We can only do terrible things permanently. Good things are always temporary and we are powerless to change that. Children have to starve because otherwise politicians might have to actually do some work for a change. This is a very good and serious political system and we should just accept it as it is and ignore any alternative.
Which just highlights the issue at the heart of my point: all these western weapons systems are utterly reliant on some magic sauce working perfectly, and if their opponents figure out what that sauce is and either develop a countermeasure or figure out the flaws and exploit them, the systems are fundamentally no better than their (significantly cheaper and easier to maintain) counterparts. It’s Security Through Obscurity implemented as a strategic doctrine.
I’ve been on a Wunderwaffen kick recently, but we’ll keep it up: this is a preview of every major NATO weapons system that hasn’t already seen extensive combat the second it goes up against anyone capable of shooting back with something larger than small arms fire. Anyone telling you otherwise is drinking the koolaid or selling it.
You win wars through producing high quality, reliable, simple weapon systems and then making sure your troops know how to use them and that you can continue to produce and ship replacements + ammo to the front lines. That’s it. No plane will ever be invisible to enemy radar, no tank will ever be invincible, no anti-missile defense will ever shoot down even half of incoming fire reliably. It all boils down to a numbers game in the end.
How the fuck did I miss that we already had the perfect emoji for this? 
I mean, I’m pretty sure DRPK produces more artillery shells than the US does, so that wouldn’t even be a big deal for Russia
The funny thing about nuclear warheads is that you don’t have to be terribly accurate with them.
That’s what 70 years of exclusively using your military as the enforcers of neo-colonialism does. Turns out what works for leveling a low-tech guerilla hideout in Vietnam or Afghanistan isn’t so effective when your opponent has comprehensive SAM networks.
No no, you see, having your weapon systems cost 5 times as much money as the opposing side’s is a good thing actually. Clearly it means it’s 150 times more effective, according to this marketing presentation I found from the for-profit corporation that makes it and then sells it to the military and this press release from the general whose entire career is intrinsically tied to it, both of whom couldn’t possibly be biased in any way!
That’s not entirely fair. Those buildings are the useless luxury malls built around their respective stations; the actual platforms are just as shit and barely functional as the rest of NYC.
He wasn’t just a hero, he was a union man! 
For the most part it is the same infrastructure. The signal system in the subway is still analog.
Horny answer incoming:
If you’re into ERP at all, f-list.net is unparalleled in catering to just about anything you can think of that isn’t outright illegal. There’s a lot of trash as you can imagine, but you can build out a fairly intensive kink list and scroll through an absurd number of character profiles and channels for just about anything.
Well, I’d rather the day be sooner than later.
Agreed, but we’re not the ones making the decision. And the people who are have two options: move forward with a risky, expensive, and potentially career-ending move with no benefits other than the system being a little more maintainable, or continuing on with business-as-usual and earning massive sums of money they can use to buy a bigger yacht next year. It’s a pretty obvious decision, and the consequences will probably fall on whoever takes over after they move on or retire, so who cares about the long term consequences?
You run months and months of simulated transactions on the new code until you get an adequate amount of bugs fixed.
The stakes in financial services is so much higher than typical software. If some API has 0.01% downtime or errors, nobody gives a shit. If your bank drops 1 out of every 1000 transactions, people lose their life savings. Even the most stringent of testing and staging environments don’t guarantee the level of accuracy required without truly monstrous sums of money being thrown at it, which leads us back to my point above about risk vs yachts.
There will come a time when these old COBOL machines will just straight die, and they can’t be assed to keep making new hardware for them.
Contrary to popular belief, most mainframes are pretty new machines. IBM is basically afloat purely because giant banks and government institutions would rather just shell out a few hundred thousand every few years for a new, better Z-frame than going through the nightmare that is a migration.
If you’re starting to think “wow, this system is doomed to collapse under its own weight and the people in charge are actively incentivized to not do anything about it,” then you’re paying attention and should probably start extending that thought process to everything else around you on a daily basis.
Translating it isn’t the difficult part. It’s convincing a board room full of billionaires that they should flip the switch and risk having their entire system go down for a day because somebody missed a bug in the code and then having to explain to some combination of very angry other billionaires and very angry financial regulators why they broke the economy for the day.
Train gang needs no justification 
Feudalism never ended, it just transitioned from a bunch of failsons inheriting land titles to a bunch of failsons getting middle management jobs through nepotism. Every company larger than 50 people is a vast internal labyrinth of lords-in-everything-but-name jockeying for promotions, accolades, and raises by inflating their roles, and the best thing you can do for yourself is find a position that isolates you as hard as possible from having to deal with that yourself lest you end up spending 50 hours a week working to get one over some petty rival of your boss.
Company whose business model is based entirely on running an enormously massive and expensive LLM and then serving content with it publicly for free with no greater ideas on actually turning that into a business is going under. In other news, water still wet.
I’ll admit I thought the AI bubble was going to last longer than a few months (and inevitably FAANG will probably artificially extend it until even they have to admit there’s not a ton of productive real world uses for it), but I suppose late stage capitalism has to speedrun the boom-bust cycle as it gets increasingly desperate for profit.
The people next in line behind Putin are rife with hypernationalist hawks. I highly doubt you’re going to find someone who would both sell out to the west after all this and live long enough around their compatriots to accomplish much before getting couped.