When you’ve got over half a trillion dollars at stake, people will do or say pretty much anything. So it gets hard to figure out what’s going on when you read headlines in the form of “X is an ongoing disaster” alongside of “great cost-savings achieved via X” for any given X. It’s hard to be both a tremendous success and an ongoing disaster. I am, naturally, referring to the latest news about the F-35 program.
I got this old thing from a fellow on craig’s list who was clearing out an old farm.
Eventually I will stop making fun of the “tactical” gear mindset. But for now, since I’m stuck in an airport, I’m going to continue to trawl through the justifications in hope of understanding.
When the US invaded Iraq and overthrew the government, we heard a bit about “nation-building” until the establishment discovered it no longer knew how to do that, and/or wasn’t willing to pay the price that it paid rebuilding Germany, Japan, and South Korea. [Read more…]
My posting about the paradox of “self defense” triggered much more response than I expected. [stderr]
In computer security transitive trust is when system A trusts B, and system B trusts C – in that case system A trusts C but doesn’t usually realize it.
Witcher 3 mild spoiler below:
Strategy is the process of imagining possible futures and how they come about, then “pruning” back the lines of causality to try to infer what actions will get you there. It’s an active process that stresses a person’s creativity and analytic skills. The hardest part, I believe, is coming up with (and eliminating) endless hypotheticals of everything that could go wrong right now for any given now. This, however, is the essence of strategy.
Warning: Sculpted Genitalia
I don’t play kickstarter much, but I occasionally dabble. Mostly, I see it as an interesting alternative way of funding art; I’m not a big fan of The Gallery System and I like to see a way creative people can get something done, publicized, and out there.
This is another story in the “things I am tracking but I am not sure what they mean, yet” file. Unfortunately, we won’t (probably) know for a year or two; there are still a lot of shoes to drop.
[Edit: I wrote this monday afternoon. Since then there have been new developments, which I will comment on at the bottom. The bit about hypothetical Mossad spies inside Kaspersky Labs was kidding, when I wrote it, I swear.]