Furthermore US culture has a type of protestant work ethic combined with a social atomization (lack of strong community/family network to pick up slack on personal life) that encourages people to resort to aids such as amphetamines. Iirc the US has some of the highest rates of amphetamine and stimulant use. Not talked about these days is before the 1980s war on drugs you could buy drugs like dextroamphetamine (Adderall/Dextrine) at the gas station or grocery store. After the war on drugs the rate of amphetamine use mostly stayed the same but wealth, upper middle class, and some of the middle get prescriptions from medical doctors that make their stimulant use legal while most of the working class restort to getting their stimulants off the black market making them criminals. You see this pattern even in how employers enact so-called drug policies with their white collar workers being allowed to use stimulants with no consequences while blue collar and service workers have drug testing used as a way to discipline the workforce. Americans came back from WW2 military service hooked on dextroamphetamine, which was issued as part of rations for US military personnel, much like Germany and Japan issued their soldiers methamphetamine. In the post war on drugs era all of this has mostly been blackholed.
Even more ironic that people often get introduced to stimulant drugs in the US military where pilots, radar operators, and special forces often get given amphetamines as part of their job while positions like analysts often have military doctors pushing stimulant drugs prescriptions on them regardless of there being a legitimate medical need.
It's funny that none of the AI firms in the limelight are making any attempt to actually copy the architecture of biological neutral networks. Analog and neuromophic neural network hardware acceleration chips, ie hardware that mimics how biological brains compute, have both crazy energy efficiency and high performance. The only two firms that have actually been making a serious effort at developing such hardware are Intel and IBM. For both companies neuromophic chips have been r&d projects that have already had over a decade of resources poured into and will probably require at least another decade before producing something commercially viable.
It's also evidence that firms like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and all the AI startups that are spouting off about working on creating actual AI are full of shit. None of them are working on developing hardware to run real neural networks able to emulate the type of intelligence human brains are capable of, ie dynamic, general, and realtime learning.
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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)?
Can be even more brazen and accuse them of being antisemites for making any criticism of him. We can be just as deranged.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
A Michelle Obama with VP Mark Wahlberg ticket? You know what... I think you're on to something. Michelle captures the run of the mill liberal voter while Wahlberg scoops up enough of the toxic young male and white racist vote to cross the finish line. All Biden was able to offer Obama was eulogizing famous segregationists while Wahlberg has been convicted of actually committing violent hate crimes.
Turning piezoelectric materials and lithium-ion batteries into thread, innovators will weave fabrics that record sound.
Indistinguishable from regular clothing, all of the necessary components (microphone, lithium battery, etc) are woven into the fabric itself.
>Under a contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), an expert team led by SRI research engineers Marcus Bagnell and Nicole Heidel, specialists in fiber technologies and collaborators at North Carolina State University and International Fabric Machines (IFM), a textile maker, will seek to incorporate a piezoelectric material into a fabric that acts like a microphone — a textile that can record audio. The key component will be piezoelectric threads woven into the fabric, which were demonstrated in Nature last year. The team will work to seamlessly integrate the sensor, along with its support electronics into a textile that closely resembles the ones used in off the shelf clothing. > >“When sound waves strike the fabric, it stretches the piezoelectric threads, producing an electric signal like the diaphragm of a microphone,” says Bagnell, who is principal investigator. “The fabric is essentially a drum. The sound waves bend the piezoelectric threads, creating an electronic waveform that can be recorded and played back.” > >Pulling on the thread > >The project is known as “Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems” — SMART ePANTS, for short. Eventually, the team hopes to fashion a whole garment — a shirt, pair of pants, socks, underwear even — that records sound. IARPA refers to these garments as primary clothing.
>April 13 (Reuters) - Iran's state news agency IRNA said on Saturday that its Revolutionary Guards had seized the MSC Aries vessel it said was "linked to Israel" and it was being transferred to Iran's territorial waters. > >A Guards navy special forces helicopter boarded the Portuguese flagged vessel and seized it, IRNA added.
Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.
> Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
American universities increasingly distanced themselves from Chinese professors targeted under the China Initiative and similar federal agency investigations, often pressuring them to resign voluntarily or retire early.
Commander Biden, President Joe Biden’s family dog, bit US Secret Service personnel in at least 24 incidents at the White House and other locations, according to new internal USSS documents obtained by CNN.
>Reddit plans to place a big chunk of its IPO shares in the hands of its users, an unusual move that could build loyalty but also comes with risk. > >The company plans to reserve an as-yet-undetermined number of shares for 75,000 of its most prolific so-called redditors when it goes public next month, according to people familiar with the matter. The users will have the opportunity to buy Reddit shares at its initial public offering price before the stock starts trading, a privilege normally reserved only for big investors. > >Ideally for the company and its underwriters, Reddit shares will rise in their stock-market debut, bestowing big gains on those who buy in at the IPO price. If the stock falls, however, it could anger those members of Reddit’s community—a group that, broadly speaking, hasn’t shied away from boycotts in the past. > >Banks generally favor selling the bulk of an IPO to big money managers that tend to hold stocks for a relatively long time. Individual investors are viewed as more fickle and prone to selling at the first sign of weakness.
China’s ruling Communist Party will play a bigger role in steering its vast technology industry, the latest sign that Beijing intends to exert more influence over swathes of the world’s No. 2 economy.
Yemeni rebels attempting to impose a blockade on Israel fired rockets on a British ship and reportedly managed to sink it, the first time it has succeeded since the start of Israel's war on Hamas in Gaza
College-educated voters increasingly align with the Democratic Party, but simulations show that since 2016 Democratic Party no longer benefits from high voter turnout. Democrats would perform better in low-turnout elections, like local or primary, and Republicans in high-turnout general elections.
Abstract
Party realignment is occurring along the lines of education in the United States. As college-educated voters increasingly align with the Democratic Party, it is necessary to revisit the partisan effect of turnout. We predict that, since 2016, the Democratic Party no longer benefits from higher turnout. Using validated voter turnout from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), we simulate election results across turnout rates for the 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections. Our findings show that increases in turnout greatly benefit the Democratic Party in the pre-Trump era. However, this pattern has drastically changed. In 2016, 2018, and 2020, the Democratic Party sees a much smaller gain in vote share as simulated turnout increases, but also a large vote share advantage when voter turnout is extremely low. These results indicate that continued party realignment along the lines of education could lead to a persistent reversal in the expected partisan effect of turnout—where Democrats perform better in low-turnout local or primary elections and Republicans perform better in high-turnout general elections
On his podcast “Off Leash,” Erik Prince said the U.S. should “put the imperial hat back on” and take over and directly run huge swaths of the globe.
MRI machines need thousands of liters of liquid helium to function. Health care workers say they can’t afford any disruptions to the helium supply chain.
Privatizing the US national helium reserve. Gonna laugh when in a few years the government of another nation ends up owning it. Helium is dwindling finite resource that key technological infrastructure relies upon.
New paper claims unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster
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Two U.S. Navy SEALs are missing after doing a nighttime boarding mission off the coast of Somalia, according to two U.S. officials. In a statement Saturday U.S.
>WASHINGTON (AP) — Two U.S. Navy SEALs are missing after conducting a nighttime boarding mission Thursday off the coast of Somalia, according to three U.S. officials. > >The SEALs were on an interdiction mission, climbing up a vessel when one got knocked off by high waves. Under their protocol, when one SEAL is overtaken the next jumps in after them. > >Both SEALs are still missing. A search and rescue mission is underway and the waters in the Gulf of Aden, where they were operating, are warm, two of the U.S. officials said. > >The U.S. Navy has conducted regular interdiction missions, where they have intercepted weapons on ships that were bound for Houthi-controlled Yemen.
Two U.S. Navy SEALs are missing after doing a nighttime boarding mission off the coast of Somalia, according to two U.S. officials. In a statement Saturday U.S.
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they've already weathered a decade of CIA drone strikes and Saudi air strikes. did anyone believe these recent strikes were anything but performative actions by a humiliated US administration?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/13/us/politics/houthis-yemen-us-airstrikes.html