Donald Trump announced a $600 million cut to the cost of the F-35 joint strike fighter. That sounds pretty good, unless you look at the $600 million stacked up against the total program cost, which is going to be nearly $1 trillion by the time the first-order fleecing is complete. [cnbc]
People send me links to weird things; so I have become a nexus of weird. It’s a good place to be.
What. The. Fuck.
“Jaywalking suspect”?
Jaywalking?!?!?
Put the word “Jaywalking” with “suspect” and it makes absolutely no sense at all.
[washingtonpost]
There’s a fellow on Twitter who somehow came across my path, claiming that the Japanese are playing victim regarding the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima. This moves me to want to offer a refuter for those who encounter such idiocy. It’s probably not complete – feel free to tell me what to add.
Missile defense is one of those technologies that has the potential to dramatically destabilize certain aspects of warfare. Back in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began his fixation on “Star Wars” ballistic missile defense, wiser heads pointed out that: a) it’s really hard b) if it did work, it would mean the US was setting itself up to “win” a nuclear war.
The best kind of ‘risk’ to take is the risk of no-risk. I.e.: a sure thing. when you’re talking about capitalism, that means “win/win” scenarios should look indistinguishable from when the game is rigged in someone’s favor. Otherwise, you haven’t rigged it hard enough.
This must be a horrible moment for a rabbit or a mouse or a chipmunk; when I think about the predator drone-strikes, I imagine they must instill the same immobilizing terror, except the drones don’t cast that flickering shadow.
Back in 2009 I did some strategy consulting for a company that was building a cop-cam system; they wanted to know if having the data in “the cloud” would be acceptable, and what protections would need to be in place for the customers to trust it. My job was to look for perverse incentives in the design, and to suggest ways to make the storage option more palatable.
It’s become a rite of the losers to decry the influence of money on politics, and it’s a legitimate complaint. As a portable form of power, money is going to immediately be corrupting to any system you can inject it into.
What do you call it when someone wants more money, even proportionally tiny amounts, yet is willing to go to great lengths to get them? I’m surprised psychologists haven’t come up with a term for it, though I suppose it could be a manifestation of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.