rekabis

Imagine being dumb enough to invest into the military industrial complex of a country that's actively threatening to invade you.

And to buy defensive weapons that can be summarily and remotely shut down by that invading country.

That would be the most moronic decision possible.

The Gripen may not be a 1:1 match with the F-35, but neither was the Sherman a 1:1 match with the Nazi Tiger tank. It took an average of 8 Shermans being KO’d to take out a single Tiger. But when 10, 20, or even more Shermans could be fielded for every Tiger that hit the field, victory came down to numbers, not technological superiority. As has been copiously demonstrated across nearly every conflict of the 20th and 21st centuries.

And instead of 88 F-35 aircraft, that exact same dollar value could buy us 420 Gripen aircraft, at even less on-going maintenance costs on an overall basis.

True, even with 420 Gripens we don’t stand any chance of defending ourselves. But effective defense is not the goal… the goal is to make any invasion as prohibitively expensive for America as possible. And 420 Gripens that cannot be remotely shut down is that answer.

Considering that all other alternatives are either

• extremely difficult if not impossible for non-technical users to leverage, or
• much, much worse, up to even eagerly giving out your data

I consider Signal to be the best option out there. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. It simply is the best general option out there, by far, for a general audience.

Yes, you can be totally secure, untraceable, and ultimately unfindable. But being cut into pieces, with each separate piece entombed in its own barrel of concrete, and each barrel dropped into a different oceanic trench, tends to be a bit beyond what I consider to be reasonable to achieve that.

Okay, so I was not specific enough. Let me rephrase:

“Name me any popular media that centres around a husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend dynamic, where the man isn’t a moron…”

There we go. Happy?

And notice the term “likely” in my prior comment. Don’t ask me to pick grains of sand off of a beach when you have the entire beach in the first place. I’ve got better things to do with my life than working through Brandolini’s Law; gesturing to that beach is as far as I am going to go.

Aside from distressingly rare well-written examples of healthy relationships such as Babylon 5, the “foolish husband, responsible wife” trope is almost everywhere. It even figures prominently in a majority of advertising that features couples interacting with each other.

• https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FoolishHusbandResponsibleWife
• https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentingTheHusband
• https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HenpeckedHusband

And this is far from an exhaustive list. But it’s telling that this is a widely-known and ubiquitous trope, whereas its flip-side opposite is pretty much nonexistent.

In fact, the only references I could find were on the “foolish husband” tropes:

• https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210615-why-tvs-most-toxic-stereotype-endures
• https://www.huffpost.com/entry/retire-the-bumbling-husband_b_5602054
• https://feministing.com/2012/08/24/the-doofy-husband-trope/

And Star Trek should not be on your list:

• OS did not include explicit relationships between main characters
• TNG series had only two historical relationships, neither of which were “active”.
• DS9 had Rom (last season), O’Bryan, and (in the early seasons as a bumbling romantic) Bashir. To a certain extent the trope even existed between Quark and his mother, in terms of her being financially successful and smart in ways Quark never was, although this was shown in just a handful of episodes and so doesn’t really count.
• Voyager had Paris, Neelix, and - to a painfully awkward extent - Kim. Plus, poor dude spent the entire voyage home as a f**king ensign.
• Technically Enterprise had Trip, who as a human was very emotionally foolish next to T’Pol.

Plus, the argument can be made that a few of your other choices don’t have a husband/wife relationship as a central/recurring feature between main characters, and as such are also ineligible.

The only solid mark that I see in your favour is Babylon 5, with Sheraton’s relationship with Delenne and Ivanova’s tragic relationship with Cole being exemplary examples that are shockingly rare in media.

So they’re stomping all over State’s rights.

Cool. So by that metric, can we socialize the nation, such as with power grids? C’mon, Texas. Don’t be like that.

AI is a solution in search of a problem.

The problem being CEOs asking themselves, “how do we acquire labour without having to pay for said labour, in order to maximize our own profit margins?”

AI was always meant to allow wealth to access labour without allowing labour to access wealth.

I, for one, am designing an entire production line of guillotines for when our capitalist system finally collapses. And for those in bunkers: a way of discovering air exchangers and all emergency exits so they can be filled with cement to turn bunkers into tombs. We need an effective method of culling sociopaths from our civilization, after all.

Insurers, he said, are already lobbying state-level insurance regulators to win a carve-out in business insurance liability policies so they are not obligated to cover AI-related workflows. "That kills the whole system," Deeks said.

If insurers are going through extreme lengths to remove AI output from the list of things they will insure, this says everything about its future.

Because nothing says “effective risk management achieved” like an insurer signing off on, or forbidding the insurance of, an entire class of materials.

It’s a canary in a coal mine, like how insurers are now removing any ability for Floridians to insure against hurricanes or sea level rise, despite flat earthers screaming their heads off that climate change is a conspiracy and isn’t real.

(Note: I have seen the term “flat earther” starting to mean anyone who vehemently denies reality in spite of copious evidence that shows they are wholly and completely wrong)

ROTFLMAO 🤣🤣🤣

“Nasser” is definitely not the name I would have guessed.

Racists gonna be racist. All they need is the colour of a person’s skin.

Finland facepalms furiously in the corner, gesturing vehemently at the homeless solutions it has proven as being wildly successful and undeniably effective

What a great way of identifying racists and other societal undesirables.

Nationalize healthcare. Build a web of regulations that set regional funding on population metrics, prevent government interference, and lock in funding in ways that are impossible to politically interfere with. Use efficiencies of scale to trim the fat at the top even more.

Also make it illegal for any healthcare org to charge the consumer for any essential service, and make it illegal to discriminate where consumers come from. They can only triage based on medically-basedl rules.