Sadly the Obama administration made it illegal for NASA to cooperate with or take any aid from China.

And even old artillery is incredibly accurate if the team operating the gun has both modern targeting computer software and access to localized real-time meteorological data. When you throw in the use of aerial drone spotters, that old artillery performs almost as well as the highly integrated artillery systems NATO nations field.

It’s funny because the actual gun isn’t where any of a magic of modern artillery is but instead the targeting computer and data links. US defense contractors just upcharge to integrate all that tech into a single piece of equipment and disregard all the drawbacks involved.

Yes you can. Just like Android it’s been open sourced.

http://openharmony.cn/

Anyone else remember how in the fantasy material of the 1980s male characters were in outfits just as ridiculously skimpy as the female ones? An era of leather daddies and heavy metal. The armor was ridiculous with greased up muscles and armor plates that exposed 75% of their skin. Usually it was something like an armor plate covering a single side of their chest with the other side and their abdominals exposed. Outfits never made sense for anything other than looking sexy.

Only real use I can imagine for these is wildland firefighting. I figure it’s supposed to be used for reducing risk to firefighters when the time comes to create backfires in the path of a wildfire. Can sit in the truck with a remote control and send the robot dog to walk a few miles setting a line of fire.

Checked company website. Looks like they also market it for agricultural use and deicing. From a childhood spent farming, I can see how it might be useful in agriculture. Every year farmers need to set fires and burn what remains of fields after harvesting crops like grain. A few times over the years I witnessed people get themselves in dangerous situations (trapped in the middle of a fire or their pickup truck trapped) after the fire spreads in unexpected directions. Being able to stand back at the edge of the field and remotely set the fires could be useful. The risk of burning up a $9,000 robot dog is a lot cheaper than a human life or $60,000 pickup truck.

https://throwflame.com/products/thermonator-robodog/

You are right about that. The French Foreign Legion aren’t black operations soldiers but rank and file military. The French equivalent to US JSOC units are their Commandement des Opérations Spéciales units.

This recent action by France is equivalent to the US deploying a USMC expeditionary force near the Ukrainian frontlines.

very much doubt the US will enter Ukraine

US JSOC troops have been fighting in Ukraine since before the Russian invasion. The first month of the war saw a sudden uptick in US special forces killed in training accidents and new unnamed stars going up on the walls of the CIA lobby in Langley. Same shit happened in the month following Oct 7 and Gaza.

At the bare minimum Green Berets have been deployed the entire time attached to Ukrainian units as “advisors”. None of it is a controversy or escalation because the US has JSOC special operations soldiers and CIA paramilitary soldiers doing black ops shenanigans in most conflict zones around the globe. They are like cockroachs.

No reason to use ketamine unless you are in the process of intubating them or they have woken up during surgery. Putting someone on a breathing machine happens in a hospital environment not on a sidewalk done by an EMT. Ketamine at high doses is a powerful dissociative (forces mind to switch to 3rd person view) used by anesthesiologists when someone becomes conscious during traumatic procedures. Like when someone wakes up while surgeons have their chest opened up or they need to be woken while intubated on a breathing machine. Causes what would be an extremely traumatic experience to become an out of body experience that a person will likely dismiss should they even remember it.

Only group that has at all times been “white” since whiteness and “race science” were pioneered somewhere around the 1600s are English people of Britain. They pioneered the idea to explain why behavior of the British empire was actually the natural order of things and a just cause.

There were points where pale ass groups like the Irish and Germans weren’t white while darker skinned Europeans like the Spanish and Portuguese were. Ofc European nobility were always white even when the commoners of their nations weren’t.

They are literally means testing the price of tuition for elite private universities. Liberals love their means testing.

Great post. I would welcome more of these microprocessor history posts.

but at what cost?!

my first thought was that this must be because Microsoft recently surpassed the $1 trillion mark.

Microsoft recently surpassed the $3 trillion mark.

every other regional power will be using advanced smart weapons built with off the shelf Ali Express parts

Biggest factor in cost is all the other regional great powers (China, Russia, Iran) have military industry under state enterprise while the US military industry is entirely privatized. The state enterprise military industry operates under supremacy of responsibility to the nation while the US privatized military industry has fiduciary responsibility to private capital as their only real responsibility. Under US law the corporate leadership of Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop Grumman must follow a doctrine of shareholder supremacy and those shareholders are not the American people but a collection of private capital investment banks. It would be against US law for them to not make every effort (including buying politicians) to under deliver on contracts and milk every possible dollar from the US government.

Iirc research has shown adults with shaved heads are perceived as more confident and assertive. Seems to be the case for both men and women. Something about just shaving your head or a Patrick Stewart (or is Lenin more iconic?) close cut rather than trying to hide balding makes a person seem more mature, higher status. Maybe it signals that a person isn’t filled with existential dread about aging and has the self assured confidence to age with dignity rather than butchering themselves in an attempt to look like a child their entire life.

Male pattern balding is a direct result of testosterone, the drugs to prevent it are testosterone blockers, so maybe human psychology at some subconscious level associates it with masculinity and maturity.

Funniest part is they got owned by either Somali fishermen or Houthi fighters. Also the US are such fkn hypocrites to scream about Yemenis interdictions off the coast of Yemen when the US has been covertly doing it in the same area for the past decade. This isn’t US waters, ridiculous. The US only ever talks about it when their SEAL teams get owned and there are too many questions.

Is funny because sports psychology has been a thing in professional sports for a while now. They make the players read philosophy books and try to coach them on how to get into the right mental state. Mental state is actually a big deal when it comes to peak physical performance. None of this is for altruistic reasons but about winning.

Also checking a players cognition and mood during games can probably help spot signs of injury. Entire reason coaches and owners started giving a fk about all the brain damage and stroking out is losing an investment. Everything from heat stroke to brain injury often comes with behavioral symptoms like confusion. Spot that shit immediately by doing basic neurological assessments, you can treat a player soon enough that you might not lose your investment.

In addition to spotting signs of internal physical injuries or degraded performance… mfkers, spotting signs that a player has deteriorating mental health and intervening also protects the investment. If they attempt suicide, successful or not, that’s a problem. If they become emotionally unstable and commit an act of violence in their personal life (crime) or in-game (foul), that is a problem. Not just losing them to penalty, injury, prison, or death but the damage to the teams brand from the public relations fallout.

Yeah. I remember something about everyone intentionally using incompatible rail gauges out of fear that other nations would use trains for military invasions. It’s only been in recent decades where we have started to see a globally adopted standard rail gauge for freight networks.

Also, can’t help but see the BRI guys feeling a little extra smug about their plane for overland transport through the Middle East.

I had actually forgotten that China’s belt and road initiative involved electrified freight train routes from China up through Russia or the middle east into Europe proper. Iirc there is also work to build routes from China deep into Africa to allow reliable trade of resources and goods without ocean going freight.

Years ago I was honestly surprised to learn that there wasn’t already a reliable freight train network connecting all of continental Asia, Africa, and Europe. That everyone was sending freight longer distances via ocean going freight traveling around continents rather than via rail in straight lines over land seemed so wasteful. Ocean going freight should only be necessary for oversized freight, island nations, or freight between the eastern and western global hemispheres.

Funny because US presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution, have always had it, but when other countries set their laws up the same way it’s dystopian.