It’s a big bureaucracy and procurement often just means going to the private sector and scooping up what’s on sale.

Non-zero chance the Koreans are running around with explosive pagers in their pockets right now.

It’s expensive because it has to go through a dozen layers of private contractors.

The US military was remarkably good at rapidly churning out cheap, effective armorments during the WW and early Cold War era. But the LBJ/Nixon pivot to private industry eroded all the efficiency. Then Reagan kicked military spending into overdrive in the 80s, and it’s been a snowball of waste, fraud, and embezzlement ever since.

Now the model for military procurement is just a jobs program for Congressional districts. The epitome of the Do Nothing profession.

Yes Jeff, I know they are cheap as shit, you cheapskate

Remind me again why you’d want an Apple (made in China) or OnePlus (made in China) or any of the other 70% of all cell phones available in the US? Are you just a big fan of paying extra for the same technology?

Or are you more wedded to phones made in Malaysia, India, or Vietnam for some peculiar reason?

you don’t put the cheapest solution in place

No shortage of high end Huawei models. They’ve been competitive with Samsung for nearly a decade.

Wait till they start dropping the big bombs. Then it’ll be even less like terrorism and you’ll be called antisemitic for suggesting otherwise.

who was in a car with a Hezbollah member

“How do you know he was a member?”

“He must have been a member because he was using a pager”

Perfect impenetrable circle of logic.

Then there would be news articles about mass civilian casualties

You’re literally posting under one of them.

Distributing bombs to terrorists

What if you distribute bombs to Lebanese civilians, detonate them, and then label the corpses “Terrorist” after the fact?

10 year old girl clearly was in a right wing terrorist group.

This is what Israelis actually believe

In an episode of Two Nice Jewish Boys, which aired three weeks ago, host Weinstein said: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second.”

He claimed that “most Israelis” would do the same.

Meningher added that they would also want to wipe out Palestinians in “the territories.”

“Because that’s the reality we live in, it’s us or them, and it has to be them,” Weinstein said.

He added that Israelis want “full-scale war.”

Oh man, the bill to go to war with China would have been ratified in milliseconds.

Frustrating to do another long-form argument of “actually, when you distribute a bunch of explosives and set them off in crowded areas, you’re not fighting terrorism but doing terrorism”

For some reason people struggle to believe flinging hand grenades into a crowd is bad public policy when a US ally does it.

I guess better late than never. Although, I do begin to wonder how much of this is in response to Israeli’s tax base getting eviscerated by the war

That’s not true. Pagers are still in regular use for two reasons:

• Hospitals hate upgrading their tech infrastructure, so they’ll sit on a 20 year old system until it falls to pieces

• Pagers don’t get spam texts at the same volume as cell phones, so you can be confident that when your pager rings its serious and not automated solicitations.

I have not seen a doctor with a pager in a long time

My friend’s a pulminologist and his hospital still uses pagers. They just never bothered to upgrade their 20 year old system to use SMS. And he says he’s partial to it, because he’s not forced to check his phone every time it rings when 99% of the messages are spam texts anyway.

The articles keep repeating “Hezbollah”, but the target of the attack appears to have been the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon.

Much like the US bombing of an Iraqi airfield to kill the Iranian diplomatic delegation to Baghdad, this appears to be an entirely illegal and recklessly deployed assassination plot aimed at one guy. The thousands of injuries and the eight dead (at least two being children under the age of 11) are just collateral damage the IDF has once again blanket-tagged as “Evil Muslim Militants”.

stalin, mao, min, castro …

Who could forget the time FDR, Churchill, and Hitler met at Yalta to decide what to do with the defeated Soviet Russia?

And for the love of god, don’t google any pictures of Nixon. Very real chance you’re going to catch him shaking hands with some shady communist characters.

Macron needs the electoral threat of a fascist majority to spur people towards his lukewarm liberal En March. He didn’t anticipate that Mélenchon would command such a popular turnout. So now he’s scrambling to reinflate the fascist boogeyman in hopes of pitting the far-right against the center-left. And, in the process, he’s turning everyone against him.

But Ukraine no longer has a meaningful domestic productive capacity. This war is entirely the result of foreign countries funneling weapons into the Ukraine and using it as a proxy against Russia.

That’s not a conflict Ukrainians can truly win, as Zelensky is no longer in control of the military assets he needs to guard his borders. At best, they can bleed Russia hard enough so that both countries lose (the tragic consequence of every long running war).

The problem is all the critical targets are a long ways from the front line

How would a Russian military respond in turn, if the targets in Ukraine have been exhausted. How long will the diplomatic shield of NATO protect supply lines passing through Poland or Romania?

What benefit does striking some random target hundreds of miles within Russia accomplish for Ukraine, who is slowly losing the ability to hold ground?

The goal of the Ukraine conflict is to create a Pyrrhic victory for Russia so costly that it collapses from within. Long range missiles capable of destroying key domestic infrastructure and material reserves will (hypothetically) hasten that economic collapse.

If you can start hitting major financial centers, administrative offices, and social meeting spaces, you might even be able to decapitate some of the senior leadership and kick off a succession crisis in Putin’s government. Alternatively, you push these leaders so far down into hiding that they can no longer effectively govern the country and foreign-sponsored insurgents can take over.

That’s the theory of the war, at least. In practice, NATO leadership is still unsettled by the prospect of a Total War with a nuclear armed state. So they’re not quite ready to drop a long range cruise missile on the Frunzenskaya Embankment, for fear of what a retaliatory strike would look like.

World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha.

The original versions of the game wouldn’t allow you to simply spend real money for in game benefits.

That’s since changed, as in game marketplaces have given users the ability to buy up their level, their gear, and their various grindable ranks.

But this is a relatively new iteration of the franchise. They also don’t use the “stars” power curve, wherein characters need to spend exponentially more in game currency to achieve linear power scale.

Without spending money, a lot of these games simply become boring and deeply repetitive over time.

The system for farming “free” in game currency feels more like a chore than entertainment. The benefits of each upgrade is more marginal while the adversaries progress rapidly.

There’s a “git good” angle to this kind of game, as it drifts from an FF-on-easy-mode to Dark-Souls-on-Legendary. But if I want that experience, why not just buy a copy of a Souls game?

Certainly Eldin Ring is worth a few hundred hours, has a much richer experience, and won’t immolate my wallet inside a month.