How… does a jet shoot itself

It’s been ten years now, but I went to Beijing and xian over 10 days and was fairly ignorant and neutral going in on China. There’s some annoying stuff, but I could not shake how it felt like they had surpassed us clearly then, and I was visiting a not horrible near future. This was a decade ago, and you could pay for everything using QR codes, including street vendors. There were fancy coffee shops where you had to use the codes. We didn’t have WeChat with money enabled (you need a Chinese bank acct) but the cashier was very nice and paid for our coffees with her WeChat and we gave her cash.

That’s all window dressing though, compared to the infrastructure. We took a high speed train to xian from Beijing and it took 3 hours, for a trip that used to be 14 hours. As we were travelling you could see other high speed rails being constructed in all of these directions, using huge modular concrete sections, they clearly had optimized the process.

Zero visible crime. There were Chinese army ads everywhere and visible presence in big public areas, but this was not any different than back home so I hardly noticed it. There were… PUBLICALLY AVAILABLE BATHROOMS EVERYWHERE.

Mass transit in Beijing, which is fucking huge, was highly functional, clean and on time. They’d built like 4-5 new major subways in the last decade leading up to the Olympics, on top of the many they already had.

The smog was bad, and it was hot because it was August, but again, we have that here as well. They had a govt program to plant millions of trees going and you could see them from the high speed rail.

Anyway, I was throughly convinced on that trip that they were gonna drink our milkshake and we deserved it. They were selling multiple domestic smartphone brands for the same as iPhones (which is to say quite expensive) and were building tons of tourist stuff all over the place, but for internal tourists, not external.

I could list things I found unsettling, but honestly most of them could be explained by the fact that I was raised in a individualistic culture and not a more communal one, or were things I’ve realized are the same here.

As a foreigner I wasn’t affected by the firewall, and I was against the firewall, but to be fair, it’s not like the internet had been a great thing in the balance, so maybe it was a good idea?

I should amend my comment to say that even if ramaswamy doesn’t know it, he’s not really being honest though. The federal govt isn’t that inefficient. And his purpose isn’t to make it more efficient; it’s to degrade and destroy federal institution function.

Even the ghoul Larry Summers said attacking payroll is a losing battle, as it accounts for like 15% of the govt ledger, and that ledger is made of fun money to begin with. Sigh.

More awful and stupid bullshit. I guess I should be glad he’s being honest though, he’s proposing it not for collaboration or efficiency, but as an end run around employment protections to thin out staff. Love the DC mayor trying to get the govt to force RTO… everyone should suffer a commute so we can have more chain fast-casual eateries, yay!

Got to see blast wave, lost my eyes due to exploding window, worth it.

Well, yeah, there is that possibility.

Great will check that out

Yes, and try and live close to the center of where you think the nuke would be targeted. If it comes, you’ll be vaporized instantly with no awareness. Depending on the size of the nuke, if you’re outside of that radius, you get shockwave, firestorm and fallout depending on distance, and while you will almost certainly die, it may not be quick and painless.

Yeah I don’t think NATO would definitely nuke respond intentionally. I just worry that there are a lot of countries with nukes, and a lot of early warning systems of varying degrees of sophistication. If something gets misread, the timeframe in which nuclear decisions are made is tiny by design, you can imagine a scenario where with bad luck, things spiral out of control .

I realize the tactical nuclear weapons are much smaller, so maybe they’re not as risky as I’m thinking in terms of tripping early warning systems and such.

Yeah that makes sense—we send them a bunch of our stockpile (don’t we also keep a stockpile in Israel anyway, is that like the summer camp store?) and bonus! We get to get that newly made jdams and shells!

But hey, things are tough, and belts need to be tightened; really need to get a handle on entitlement reform. I’m guessing one of the few agencies the DOGE thing won’t try and streamline will be DOD budgets.

I still don’t really see how tactical nukes can be a usable thing on the battlefield. There are so many ways that systems or protocols could get tripped which basically then mainline into total nuclear destruction no matter what. I really don’t think there’s such a thing as a limited or small-scale nuclear war—the systems that support it almost guarantee all-out nuclear escalation.

I’d mostly say ok this is more nuclear Sabre-rattling like they’ve done over and over again. But a small part of me always wonders, if you have powerful, narcissistic old men in control, is there really a guarantee they wouldn’t just say fuck it and end the world? Particularly if they were near death and pissed off? Dunno. hope we never find out.

like the other comment said, it’s a fluid situation. It was bombed/shelled earlier, but was still operational. I think it’s now been physically raided by troops, and majority of the staff has been forcibly expelled or arrested. per a news program I saw an hour ago, the hospital was turning away casualties from the overnight bombing that killed 100 people in one building, since they have no capacity to do anything at this point. I suspect the couple of staff still left are doing what they can for any patients they still have, though I know the kids that were on ventilators died when they shelled the hospital earlier, so who even knows. I unwisely watched this news program over lunch, and they had images of the children loaded into body bags 2-3 per bag, open. Those photos should be plastered all over billboards across America: this is where the bombs go.

Is leaving one doctor like some vicious troll move? Or did they just miss him on his lunch break? (dark joke, because, what lunch, what break?) What is the 1 doc and 2.5 nurses left supposed to do with human wave of casualties that Israel creating with each high rise they level.

hello!

yeah I think I follow. So basically Israel is just viewed as such a crucial and intrinsic part of US strategy/power projection/dominance in ME, that it’s simply not even thinkable to conceive for most of the system to be in conflict with it, even when it continues to veer into deeper and deeper levels of genocide and impunity. And perhaps the bureaucratic and temporal nature of administrations and US officials (moving in and out of office, new staffs, etc) allows for the humiliation to be less damaging than it would to a more directly strongman/authoritarian system, like say Putin and Russian Federation?

yes, that’s correct. I don’t mean to suggest there are actually pocket nukes in sweetgreens, and good US politicians are just “trying to save the world”. I’m just trying to understand how they can allow Israel to humiliate them so much. I buy it that they might be willing to just take the PR L and look like dipshits in order to deflect the blame for the nastier stuff to the client state, but the uniformity and lockstepness of it, plus the very real loss of face it represents seems to run counter to what I understand to be typical neocon tendencies.

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look, if you read my post, you’d note that I accept this position in my first paragraph. And I’m not interested in taking blame off of America–I’m just curious about an aspect of the behavior that never quite makes full sense to me. Regardless, I note that you’re a staunch support of option a.

Yeah this whole “give RFK secret service detail” made me wonder, are there just like cadres of reserve/on-call secret service protection details chillin in office cubicles ready to go out and take bullets for weirdos? I mean they must have some depth, but like wouldn’t it definitely mean some mild deduction to back for the existing details?