Lord Ratner

Way, way earlier than we all thought. The longer I was in, the more I realized the "good dudes" who became bad leaders were just pretending all along.

Don't backpedal.

Oh? Please explain more. I'm from California and my cousin's house just went up in flames. Doesn't mean I'm a little bitch when someone tells a joke online. It was funny and I laughed. It didn't make her house burn any more or less, and I didn't forward the meme to her. And it doesn't matter what state it happens in. You are literally in a joke thread, which you noted and yet still somehow feel the need to be the fun police.

Humor doesn't have a buffer, and the joke didn't target any specific vulnerable person. And people are fighting for their lives all over the world. Just keep scrolling if you didn't like the joke.

A VPN is almost always a waste of money if you are using it for privacy or security. They are great tools for logging into a remote work site and getting things done as if you were there. And they are good at bypassing low-security location based firewalls. But there are a million other ways to track you, and the information is for sale. So even if you use a VPN to hide the destination of your web traffic, and https to hide the content, your device ID, login cookies, MAC addresses, or other identifiable items will link you to one of your many advertiser profiles, and the bad-actor can just buy that and see where you've been.

A VPN and or encryption would do absolutely nothing to prevent what's being discussed here. It prevents your ISP from seeing where your traffic is being directed (the traffic itself is already encrypted and beyond your ISP's ability to read), but the ISP is the tiniest player in the game of data brokerage.

Elon was not chosen by happenstance. He eliminated 75-80% of Twitter's employees, nearly overnight, and nothing changed. We complained for years in the military that there were too many unnecessary tasks. Too many unneeded CBTs. Too many steps on the deployment checklist. Elon rocked the tech and broader business world with a concept they had entirely forgotten: some things don't need to happen. Boom, DEI evaporates overnight. An entire industry that created tens of thousands of jobs... Gone. That's exactly what the Republicans want from Elon. But he had to buy Twitter to make that happen. With the federal government it will be far more about making the jobs undesirable, waiting for people to quit, then deleting the position. It won't work as cleanly as it did at Twitter, but it can still work.

It distracts from his track record of being wrong.

Oh man, blast from the past. I wonder what Hacker is up to these days. Great dude, terrible King Air pilot 🤣😂

I've heard tales from the grey-beards that Korea was almost banned from flying in the US back in the 80s or 90s because their culture of senior worship was so pervasive that they had zero safety instinct. A bunch of pilots from the US were brought in to take over their training and crush the dinosaur captains who felt like they were above criticism, even if they were about to crash a plane. EDIT: Maybe mostly true? From ChatGPT:

Walk away? Why type of high school romance analysis is this? No, they are not going to willingly "lay it down" against China. They are going to send what they have, where we tell them to send it because they know without us they are nothing more than Chinese vacation destinations. And I bet the Japanese have no interest in finding out how much the Chinese remember about their treatment during WWII. And where does this NATO loyalty come from? As soon as the threat from Russia fell with the Berlin Wall, Western Europe allowed their militaries to crumble into dust, finally free to spend that money on social programs and solar panels. NATO is a joke, and it exists for one reason. We saved them from Russia (and freed the rest of them), and they know we are the only thing preventing it from happening again. So in exchange for our blanket of strength, they had to pull their weight (a whopping 2%). Of course future American liberal politicians found orgasmic elation from the fantasy that we had finally defeated human nature once and for all and "ended history," so they were only too happy to look the other way while the European military capability evaporated. Now Russia is reminding everyone just how scary a few hundred thousand soldiers on your border can be, even if they lack any semblance of training or modern equipment, and suddenly the Euros have a newfound appreciation for NATO. Cute. You have to be delusional (and I know you aren't) if you think any of these countries are going to raise a single pistol against China unless they think it's the only way to maintain their sovereignty and get the Americans into the fight. The Germans sacrificed their entire energy industry for cheap Russian gas, just wait until we find out how dependent these countries are on the Chinese when the time comes to "lay it down." Our loyalty has always been transactional. Welcome to democracy. Thomas Jefferson learned it the hard way less than 10 years after he helped create this country. Many others have learned it since. Exactly. NATO only has value if the members are capable of military projection. And if you've ever negotiated anything, you should know that your have no leverage if you aren't willing to walk away.

This is the entire foundation of geopolitics today. The [long-standing system] is broken so let's get rid of it. You can't say that about [long-standing system]! Sure it needs some adjustments to work again but it's vital to global stability. Ok fine, if we're going to keep it then let's make those adjustments to fix it. No. It will take years to make these changes. Fine, then we're cancelling [lopsided trade arrangement that favors an ally at the expense of America]. Wait no, we're fixing it right now! See?! Why are you punishing us by trading with our country the way we've traded with you for decades?!

They broke the first rule of the F-22. Your plane needs to look cool.

Makes sense... Because I totally didn't intercept physical mail when my report card was in it as a kid. My email however, is a literal fortress with a unique complex password and a physical hardware key that has its own separate pin for access...