This has been a long time coming, and most of the decent ones chose to resign rather than split the party. I remember for instance years ago when the far right really started winning elections in Idaho, a lot of the lifelong conservatives chose to resign in quiet protest rather than fight them or try and work with them.

It’s basicly the same thing you’re seeing in the federal government now, a lot of the people would rather resign than deal with him, and as such he gets to fill the roles with his loyalists without a fight.

You realize that even with a laws-of-physics-perfect-theoretical camera in order for a fighter jet to be even a single solitary pixel it would need a primary mirror well over twice as wide as the SpaceX “starship”, right?

Like launching a keyhole style satellite would require a Sea Dragon just for one pixel per ten by ten meter square.

I get that space is big and most people really don’t understand scale, but there is a reason that optical spy satellites are well below the ISS in some of the lowest stable orbits for such large satellites, about a hundred and twenty times closer than geostationary to orbit.

Suffice to say no one has come close to trying this, and it would be the wrong solution to the problem as compared to just throwing 100 times the money to the NRO and letting them throw up keyholes like they were cubesats, and that still would only get you limited areas every few minutes.

All of this doesn’t effect any of the other problems, like trying to get this imaging down to data centers, doing image recognition on such a massive data stream in near real time, or that it can be completely eliminated in a half hour with a few old fighter jets and some of the anti-satellite missiles everyone down to India has whole stockpiles of.

I hate to burst the bubble on the Elon Musk school of ‘what use is stealth when everyone has cameras’ way of thinking, but even neglecting that if you are in a conflict where you are using this sort of fighter jet then your satellites have been shot down by the enemy’s air force, satellite imagery and the laws of physics just doesn’t work that way outside of sifi.

The planet Earth is just too damn big for that sort of thing. The NEO can give you a decently high res photo of a place maybe several times a day, and even that means prioritizing using said satellite to look at that one single place on Earth.

More practically you get once or twice a day, with the resolution necessary to pick out a jet being limited to the small area you picked out ahead of time, and of course the enemy knows to within a half and hour or so when that picture is going to be taken.

AI guided TV missiles have been a thing since the 70s, and still remain only really practical for targets that can’t move very much. Little real world things like size of optics, stability of optics, resolution of optics, atmospheric distortion, cloudy days, night, mountains, horizons, etc, have kept this a non-answer to an unsolved physics problem for quite some time.

This isn’t to say that the military isn’t an incredibly good way of making public money disappear or that the US has it monitory priorities in order, but rather there is very much a reason that the Inspectors General report into this very project several months ago came back with Yes, this is the most cost effective solution for the military to achieve its goal of providing credible deterrence and preventing a war in the Asia Pacific region.

Moreover I would argue that the US has never lacked the money for healthcare or schools because of the military, and that if Trump desolved and fired the entire military tomorrow it would still not spend more on schools or healthcare. Rather I would argue that the US is ideologically driven to generally avoid taxing the people with all the money who own its leaders, it by and large does not want that money bring spent on things that benefit poor people, and many of its voters would rather burn the whole thing down than accept a dime going to a black or brown person.

It’s worth noting that this project for a F22 replacement has been known to be in development for quite a while now, so this is less a Trump thing than someone at the Pentagon pulling him aside and changing the name to make it less likely he will kill it when Putin or Xi Jinping remember they can just ask him to and he will.

Here is an excellent as always Perun summery on the US, EU, etc projects as of a month ago, but basically it doesn’t matter how good the F22 is over the pasific if China just shoots down all your tankers and carriers from well out of range, so it’s high time for a pasific range capable fighter.

Shame it’s going to Boeing though.

Yup, and he also vaccinated his children as soon as they were old enough to qualify. He wants his voters dumb, trapped, and desperate, not his family.

Fun fact, the US first developed a hypersonic interceptor in the 1960s with the nuclear armed Sprint missile.

Moreover, the US demonstrated the ability to successfully identify and shoot down incoming ICBMs launched from the other side of the ocean with the Aegis system in 2012, and said system is now installed on a number of our and our key allies ships and bases.

The problem is not that it’s impossible to shoot down an ICBM, far from it, the problem is that to provide a reasonable margin of safety in a full scale nuclear extange you would need an absurd number of said missiles, as an opponent an just choose to focus all their missiles at a few key targets, so you would need to have all your cities and bases to each protected by enough missiles to take out the entirety of your adversaries arsenal by themselves.

So if you actually wanted to actually improve the US’s missile defenses, you would just be ordering more RIM 161 SM 3’s from Raytheon and Mitsubishi, not throwing money at Musk’s cronies for their ‘invaluable insight’ into this new idea.

Counterpoint, I grew up in a smallish town in Idaho and was still absolutely surrounded by Democrats. State wide, only sixty percent of the voting age population actually turned out, and of those one out of every three people voted against Trump.

Hell, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in some countries and again, this is fucking Idaho.

This means that if you talk to an a Idahoan at random, there is a more than fifty percent chance they either largely already agree with you, or they are largely insulated from and not paying attention to politics and thusly susceptible to being swayed with the right approach and concrete examples of what Trumps doing to fuck them and their friends over specifically.

Left wing ideas and policy are still far more popular among the general public, which is why Republicans have to lie about them constantly.

Look for your local anarchist bookstore, look at what your counties Democrats actually organized, especially things like local pride events, show up, and network/make friends.

As is fun to note, there are more Democrats living in Texas than New York state, so the idea you should just give up on finding any around you because you live in a red state instead of one where the numbers are reversed is honestly rather absurd.

I mean the Gospel also says it’s easier to put a camel through the eye of a sowing needle than for any rich person to not be justly suffer eternal torture for what they chose to do to others with their limited time on Earth. So if they think this is a hard left liberal just wait until one of these propagandists actually reads the Bible and all it’s talk about unconditional love, support, and liberation.

From my youtube understanding the 737-800 doesn’t have a RAT, instead using a battery system to power the DC bus, some controls, and minimal avionics. Also for some reason the FDR and CVR are powered only from the AC buses, and so would not have power in a two engine out scenario until the pilots manually started the APU and it came online. It also predates the requirement for said systems to have an independent backup battery.

This means things are still consistent with a staggered double bird strike or with a single bird strike followed by the pilots shutting down the wrong engine as well as some of the more out there theory’s.

Investigators might still be able to recover enough switch positions to figure out what happened in the air, but it’s going to be a hard investigation.

The major takeaway and factor that turned this from a major incident into a catastrophic one however is still that putting the localizer on a concrete reinforced berm for typhoon resistance is a major safety hazard.

So you think after decades of wage stagnation, the 2008 financial crash, and multiple recessions demonstrably didn’t have this effect, a short spike in inflation where the poorest workers actually saw the first real wage gains in decades was all it took to suddenly develop a new form of previously nonexistent class consciousness?

I guess Amaricans really do hate moderate inflation more than high levels of unemployment.

So why do you think this empathy not exist before the last few years? Why are people now so worried about the people who themselves say they are doing well when they weren’t before?

Except the same surveys that show that people think that the economy as a whole is doing terrible also show that the same people report they themselves are doing great economically, their friends are doing good, and their state is doing ok. If everyone thinks that themselves and their friends are doing well but the economy as a whole is doing terrible, that is a large disconnect between people’s perceptions of the economy vs the actual economy as a whole.

While a lot of things are going to depend on area and experience, for instance real energy costs have gone down since 2020 for me and wages in the lower quarter of workers have at the very least kept pace with inflation if not grown beyond it, that does not explain why this perception of the economy doing horrible even when you and your friends are going well did not exist five years ago despite everything you suggested as being new having been the case then too, often to an even larger extent.

Similarly, the cost of rent and food literally is the primary economic measure of inflation, and demonstrably has recovered from the supply chain shocks of Covid. It’s indeed the principle measure that where people’s perception of it no longer has any correlation with measured reality.

The silver lining is that everyone from Lemmy, to youtube, to Bernie seems to have correctly identified the problem early on this time around, so much of the anger is being directed towards the party establishment for screwing up the easy win as it is towards Trump. The question is whether or not that anger can be turned towards productive action to gain control of the DNC, or will be quashed by the establishment once again.

Time, and agitation, will tell.

Given how entrenched support for Isreal is parts of the base and moreover how conflicted much of the middle ground of the community is, I expect a lot of them would have sat the election out. Of course I think playing both sides of the street did lead to a lot of them sitting it out, but I think the hope was that an week intermediate position would allow for unity and coalition building around issues that didn’t have your party primarily fighting itself.

And the Jewish voting population of PA is more than three times that. Now, that hardly means that they’ll all vote for Isreal, but it does mean that how that group breaks has a far more outsized impact and why Haris was focused so much on things that both sides can generally agree with like conditional aid.

I would have much preferred an actual hardline leftist stance of course, but at the end of the day Gaza does not seem to have played a significant part in this election.

Not really, without Pennsylvania Michigan doesn’t matter unless nearly every other swing state goes for her, and they don’t look like that’s even a possibility.

The bible isn’t the infallible word of God though, at least not according to anyone but the most fundamentalist and not particularly literate sects, it’s a collection of stories sometimes about God and mostly about their fallible human followers originating from entirely different religions, cultures, and centuries that were passed down though oral tradition and copies of copies of copies for centuries. Hence why so much of it is open to debate even within a given church, even before getting to how much of it is explicitly metaphorical or any of its actual history might have affected how said stories were retold and which parts survived.

Don’t forget that 20% tax on all foreign goods and a 60% tax on everything made in China, which will definitely cause prices to go down./s

Politically, major outside military forces like aircraft carriers tend to be viewed at a stabilizing force in the local region, but more to the point Redrum and I were talking about Isreal’s primarily being useful politically rather than militarily to destabilize and break up leftist and Soviet groups in the region.

Except OPEC still had significant power and influence in the US well after the Yom Kippur war ended in 1973, and said war didn’t even involve the majority of the OPEC member countries.