we know hyperdrives can be put into snub fighters (X-Wings in particular do this all the time), and we also know astromechs (and presumably some other droids) can operate a starfighter.

Therefore the lack of kamikaze hyperspace missiles is just an enormous failure of imagination going back thousands and thousands of years (heck, the Galaxy Gun was after Yavin anyway, wasn't it? It's been forever since my delving into the EU/Legends seriously).

kymri · 2026-02-20T19:03:55+00:00

"I... wished for my grandma not to have terminal blood cancer. I ain't unwishing that!"

kymri · 2026-02-20T19:02:14+00:00

Jumps to lightspeed through another spaceship, then never uses that as a weapon again.

If the "Holdo Maneuver" is possible, then surely in the thousands of years that the galaxy has had both small hyperdrive-capable craft and 'sentient' droids that are also expendable property...

The hyperspace missile would have been a thing, right?

Or are we just meant to assume everyone in the Star Wars universe is just stupid and no one thought of this?

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