I sure as hell wouldn’t want the job of securing logistics in the northern woods with a bunch of angry Canucks running around.

This guy seems like he might know what he’s talking about but is there a version that isn’t a 3 hour video?

Like an article or something?

They do work. They’ve been using them to blow up tanks.

The way they’re used there isn’t much time for that. With regular drones they hunt around for something to kill and then dive in. The wired drones stay hidden until the target comes into range and then they just come out for the strike. The defenders only have a few seconds to react.

Wire guided missiles have been in use since WWII.

Markus Reisner has a pretty good explanation of how they’re deployed in one of his videos.

They have much shorter range so they basically set them up as ambushes. The wired drone gets hidden somewhere at a choke point. An other operator flies a recon drone at long range. When they report that a good target has come into range the wired drone takes off and hits the target.

I really wish we could retire the phrase “tech bro”.

It actively alienates allies that we desperately need.

The average techie does NOT fit the mold of “tech bro”.
They tend to be very liberal https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/122582/web.345435/#/summary They tend to be more LGBTQ friendly than most industries https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/diversity-inclusion/guest-article/top-lgbtq-friendly-industries-in-the-us/

There’s a loud minority of tech leaders who qualify as “tech bros” and they’re not representative of the industry. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-02-20/california-silicon-valley-andreessen-zuckerberg-musk-donald-trump

If we continue to lump that large majority of nerds in with that group; at best we’re wasting time yelling at allies, at worst we’re driving them to the other side.

No shame.

I view it as a friendly competition between Europeans. Right now, Spain is in the lead. UK and Italy are trailing but they’re still racing in the right direction. I’m cheering for them to catch up.

The major difference is that in “blink” and “chicken” you expect to keep doing your thing (eg driving straight ahead) while only your opponent makes concessions.

The Cuban missile crisis involved significant concessions on both sides.

The Cuban middle crisis was resolved through negotiation and concessions, not by a game of nuclear chicken.

Agreed. They don’t necessarily vote for the better candidate, they vote for their favorite candidate.

They vote against their interests but not against their emotions. People hate her now, for good reason. The people voting for her then, clearly didn’t hate her.

There are plenty of reasons to hate her but she was the longest serving UK PM ever. She couldn’t have been that hated if they kept re-electing her

As a joke, I once asked an LLM to produce a review of Top Gun that argued that it was actually a trans allegory. It made terrible arguments but it did produce words that technically met that requirement. (It included some kind of hilarious lines about the satirical use of hypermasculinity)

I imagine an argument that “Amerika is a love song” would look similar.

Rammstein released “Amerika” in 2004. That was during the 1st Bush Jr administration but the complaints in the song aren’t limited to Republicans.

They’re being researched. It looks like there is a lot of funding pledged to the program. If those funds get cleared, they will be part of a 10 year research phase. That means that by 2035, they’ll be ready to start thinking about how to start building prototypes. There were predictions of earlier prototypes but they seemed to have gotten pushed back.

So the Tempest and FCAS could come eventually. Canada may need some planes before that.

Stealth is part of it. The those two systems are the most advanced in the world on many factors.

It’s unlikely that anyone will develop a superior system any time in the next decade or so.

That’s sad but I understand.

You brought joy to a lot of people but it must have been a ton of work.

Sorry. That was an error on my part. I’ll correct it.

I’m confused.
That’s not a poem.

I was assured that Sprog bestows awesome poems upon the masses.

China has more rare earth deposits than the US but that’s a bit misleading. Rare earths show up in trace amounts all over the world. China has them in higher concentrations.

The bigger issue is that China has been the main refiner of rare earths for decades. That means they have all the infrastructure for actually making it available and they’ve developed a bunch of technologies and processes to do it way cheaper and more efficiently than anyone else can.

I don’t know the pricing specifics of EV motors but I have some familiarity with electric motors, in general. The technology hasn’t really changed much in a long time. We’ve have 3 phase motors and hall effect sensors for ages. They’re better than older electric motors but the huge technology leap, that made EVs practical, was the batteries.