They’re all Military/Intelligence related.

The phone running FuriOS seems neat.

Most of the expense/time (proportionately) is the Navy patrolling the various trade corridors and oceans with near routine exercises/drills from nearby nations against it, preventing disruptions and theoretically enabling the dying/dead “Pax Americana,” ultimately for US capital’s benefit (in tangent with the stability of the US dollar as the former de facto reserve currency). It’s the real reason the US is content with spending all the money on the military, not just a projection of power but a real return on investment (even more so now that taxes are getting more and more regressive and corps pay less than ever). The murder is almost secondary when it comes to that, a petty demonstration of what they’re capable of. Pretty gross tbh.

It depends. You can generally choose a career field to specify in your contract, and you’re not directly shooting people for the vast majority of career fields. That’s not to say your actions won’t support killing people in some way, most career fields are there to support the ones that do, but there’s ones in cybersecurity for instance whose goal is generally more aligned to providing support to other nations or industries that might’ve been hacked. Outside of general areas though, it’s not like the mission is decided by anyone other than the U.S. President or Congress (or continuing obligations from prior agreements).

I mean, there have been at least a few instances of humanitarian missions that actually help, even if there has to be some sort of military justification for it like “building goodwill” or having it combined with some joint military readiness exercise with the host nation. There was that Haiti earthquake in 2021 (and 2010), the relief supplies to Mozambique following the cyclone, Haiti again with Hurricane Matthew in 2016, the Nepal earthquake, that typhoon in the Philippines in 2013, a cyclone in Bangladesh, the Indian Ocean tsunami back in 2004, plus Operations Support Hope, Restore Hope, or Provide Comfort for Rwanda, Somalia, or the Kurds in Iraq+Turkey. I’m not sure you could count Operation Pacific Angel, though it’s arguably more helpful in that it’s building capacity instead of just giving direct aid, and Operation Christmas Drop seems almost silly I guess (even though sometimes it’s medical supplies instead of toys). It’s hard to paint those efforts as ultimately about killing people (it’s possible though, I might just be ignorant).

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of nasty shit too, whether it’s destabilizing OPEC member nations or their relations to drive down oil prices or just fucking up Afghanistan with no good plan and no real reason, it’s not like I’d consider it a positive force overall even in a macro geopolitical sense, let alone the stupid unsanctioned bullshit its smaller factions take part in (and the CIA, as always, can just fuck right off), I just wouldn’t characterize “every one” of the campaigns to be about murder.

Or the humanitarian missions delivering food or supplies sometimes. Most of the time it’s sit around and look threatening enough that trade is protected. That’s not really a defense, it’s ultimately a tool protecting American capital and propping up a failing system, just saying that most of the expense doesn’t go to murdering brown people.

Turns out ghosts also like corn.

Honestly it probably went better 5 years ago. Cyber in the military has been floundering for a decade, but they probably hit a sweet spot around that time where competence met a lack of interference.

And some of them are doing aid missions or patrolling areas to deter invasions, and some are doing defensive cyber to protect US elections or to counter other nation-state hackers or their subcontractors who ransomware hospitals. It’s not always murdering brown people.

I’m a fan of Анна Ястрежембовская’s art, it looks almost real.

Makes sense, as you get older you get more and more disgusted by the weakness of your flesh, and tend to crave the certainty of steel.

Earliest reverse image search I can find is from 2014.

The “spooky action” is really just the determination of a particle’s spin on one side meaning you already know the other particle will have an opposite spin. This probably violates locality because you gain knowledge about something that’s non-local from a quantum perspective, even though entangled particles have to start local (there are opposing interpretations, like the de Broglie-Bohm). While in fiction this might suggest that changing the state of one particle simultaneously changes the other, in real life this just means extra information you mathematically shouldn’t have, and doesn’t really lead to FTL information transmission. What it does mean is that if you want secure communications you can use entangled particles to generate a secret key, determining the spin of them on either side, and you can be sure that they haven’t been tampered with and that the other side of the communication will be equal and opposite. It’s essentially a one-time pad.

Isn’t the balkanization of the US explicitly part of Russia’s goal, and establishment of city-states (or CityCorps) the explicit goal of the dark enlightenment types that Peter Thiel is backing?

I have both, but I also have ADHD and prioritize the novel over the good. I find cilantro and bitter foods to be more interesting, and don’t mind them at all.

Damn dude, seems like you’re still winning to me. Just having that support goes a long way, hope you can keep at the weight loss (progress is progress) and have more good mental health days than bad (the more you practice the easier it gets, even if it’s never easy).

Oh definitely, it’s not like Lemmy is overflowing with it and I can’t imagine the author is the one posting here. I’m just saying that if you’re sorting by hot or active you increase the odds of seeing content with these spelling mistakes or silly errors by calling it out, so instead of the presumed effect the corrector wanted, i.e. either getting the author to change it, the poster not bother, or having it seen fewer people, it generally has the opposite effect.

Spelling mistakes getting called out increases engagement. I’m not saying it was done on purpose in this instance, but in general it does make sense that you’ll see more posts with spelling mistakes because they’ll rise to the top. The only winning move is not to play.

Usually that’s a wide-brim hat, especially after the last wispy vestiges of your hair cross the rainbow bridge.