hotspur

How… does a jet shoot itself

It’s been ten years now, but I went to Beijing and xian over 10 days and was fairly ignorant and neutral going in on China. There’s some annoying stuff, but I could not shake how it felt like they had surpassed us clearly then, and I was visiting a not horrible near future. This was a decade ago, and you could pay for everything using QR codes, including street vendors. There were fancy coffee shops where you had to use the codes. We didn’t have WeChat with money enabled (you need a Chinese bank acct) but the cashier was very nice and paid for our coffees with her WeChat and we gave her cash.

That’s all window dressing though, compared to the infrastructure. We took a high speed train to xian from Beijing and it took 3 hours, for a trip that used to be 14 hours. As we were travelling you could see other high speed rails being constructed in all of these directions, using huge modular concrete sections, they clearly had optimized the process.

Zero visible crime. There were Chinese army ads everywhere and visible presence in big public areas, but this was not any different than back home so I hardly noticed it. There were… PUBLICALLY AVAILABLE BATHROOMS EVERYWHERE.

Mass transit in Beijing, which is fucking huge, was highly functional, clean and on time. They’d built like 4-5 new major subways in the last decade leading up to the Olympics, on top of the many they already had.

The smog was bad, and it was hot because it was August, but again, we have that here as well. They had a govt program to plant millions of trees going and you could see them from the high speed rail.

Anyway, I was throughly convinced on that trip that they were gonna drink our milkshake and we deserved it. They were selling multiple domestic smartphone brands for the same as iPhones (which is to say quite expensive) and were building tons of tourist stuff all over the place, but for internal tourists, not external.

I could list things I found unsettling, but honestly most of them could be explained by the fact that I was raised in a individualistic culture and not a more communal one, or were things I’ve realized are the same here.

As a foreigner I wasn’t affected by the firewall, and I was against the firewall, but to be fair, it’s not like the internet had been a great thing in the balance, so maybe it was a good idea?

I should amend my comment to say that even if ramaswamy doesn’t know it, he’s not really being honest though. The federal govt isn’t that inefficient. And his purpose isn’t to make it more efficient; it’s to degrade and destroy federal institution function.

Even the ghoul Larry Summers said attacking payroll is a losing battle, as it accounts for like 15% of the govt ledger, and that ledger is made of fun money to begin with. Sigh.

More awful and stupid bullshit. I guess I should be glad he’s being honest though, he’s proposing it not for collaboration or efficiency, but as an end run around employment protections to thin out staff. Love the DC mayor trying to get the govt to force RTO… everyone should suffer a commute so we can have more chain fast-casual eateries, yay!

Got to see blast wave, lost my eyes due to exploding window, worth it.

Well, yeah, there is that possibility.

Great will check that out

Yes, and try and live close to the center of where you think the nuke would be targeted. If it comes, you’ll be vaporized instantly with no awareness. Depending on the size of the nuke, if you’re outside of that radius, you get shockwave, firestorm and fallout depending on distance, and while you will almost certainly die, it may not be quick and painless.

Yeah I don’t think NATO would definitely nuke respond intentionally. I just worry that there are a lot of countries with nukes, and a lot of early warning systems of varying degrees of sophistication. If something gets misread, the timeframe in which nuclear decisions are made is tiny by design, you can imagine a scenario where with bad luck, things spiral out of control .

I realize the tactical nuclear weapons are much smaller, so maybe they’re not as risky as I’m thinking in terms of tripping early warning systems and such.

Yeah that makes sense—we send them a bunch of our stockpile (don’t we also keep a stockpile in Israel anyway, is that like the summer camp store?) and bonus! We get to get that newly made jdams and shells!

But hey, things are tough, and belts need to be tightened; really need to get a handle on entitlement reform. I’m guessing one of the few agencies the DOGE thing won’t try and streamline will be DOD budgets.

I still don’t really see how tactical nukes can be a usable thing on the battlefield. There are so many ways that systems or protocols could get tripped which basically then mainline into total nuclear destruction no matter what. I really don’t think there’s such a thing as a limited or small-scale nuclear war—the systems that support it almost guarantee all-out nuclear escalation.

I’d mostly say ok this is more nuclear Sabre-rattling like they’ve done over and over again. But a small part of me always wonders, if you have powerful, narcissistic old men in control, is there really a guarantee they wouldn’t just say fuck it and end the world? Particularly if they were near death and pissed off? Dunno. hope we never find out.

He totally didn’t do any of this.