golden-face

Praise to the old gods and the new, why?!

It took me a hot minute to understand what square packing really means (the Wiki is insightful) but TLDr: it's packing unit squares (1x1) into a larger, arbitrarily sized square. When the larger square has a side length that is not an integer, it becomes non-trivial to determine the most 1x1 squares that can be placed inside/packed.

Among The Thugs!!

Read it!! Some of the best literature of the late 20th century.

Hunter S mixed with David Foster Wallace mixed mixed with Tom Wolfe.

Great writeup! Vividly remember this being a thing especially in multiplayer. What was that janky match matching service, MSN something?

Also a really underrated game, the mechanics (line of sight over the horizon stuff) and isometric graphics were pretty cool for the time and it had a well developed story/campaign mode.

Even if the peace holds the whole thing feels like a definite L for the following reasons:

Materiel - a huge amount of expensive and long lead time to replace missiles/interceptors expended - a $300,000,000 radar station destroyed - like 30 Reaper drones (approximately 1/5 of the total) - 1 AWACs destroyed and 3-5 others heavily damaged (we only have about 20 of them - tons of damage to infrastructure in the area (like refineries, ports, chemical plants)

Geopolitical - primacy of American military power shown to be truly questionable (I consider this as the biggest part of the L; can't decide if it's an unforced error or it was bound to happen under any administration) - Iran now knows it can leverage its drones and missiles to influence the region and world; they don't even need a nuke anymore to project power

I guess if there is a silver lining it's that the conflict has exposed how unprepared some of our doctrines and orders of battle are when dealing against an adversary that needs to operate on a more asymmetric level. But also it feels like that should be already known after years of monitoring the Ukrainian conflict.

Oh come on Jump, how can you deny it's not shady?

I could kind of agree with the argument that "well these companies stay private longer so they are more mature" but the float exemption with the seemingly arbitrary calculation to figure out weights completely belies that argument.

Something definitely seems rotten in The Kingdom of Denmark with respect to the price of oil but I guess the market knows best. What that knowledge is, I don't know.

If anything it's surprising the price of natural gas hasn't gone higher considering ~20% of the supply is going to be inconsistent for 2+ years.

Feels more like: can the bond market handle any potential outflows as money is rotated into these IPOs?

How can this ever be approved? Under the unitary executive theory he was suing and is now settling with himself.

IIRC Israeli special forces knocked out almost all of Iran's advanced radar systems last summer right before the nuclear program strikes so to say the F35 dominated is somewhat disingenuous.

Damaged is an understatement, its aft section was completely destroyed and the plane is in two pieces. We only have like 20 E-3s, half of them can't even fly at any given time, and this one was sitting out on a runway like a sitting duck and we've had weeks to learn since those KC-130s got hit in a similar situation.

It's frustrating that we're constantly being lied to about what's actually happening.

$300,0000,000 phased array radar stations getting knocked out of commission by a $50,000 drone traveling at 140 MPH which a $20,000,000 SM-3 can't intercept.

Weeks of 8,000 airstrikes leading to "complete annihilation" but now we need more weeks to finish the job with energy prices skyrocketing.

Asymmetric warfare is a bitch.

This feels like a misleading ratio, it's just saying the cost is the same in per capita terms but says nothing about the absolute cost or more importantly cost as a percentage of income, which matters for the majority of people in the denominator of the GDP per capita calculation.

It's not guaranteed to be the same outcome in Iran, we're just rolling the dice again and hoping it is.

What is the mechanism which turns these assemblies to do work and move/pull/push something? The inner screw is rotated by a motor, which causes the planetary roller system assembly to move, where the thing you want to move is attached to the moving roller assembly?

Yeah really does show you how it's now (actually for some time) just a label, conveniently morphing over time for people/groups you don't like, losing any actual meaning because it's applied so liberally.

And it's ironic because there are clearly "real terrorists" (i.e. 9/11 guys).