psunavy03

In practice this is why it is abbreviated USSS, and not SS. I've never heard of anyone with a brain calling it just "SS."

You are conflating separate things, considering that (for very good reasons) it is go-to-jail illegal for at least US intelligence agencies to collect on US persons, i.e. citizens, green card holders, and a few others. And please don't waste my time trying to gin up counterexamples when I'm explaining the law, not whether it's ever been broken.

There are also loads of caveats about whether or not intelligence information can be used in prosecutions of US persons, again for very good reasons. The idea that the NSA or CIA is magically spying on all of America is a tinfoil-hatted myth.

"War/defense spending" != "law enforcement spending" and if you conflate these, you're either being ignorant or deliberately disingenuous.

No, most white collar work is ultimately keeping groups of humans in alignment, working on the same thing without stepping all over each other, and working on something that generates value and isn't a total waste of time/money.

The PPTs and emails are just means to an end. But at least you're able to sound all cool and edgy on the internet.

This is literally what American HOAs are becoming.

Great. Now do the British nuclear deterrent, the French one, the Russian one, the Chinese one, the (all-but-confirmed) Israeli one, the Pakistani one, the Indian one, and the North Korean one. You know, because Murica Bad and all. Also the access that Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Germany, and the Netherlands have given to base US nukes on their soil and share them in the event of a nuclear war.

And the US has 11 carriers, not "over a dozen." And we do that to keep world trade flowing because it's good for business, Trumpian idiocy notwithstanding. We have 11 carriers so we can keep about 3 or 4 on patrol at any given time, because that's the level of maintenance and staffing that's required to do that.

No, the military doesn't tell presidents that. It gets given tasking and then gives recommendations to achieve what the civilian leadership demands of it.

You don't seem to have had any time in uniform, let alone seeing how things work on 4-star staffs. I have. The military does not tell the President what to do.

Part of the problem is that senior management in many organizations is so damn bad at, well, organizing the organization. Both the people and the software architecture. There really is something to an approach like everyone credits to Amazon: small team with a discrete product and proper architectural boundaries, communicating to other applications in known predictable ways with a proper process on both ends for making changes.

When you do that, a team can just go. Instead, in many places there's all this bullshit about "Application X is built by Team A, but Team B and C will do the QA." Or "Team D is in charge of Applications Y, Z, and Q, so they can't get to your feature request for Q this PI, because they've got high-priority work for Y and Z." So now you've self-blocked all work on Q just by screwing up your org chart. And we haven't talked about the fact that Team A is in the US, Team B is in Europe, and Teams C and D are in India, so now let's add time zone nonsense to all of the above stupidity.

You don't need as many of those ancillary roles if people involved actually understand Lean and how to run an SDLC, but in my experience, there are too many devs who don't care about anything other than slinging code and too many managers more interested in expanding their own rice bowls and looking important than in actually streamlining how stuff makes it to prod. And then you need a pile of PMs or Scrum Masters to sort out the mess.

The main problem with the US military is that after George Bush, Sr. in 1991, there's been no one of either party in power who's been remotely competent at using military force as a tool of national strategy. By which I mean knowing its limitations, knowing how to use it, and most importantly when and how NOT to use it.

There seems to be this belief since Desert Storm that the US military is this invincible fighting force that's an easy button for any kind of geopolitical problem, when it's an institution with capabilities and limitations that need to be taken into account, and that has to be integrated with all the other levers of national power. We're seeing now how much the most powerful military can spin its wheels and sputter when you don't have a proper strategy or a proper logistical plan behind what you're asking of it.

There also seems to be a belief both in government and the general public that warfighting is "just bombing things." Which does not help.

I don't know how someone can look at what's going on in Ukraine and then scoff at military forces as just "killing each other." We are humans. Humans have been fighting since we were on the grasslands of Africa, and if we conquer the stars we'll fight there, too.

The only way you can protect a society is by being strong enough to intimidate the people in the world who would otherwise look at you and go "I want, I take." Wars are a great evil, but being prepared to fight one is a necessary evil.

Ironically, there have been studies done in using Monte Carlo methods to predict software delivery timelines (Dan Vacanti and Prateek Singh's work specifically), that found out that the more mature and well-behaved your pipelines and test automation were, the more accurate a naive Monte Carlo simulation was.

The only teams where Markov Chain methods or messing with sampling dates would provide more accurate timelines were the teams whose delivery processes were the most borked and spiky.

"We have no idea why the fuck these neutrons are doing what they're doing, because we haven't figured the physics out yet, but we realized we can still statistically simulate what they're going to do to a good enough level of probability."

That's literally why they invented Monte Carlo as part of the Manhattan Project.

I need a rag to wipe up the condescension this post is dripping all over my monitor.

Huy Fong also famously had a blowup with their main pepper supplier that ended in litigation and the supplier starting a competing brand, so it's not surprising their Sriracha now tastes differently, given they literally had to source different peppers for it.

Anyone who's brewed beer can understand two things at once.

1) The brewmasters of mass-market lagers are legitimate masters of their craft, because that style leaves absolutely no room for error and nowhere to hide mistakes. You can screw up an IPA and cover it in hops, at least to a point. You can screw up a porter or stout and cover it in malt. You have to nail a lager.

2) The product itself is still usually insipid, flavorless, and not worth drinking.