@OpenSexism Forty mortal years ago it was considered well-established that it starts at birth. People behave very differently towards a boy baby or a girl baby, and attempts to not tell people the gender of the baby sometimes result in violent responses.
@isaackuo Ukraine's adapting commercial hardware, like early Great War aircraft using rotary engines originally designed for motorcycles. A state-equivalent actor starting today and setting out to make an invader's costs unbearable isn't going to start there.
There's work going into "looks like a bird", "smallest practical flying robot", and so on. "How small and cheap can something be and have a 5% PK against human targets for a day?" isn't a quadcopter.
@isaackuo@dymaxion@wonka@dr2chase@cstross The problem is incredibly hard. Rested, trained humans aren't good at it. (and in a conflict like Ukraine, with similar troops, uniforms, and equipment, it's even worse.)
The capability to do "artificial biting insect" is near-term, if it's not poorly-distributed-present.
I expect someone is going to go for what they can build. It's how we got chemical warfare in the Great War; it's at least a chunk of how we got napalm and cluster munitions.
From 1860 to 1914, the decisive force is rifle regiments; you see things like the reconquest of Sudan where enemy forces are shot to pieces at ranges above 1000 m.
1915 and subsequent, the continuous front and concentration means anything seen gets ground up by artillery from beyond rifle range. It's a pure mass contest. (and "mechanised warfare" dilutes by making the continuous front move. 1939-1945 is an historical anomaly.)
@cstross What we're seeing with drones is the collapse of the loop between "see" and "hit"; the diffusion of fire which increases specific lethality (individual weapons are much closer to just enough); and the beginnings of the ability to do reconnaissance-by-fire in a literal way. ("seek until found", then kill it.)
Thing is, this is an asymmetric mass contest; Ukraine has cultural machinery Russia doesn't. If it's analogous to 1915, it doesn't reflect what 1918-equivalent will look like.
@cstross Nothing says you can't build or power a mobile jammer that puts out several MW; nothing says you can't build defensive drones, nothing says the sensor quality contest has even happened yet (can the attacker spot the target before the target spots the attacker and responds?), nothing says the trend to precision fire over volume of fire can't produce precise volume of fire. (the move to precision is economic.)
It's why I don't expect we're going to see a "recognise faces" approach. Think "biting insect"; it's got several sorts of toxin and enough circuitry to go "is it warm?" and "does it have a heartbeat?" and some way to prefer stinging skin to armour.
Add in a few simple eusocial rules and some return-for-reload capacity if you can, but even as a one-way munition, the cost per corpse is likely much lower this way.
Functionally, they believe that money is the material love of god. And under no circumstances do you ever want god to love you less, so it turns out you're trying to obtain all the money.
It's needy and unstable and something beyond the usual imperial power structure failure of using access to military power to guarantee a commercial outcome.
@Remittancegirl It does clarify the terms of the election for the democratic candidate to be a woman of colour; is the United States going to be an autocracy who elects a President as CEO, or will it be a one person, one vote democracy with the rule of law and some notion of human rights?
@silverwizard N95s are a working surface of the whole and function by grace of a LOT of industrial design. I would avoid customizing one if I needed it to work.
(My gut-level flinch response is that the fate that finds you for altering safety equipment will be strange to mercy. This is plausibly excessive and as specific consequence of my misspent youth.)
Nobody gets to keep what they have or to be certain there's anything to pass to their children nor to have any plausible expectation of cultural continuity. (If there are history books, they're going to despise us.)
What we're seeing in politics is some mix of anger, bargaining, and denial. And none of those ever work, and it's not to be expected they're going to help.
@cstross The Laundry needs some modicum of peace, government, and good order to exist as a thing in a context, and the Black Pharaoh does provide.
The current crop of politicians aren't arguing about how to do the thing; they're arguing about what other thing should be done instead, if only people can be compelled to be good, righteous, moral people who understood their duty to die uncomplaining in specific ways with specific timing, lest the incumbents face alteration of circumstances.
@clacke@katzenberger@cstross@juglugs The country had four hundred years of being the Pirate Kingdom. (And to the extent that it is not now the Pirate Kingdom, that was involuntary and is not acknowledged.) The idea of admiring a big pile of loot, however gotten, is axiomatic.
Axioms never die on their own; you have to replace them, and what you replace them with has to win the inevitable fight with the incumbents.
@cstross@emilygorcenski There is a shedload of wetware specifically to recognize faces. It's why we can see faces in clouds.
The problem with Chomsky's grammar notions is that no one has been able to find it. There's a bunch of developmental stuff about sound order in infants and another bunch of developmental stuff leading up to theory of mind, but the organization of language doesn't seem to be especially constrained.
I think the "psychic illusion" take is much closer.
@joewein Y'all keep refusing to internalize that the GOP is a cult and it wants to bring about the literal end of the world in the everyone dies, smoke-covers-the-land sense.
Failure of non-proliferation is a terrible thing, but not to the GOP.
They're trying to do this enormous act of necromancy to compel God to prove He loves them.
Their objectives make no more sense than that and can make no more sense than that.
@kcarruthers While that's a factual statement, it's also unhelpful.
Moral frames that require people to acknowledge that they're bad are resisted. (Moral frames in general are only effective for rationalizing the awful, awful things you did to benefit the ingroup.)
Opposing hegemonizing normalcy in the service of guaranteeing secure status needs a successful alternative power structure where participation raises people's functional relative social status.
@kcarruthers We can be absolutely sure the incumbent social order will not survive; any one of decarbonization, agricultural collapse, or the rising sea would suffice that.
The trick is not so much to contest the really bad insecurity management that comes with people knowing they're going to lose relative status, but to find a way for people to participate in an increase in absolute measures. (More agency, larger choice space, greater egalitarianism in outcomes, etc.)
@kcarruthers And for that better future to win the inevitable fight with the folks who will burn the world to be sure they're accorded the deference they're sure they deserve.