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atomheartbevo

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by atomheartbevo

  1. We were not staying out though - Japan attacked us precisely because we were interfering in their supply chain with the oil embargo - it was economic warfare. We put them on a timer of sorts where they were going to run out of fuel for their fleets, leaving them vulnerable to us We can argue that we wouldn’t have done a first strike against them, but militarily if we bottled up their fleets in their ports through a lack of fuel, the effect would be the same as outright sinking those fleets. They would struggle to consolidate gains and put down guerrilla movements if they couldn’t easily move troops around. And given how paranoid they were, even if they didn’t hit us at Pearl Harbor, they had to try and take the Philippines from us because those islands stuck right out into the major supply lanes coming out of Japan. A few dozen PT boats out of the Philippines could have shut down their supply lines. And they had to cut off Australia from us because Britain was struggling with their own defenses, let alone trying to keep Australia free from the Japanese. At some point they had to hit American supply ships going to Australia. It was inevitable.
  2. I wouldn’t leave Poland out of the equation, and we’ve pretty much unified the Baltic and Nordic countries, to the point where some of their air forces are operating as one. It’s agonizingly slow, but as Europe takes our place as the leaders for the West (and probably ramp up arms production even more), they are going to be a lot more unified than they’ve been in many years. Even though Congress passed legislation that prevents us from flat-out leaving NATO , I expect we will bring most or all troops home (which will cause us huge problems if shit happens in the Middle East/Israel), but I can’t see Russia trying to invade a NATO country at this point, especially with a powerful Ukraine tying up almost all of their ground forces. Their fucking Scooby Doo vans and golf carts don’t have the distance either once NATO strikes take out their railways. Hell, Putin got Finland and Sweden off the fence and joining NATO, which is like UT and OU joining the SEC.
  3. I did. Fucking iPhone. Sorry @Schulz2.0
  4. Yeah, are we turning off Russia’s Starlinks or demanding they pay us hundreds of billions of dollars? Or even give the Ukrainians a few million?
  5. I opened my email client I read the email I created this email with 5 bullet points I added my manager to the CC I checked the deadline to make sure I wasn’t late I sent this email. I know you said five bullet points, but I wanted to show you I was a real go-getter with upper management written all over me. Signed, an overworked and underpaid federal employee.
  6. She’s a poor man’s Vanessa Hudgens. But she’s an open book apparently, NSFW see-through clothing https://www.abookof.us/openbook/natalie-martinez
  7. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, you are about to be on the doge chopping block. https://www.kxan.com/news/tesla-recalls-over-376000-vehicles-due-to-power-steering-defect/
  8. Gonna leave this here Prominent DOGE Staffer Is Grandson Of Turncoat KGB Spy Among the cadre of DOGE engineers now rooting through the guts of the administrative state, few have attracted more curiosity than Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old coder who interned for three months for Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant company. Coristine has a brief but colorful history that includes being fired from Path Networks, a cybersecurity company, for giving company documents to a competitor. He apparently palled around with a criminal hacking group called The Com and, according to a Telegram account associated with him, had solicited hacking services online. In 2021, he founded a company called Tesla.Sexy LLC that, according to Wired, “controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains. One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market.” A lot about DOGE remains unknown – like who’s officially in charge – but Coristine has email addresses at USAID and the Department of Homeland Security and was recently seen inside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the State Department. Across the federal government, he seems to have the run of the place. There’s one aspect of Coristine’s background that has escaped public notice: his grandfather, Valery Martynov, was a KGB spy who played an intriguing role in a sprawling 1980s espionage drama. ------- Seriously, go read the whole article. Subscribe to that guy if you like it.
  9. Both of them should be very insecure - Zuck's eggs are all in one (Facebook) basket, and Facebook succeeded because AngelFire, Friendster, GeoCities and MySpace failed spectacularly, and all of the walled garden communities were starting to lose their walls (Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe, etc.) just a few years before FB got going. Now mix in that Microsoft-backed LinkedIn is headed towards a billion users (I doubt it will get there, but it's not far away). Hell, Pinterest had FB worried for a while Zuck is now in prevent-defense mode (too soon?) - Threads should have been a twitter killer and FB had the resources to make it a twitter killer, but they were too paranoid that it would take users away from Instagram, so they've kept it deliberately stripped down/crippled, such that if you are a Threads user who wants private messages, you have to rely on Instagram for private messages (among other major problems with Threads). It's fucking stupid that in 2025 a large (what should be a standalone) social media platform relies on another social media platform for private messages, but here we are. Zuck is also willing to lose millions of users by loosening up moderation and letting misinformation and disinformation run rampant (which then generates clicks and ad revenue) because in the short term, all of the ad revenue from the misinformation/disinformation flowing freely now is good for his bottom line. He's not looking a year or two down the line when things have gotten worse (a lot of FB user groups are starting to plot exit strategies to other platforms such as Groups.io) and there's always community-based platforms looking to horn in on FB's audience. FB has had a longer run at the top of the hill than its predecessors and competitors, many of whom had serious financial backing, and Zuck knows that LinkedIn, some of the smaller community-based platforms or user group-based platforms, and even a Google or Apple could probably put Facebook in the negative. Zuck knows that if Google got their shit together on social media and truly leverages YouTube (2nd behind FB with 2.5 billion active users vs 3 billion for FB), or Apple decided to nudge into the social media arena, it would eat into FB. And he's constantly attacking Apple because they keep (openly) working to block off FB/Meta access to the rest of your phone or at least make you aware that Meta wants access to it. And most importantly, Zuck knows that serious FB growth is a thing of the past - a fuckload of FB users are aging out (dying off) while younger generations give no particular fucks about FB or even view it as the old person platform. And those younger generations are constantly bouncing around social media platforms. If they are on TikTok they aren't on Instagram. So he's got to keep engagement up which is why misinformation and disinformation is running freely. Musk should also be insecure for a lot of reasons - he didn't start Tesla (buying companies sometimes makes people insecure that the original founders could have done a better job), and he has to know that sales are not as good as he'd like, and we've all seen parking lots full of CyberTrucks in person, and most auto companies are rolling into their 2nd and 3rd-generation (or more) EVs with popular brands (F-150, etc.) catching some attention in their first-generation releases. SpaceX relies so much on the US government, it makes sense that he's put his people into leadership positions at NASA. If Boeing gets their shit together on the larger stuff, or Blue Origin continues to progress, either one could start nibbling away at SpaceX's business (or worse, Boeing compete with the heavy lift stuff while BO takes low-end satellite launches away as it moves towards heavy payloads). And twitter is not going to make him even more rich, even if its value comes back up, because, like FB, twitter is tapped out - it's not going to continue to gain the numbers it once had, and if anything, as BlueSky and others take in more and more serious/official/famous people, organizations, or companies, it'll have a harder time. And I still have to look a few times a week, and the ads are shit and can't be paying that much. And like FB, twitter is faced with younger people not having any loyalty for platforms and bouncing around whatever is trending. Hell, there are 11 social media platforms with more active users than twitter (and QQ, Weibo, and Pinterest aren't far behind). And the thing about FB and twitter, and this is not lost on Zuck, but it could be on Musk, is that there doesn't have to be one major platform suddenly coming up the ranks - social media can be death by a thousand paper cuts and it can also be a company willing to utilize their existing user bases. YouTube has a lot of Instagram features (it's not just videos, there are discussion areas where YouTubers provide updates) and with its video shorts, we could wake up tomorrow and they piggyback that 2.5 billion active users into a new app focused on shortform videos (and photos) and social media updates, and the big-ass YouTubers with their tens and hundreds of millions of followers will be all over it. What does it do to Instagram if it goes from 2 billion active users a month to 1.7 or even 1.5 in a month? What does that do for profits/revenue, and what does that do for the stock price - in the span of a year it's went from $430 to $730, and it could easily drop down. What if LinkedIn/Microsoft spins off a new service that could be still tied to it, but is more of a personal vs business nature (Microsoft has the know-how, the users, things like Teams, etc.? What if Apple decides to unify some of their services and push a barebones social media platform and Apple being Apple, skip most/all advertising. They have the money to burn, and it would help sell more of their services. TLDR: There are a lot of reasons both Zuck and Leon should be insecure. They could fall just as rapidly as they rose, and there's plenty of money that could make that happen.
  10. Yeah, it’s not bad at all. It feels more Star Trek-like than some of the TNG movies. I even like The Motion Picture now. I used to be a real snob about it as a kid (saw it in the theater when it came out) and rave about II-III-IV, but now that I am older and understand everything that was going on with ST at the time, I appreciate it for what it is. I want to take my kid to see TMP and the others at Alamo when they occasionally show them.
  11. Bloody as hell. Would pay to see it.
  12. Yep, and sure, we had to bury some of those friends along the way, and disown others when their webcams shifted and we saw they were wearing nothing below the waist, or our webcams shifted and showed we were wearing nothing below the waist, but it’s the friends that we kept that are important.
  13. Then go ahead and run for DA. We will vote for you.
  14. He no longer cares about when Bob Stoops or Barry Switzer die. He will head to the bar and have a drink, sure, but he’s getting softer with age.
  15. It feels better than the second season.
  16. I wouldn’t count them out yet. Russian manufacturing still can’t supply their own troops in large numbers, so we see them driving around on motorcycles, golf carts, and Scooby doo vans. Ukraine keeps hitting facilities that in the long run will make it hard for the Russian economy. They still haven’t come close to driving Ukraine out of Kursk, even with their dwindling North Korean soldiers. I’m half expecting to wake up one day and see the Kremlin in flames from a drone strike.
  17. It could very well be the military industrial complex making itself heard, but there are plenty who genuinely hate Putin and Russia. My dad (retired oil and gas, does some analysis on exploration these days) also believes some major O&G are making noise about the possibility of sanctions being dropped and Russian oil and gas flooding the market and hurting American production and profits. They are not happy with the prospect of Russian flooding certain areas either (Europe won’t go running back to Russia, but there are some markets where Russia would dump a lot well below the current prices).
  18. For those of us who are history nerds, the door is being opened up for Europe to go back to being the leaders of the free world, at least in the western hemisphere. And unlike in the past when it was usually one country, there is now a mostly unified Europe (UK may not be in the EU but they will side with the EU) and not only that but Finland and Sweden have firmly joined up with Europe militarily. European armaments companies got a huge boost as well. We’ve never seen a Europe that is overall this unified about something. Zeihan is probably writing a book about it as we speak.
  19. He can’t pull Tesla back from where it looks like it’s headed sales-wise. He’s completely turned off the biggest chunk of people who would happily buy an EV, and the people he is catering to either can’t afford it, don’t have the infrastructure to support it, or are not going to give up their gas- and diesel-burners.
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