hguant

This was a fun article, but I think the core argument - indeed the article as a whole - is lacking because it fails to mention the actual major influence on the German general staff; Clausewitz, who did not rely on ancient battles and poorly drawn maps, but his own experiences and the immediate experience of those who were decimated by maneuver warfare in the Napoleonic wars.

If there was a battle that the German high command was obsessed with, it was Austerlitz, where Napoleon showed how maneuver and control of his armies could decimate larger forces. That's, well, the reason the German general staff came into existence - analysis of Napoleon's victories and style of leadership showed that just amassing troops wasn't enough, here had to be a plan, and an operational art of war, beyond mere tactics.

Many studies, even the very first war games, were done by the German high command, using exquisitely drawn maps (again, one of the things they learned from the preceding wars, actually knowing what terrain you're on, and where you are kind of matters a great deal) looking at the battles of the Napoleonic wars, and the power of maneuver over fires.

The issue comes, not from machine guns, but from the absolutely devasting power of artillery, which turns nearly maneuvering blocks of infantry into, well, horrible casualties. Generals on both sides of the war looked for that one crushing engagement, that one sweep where they could break the enemy morale and carry the day. Of course they looked to Cannae, and spoke of victory to match it, it's one of the great battles and is taught for a reason. However, I think it's a mistake to look at the speeches and letters extolling a battle from 2000 years ago while ignoring entirely the world changing war that happened in their nation's recent memory, the one they literally wrote the book about.

I disagree. Look at the history of the Mormons - they spent many years getting run out of town because they were a weird cult, culminating with a state sanctioned armed attack and destruction of the principle Mormon settlement (Navoo) and the lynching (to them, martyrdom) of their founder, who was also an elected official and a surprisingly serious presidental candidate. Follow their Exodus to Utah, they very nearly declared themselves to be their own nation and we're engaged in low level fighting with the western US Army until the admission of Utah into the union - which only happened after the Mormons, effectively at gunpoint, declared the more blatant polygamists schismatics and sent them packing to Canada and Mexico.

I'm not a huge fan of the Latter Day Saints, but for a large and important chunk of their religion's existence, they were not only called a cult, but persecuted as one.

Answering without doxxing myself is harder than I thought. The last time I was on a US military range, which to be fair was right before the pandemic so things probably have changed - we drew green tip (M855) from the range master. My understanding was that a) the steel targets were getting beat up by A1 and there wasn't any money to replace them and b) we weren't a combat group so we didn't rate the good shit.

EDIT TO ADD: I don't know if that qualifies as "quantities" and anecdotes are just that, but that's been my experience.

This post is a master class in why you shouldn't get all your information from Wikipedia. Press releases are not reality.

Yes the M855A1 was developed and started operational testing in 2010. However, it wasn't available to anyone who wasn't forward deployed until...my memory says 2015. The M855 is still used on post because a) it's cheap, and ballistically similar to the M855A1 and b) the production lines at Lake City are still geared for them

The Marine corps didn't formally adopt the M855A1 until 2017/2018. Brass didn't like it because it broke the feed ramps on machine guns. There was a big procurement SNAFU about this.

Marine corps times article on the matter:

https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2017...

I get that you're trying to be snide because you were so publicly wrong, but your tone here really just makes you sound like you're trying to sound smart about something you know nothing about. Something to consider. Frantic googling does not an expert make.

You're right about the copper core on the new model A1 - I thought it was steel entirely with thin jacket. I would argue that when, by weight, the majority of the bullet is steel, my original point still holds.

Sorry, but this is entirely incorrect.

First, terms - brass is not used to "jacket" a bullet. Brass is used as the case material for the cartridge. Steel, and nickel plated steel are some times also used here. "Jacketing" (as in, Full Metal Jacket) refers to the material that wraps around the exterior of the projectile. As far as I'm aware, the material used here is almost always copper, or a copper alloy (cupronickel).

The US standard bullet is the M855. It's a lead core with a soft soft steel penetrator at the tip, that's jacketed with copper.

There's an advanced version of the M855, the M855A1, which is an entirely steel slug, jacketed with copper. This bullet has better terminal performance at longer ranges, and slightly better armour piercing capabilities.

The US army standard training round is the M193. It is a lead bullet jacketed with copper. Interestingly, it in many ways has better terminal performance than the M855 because this is the bullet the M16 and M4 rifles were designed around, and the M855 only exists because of NATO politics.

There are no bullets in the US inventory, to my knowledge, that use a copper core. Copper is simply far too expensive to be used at that scale, and, as you pointed out, reduces the weight of the projectile which has negative effects on terminal performance.

"Why are bullets jacketed in copper" you might be wondering here - when rifle cartridges were invented, they still used black powder, and all bullets were lead. When smokeless powder was invented, it became possible to have more explosive power per unit of volume. However, this had two negative effects - one, the lead projectile would either disintegrate, or became entirely inaccurate, at the speeds it was accelerated to. Second, the force of the bullet against the rifling of the barrel was rubbing away metal from the bullet, leaving lead deposits which fouled the gun and made it inaccurate. All steel bullets solved this problem, but increase the wear on the barrel. The solution was to coat (jacket) each bullet in a thin layer of copper, which was stiff enough to withstand the force of friction in air, while also softer than the steel barrel and reduced wear and tear on the rifles

I would argue that media pcs and home servers are becoming _more_ not less important, precisely because Netflix, Disney+ et al have become such bad stewards of movies and shows, both in terms of deleting content, and no longer being "worth it" for the price. Anecdotally, I know more and more friends and coworkers who are moving to having their own media servers because they don't want to have to hunt through different services for their favourite shows or movies, or they've been burned by Amazon changing the streaming license of their "purchase."

Which is doubly ironic, because (in the book at least) HAL-9000's murders/sociopathy were a result of a conflict between his superhuman ethics and direct commands (from humans!) to disregard those ethics. The result was a psychotic breakdown

> 1. Stand on a street corner (if you're in a busy area) or make a call if you're not. If you have to make a call, there's a ~20% chance a taxi actually shows up.

option 3 - go to a hotel, and have them call a cab for you, or get one from the stand there. This is my go to for cities I'm unfamiliar with, and it's never let me down. The taxi companies might not have an incentive to show up promptly for _you_, random person calling them, but they do for the hotel in their area.

The penalty for having an allergen present is steep, and the process of certifying that yes, you are in fact allergen free, is expensive and difficult, while the cost of adding an allergen into your process, for pretty much any foodstuff, is cheap, and the cost of slapping a "may contain peanuts" label on is cheaper.

I believe the original comment was complaining about the perverse incentive there.

Increased regulatory burden for US companies, increased labour enforcement targeting foreign companies in general, and preferential treatment for DE/EU companies codified in law.

In 7 years? I think the current crop of pilot tests for UBI are set to finish up in 7 years. No way meaningful UBI gets well enough established in 7 years to be considered "a norm."

UBI is this generation's fusion - it's going to be 10 years away until the late 2070s, if at all.

It's not that you omitted nuance, it's that your basic premise - "cash assistance to the poor generally does not drive inflation in any meaningful way, because the cash used is extracted via taxation in the first place, its, quite literally, shifting money around" - is fundamentally incorrect, and goes against both economic theory, and lived experience over the last few years post COVID.

> Its false equivalency to think cash assistance and many other forms of social welfare drives inflation more broadly, in the general case.

This is also probably why you're getting down voted - it's just wrong

1. taxation, either explicit or implicit through interest rate manipulation, doesn't impact monetary supply at the scale we're talking about here. It impacts the cost of, and therefore the availability of capital.

2. cash assistance to the poor isn't a simple "take $100 from Peter and give it to Paul" transaction. It transforms capital (what taxes impact) into money. This is a weird distinction, but capital isn't money. Think of it as two separate streams - there's a fictionalized capital stream of stock markets etc, and a "real world" money stream that interacts with good and services.

3. Cash assistance to the poor directly drives inflation because the demand for goods is decoupled from reality. By giving cash to the poor, you generate increased demand for the same amount of goods and services. This is econ 101 - demand goes up, prices go up. Because the monetary supply has been manipulated by injections from capital, this demand is decoupled from the cycles that would tamp it down.

Let me repeat that: a sudden increase in demand, coupled with more money in the system, decouples prices from the systems that keep them in place and drives inflation.

If you'd like an object lesson in this, I'd refer you to the past 3 years of experimentation with wealth transfers in the US, and the current inflation as a result of that.

Edit to add - I make no moral statements here. I think that cash assistance to the poor _is_ generally the least bad option of government assistance; however, we should be clear eyed about the costs of these actions, and not hand wave them away, only to be shocked, shocked, shocked, when those costs come due.

My math teacher in 6th grade had a conversation with my parents that essentially went "he's not going to learn algebra from the Hobbit, but I feel bad telling him not to read"

There are worse problems to have!

1. Generally photos from active investigations aren't released until the investigation is completed. These are active records, and could potentially become part of civil or criminal hearings, so the agencies in charge of them tend to keep them close until they've finished the report.

2. The US Coast Guard is a part of the Department of Homeland Security; the sonar and pictures they take could reveal capabilities they deem important to US national security (ie how good the sonar is, resolution of photos, etc.).

3. It's generally considered poor taste to post disaster photos before the families have had funerals. Naval institutions tend to be more tradition focused than other entities.

This is something of a false equivalence - yes, "everyone" is at risk from a country ending event, but not all countries are equally at risk.

>This has been known for a while yet does not receive any real attention.

because school teachers are overwhelmingly female, and overwhelming biased against male students? And there's a political/cultural movement built around promoting female academic advancement, while no such movement exists for male students?

>Results show that, when comparing students who have identical subject-specific competence, teachers are more likely to give higher grades to girls. Furthermore, they demonstrate for the first time that this grading premium favouring girls is systemic, as teacher and classroom characteristics play a negligible role in reducing it.

https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...

https://economics.uq.edu.au/article/2021/12/teacher-gender-b...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01425692.2022.21...

There's also some speculation that the Greek phrase he used was somewhat ritualistic and was potentially a curse, I believe acoup.blog or the associated Twitter account shared the research on that

Not their human rights, but many of their civil rights, yes.

A good example - the Sikh believe that men should maintain their beards, and should wear a specific head covering. Freedom of religion/expression laws in the US prevent schools, or public institutions, from requiring those men to remove their head coverings or to shave. However, for the longest time, Sikhs who wanted to serve in the US armed forces had to chose between being religiously observant,or being eligible to serve (saying "no" in boot camp when they come by with the clippers does not a happy career make).

Even now, there's a dispensation for Sikhs, but in times of war/necessity, that goes out the window. (Tangent - the reason the armed forces have facial hair regs for men is a) conformity but also b) so that gas masks/CBRN protective gear can get a good face seal. Additionally, and this sounds dumb but it's true...helmets aren't designed for people to have a lot of hair under them, which is something women in combat conditions she had to encounter as well)

> What do we want from self driving cars

Frankly? I want another 10-15 years of independence for my dad. His eyesight is failing due to a mix of wonky genetics, he's fine driving in daylight, but already has started being much more cautious driving around dusk.

I want an AR display that will highlight the road and objects in it. I was LiDAR sensors hitting the brakes if it detects catastrophe. I want the car to augment and extend his ability to use it.

That's the big sell of self driving cars. Not "push a button and be whisked away," but having your own abilities enhanced by machine input that would otherwise be inaccessible to you.

Yeah if you want to shut down a conversation in Taipei, or suddenly run into "oh no I don't understand your English," bring up the treatment of the native Taiwanese.

To be fair to the ROC, the Japanese colonial era was FAR worse to them than anything that happened post 1949, but still.

The FBI of course giving the credit to their "linguistic analysis team" and "fearless investigators" when Ted's brother literally turned him, told them where he lived, and that he had talked about bombing the targets in question.

Many, if not most, murder investigations are resolved by confessions, or someone turning the culprit in. Absent that, after...I want to say 48 hours, the police know that they should essentially write off the case. There are obvious exceptions, especially if there's public notoriety (crudely, young white coeds or "sexy shit"), but most murders are poor drug addicts murdering other poor drug addicts.

Source: worked 2 years in DC as a freelance reporter, was ultimately not successful there, but soaked up a lot of stories/cynicism

Just to touch on this - Cantonese is not really mutually intelligible with modern Chinese, that's CCP propaganda. They're big on the idea that there's only one Chinese language, and there are "regional dialects" but...those dialects meet an awful lot of criteria for being a different language. It's very similar to their push to make all Chinese culture and history Han Chinese.

The mandarin spoken in Taiwan is 1:1 with that in Beijing (minus the accent) but the characters for the language are radically different, to the point where someone knowing simplified Chinese is essentially illiterate in Taipei and vice versa.

Eh, not really, seeing as those pre-existing organizations were themselves relatively recent wartime creations. The Office of Strategic Services was created in '42, the CIA in '47. "Intelligence" in the American sphere existed in an ad hoc manner up until that point - during WW1 the US mostly relied on the Brits, and the personal insights and observations of ambassadors or military attaches.

Yes.

Horses are incredibly fragile, and over long distances would prefer to be moving at human walking speed.

Horses also require continuous grazing to sustain themselves, and because of how their digestive tracts work, really need time to amass energy.

It's not a question of "running down a horse." It's a question of heat exchange and endurance. Humans are incredibly efficient at maintaining homeostasis "under load." Horses are not.

If you read a histories any war/conflict where there are large numbers of horses involved, a common theme is them just dropping dead of exhaustion along the side of the trail, because they can't sustain the pace of the army marching with them.

Generally AM is used in mountainous areas because it's MUCH cheaper than FM, and those areas don't have the population density to make FM stations viable.

It's also used for natural parks, and anywhere you might need updated, local, information, again, because it's so cheap and because receiving is so easy.

Couple of different answers to these questions:

a) whales don't tend to go where volcanos are. Whales dive to find food, and their food sources aren't near the seabed. I think the deepest diving whale species are sperm whales, and they go after squid, which are not typically found near volcanos.

b) it's not a question of matching frequency with the whales, it's a question of noise emissions and the amount of energy you're putting into the water. Modern active sonar systems are incredibly energy intensive, and the technology to modify the waveform and limit the power of the waveform to match something biologic doesn't really exist, and would have to justify all the added complexity

c) USN and US geological survey charts are really really good, and regularly updated, to the point where "It wasn't on the charts!" is a claim met with extreme skepticism. 9 times out of 10 some sort of navigation or systemic error was involved.

My understanding is that a lot of natural gas is used at refineries because, for so long, it was effectively "free" - there was a limited market for it and it was a byproduct of refining the stuff you wanted (light and heavy oils).

>My favorite pet theory about Microsoft is that no one that works there actually uses any of their products and are just on Macs lol

There have been multiple comments on HN from Microsofters (Microsoftarians?) about how the Windows UI/Design team uses Macs exclusively, which explains a lot. I believe the Visual Studio team is still dogfooding, but can't believe that about anyone else, given how actively user hostile the OS has been.

>Although C and C++ are also built like this, Lisp is different: the implementations of Lisp are often much different than each other, and one implementation can offer plenty of different features not seen in another.

The author clearly has not spent much time developing modern C/C++ - the various pragmas, implementation details, and "here be dragons" quirks of undefined behaviour in msvc, gcc, and clang differ _greatly_.

I would argue that C is the Linux of Languages - a behemoth in the industry that every other contender is measured against, one that has large numbers of detractors and advocates, and that runs the majority of modern computing by an unholy trifecta of sheer inertia, the first mover advantage, and at their core, a really powerful tool.

Superficially, FAANG offering massive compensation packages to anyone who fits their model of "Stanford/MIT degree, willing to suffer through LeetCode challenges", which has a massive effect on the market for SWE, as it changes the bar for what's _possible_ in the realm of compensation, and ensures that the cartel gets its pick of SWE talent, simply because it can offer substantially more than most other companies.

Interestingly, those companies are also the ones that I think have put the most effort into quantifying the value of a software developer to the business as a whole. The salaries look obscene to many people, but the cartel pays them because it believes it's getting more value than it's paying for.