I think it was Angela Collier that did a pretty basic test with a common store bought alkaline water, a lemon and some test strips. The water doesn’t start very alkaline at all.

edit: Yep, here we go. https://youtu.be/rBQhdO2UxaQ

It’s an amusing video.

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Seemed to me that pilot could’ve nailed him any time he wanted. Dude wasn’t exactly moving like Batman out there. If you’re really trying to get him, it’s not like you lose anything if you actually try to hit him and he ducks, you just come back around. No actual benefit to toying with him.

Getting him to surrender is a benefit though. Saves a drone, and gets you a prisoner you can milk for intelligence and maybe swap in the future. Prisoners are an asset, and it is beneficial to collect them when possible.

Yeeesh. I get the impression the drone operator really, really wants this guy to just surrender so he doesn’t have to waste the drone on him, but the guy just won’t…

Gave him every opportunity, while the guy is alone, and just looks lost, confused and hungry.

I understand, but I’m not so sure that’s a viable long-term strategy in the modern, digital world. Perhaps you could argue it’s the best we’ve got, but I think the jury is still out on that.

That’s the path to victory though. As soon as you draw out the ad hominem, you’ve forced them to pivot off of the main topic, withdrawing from an untenable position.

You can’t actually expect a zealot to admit they’re wrong (edit: on an issue of core belief), that’s not realistic. You need to be comfortable accepting something else as the conclusion of the argument, by necessity.

One thing you have to remember about the communists is they see everything through the lens of class. They do not acknowledge any other form of conflict as legitimate, everything else is a smokescreen to distract from their attempts at class warfare. They have an overarching goal in mind, and they work backwards to diagnose the hurdles, placing value only in how something pertains to their goals. They’re zealots, no different from how a religious fundamentalist views everything in the framing of their religion’s worldview. Attempting to remain objective takes a backseat to these goal-oriented perspectives.

The reason I accept the civil ones is they do have valuable input on occasion. While I don’t see class as the central cause of society’s ills, I do acknowledge class conflict as one of many “legitimate” forms of conflict. And in the same way that I acknowledge a theologian viewing the world from some religious perspective and analyzing all problems from that singular point of view, I acknowledge these folk’s rights to do the same from their class-based perspective. At least class exists, where someone’s mythical battles between heaven and hell may very well not.

It really is helpful if you remember that while we may be trained in trying to stay process-oriented through things like the scientific method, that’s not a default way of thinking or anything. So, if you’re going to argue with one, you need to remember they’re not going to see even basic facts from your perspective. What is a fluke/outlier vs what is the statistical trend, is just interpretation until you have the hard numbers, after all. Keeping the focus on actual data and verifiable facts, while pointing out what is merely subjective interpretation, is a good way to keep the conversation somewhat balanced.

Honestly, Cowbee is one of the few over there that I retain full respect for. They tend to stay on topic and polite, and that’s good enough for me. The rest I can accept under viewpoint diversity.

I do agree there’s some alternative facts at play, but that’s unsurprising in this world of ours, particularly given how information exchange has become so international. Alternative fact sets are an inevitable result of that, given that different people have had their own values and narratives for … as long as there have been countries I suppose. Longer, even, countries aren’t really that old. Spin is much older.

if someone is doing that

Key words. I think we can look at

Someone showed me a TikTok video of a…

and assume with a fair degree of confidence that something a little fishy is going on here.

Off topic, but of all the algorithmic niches someone can occupy, I think the cusp of cottagecore and tradwife is one of the most interesting. I noticed some time ago just from being a Tolkein fan, that people were trying to claim Tolkein for conservative Christianity, really pushing hard on the Eru Iluvitar (sp?) aspect of his cosmology.

Do you get a lot of religious recommendations from your algorithms? Do you notice any particular trends in the permaculture community?

What is a must is combatting it. Hating something before you choose to combat it is optional, so long as the decision to combat it is made.

In other words, if someone hated something, but did not combat it, that would be ineffective. If someone combatted something, but did not hate it, that’d be fine.

The choice and the feeling are two completely independent things.

It’s in the same vein as gamma ray bursts. Could possibly cause problems, but space is so big, so heavily occupied by empty space, that the odds of ever encountering one vs just more empty space is almost infinity:1.

I mean, our planet is billions of years old and hasn’t encountered a single one yet, based on the fact it’s still comfortably in orbit around the sun.

Asteroids are far, far more concerning. Encountered a bunch of those already.

Prior to the recent decade, peer on peer warfare was considered pretty unlikely overall, where COIN was the big thing everyone was worried about.

Here in the US anyway. I’m not sure what priorities the British have and how much budget they have to throw at them.

More that “obsolete” doesn’t mean useless. It just means its unable to adequately fulfill all the roles in all of the potential situations that the British may want for their arty. It can still perform a lot though.

Plenty of obsolete things can still be very useful.

Did a FNV run for the first time in maybe 10ish years? I had never played modded, was feeling like some fpv shooter arpg hybrid with a dose of nonsense, so figured I’d give it a replay.

Holds up remarkably well. Played it with the Viva New Vegas modpack as a base to simplify things a little bit for myself, added on a few extras for cool features, and it did significantly improve the experience. I remember crashes used to be very frequent, but even with a bunch of mods, this was actually more stable than I remember. Multiple companions mod made the difficulty completely trivial, so felt more like a power romp than an immersive game, but still fun as it sped the playthrough up enormously, with this posse I’m running around with just gunning down absolutely everything in the wasteland.

On the whole, good stuff, modded replay is recommended.

I’m not sure the cauldron strategy is as viable as it was in the past. This isn’t the Red Army of Stalin’s day, this army retreats en masse when you shatter its lines, as we saw in the Kharkiv offensive a couple years ago.

Do their missiles and big drones have inertial guidance? If not, more jamming systems could work really well.

The big challenge is the multiple entrenched lines of Russian defense. Minefields covered by artillery and drones are difficult to penetrate, especially when you have to pierce several in a row.

It’s good to see more tanks going, having more materiel is better than having less materiel. But I’d also like to see more pledges of aircraft. The jets have been doing good, important work, and we do have more that we can give.

Ultimately the war is never going to be won by some huge Ukrainian ground push to Moscow or something though. It’ll be won by slowly grinding the Russian war economy down, somewhat similar to how Germany was defeated in WW1. Turns out these full-scale war things are horrendously resource-intensive, and nobody gets infinite resources… I think the Russian wealth fund is down to less than half its liquid assets, if I remember right?

Frankly, if the goal of the administrations was to be helpful to Russia’s offensive, then halting shipments while muddying the waters with inconsistent messaging would be an excellent way to accomplish that.

Stop the shipments, but lie about it and say that you will ship more in the future. Then just never actually do that. This keeps them hoping for shipments that will never actually arrive.

edit: Another possibility here is that the Def Sec Hegseth does not want to help Ukraine, but Trump himself does not actually care one way or another, and thus could be convinced to overrule his Def Sec.

Tough to say.

The idea of imbibing potions whose recipes predate our awareness of things like radium or mercury toxicity somewhat disturbs me.

Wow. Honestly kinda surprised they were that vulnerable. Doesn’t Russia have any sort of CWIS systems to defend their ground based nuclear bombers and advanced radar command and control aircraft? Seems kinda important, don’t you think?