Notices by gentoobro (gentoobro@shitpost.cloud), page 6

I don't think Nick is a fed or is compromised. I think he's just a vain patsy who is easy to manipulate without compromising.

Copyright was originally 14 years. It's waaaaaaaaay too long now.

Firefox performance is fine. Chrome gets more bloated with every release now.

My kids will have to write most of their own games. Not even kidding.

People are sick of subscriptions

Probably not. They're in for a rough time ahead with population collapse. It'll be much worse in China, and they won't handle it as gracefully as Japan will. Thailand, Vietnam, and Mongolia are probably fine though.

I remember life before git...

Post woodworking project pics. Your media tab has a lot of waifus and not a lot of woodworking for someone called "Woodshop", just saying....

Lots of the modern mid-level bloat came from Job Justification. Can't justify your six figure manager job if you're not managing people. Can't justify making more than the other manager if you don't manage more people than him. Can't justify handing out a promotion if there aren't more people being managed than before.

In more normal times, budgets limited this sort of chicanery. For the past few decades, Wall Street, VCs, and the Fed have been pumping endless free money into big corporations for various unusual and unsustainable reasons. It's starting to unravel now though. Grab some popcorn.

By the best metric, which is the Government Spending to GDP Ratio, the US is far more communist than most "communist" countries.

There are far too many needless dependencies these days. I swear, people have become allergic to actually writing code. It's especially bad in languages with standard or semi-standard package managers. Is a simple wrapper arounf print() too hard for you? Gotta pull in a "logging library" that itself has a few dozen deps. Fucking pad a string? npm install lpad.

The needless deps make everything brittle.

The Ukrainians barely use any drones anymore, as far as I can tell. A handful of tiny antipersonnel FPV drones barely moves the needle.

50 to 70 miles

That's 50 to 70 km, or 30 to 50 miles. And that's for heavy artillery with expensive rocket-assisted shells, like the Malva. Most artillery is in the 20-25 mile range or less, including the M777 and all the old soviet 152mm towed junk like the D20 and Msta. That's within Lancet range, and therefore sitting ducks. It's only a matter of whether Russia makes Lancets faster than the cannons wear out their barrels. And the bigger artillery is a lot more expensive then a Geran.

Mainly, at this point, Ukraine is fighting with whatever leftover last-gen junk that NATO nations are willing to dump on it, and a token amount of more recent weapons. Have they even been given a significant amount of JDAMs? Are the handful of old MiGs they have capable of dropping them? Ergo, Ukraine shoots lots of artillery and tries to target it with the handful of recon drones they can afford. Why? Well, what else do they have?

Russia also shoots a lot of artillery targeted with recon drones, but mostly because they have mountains of "free" cannons and shells laying around from the Soviet buildup, and this is one of the last wars where it will be usable, either due to age or obsolescence. More importantly, Russia has shredded Ukraine's AA systems with Lancets, and the Geran gives them a very hard time trying to use western MLRS systems. No long-range AA means there's nothing to stop FABs.

While Ukraine made a lot of strategic blunders, loss of AA was the worst one. Now they're just going to get FAB'ed to death and there's very little they can do about it. They lost the AA systems to drones and ballistic missiles, but mostly drones. Even if they didn't lose the launchers and radars, they burned way too many missiles trying to defend against missiles. Should have just taken the missile strikes on the chin and saved their ammo for the jets which are now a huge problem.

All in all I put the 7.62x39 and 5.56 in the same general bucket. The M4 platform is a better platform than the AK for well-funded, well-organized armies, and the AK is a better platform for illiterate peasants fighting a guerrilla bush war. Both rounds fit the same general combat niche.

If I had to choose exactly one weapon to equip all the US/Russian soldiers with, it'd be a plastic AR-10 chambered in 7.62x51. A lesser-of-evils compromise among all the bad single-platform options. Heavy, but not absurd. Powerful enough, but just barely. Good rifle, so long as you keep it clean. Not particularly cheap, but won't bankrupt the treasury if a couple get lost.

Only for armies that have enough industry behind them to keep up drone production. We're talking 5,000+ small antipersonnel FPV drones per day and 100+ Lancet class drones per day, minimum, for a conflict like Ukraine.

On top of that, you'll need drone defenses, most of which will be interceptor drones. Several hundred per day, plus millions up front to stock the battle lines. Plus all the tiny radars and sensors to know when to launch them.

Likely those numbers would be much higher against a prepared and advanced enemy, like China or Iran.

The whole point of the M16 was to be light as fuck. The ammo was nerfed so you could carry lots of it. This was all done in support of "cover and move" tactics, which were all the rage at the time. While a useful and legitimate tactic, it's not a silver bullet, and comes with significant costs against trained and armored enemies. (As opposed to rice farmers with a rusty AK47)

I don’t think 7.62x51 beats armor at 200+ yards either.

Yeah. Hot rounds with steel cores, sure. Standard loads with FMJ, nope. But Geneva conventions and such. It'd be a lot better than 5.56/7.62x39 at 200 yards; the Marines are trying to drop the short-barrel M4 because they find it to be effectively ineffective against armor at 150yds.

.30-06

My reasoning is if you're going to carry a big round, carry a big round. .300 winmag. .338 Lapua Magnum. The difference in weight from a .30-06 isn't meaningful compared to only having to hit them once, and being able to shoot straight through various objects.

Ukraine

Drones, and specifically the ability to manufacture them cheaply, will win the war. Artillery that can't move within 30 seconds of firing is just waiting to die. The 777 and all the old soviet towed artillery is disposable drone food now. Even the M109 is a bad investment compared to a pile of Lancets, frankly.

But, there's nothing new under the sun. Medium range drones are the new artillery and infantry tactics won't change significantly because of the change. Short range anti-personnel drones are a different story, but I don't think they significantly change the rifle choices.

The Russians still understand war.

Much better than NATO, at least.

The military ... has been financialised

Not even the worst of it. The US is so hyper-regulated that it can't even supply its own raw steel at this point, much less weapons. There aren't even factories that make tools to build factories to make weapons. The US would be lucky to keep the tractors running if it got cut off from global trade at this point.

"what can improve the bottom line of the MIC"

The oligarchs are well known for scamming the ministry of defense, but are still amateurs compared to Boeing and Lockheed. Much of this, I believe, is due to the Russian government not having as much money to throw away (embezzle) as the US. They would if they could but they can't so they don't.

DIE

About says it all.

What they did making FABs seni-guided bombs that can fly giving them wings is short of fantastic. Transforming fleets of obsolete fighter planes into mobile flying missile batteries; again pure common sense.

Nothing new. JDAMs had similar wing kits as far back as 2006.

first military blunder

Their first major strategic blunder was giving back their nukes, but that was long before the war started. Their first strategic blunder of the war was not doing some quick back-of-the-napkin math and realizing they are much smaller than Russia in every way and would need to minmax the whole fucking country in order to have a shot at winning.

I honestly don't believe there are many fanatics running things over there or with their allies. They are thieves pretending to be fanatics, which is much worse.