rekabis

And historically speaking, megafauna start going extinct at +4℃.

You know what is classified as a megafauna? Humans. And we are already a minimum of 3× past our planet’s carrying capacity.

but couldn't due to a crippling fear of heights

I grew up with a 50m cliff as a backyard.

Absolutely stunning view, the kind that super-wealthy people pay many tens of millions for these days. My parents picked it up in 1977 for practically a song because nearly all the construction companies came from the prairies and had no clue of how to develop on anything other than a pancake-flat piece of land.

But still. It installed into me a particularly overactive fear of heights. I have trouble getting onto roofs thanks to it. When putting up Christmas lights, my wife needs to hold the ladder, as I am tensed up six ways to Sunday by the time I’m at the top.

Skiing is just as bad. I can take most any slope up to and including a double black diamond. It’s only the triples I cannot handle, because that involves vertical drops.

So I understand that fear. Just not the desire to bodily leap out of a perfectly functional aircraft. That’s nuts.

I like RustDesk. If you’re worried about connectivity, you can even run your own relay server.

Then volume is the tactic we need to work with.

Keep in mind that if we were to cancel the entire order of 88 F-35 aircraft, and use that money on Gripens, we would be able to purchase about 420 of them from Europe. That is before any cost savings of building them domestically, this is full sticker price.

Then also consider that quality of tools has never won a war: quantity has.

WWII - on both fronts - has demonstrated this superbly. Sure the Tiger was an exceptional tank, and was virtually unbeatable by a Sherman. The Germans knew how to build a quality machine that was years ahead of anything that America could put out. In fact, it took about 8 Sherman tanks - operating in concert - to take out a German Tiger; distracting it until a shot could be taken against one of its vanishingly rare vulnerable spots at exceedingly close range. And the number of combat-ready Shermans by the end of that skirmish was usually 1 or 0.

But when America had manufacturing capacity to pump out Shermans by the tens of thousands, it didn’t take very long before 10, 20, or even more Shermans started trundling over the ridgeline for every Tiger the Germans fielded.

At that point, despite the clear technological superiority of the Tiger, it was simply overwhelmed.

Almost every modern combat has had numbers win. Not quality, numbers. Especially among tech-similar forces. And the Gripen is the closest available aircraft to the F-35 in tech; certainly closer than the Sherman and Tiger were.

I know what he’s talking about: not against American pilots, but as make-believe American pilots.

Which is a good idea, but not perfect: American pilots will have noticeably different behaviours and tactics, and even personality types that are (generally) not found up here. While training against other Canadians in an F-35 is great, it’s not as good as training against Americans in an F-35.

But that’s the trick - how do we get America, using F-35 aircraft, to help us to train up our Gripen pilots?

And when our original order of 88 or so F-35 planes could, if completely cancelled and on a per-dollar basis, buy 420 Gripens straight from Europe, how do we get America to unknowingly train up so many Gripen pilots?

I have been watching his videos for years with great enthusiasm.

If I ever meat him, it won’t be a handshake. That rant at the end deserves a hug. I love that antifascist energy that came pouring off him.

A phyrric victory is one where the costs have exceeded the benefits that have accrued through victory.

Make no mistake, we would never be able to win in a modern conflict against America. Even if we dropped the entire original order of 80 F-35 aircraft, and used that money to buy 420 Gripen straight from Europe (ignoring domestic production and the lack of skilled fighter pilots, here), we would still lose any kind of air superiority push by America.

But (again, assuming sufficient well-trained pilots) we would definitely f**k up America’s ability to project air superiority by a massive amount. I would even call it a strategic disembowelling of America’s air power.

Just like hunting boar with a spear, the hunter risks the boar being so enraged that, despite being lethally wounded, it still force-impales itself the rest of the way up the spear to get at and kill the hunter.

The point of the Gripen isn’t to win against America. That is impossible.

The point of the Gripen is to have the majority or entirety of the Canadian Air Force beyond America’s ability to remotely restrict operations or shut down completely, such that the pain of any invasion dramatically exceeds any rewards and could even be a lasting semi-lethal blow to their domestic air capabilities as a whole.

You stopped a bit short on your delete spree I guess.

No, that was just the first two steps. Just on the “rip shit out” category, I typically churn through at least three separate tools, usually in this order:

• Win10Privacy
• Win11Debloat
• Winslop

I mean, sure, Windows can take as little as a half hour to “install”. But on a personal rig (which also includes my own workflow software and personal data shoehorned back into place), I take another 24-48 hours to gleefully beat it into submission and install secondary programs that bypass the warts it has acquired over the years.

And as a benchmark, XP needed only about 6-8hrs of extra work to reach the same threshold of data migration, workflow software, and improved usability (I was an NT fanboy, IMO the primary improvement of XP over 2000 was the start menu).

If we add up the AI push, the spyware/telemetry explosion, the recent attempts to force the use of a Microsoft Account as the default login, and the massive bloating and instability of Windows in general, it’s slowly becoming time for even non-technical, everyday users to move to Linux.

I just rebuilt my Win 11 Pro Workstation setup (yes, it is the version for stupidly high core and thread counts), and one of the first things I did was to bodily eviscerate anything AI in the system. Right after gleefully ripping out all the telemetry and spyware.

and shift faster (milliseconds)

Which road-legal vehicles outside of dedicated supercars?

In late 2024 my wife and I went around kicking tires. On a good dozen-plus vehicles we tested in the $60k to $100k range, all had noticeable hesitation between ramming the gas down and actual shifting to a more appropriate gear. Like, close to full seconds of hesitation as the automatic transmission struggled to figure out which gear was needed.

And this was on 2024 models like the 4Runner, ES 350, GX 550, and many more. Didn’t matter whether we were stopped or driving, the hesitation as the transmission failed its telepathy roll was palpable.

And don’t even get me started on road elements like hairpin turns, where clutch work is vastly superior on any manual with a clutch pedal. Being able to drop a manual clutch exactly where it is needed cannot compare with any automatic hunting for the correct gear. It gets even worse if the approach to the hairpin was a coast to any degree, and the automatic moved several gears off in response.

Like JFC, put a GVW-appropriate, HP-comparable engine in my 1986 Jetta, and I could out-perform any automatic vehicle under $100k. About the only thing I wouldn’t bother going up against are the dedicated sports cars and supercars that less than 0.01% of all people own.

Fuel efficient, possibly.

But their capabilities envelope is still significantly within that of a traditional (not fake) manual transmission.

After all, how does one ride the clutch on an automatic? How does one drop the clutch? How does one go from 5th into 2nd without touching the gears inbetween?

I don’t know how valid it is these days, but when I was last in Germany in 1989, I asked my much older cousin about automatic vehicles.

Conceptually he knew what they were and that Americans drove them, but aside from large commercial vehicles - and it was rare at the time even there - he had never come across a consumer vehicle with an automatic transmission in his life. Like, everything at the time was stick and three pedals on the floor. Everything. If you wanted an automatic it had to be special-ordered and shipped in at significant expense from America or something like that