Quick analysis: the US flushed itself down the toilet.

• Likely fact: Republicans now control all 4 towers of the castle (president, senate, house of representatives and surpreme court).

• Conclusion: the situation allows Republicans to steamroll legislation into force.

• Further conclusion: US voters really don’t understand what they are doing.

Climate: it’s bad, but one president’s rule is short. Trump will withdraw from the Paris treaty and sabotage domestic attempts to curb emissions. Europe and China will continue their attempts because they haven’t changed, and they want energy independence. Climate is a system with great inertia. We are beaten by the mistakes of previous decades, new generations will be beaten by our mistakes. Increasingly hard.

Ukraine: the situation is very bad. The Biden administration won approval for 60 billion of support in spring, but according to Zelensky, only 10% has been delivered so far. Unless the DoD hurries the hell out of itself, Trump will close the tap on aid that Biden secured. Trump will try diplomacy, but Putin’s administration is made of a different sort of people. They are running for life while Trumpists are running for lunch. Putin will politely send him where sun doesn’t shine and continue grinding meat, now with an added flavour of North Korean. Ukraine faces a very difficult choice: fight a retreating war in conditions of decreasing aid, hoping that revolutionary conditions arise in Russia… or make peace with the attacker, giving them territory. Ukraine will need all the assistance it can get from anywhere. Knowing this, and knowing the risk of a Trump re-election, I started developing a drone system 6 months ago. It has gone through many iterations and might be capable of combat in the coming month. I didn’t sign up to live in a world like this, but hey, you take what you’re given. :(

If the war in Ukraine gives Putin territory and peace as a result, Putin and his heirs know that you can get territory and peace with war: any place in Eastern Europe could be next.

In summer, Congress locked away the keys for leaving NATO, but Republicans now control both houses and Trump has cleansed the party of dissenters. Trump can credibly threaten to withdraw from NATO or actually do it.

Taiwan needs to find more alliances, because the US might become unreliable, and China knows this. The rest of the world needs to think if they can do without electronics during a Chinese attempt to conquer Taiwan.

Democracy in the US: will be dismantled in favour of something like Hungary. We will see ministers who are oligarchs like Musk or irresponsible liars like Kennedy. Since the storm is near-perfect, I predict that democracy will give way to oligarchy. Risk of disturbances, repressions and internal conflict will grow.

Until now, only unstable people wanted to assassinate Trump. Given these conditions, I predict that stable but ruthless people who see a danger to their future will join the game. They will reason as follows: “risk has reached certainty and there is still time to prevent outcomes”. If I was working in the Secret Service, I would increase protection on Trump 10 times (unless I hated him).

I live in Eastern Europe, and seriously recommend your people start researching nuclear weapons. :(

A note about Taiwan. Allegedly, Putin asked Musk for a favour for Xi - to refuse Starlink for Taiwan.

Coincidentally, negotiations between Taiwan and Starlink broke down. The Guardian reported about it on October 15:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/15/taiwan-to-have-satellite-internet-service-as-protection-in-case-of-chinese-attack

“Starlink is not available in Taiwan after negotiations reportedly fell apart over Taiwan’s requirement that a local entity have a majority share of any joint venture established.”

A person experienced in investigating such matters would take a look at the ownership structure of other Starlink local representatives, and see if Taiwan had unusually harsh demands or Musk was unusually stiff while negotiating with them. If Taiwan had harsh demands, it is plausible that no favour was done. If Musk was unusually stiff, then it’s plausible that the favour was done as requested.

If conservative means “cautious and wary of unexpected results”, “disillusioned with methods that we tried and failed with” or maybe even “equipped with experience of successful and failed cooperation with various sorts of people”, then yes. Already before age 50, I’m spoiled with various good and bad experiences. I cannot exclude that as my tendency to explore decreases (psychology tends to affirm this trend), I may get prejudiced too. I may have to figure out something to counter it.

But if conservative means that I suddenly don’t want a society with equality and without hierarchy, then - nope.

Alternatively, and perhaps more plausibly - people who are new to politics fall for a populist.

I’m a bit scared of where the world is going, but it doesn’t make me vote a local populist. One of the things that helps me recognize a scammer from distance - 3 decades of experience with garden variety politics.

/me listening to the sound of a WinXP virtual machine booting under Debian Linux

They can shoot their foot with a grenade launcher next. I’m already out of range.

Sadly, until the IDF starts investigating and prosecuting their members for war crimes (and stops assigning people without the required education, skills and psychological traits to essentially do police duties) - some parts of the IDF will continue to perform the role of recruiting Palestinians into extremist and militant organizations. :(

I would not be surprised if one of the dead man’s relatives decides at some point to take up weapons.

Having once worked on an open source project that dealt with providing anonymity - it was considered the duty of the release engineer to have an overview of all code committed (and to ask questions, publicly if needed, if they had any doubts) - before compiling and signing the code.

On some months, that was a big load of work and it seemed possible that one person might miss something. So others were encouraged to read and report about irregularities too. I don’t think anyone ever skipped it, because the implications were clear: “if one of us fails, someone somewhere can get imprisoned or killed, not to speak of milder results”.

However, in case of an utility not directly involved with functions that are critical for security - it might be easier to pass through the sieve.

Smash anything but a windshield. I’ve needed to violently remove a windshield when replacing it (time was running out and tool shops were closed). Wearing protective glasses and pushing with both legs is what it took to somewhat loosen it, but not immediately remove it. Windshields are a multilayer structure of plastic and glass. Side windows are just glass.

True, but there’s some more.

Over here, ice roads are opened on typical winters on several smaller bays. The instruction to drivers is:

• don’t wear a seatbelt
• if ice breaks, open your door swiftly (get out first, then think about calling people)
• if you can’t open the door, lower your window swiftly
• if you can’t lower the window, break it (the side window, not the windshield - a windshield is multilayer laminate, too strong to break quickly)

Typically, if a car sinks on an ice road, people are likely to get out. A crank-operated window is handy in such a case. But regardless of instruction, sometimes folks do die. :(

In general, I would not like to experience any sort of extreme incident in an over-engineered car. I’d prefer something from the 1970-ties, but with airbags.

Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.

As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in slower than 300 km/h, one or multiple truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.

Both of you are right.

It’s difficult, but how difficult depends on the task you set. If the task is “maintain manually initiated target lock on a clearly defined object on an empty field, despite the communications link breaking for 10 seconds” -> it is “give a team of coders half a year” difficult. It’s been solved before, the solution just needs re-inventing and porting to a different platform.

If it’s “identify whether an object is military, whether it is frienly or hostile, consider if it’s worth attacking, and attack a camouflaged target in a dense forest”, then it’s currently not worth trying.