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Honestly it’s just a modern take on the “bread & circus” concept that goes back to city-states of the ancient world. It’s not unique to the US and is even something socialist governments must account for, but with the US it sure seems like an entire cultural identity has been built around consumption of treats. Just look at what happened in the US when COVID caused mass media entertainment (television, movies, novels) to be delayed indefinitely along with restaurants, bars, and themeparks closing down.

Other than treats citizens of the US often have nothing, living lives that can be quite hollow. Atomization. Freedom where to others they owe nothing and are owed nothing. No community, protestant religion centered around the individual, family is extremely shallow due to being limited to the so-called nuclear family that often abandons relationships when children turn 18, and suburban living where people often don’t even know their immediate neighbors.

It’s basically the same class of ship the US, China, and Russia use as coast guard cutters. I often find it more than a little entertaining how most Navies outside the great powers label as warships what amount to coastal patrol vessels meant for civilian police actions in litoral water. Is something really a blue water Navy when you don’t even have the ships to assemble a Navy strike group (1 cruiser for command & control, 3 to 6 destroyers, and 1 attack submarine)?

Up side is central African countries are extremely good at containing outbreaks once identified. It’s the reason most of those countries handled COVID better than any European or American countries. Outbreaks of hemorrhagic fevers like ebola (horrific way to die, traumatic to witness) have a way of causing the type of mass psychological trauma that teaches entire generations to take shit seriously.

Can be even more brazen and accuse them of being antisemites for making any criticism of him. We can be just as deranged.

got it!

I’ll give it a try. I actually enjoyed Paragon before Epic shut it down, so I might enjoy this shooter-moba.

It’s meaningfully different in the US at least because these corporations are some of the most powerful on earth. Musk’s companies are small beans in comparison because market cap is meaningless compared to actual revenue. He is fucking around with corporations that literally overthrow governments, kill disloyal people, and fund private militaries to advance their interests. The kind of corporations that US federal judges rubber-stamp even criminal rulings for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue

Even if turkey just started covertly supplying weapons, it would be a significant turning point. Turkey is one of the 4 major manufacturers and exporters of advanced military hardware. Like the US, China, and Russia— Turkey is one of the sources of so-called 5th generation military hardware.

Currently the most advanced weapons available to the resistance axis come from Iran. Iranian weapons are admirable, especially when one factors in the decades of sanctions, but Turkish military hardware is comparable to top end US, Chinese, and Russian military hardware. Would be high attrition military hardware like single use drones, manpads, and cruise missiles.

Wasn’t be born in Philadelphia or something and lived in the US past his tenth birthday? Unless he renounced his citizenship at some point, he should qualify.

The US space program has always been privatized. The Mercury program was McDonald Douglas, Apollo program was Boeing, and the Space Shuttle program was Rockwell. Said companies weren’t just the prime contractors responsible for design and manufacturing but also contracted for launch operations.

NASA space launch has always been contractors all the way down. The only thing that changed over the last couple decades is were the liability lies. The previous system of NASA being responsible for all the failure, held hostage by contractors, wasn’t sustainable and under the Obama administration an initiative was launched to restructure things so all liability was on the prime contractor for any program. The old system was NASA contracting for labor and the prime contractor giving it their best effort rather than NASA contracting for a finished product. NASA now buys a finished product, a commercial relationship, rather than signing contracts for design services, manufacture, and launch operations that have no contractual guarantee the product will actually be delivered. This is why Boeing has actually lost money on the Starliner and SLS program rather than the previous situation of being able to hold NASA hostage milking more money as a reward for fking up.

Another fun fact is the US National Labs are also privatized and have been since the very beginning. National Lab scientists aren’t even US government employees and their salaries come from whatever corporation has hired them to work at the lab. The US government owns the real estate and issues grants for the research to be done but the labs themselves are private sector operations, each one operated by a handful of corporations. It’s why the US government never owns the patents from US national lab research.

Funniest shit is they have been using grey market SIM cards from Ukrainian cell providers when within their coverage zones. There are plenty of Ukrainians willing to make some extra money creating accounts and selling said sim cards. The Russian military has even been using Ukrainian cell providers as the fallback data link for their drones once they cross the border. If Ukraine uses electronic warfare to jam Russian military radio frequencies, equipment just falls back to the Ukrainian cell network. Ukraine can’t do much about it without shutting down their own cellular network and doing so would be a morale/humanitarian disaster.

I assume the USSA is much larger than the USA, hemisphere spanning perhaps? Latin America eventually unites under a federation of socialist republics that then invade and “liberate” north America? An actually united america rather than a fraction claiming the name?

Why would people admit to getting bullied by sea lions? Sad.

Harmony is the mobile and iot OS, it is also no longer based on Android. For the replacement of Windows on critical systems it’s a Linux distro called Kylin maintained by the National University of Defense Technology.

https://www.kylinos.cn/

Debtors prison is quite possibly the most unamerican practice one could instate. The US is more than a little unique with practices such as defaulting on debt being solely a civil matter and one with a 7 year statute of limitations. The US was founded on the idea that someone can repeatedly go bankrupt without any real consequences other than not being able to get future credit until debts are somehow settled or a decade has passed. It’s extremely British to instate debtors prison, criminal liability for defaulting on debt, legal liability for debt being inherited by next of kin upon death, and psycho shit like denying a person burial/cremation until their debt is paid.

Abolishing that British practice of putting all liability on the barrower was one of the petite bourgeoisie goals of the US founders. A big change was all debts dying with the original debtors rather than being inherited by next of kin. One of the major revolutionary changes the US brought about was the idea that almost all liability is on the lender (unless the barrower knowingly commited fraud, ie lied while being evaluated for credit) because they should have been more responsible in gauging risk since extending credit is no different than any other form of gambling/speculation.

During and shortly after the revolution. They fkd around afterwards, father got locked up and family got sent to the rural countryside for reeducation. After serving the prison sentence, his father did eventually redeem himself but it left a mark. This experience in adolescence is supposedly what caused Xi to develop a hard-line reder-than-red Marxist-Leninist world view and aversion to corruption when others he grew up with fell down the liberal rabbit hole. This is at least what his CIA dossier outlined as family background and early life.

Lesson the US military eventually learned in Vietnam after camera and television technology had matured to the point the general public got to witness weapons of mass destruction in use. Until that point there was no real backlash whenever the US military fire bombed entire cities. In the WW2 Pacific theater the US killed over a hundred thousand civilians at a time fire bombing Japanese cities and no one gave a fk but when the public watched on their living room televisions the same tactics being used in Vietnam there was backlash.

I guess the lesson learned was that after the advent of video mass media you gotta only kill hundreds of civilians at a time and if you do shit like depoy a weapon that kills tens to hundreds of thousands at a time the public starts getting squeamish.

Last time US fighter pilots had to deal with people firing anti aircraft missiles at them in volume was during the opening days of the first gulf war.

Anyone remember the flight recorder video from an F16 over Baghdad being chased by six surface to air missiles? During the chase sustained an average of 3.6G with peak acceleration at points reaching 6.4G. Does seem like the stuff of nightmares.

https://youtu.be/2uh4yMAx2UA

Dick Cheney if he were anyone else would be dead but he has access to a rather unique combination of billionaire wealth, US govt executive branch VIP privileges, deep military industrial connections, and access to bleeding edge DARPA tech. Guy literally holds the world record for time spent living without a heart. Spent something like a year without one. The resources and expertise expended on keeping him alive have been ridiculous.