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Birdshot is effective against drones, but only within a few hundred meters:

https://www.northeastshooters.com/xen/threads/how-far-will-b...

Rifles aren’t a desirable drone-interception tool. For one thing, it’s hard to hit a small moving target that may be hundreds of meters up in the air. Overshoot is also a huge problem - unlike birdshot pellets which fall harmlessly to the ground after 300 meters or so, rifle bullets can travel at lethal velocity for several kilometers. Even if you hit the drone, your bullet may keep traveling.

Anduril just recently announced their drone-interceptor drone:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/4/20898931/anduril-anvil-dr...

>Well, you could a look at the antebellum south of the US, to start. Don't think much more needs to be said about that...

The abolitionist movement was huge in the North, where economic equality was better [0]. The antebellum South was a great example of a deeply unequal society, where poor whites were easily pitted against blacks. (Still haven't solved this problem)

>Or you could look at the contemporary US. We have basically no unemployment, enormous wealth, no war on our land

Huge wealth inequality. Student debt crisis. Opioid crisis. Healthcare. Good jobs gone, replaced with bad jobs. Labor participation rate hasn’t recovered since the Great Recession.

>Maybe let's flip it, do you have examples of peaceful high-well-being societies where people who were different from most people in the society were equivalent participants in that well being?

Sure, though I did only say better, not "equivalent": we can look at Jews who prospered in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth [1][2], or Jews in England during the Victorian Era [3]. As contrasted with Jews in Western Europe during the Dark Ages -- _lots_ of pogroms and expulsions -- or Jews in Weimar Germany, or Jews in Tsarist Russia.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antebellum_South#Wealth_inequa...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland#...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_England...

It’s harder to scapegoat minorities when nobody’s all that mad about anything. Conversely, it’s easier to be charitable when you have more to give. Finally, there’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: self and family survival comes before everything else.

If you have counterexamples to this theorizing of mine, I’d love to see them!

I'm perplexed by writers who prioritize the social equality of a minority over economic equality among the majority.

Don't get me wrong - I think both are important, but if we're honest, doesn't the general peace and well-being of society (from which better conditions for the minority tend to spring) depend more on the latter? You can't solve these problems easily in reverse order; the disgruntled majority will get tired of hearing about minority issues while they struggle to put food on the table.

This is a bit of a false dichotomy, but as a continuous balance of focus between the two issues, I think the point stands.

>this attack requires a more sophisticated attack method which automatically limits the suspects to US, Russia, Israel, Germany, UK and France.

What about China? They undoubtedly have the capability. As for motivation, they’re a regional and economic competitor who shares a disputed border with India.

Sorry, I'd assumed your first comment which diffed 2013 and 2016 was a comprehensive summary. Now it looks like we're shifting the brackets around, and I'm not sure where the goalposts are. I'll defer to the study in my original link.

>I don't think even most American white people view their economic status and fear of the future through the lens of their own racial identity.

Personally, I would also prefer to leave race out of it. However, in the Democratic Party 2020 primary, racial identity and "intersectionality" is at the top of everyone's mind. In that environment, I think it is unwise to address every racial group by name except for the largest one.

>This isn't a racial issue - the decline of Middle America is not the decline of white America.

The data shows that something uniquely bad is happening to white Americans [0]:

"We focus on non‐Hispanic whites because their mortality trends were particularly adverse in the last decade and differ from those of non‐Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics."

"The underlying mechanisms driving mortality trends for non‐Hispanic whites are fundamentally different from those driving trends for other racial/ethnic groups, as suggested by James and Cossman (2017)."

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/padr.12249

The trends examined by UPenn researches in the paper [0] from my first link span from 1990-2016, vs. that CDC report's 3-year span. From the paper:

"We focus on non‐Hispanic whites because their mortality trends were particularly adverse in the last decade and differ from those of non‐Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics.

In contrast to non‐Hispanic whites, mortality has continued to decline among Hispanics and non‐Hispanic Blacks, although death rates remain substantially higher for Blacks than for whites (Harper, MacLehose, and Kaufman 2014; Murphy et al. 2017; Stein et al. 2017). The underlying mechanisms driving mortality trends for non‐Hispanic whites are fundamentally different from those driving trends for other racial/ethnic groups, as suggested by James and Cossman (2017)."

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/padr.12249

>Certainly, non-white Americans [...] would not be amenable to viewing themselves as either a symptom of, or merely collateral damage in, the narrative of the decline of white people.

I'm not framing it that way. I think you're the only one here who's doing that. In my view, if we're going to break big issues down by race, it's smart to address and include all the races - especially the biggest one.

While it's nice to imagine that non-white Americans would care about the problems of their fellow citizens, the decline of white America is at least the concern of voting Americans who happen to be white, which is most of them. This fact may be of interest to candidates seeking an electoral majority.

I don't disagree with you about Bernie's fantastic support in the heartland. I think it stems from the strengths (EDIT: and consistency!) of his policies, despite the lack of attention paid by name to the largest American ethnic group.

For the other candidates with weaker policies, or less name recognition, I think my point is even more important. Intersectional politics have put race at the top of everyone's mind. When a candidate mentions every race by name but yours, and when yours is facing the steepest decline in life expectancy of nearly all of them (I haven't checked, but I assume life's worse as always for American Indians), folks tend to notice.

Thanks for the correction. I've included Bernie in my comment.

Your link only examines data up to 2003, accounts only for poverty vs. other measures of economic opportunity, and does not account for the steeper decline in life expectancy among white Americans vs. other groups.

>In 2019, anyone with a pulse in the United States can find a $15/hr service job

Source?

I'm not interested in comparing Bernie's policies vs. Yang's. I highlighted Yang's tweet specifically because it singles out the suffering of rural whites by name.

In a U.S. presidential election, I think perception is at least as important as policy. Most Americans aren't policy wonks, and they don't scrutinize all aspect of a candidate's platform. They simply choose the candidate who they feel will best represent their interests. When one candidate addresses them and their suffering by name but the other one doesn't (or even minimizes it, a la Bernie 2016), that second candidate's a tougher sell.

I'm not interested in a discussion of Yang's policies, or a debate of his plan for UBI. I highlighted his tweet specifically because it singles out the suffering of rural whites by name.

Bernie, Warren, Harris, etc. speak directly to issues which disproportionally affect other groups (police violence against blacks, immigration policy that mainly affects Hispanics, etc.), but never this one. It gives an impression of unequal treatment, and leaves some feeling unnoticed and ignored. This creates opportunity for the first politician to say, "I see you, I see your suffering, and I will not ignore you."

>As a middle class member it would also be much easier to lose your position, just have some health issue and you'll see how fast it takes to burn your life savings.

I am currently in that exact position. I have very bad RSI and can no longer write software full-time. On better days, I can drive and do errands. I've spend roughly $40k out of pocket on treatment so far, and my COBRA health insurance runs out in a year. I had looked into speech-to-text, but now I have bad TMJ syndrome and talking is difficult. I'm honestly very afraid for my future.

Bernie also said, "When you're white, you don't know what it's like to be poor." [0]

While his policies and voting record may tell a different story, that comment left a lasting impression on a lot of people. I have yet to see him speak directly to poor white people as Yang did, and I suspect he (Bernie) is afraid of alienating his younger, left-learning base. To see who I mean, check out those replies to Yang's tweet.

[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/bernie-sanders-povert...

The decline in U.S. life expectancy has disproportionately affected whites, especially in rural areas with decreased economic opportunity [0][1]. I think this economic shift and its consequences largely determined the result of the 2016 Presidential election.

I've only seen one 2020 Democratic candidate directly address this trend so far: Andrew Yang [2]. (I don't advise reading his tweet's replies, it's typical Twitter political hyperbole.)

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190711122655.h...

[1] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2019-09-06/economic-ha...

[2] https://twitter.com/andrewyang/status/1010207553324806150?la...

For sure. But of the capital they managed, how much belonged to someone else? Did that someone else trust Softbank (for example) to do their due diligence before making a significant investment in WeWork?

I think many would call for punishment of the WeWork CEO, along with the investors who failed their due diligence. Sometimes the law of the day does not deliver justice. Seems like another instance where everyone not taken in by the hype saw the crash coming.

Every single day people crash cars, cut themselves on kitchen knives, and choose weak methods of single-factor authentication. There’s only so much the seller can do. We’ve seen how much users love (and subvert) “strong password requirements.”

It’s far easier to build a zip gun than a killer drone, yet we don’t see too many of the former in countries with strong gun regulation. Why should we believe that hunter-killer drones carrying explosives will be any more of a large-scale problem?

Yes, Nest has offered MFA for years. The blame for this incident falls squarely on the user, who reused the same (weak?) password across multiple websites without enabling MFA.

To be fair, this wasn't explained in detail until the Brian Herbert prequels. The movie and miniseries also left the nature of Guild Navigator travel rather ambiguous.

As supporting technologies improve and materials science marches on, fringe technologies can sometimes leap quite suddenly into the mainstream. For example: the Stirling-cycle engine. It was a suboptimal technology compared to steam and IC engines for nearly 200 years, until Sweden found a use for it in their Gotland-class submarines. As it turns out, subs built with free-piston Stirling engines can run even more silently than their nuclear-powered competitors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotland-class_submarine

Fire Phone notwithstanding, Amazon seems to offer good long-term support for their devices. I've been very pleased with my e-Ink Kindles, first-gen FireTV, and first-gen Alexa. I expect the Amazon Cloud Camera to have a similarly lengthy product lifetime.

I've been leery of Google ever since they required me to enable web and search history to use weather and calendar alerts with Google Home.

I'll add another rule: don't ship behavior you can't test. This includes the behavior of a stateful system after an extended period of uptime.

I once spent weekends and late nights fixing a bug which, if it had shipped, would have eventually bricked an embedded product. It caused the software to hang in a way which evaded every watchdog and reset timer. This bug was only barely caught by the edge of a multi-week stress test. As it turned out, the bug itself wasn't in any of the code I had written, but in an open-source dependency.

There are several ways to approach this problem. Besides simply testing your product over an extended period of time, you can build a test harness which simulates time at an accelerated rate. Another method is to periodically reboot your system from scratch after the longest period of uptime you're able or willing to test. It also helps to use software and hardware watchdogs which automatically reset your system, in whole or in part, if it becomes unresponsive (fails to "feed" the watchdog).

However, watchdogs by themselves aren't foolproof - in my case, the program's main I/O loop kept running, but a critical part of the stack no longer functioned correctly.