Phileas Frogg: Jim, Funnily enough that’s one of the reasons I’m in favor of re-establishing the Papal States as key step in the remediation of the Roman Curia, despite the fact that it’s administered by dubiously Catholic individuals at present. As for modern bioweapons, it’s inevitable and stupid, but perfectly rational. Not every nation can afford, develop, or manage to sneak a nuke into operational existence, particularly under the watchful eye of the various Great Powers, so...
Jim: A law without a court without an army is hardly a law at all.
Bob Sykes: The Russians have already set up a separate combat arm for drones.
Isegoria: I’m getting strong Terminator-future vibes from drones hunting survivors in the rubble.
Bruce: At Monte Cassino, we bombed the stone building to rubble, and the Germans put machine gun nests in the randomly scattered rubble. Pricy getting them out. I expect drones to routinely arrive just after a bomb strike and nest in the rubble. Maybe in Ukraine they already are. Next, they look at the field manuals on fortifications and start sneaking construction drones into inconvenient places. Maybe in Ukraine they already are.
Jim: That is an astute observation, Phileas. Indeed, to abuse Bill Gates, “People overestimate how much decline can occur in one year, and underestimate how much decline can occur in ten.”
Phileas Frogg: When degradation happens universally, at a roughly uniform rate, it’s much harder to detect, and much more likely to be accepted as, “normal,” than genuinely isolated incidents. Isolated asymmetric catastrophes are more jarring for the public and more like to cause a response than universal and uniform ones. “Family of 3 is carjacked and killed,” in a small town is more likely to elicit a response than, “Over the course of 10 years, your small...
Phileas Frogg: The fact that they both arrived at a general method is interesting, and naturally begs the age old philosophical question: “Is reality a mathematical structure? Or, is reality necessarily instantiated with mathematical properties? Or, is reality simply able to be modeled via mathematics?” I lean towards the 2nd, but I can’t wholly dismiss the 1st and 3rd, though this tidbit does seem to argue against the 3rd indirectly.
Phileas Frogg: Unless and until they release an actual sticker price, it’s only prudent to reserve judgement given the inflationary predilections of our bureaucracy.
Jim: Don’t worry, guys, not only would they not have participated, if Our Greatest Ally had somehow received advance notice, they would have helped to stop it.
Bob Sykes: Next thing you know, people will be claiming Mossad did 9/11.
Wanweilin: In the exact place it was upgraded… hmmm.
Jim: How fortunate that they hardened the structure in preparation of a bomb.
Bruce: The March 1971 Air Force Magazine claims a Soviet FOBS passed over the tip of South America and returned to Soviet territory near the Caspian. Got this from ChatGTP, which says the Soviet FOBS were normally passing over southern South America but did not reenter. It would take looking through all South American media reports of strange lights in the sky and comparing them to all Soviet launches of the period to have a better idea of what was happening. Pournelle had good contacts in aerospace...
Bob Sykes: In modern American textbooks, Newton’s notation for derivatives (f’) has displaced Leibniz’ (df/dx). A step backwards, in my opinion. As much as I found the calculus interesting and useful (I am an engineer.), complex numbers and the vast simplifications that follow from them were an astonishment.
Felix: “The average gun owner owns about 5.2 firearms…” That looks like a number that should represented by the median, not the mean. Ah, from the PDF, page 27, the median is 3. Graphs on page 29, figure 12.
McChuck: And at least half of all actual gun owners reported, “None of your business!”
Bob Sykes: China offers other countries real and substantial economic benefits. The US offers colonial subjugation, military intimidation, and exploitation and poverty.
Jim: This terrifying uptick from years prior resulted in the FAA and NTSB convening safety summits in March and May, respectively. Whether they dared to discuss root causes seems unlikely. Take it from me: the “aviation safety” “people” would rather disown their family than restore flight to the exclusive province of high-IQ young and youngish white men. That is not hyperbole—read it literally.
Bob Sykes: I see that I, myself, have provided a funny proof. Oh for an editing function. [Fortunately we have a Natural General Intelligence editor.]
Happy Thanksgiving, Isegoria.