I'd put the emphasis on Tactical- 3500 is not a lot of a tactical weapon, but that's because there are not a lot of tactical targets worth launching a missile at. The fact that they're being used at all just shows what a cluster the entire operation is.
Article should be titled 'The Lost Civic Life of Mom and Pop Stores'- no kid making $4.50 an hour is cultivating a third space atmosphere at Blockbuster, whereas any Mom and Pop place can do that, no matter what they sell.
It's funny, one of the benchmarks I've used when trying to decide when things went off the rails was that banning CFCs was a relatively uncontroversial thing in the 1990s. Now, I agree with your pessimism.
I don't know what Cold Harbor means in a Meta context, but its interesting that its named after the battle that exemplified Grant's strategy of attrition during the American Civil War. I suspect it means waves of engineers ground down against the defenses of OpenAI/Anthropic in the hopes of eventually finding a crack. Might be best to get out while you can.
As far as I can tell the main crime Palantir commits is actually delivering what it's asked for, instead of just stringing the government along like the other contractors do.
The other thing missing is that a 1960's hardback is a much higher quality item than most modern hardbacks- sewn binding, nicer paper, better cover materials, etc. Hard covers today are cheaply made from inferior materials.
The real problem is books are too cheap- as in cheaply made perfect bound pieces of shit with a bit of cardboard glued on that don't open correctly filled with nasty lightweight textureless bleached paper covered with mis-registered text and blobs of ink from under-maintained presses. We're being charged a premium for a demonstrably inferior product.