You think you’re an expert but you’re not! Some serious Freddy-Kruger effect happening here.

A joke in the aviation industry is that planes will someday become so automated there will just be one pilot and a dog in the cockpit. The dog will trained to bite the pilot if they try to touch the controls.

So I maybe windows users will need a virtual dog to bite copilot if it tries to do anything.

FFS a government makes a policy on phone security which may or may not be a good decision. OK whatever, who cares?

Ah but that government is Israel. So now this is today’s reason for your daily Two Minutes Hate?

Get a grip people.

Not only did they take down an F-35, they took down the biggest F-35 ever made!

Defense production is the key to all of these scenarios. Russia is off the board for about a decade, and most likely they’d go after Ukraine again in a decade, and if not Ukraine it would be the Baltics. If you have defense production we can produce more weapons and munitions before they lose any conflict in Europe.

With China they’re bottled up inside a line of islands… Philippines, Taiwan, Japan. They can’t get to Canada unless they can take Taiwan first. Again, with defense production we can supply Taiwan with what they need to repel an invasion.

Everyone looks at army size but seemingly forgets to look at a map. Army size doesn’t matter if you can’t get that army across an ocean. So it’s all about navy, and Russia isn’t all that good at navies, never has been. China is building a large navy, but they don’t have a lot of experience, and amphibious assaults are ridiculously difficult, and it’s not likely they would succeed in taking Taiwan. China is building Aircraft carriers (which they don’t need for Taiwan since it’s within range of airfields in mainland China) but they aren’t building a lot of dedicated landing ships (though it’s supposed the could appropriate civilian RORO ships), so it seems they’re doing the typical authoritarian military that’s designed for intimidation more than actually being effective. But in any case we should be more concerned with defending Taiwan than direct conflict with China, because that has to happen first… and even that looks unlikely to anyone that hasn’t been influenced by Lockheed Martin’s propaganda.

But the bottom line is no one is going to attack the Western Hemisphere without permission from the US. So really the only real threat is the US or a US proxy. To prevent that we don’t need to straight up win, we need to first make a war too expensive for the US to attempt. Secondly if they do make the foolish decision to invade Canada, we need to have the capability of killing a few thousand American soldiers over the course of an occupation and they will become war weary and leave.

So we need strong alliances in terms of defense production so we’ll supply other countries if they’re attacked and they will supply us if we’re attacked.

Submarines are great for both an invasion of Taiwan and for making a US invasion of Canada expensive. Not that we could destroy the US navy with a few submarines, but having the capability of taking out a few ships and hitting some targets on the US coast makes an invasion expensive for them. Sure they could eventually track them all down, but they are going to take some damage before they do.

The Gripen is actually a great option too. They’re relatively low maintenance (it’s a fighter jet so still pretty high maintenance, but way less than the F-35) and they’re designed for a conflict where they’d need to potentially use regular roads as airstrips. Again it’s not about destroying the US Air Force, but just inflicting some expensive damage.

The goal would be to have a Pentagon assessment of the cost of a war with Canada to have the highest dollar amount as possible, since that’s all that matters to the psychopaths in power down there right now.

Any fighter jet requires a lot of maintenance, and the F35 requires more than most.

If they US cut us off from getting parts for the planes it wouldn’t take too long before they wouldn’t be flying anymore.

And yeah the biggest concern for me is a country that’s potential adversary being able to shut down our air force when they want. I’d say it’s not likely they’d do this to attack us militarily, but I could definitely see a them doing this to put pressure on us in a trade negotiation. They did temporarily cut off Ukraine from supply in the middle of a war to pressure them, that’s a line that should never be crossed, and they crossed it. So yeah they’d be willing ground our airf orce to strong arm us someday.

So using American planes makes the RCAF a potential liability in negotiations in the future. The military should be a strength in geopolitics, not a liability.

The Swedish offer shouldn’t just be about jobs, though that’s a nice bonus. If we’re building the parts for the planes here in Canada then no one can cut us off and ground our planes.

If you want a laugh, go look up the photos Iran doctored up for this bit of propaganda. I remember one had an F35 with cockpit the size of a school bus on it. Another had the tail section on backwards. Probably AI slop, but fake photos to be sure.

Why is Ukraine still using jets?

Drones require a radio signal to work. Radio signals can be jammed. You can get around this by having the drone on a wire, but obviously the range of the drone will be limited by the length of the wire.

An aircraft with a human pilot can still do it’s mission even if radio signals are being jammed.

Also I can imagine someday they might combine the technologies. Human piloted jet carries drones close enough that it can hit the target while being connected to the jet by a wire so it can be controlled by the human pilot in the jet in an area where signals are being jammed. Of course the enemy will want to counter that… by sending a human piloted jet to take out your human piloted jet.

You could of course build more sophisticated drones that can operate autonomously. But remember they they may not be able to connect to a server farm to because of jamming. So you’d have to put a lot more stuff on the drone itself and before long it’s no longer a cheap $400 drone, it’s price tag goes up until you’re basically spending almost as much per drone as we do on missiles.

Military tech is all about inventing new thing, invent thing to counter that, invent thing to counter the counter to your new tech. In wartime procurement you just need the thing that works right now. With peacetime procurement you want to get things that keep your options open and not be too dependent on a tech that might be countered in a few years. So you get both jets and drones because maybe the jets will be obsolete, but it’s just as likely drones will be obsolete if the time comes to use them.

It’s more likely they have contractual obligations with marketing companies, retailers, data centers, etc. If a product is discontinued they can get out of those obligations. Sure they will write off a loss and reduce the taxes they pay, but it’s not as if a bigger loss nets them more money somehow.

Really what needs to be regulated is all of the excessive exclusive B2B contracts which mean a company can’t just sell a product for a small amount of money to someone to maintain it when they’re done with that product.

In most of the civilized world, refugees do not need a passport when they are seeking asylum.

You’re prohibited from entering a many countries in the Middle East if you have a stamp in you passport showing you’ve been to Israel.

Because of this Israel generally doesn’t stamp passports. It would be especially a terrible thing to do to a refugee that might have family in another country that they could stay with but get turned away because they have a prohibited stamp in their passport.

They usually give a paper (separate from the passport) with the necessary information. It’s possible they didn’t get that paper, but it’s also possible they had to dispose of it if the flight stopped over in a country that doesn’t allow Israeli stamps.

Whatever the case may be, it’s not at all unusual for someone exiting Israel to not have a stamp in their passport, in fact that’s the default. It’s weird South African officials wouldn’t be aware of this.

Yeah we just called it the sound effect it made when you got it… it’s just hard to type out the exact sound.

The key is “with human supervision”. Calling it Full Self Driving with “Supervised” in parentheses aftwards while putting out videos where they say the only reason there’s some behind the wheel is because of regulations (those annoying “regulations” amirite?) leads people to think they don’t really need to supervise the driving of the car.

Couple that with the fact that there are actual full self driving cars (Waymo) there’s even greater confusion.

People have been killed because of the misconceptions about Telsa cars actually being full self driving. Which they aren’t, they cheap out on the hardware needed for that to be possible, let alone the software.

We just called it the WOOM.

I always thought of it as the “go super fast straight into a spike” power up since that’s how it usually worked out.

Yeah but the cartridges that come with a new printer are usually only 1/3 full. As another guy said, get a printer that uses toner. They’re more expensive (because you’re actually paying for the printer) but you don’t have to worry about ink drying out because it’s toner, it’s supposed to be dry.

Inkjet printers are basically a scam, if you don’t print all that often, the ink will probably be dried up when you go to use it, and if you print frequently, it’ll be cheaper to have a laser printer that uses toner in terms of per page cost.

If this AI stuff weren’t a bubble and the companies dumping billions into it were capable of any long term planning they’d call up wikipedia and say “how much do you need? we’ll write you a cheque”

They’re trying to figure out nefarious ways of getting data from people and wikipedia literally has people doing work to try to create high quality data for a relatively small amount of money that’s very valuable to these AI companies.

But nah, they’ll just shove AI into everything blow the equivalent of Wikipedia’s annual budget in a week on just electricity to shove unwanted AI slop into people’s faces.

The term “late stage capitalism” is not a call to action, it’s a call to apathy. It’s promoted by online influencers to make it permissible to participate in capitalistic endeavors (it doesn’t matter the collapse is inevitable) so they can entice people to buy their merch so they can be rich. It’s a sign that leftism has been successfully captured by capitalism.

Actually, I got the information about China’s handling of toxic waste from processing rare earths from Australian news (ABC).

Where do you get your information from? Some influencer on TikTok? Those people are for entertainment only and consider who’s choosing which content you see.

Yes they will charge you more, because there’s toxic waste involved and it can be expensive to handle in an environmentally friendly way. It’s cheaper to refine rare earths by just dumping the toxic waste on the ground, which is what China does and it’s how they cornered the market.

This is one of the cases where tariffs are good. Produce the rare earths the right way (even if it costs more) and slap tariffs on products that are produced in ways that damages the environment (as China does).