Yanks killed 4 million Vietnamese, literally salting the earth with chemical weapons all without a single declaration of war.

The idea US presidents need it is laughable. Shit it’s even more laughable that the Republicans would ever restrain a US president from a war of aggression is even more laughable, even if it was a democrat pushing the button.

For the republicans every problem is a nail (and boy do their corporate overlords have a great deal on hammers).

I don’t think people understand how completely different French nuclear weapons and doctrine is compared to the UK and NATO.

The French have a nuke first strike policy "dissuasion du faible au fort”, deterring a stronger power by threatening unacceptable damage.

Their policy, is to use a Rafale to, from a Carrier, fire a ASMP-A nuclear tipped cruise missile across the bows of anyone dumb enough to antagonise them.

Conversely the British have no tactical nuclear weapons like the French. All they operate are the Trident II D5s from their ballistic missile subs, even then they only carry 5 MIRV (est) warheads per missile.

And no first strike policy either.

Don’t get me wrong. I very much favour a European military alliance that pushes Europe off the US teat. But the idea of the UK and France changing their doctrine (and a host of other elements) without non nuclear states contributing a significant amount of money is pretty unlikely.

The problem isn’t that PFASs are in fire fighting gear.

In fact it’s PTFEs that are in firefighting gear, and due to the stability of this chemical and how this gear is disposed of its very unlikely d that their clothes are being dumped in the environment.

PFAS are, by and large a by-product of Teflon / Gore-Tex production, and even then from decades ago (as most manufacturers have exited or are exiting the use of PFAS, whilst there are much tighter controls on effluence now days).

So the majority of PFAS pollution in the environment is primarily due to the dumping of effluence from these facilities, accidents and firefighting foams, especially that used by the military fire suppression and in their use to fight fires.

Take the Blue Mountains region in Australia. Pristine environment, massive national park. In 1992 and 2002 we had two petrol tanker crashes. Now understandbly the authorities were pretty much get those tanker fires under control before the whole park burns up. So fire-fighters used PFAS imbued foams to suppress them. This in turn caused horrendous amounts of this chemical to be washed into the water table.

And thus this beautiful environment now has some of Australia’s worst PFAS pollution.

Same for land surrounding airbases where they regularly practice fire suppression.

Worse is how PFAS is evaporated from polluted waterways and bodies into clouds. So you don’t even need to live near a pfas polluted area to become exposed.

Veritasium has a great video on this awfully depressing subject https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY

https://pfas.australianmap.net/

https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/ (for the US)

Really one day I realized I rather eat lunch with my cats than any of my coworkers and have never looked back

I know right. Being with my animals, (and I suppose, even my family) is priceless to me.

I’ll have a puddle of cats on my bed whilst the GSD is wedged between my chair and the bed, my lights are off, my room is dark and cool with a silver of light coming through the top shades. I got my tunes playing and I’m not getting interrupted.

I got my computers around me, I’m running multiple processes. If I get tired I can roll onto the bed.

The dog and cats are just happy to hang, we play, do commands and I get to take my dog out for a long lunch time walk.

Sure the cats do talk back a bit but it’s so much nicer to hear them meow then colleagues crapping about crap.

I hate going to work. I’m sitting in my office (forced to come in several days a week) and I realise I do not want to speak to a single person. Sometimes I try to avoid speaking to people for an entire day.

I guess it’s the 20 years I spent running frontline customer service teams that makes you despise humanity. I am in absolutel awe that the vast majority of humans have mastered the skill of inhaling and exhaling. I’m still astounded that people have worked out how to use the buttons on their shirts, or worked out how to pull clothes onto their bodies.

Seriously I used to image customers sitting at the kitchen table with a shirt over their face and various items of clothes half on their limbs alwhilst trying, but missing, to insert a spoon of cereal into their mouths.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to make sure the goddam fucking computer was turned on (“oh is that why internet didn’t work?”) before going through troubleshooting steps, only to be meet with a “oh wow it’s working”.

Argh.

The other thing about work from home is that 10 years ago when I started my job I might have taken 8 hours to do a particular job.

Now I’m able to do it in 1 hour (ok fine, 5 mins via scripting and shit). I don’t need to explain or justify to my boss what I’m doing in the 7 hours as long as the job he pays me to do is getting done (I do time sensitive shit so it’s also being available at a moments notice to jump into action).

Most jobs come down to attitude. Now yes I’m doing my own stuff, picking the kids up at 3pm, walking my dog at lunch, but when the shit hits the fan I’m up at 2am, getting stuff back up and running and hitting/beating deadlines. I don’t mind the messy complex fucked up job and I don’t whinge/give my boss grief (unlike most of the staff I work with). He knows he can give me shit and it’ll get done, properly (not half assed), returned with even a bow tied across it and ready to present to his bosses without any further handling.

Otherwise WFH is just so superior to WFO, from a cost, time and sheer efficiency point of view.

Free the boys free the boys free the boys!

It wasn’t the lips on his face that was syncing with the music… It was his ass

All it took was a little hand-me-down.

If only OP had kept it for himself, he might have been the IT boss.

I have no other policy positions/will pursue no other policy objectives."

Except I will ensure that the army develops large 20 metre high robots that I call Battlemechs.

And we shall paint them blue, gold, white, red, green and not red and black.

Coz fuck Kurita

Apparently calling a person a dumb fuck for believing Russian propaganda is an insult

Fucking pussies

Is it an insult against Putin to declare he is running a mafia state?

Eternity on the google playstore has a swipe right to left for next post.

Absolute godsend.

ML is run by heavily-indoctrinated communists. They’re the type that straight up worship communist leaders.

It’s run by Russia bots who are pumping out Kremlin talking points whilst deleting anyone who is critical.

I got deleted for pointing out Putin runs a mafia state.

Shit even the Russian communist don’t like Putin.

Greg Egan’s Diaspora sets out how humanity could explore the galaxy and even the multiverse, which if you can’t be bothered reading consists of:

1. Upload conciousness into computers, leave physical bodies.
2. Miniaturise computers until we have spaceships in the grams/nano grams
3. As we’re no longer connected to time we can build massive solar system sized technologies, built by nanotech, that sure could take hundreds of years to build but in our virtual realms we could easily sleep.
4. Use Lasers to propel our nanogram spaceships to 90% light speed. Even then for the astronauts, time is almost nothing (time goes slower the faster you go). A trip across the galaxy would feel like mere weeks to you. We could explore the universe as immortals.
5. At this point we should have a pretty good understanding of dark matter/energy and how to move between universes (the multiverse, depending if you accept it as a base for explaining non locality)
6. Which would allow us become eternal.

In the here and now the only way to travel to another system with our current tech is via nuclear pulse engines.

Basically you build a large spaceship. Stick it on massive shock absorbers which are in turn connected to a metre plus thick steel plate.

Cut small hole in the middle. Have a door that opens closes.

Eject 1kt explosive device out door. Repeat 500x till you get to orbit.

Basically you could get a spaceship up to very high speed with nuclear pulse engines to turn a multi hundred year journey into less then 100 years.

That said the biggest problem with interstellar journeys is that our material science and manufacturing tolerances are pretty shit. Essentially all of the air will leak out through the metal skin of the spaceship.

I still think carving put an asteroid, sticking engine on it (see nuclear pulse engines) , covering it in ice and water will solve the problems radiation shielding, losing critical gases and provide ample fuel and water for a very long journey.

Gaspar Noe’s Climax

A French film based on a true story where a hip hop dance troupe had their punch spiked with a large amount LSD before discovering they were snowed in the hall they had been partying in.

The film is continuously shot with no cuts, with the cast adlibbing their lines. The dancing is amazing as is Bangalter’s utterly amazing soundtrack (very far away from any Daft Punk).

I’m sure Gaspar took liberties with the story but after discovering a child had ingested the punch I became quite sick and horrified. I could barely watch the film after that, the insanity that befores everyone is truly sickening.

Having accidentally ingesting a large amount of LSD (my first trip) at a young age (14) it bought a lot back.

And I very much enjoyed a large part of the film but after that part of the plot it really fucked me up.

I ended up on a ml thread the other day

Fucking Russia bot moderators deleted my post and banned me.

not nearly enough people are calling Stephen Miller a Jewish nazi,

Oh you mean what the victims of the ghettos and camps called collaborators, that would be Judenräte.

Especially applicable since it’s clear he isn’t being coerced into being a fascist.

Or “Fuck it, I bet there’s enough slack in there that I can pull it out a few more centimeters, I just have to pull really hard.”

That’s what she said

They’d be upset if they were able to understand what that means

All men were created equal and yet in the US they’ve made it very clear they do not believe, whatsoever in this

Unfortunately i do work for a targeted company (we do a lot of secret squirrel stuff) in south East Asia.

We get a lot of attacks.

I was looking at the attack and malware they inject (there is a blog post link on the notepad++ notice) which pointed out how the attack worked. Apparently they run a service called bluetoothservice.exe. I didn’t see anything like that or any the other stuff they said gets created.

But then again finding malware isn’t my bag so who knows.

Pretty sure my updates came via nanite installer so I’m hoping I wasn’t targeted.