WayeeCool [comrade/them]

Last time US fighter pilots had to deal with people firing anti aircraft missiles at them in volume was during the opening days of the first gulf war.

Anyone remember the flight recorder video from an F16 over Baghdad being chased by six surface to air missiles? During the chase sustained an average of 3.6G with peak acceleration at points reaching 6.4G. Does seem like the stuff of nightmares.

https://youtu.be/2uh4yMAx2UA

The US kill-death ratio is also telling.

During the Global War on Terror less than ten thousand US citizens killed in the conflict but around a million Afghans and Iraqis directly killed along with around 4 million people across the region indirectedly killed. Even the Vietnam war was something like 40,000 US citizens killed in exchange for around 3 million killed on the Vietnamese side. Hell… the US kill-death ratio in the World War 2 Pacific theater, some of the most brutal fighting the US has engaged in, was only 70,000 US citizens killed in exchange for 2.5 million Japanese soliders and somewhere around 1 million Japanese civilians killed.

The US has amazing kill-death ratios across all its wars excluding its civil war when busy fighting among itself. It’s disgusting really. The US will lose a few thousand while killing millions on the other side. Even in total war engagements the US loses thousands while the other combatants lose many millions. Since 1775 the US has only lost around 650,000 even when including both the US civil war and World War 2.

People always make the mistake of assuming during colonial adventures the US is doing anything other than smashing everything up (immediately wiping out the opposing military) then sitting back and milking any insurgency for as long as it is profitable to maintain a low intensity conflict. The US has really only ever fought two conflicts on a total-war footing (Civil War, World War 2) but managed to have hundreds of colonial adventures and so-called police actions throughout its entire history. For most of its history the US has been fighting one or more military actions somewhere, starting with westward expansion across North American then the so-called banana-wars advancing US corporate interests across Latin America and various colonial or cold war adventures across the entirety of the eastern hemisphere.

The Washington Post is whatever its owner Jeff Bezos wants it to be.

but at what cost?!

I was going to say… does Ukraine think everyone has somehow forgotten that Russia is the nation that has had globe spanning satellite surveillance longer than anyone else? To make this claim about the US, Russia, China, Iran, or India is ridiculous.

I guess Ukraine forgot which nations maintain fully integrated domestic space launch capability and large military satellite constellations. Then again they aren’t one of those nations and it’s a capability exclusive to great powers. Ukraine isn’t even in the slightly larger group of nations that have bought a few commercial mapping satellites.

In California, Oregon, and Washington the state governments stripped cities of most of their powers related to zoning in regards to blocking conversions to mixed use residential. As long as there isn’t heavy industry right next door (aren’t crazy, no one wants Houston), mixed use residential zoning is hard for cities to deny.

Los Angeles has the problem (benzene, hydrocarbons, heavy metals) of all the oil wells, pipelines, refineries, crude oil storage, and other oil field infrastructure hidden behind facades all throughout the city. The city and county are an active oil field, something that should never have been approved when there is residential or light commercial literally 25ft away from camouflaged wells, pipelines, and crude oil storage tanks. Then again people over a century ago probably shouldn’t have looked at the natural tar pits and thought to themselves “this is a great place to build a city”.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/09/oil-wells-in-la-nearby-residents-grapple-with-health-problems.html

New residential arguably is unethical in this situation, especially if it’s lower income housing. Btw, this is the reason building new public schools has been almost impossible in Los Angeles and existing schools all have soil that if there were alternatives would mean shutting them down. Los Angeles and Houston are more alike than anyone likes to admit. Can’t do the type of super fund site remediation (clean up) at the scale actually needed because it would mean tearing the city down to the bedrock to replace all the soil.

Uhhhhmm… I think the prefer to be called “tech bros” or “founders”.

Yeah. You build undersea HVDC lines. HVDC was pioneered for undersea cables because it allows smaller cables with lower transmission loss (greater distance) than AC transmission. The other reason is that HVDC is the only realistic way to import/export power between regional AC transmission systems that are not synchronized.

Infact the majority of undersea transmission lines are HVDC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable#Direct_current_cables

I hope this means the Chinese plan to create a High Voltage DC transmission super-grid connecting across over a dozen time zones moves closer to reality. It’s a development project needed for the renewable transition but a major issue is everyone believes both South Korea and Japan will never meaningfully get on board.

I’ve personally enjoyed watching all the admin meetings for the project on their YouTube Channel because it really gives an understanding of the insane inefficiency of the US system of private property rights and public-private contracting.

I laughed reading this because it reminded me about how bad the US was at building anything in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point US contractors charged almost 50 million dollars to build a single gas station and it never actually got completed. To be fair, US contractors are just as bad when hired to build infrastructure in the US.

Best printers out there. I’ve had the same b/w brother laser printer for well over a decade and it is still going strong. None of the bullshit associated with other brands of laser printers or inkjets. It can sit unused for over a year and will immediately print something no problem. Also gives me 7000 pages between ink toner replacements and only have to replace the drum every 3 or 4 tone replacement cycles.

Everyone always forgets that modern warships are mobile missile shield systems. They provide a few hundred miles of interceptor coverage. China has assets in the region and over the past week there are multiple groups staging missile or rocket attacks on everything from infrastructure to military bases in a half dozen countries.

China undoubtedly remembers how the US dropped five JDAM guided bombs through the roof of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.. Unlike decades ago, China has a modern navy and can position ships to prevent such US antics.

Lmao. Chinese officials proving to be experts at not taking the “denounce” bait.

As long as no one hits one of the two US carriers on station in the area there should be no worry about the US resorting to nukes. It’s something like an aircraft carrier getting sunk that would cause the kind of psychic damage required for US leadership to have an irrational knee jerk response involving nuclear weapons.

on a side note: does anyone else hate how because the people of the US are uniquely fkd in the head and have enough nuclear weapons to leave the earth lifeless, the rest of the world has to keep in mind what kinds of events might cause the US to have a complete collective freak out? In recent years I keep thinking about how throughout all of human history hegemonic empires would rise and fall but never before has the decline of an empire come with the very real danger that as they destabilize it could result in them killing everyone on earth rather than just themselves and their neighbors. It feels like being locked in a room with another individual who is experiencing deteriorating mental health and is in possession of a hand grenade no one can take away from them without risking setting it off.

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Even that is giving too much credit to the US government narrative.

There literally are all the US mainstream news outlets like CBS News who actually had reporters there at the time: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/

Also from classified US communications with assets on the ground: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html

Funniest thing is that “tank man” photo idiots spam on Reddit all the time. Most people in the west don’t realize there is video of it, that the guy didn’t get run over. Furthermore they assume he was blocking tanks heading towards the square, infact those tanks were at the time headed away from the square to avoid engaging with armed agitators (people with guns and grenades that had killed police) in a crowded environment. Dude was trying to make them go back.

The deaths that day were people who got gunned down by the “protestors” or the police who were killed when the “protestors” threw grenades (military ordnance) into police vehicles. People that were armed by the CIA as part of a color revolution operation, one that failed because it didn’t actually have any support and more importantly because the PLA commander on the scene ordered his units to leave the area rather than responding in kind. The only actual protestors that day were communists having labor protests happening nearby and not the dancing libertine youth acting as the face of the US color revolution operation involving armed groups trying unsuccessfully to provoke the PLA soliders into responding to deadly attacks with deadly force in a crowded urban environment.