I wonder what the motivation behind this is. Tactically, why ever show your latest weapon? What is the strategic purpose of this? It's like if I message my opponent in SC2 and tell them exactly what I'm going to tech to. That's ... insane right? Why would anyone do that?
This isn't a new weapon, this is a test platform for various ideas, none of which are new or secret. Also, there are not many groundbreaking advancements left in military aviation. Most are just fairly incremental engineering or manufacturing improvements. (Military space technology might be a different story, though.)
The only other nation with the potential to develop a high-tech military plane that could rival US technology would be China. But if we ever got into a war with China, they wouldn't need superior technology to win. They could win via superior manufacturing capacity and the sheer number of people they can draft into service at a moment's notice.
>They could win via superior manufacturing capacity and the sheer number of people they can draft into service at a moment's notice.
Even with their manufacturing capacity they don't have remotely enough boats to get a nontrivial fraction of those people to the US mainland, and the majority of those people can't swim, so they wouldn't help in taking the US mainland, a requirement to "win" a serious war. Their entire armed forces is also almost completely lacking in combat experience, and in their last skirmish (against some unarmed Indian soldiers in the mountains) 30+ soldiers Chinese tragically drowned, due to the aforementioned lack of swimming ability.
How China frames victory and how the US frames victory needn't agree, and likely wouldn't. That being said, framing victory as only counting if there is a wholesale land invasion seems odd, as I suspect neither side would want to actually do that... so who 'wins'?
I don't know why you're being downvoted because clearly modern warfare is as much (or more) about the economic warfare aspect as the military one.
There are some rather bizarre examples such as Gaza attacking Israel, despite getting something like 50% of their electricity and 10% of their fresh water from Israel!
Attacking the supplier of critical civilian and industrial inputs would seem like a mistake nobody in their right mind would make, but... there you go.
I wouldn't be surprised if a future conflict with China over Taiwan would be primarily economic.
They threaten to stop shipping, we threaten to cut off the Internet and their banking, etc...
Similarly, the most knowledgeable experts are predicting that China's strategy with Taiwan will be to simply blockade the island and wait for them to capitulate.
Last but not least, this is also Iran's current strategy. By halting shipping through the Straight of Hormuz, they're waging war on the global economy much more effectively than bombing a few small military air strips in the region.
It's not a tactical choice- it's strategic deterrence, and it's not insane at all!
The US has always had a policy of messaging programs, with a lean toward classifying some percentage of the specific capabilities.
There's a reason that F-35 program was publicized by the US government as the program was under development. It makes the US air force even scarier, which discourages adversaries from thinking about conventional warfare with America.
That said- you won't see any detailed pics of the inside of an F35 cockpit, or a detailed look at the heads up display in the fancy helmet. That's top secret, because those making those details public don't offer enough additional deterrence to justify the risk to the program.
Yes, but even if the US didn't release the specifications of the F35, other countries around the world would rapidly figure out most of the capabilities anyway from photos, videos, and casual observation. (In other words, they'd know soon enough WHAT it can do but not necessarily HOW it does it.)
I think they just show what it can be seen, like any country with advance military developments.
They won't show you everything.
Have you ever heard about those sound/sonic (or something similar) weapons the US used in Maduro's kidnap operation? Venezuelan soldiers said (pero some publications on the internet) that they never saw anything alike, leaving them completely disoriented and helpless?
Soldiers now can even see thermal figures through walls or solid materiales, and the same time, bacome invisibles.
> Soldiers now can even see thermal figures through walls or solid materiales
I have a thermal imager. They can't see through walls in the sense you're imagining. If there's an electric heating element inside a wall or a ceiling, you could get an image of that. If there's a camera or other active electronics hidden in a wall or object, you can see the heat from that.
You wouldn't be able to see a person in an adjacent room through the wall between the two rooms, unless the wall was made specifically of thermally-transparent material.
I've heard rumours of "see through walls" equipment in the US military before. If they really have something like that, it would have to be using technology other than thermal imaging.
Normally these kinds of press releases come out to generate public support for funding. I remember when the B-2 was super, super secret. No photos, "we don't know what you're talking about" answers from the military.
But when it looked like it might get cancelled pictures and exhibitions of it were suddenly everywhere.
I think we'll see something counterintuitive happen where hiring picks up dramatically. Companies are willing to overspend and over-hire to automate everything away once and for all.
lmao, That's like being an independent during Nazism. Like, seriously? You can't figure out the right side here? You just can't count on some people to be on the right side of history quite frankly.
Leaving the Republican party is so close to leaving a cult as to be indistinguishable. They are so dead set on vilifying outsiders that they won't even associate with non-republicans and Democrats in a civil fashion. I once had a family member threaten to punch me in the face for mentioning UBI.
Ensuring the poor are made to suffer for being poor is a core tenant of the republican ethos. If you don’t have someone to punch down upon you might have a chance to consider your own position in this world, which is dangerous to the power structures that be.
I think they are going all in on Alexa+ and cutting many other teams (speaking fully as an outsider). The new Echo Dot Max makes controlling your TV/Browsing youtube with natural language really nice (same for exploring Amazon Music - Spotify needs to catch up with this fast). Subscriptions for AI in the living room is what they are first movers of at the moment.
This has been the worst downgrade for me. Response times have skyrocketed. The minimum time to response is now a few seconds slower and the responses continue to be low quality. The speaker seems to have even lost some functionality where it says "I can't do that yet" for a thing it mostly could already do previously. If I could tell anyone with Google Home devices one thing, it would be to not 'upgrade' to Gemini.
Google update sucks. Not only is it slower + generally dumber, but their AI alignment has made it refuse to answer very normal questions (I got scolded by my speaker for asking about the hours of the nearest liquor store)
No experience with Google yet. Amazon still has more work to do with making their tool-use calls bullet proof, but I've been able to search Youtube naturally and "open the first video" (this is still rudimentary, it's not perfect yet). Pretty good success moving around the Fire TV app with voice (open, exit), reasonably good at switching Live channels. Really fun with Amazon music, "pull up a Taylor Swift album, but acoustic only, from 2010s ...", stuff like that. It's great, and I expect it to become rather ... perfect in time.
Other things:
- Great for todo/reminders with timers
- "Hey Alexa, turn my lights on at 5 everyday, close them at 12"
- Not great at controlling Prime Video yet, can search it, but not great yet at all. Expecting this to be perfect at some point as well.
America has never been able to successfully thwart drug proliferation. Porn, Video Games, Social Media, all substance-less drugs. It's up to you to keep your kid off Heroin and it's also up to you to keep them off those other things at addictive levels.
The thing is, keeping your kid away from things like Heroin takes a village (especially if Heroin is pervasive in the environment). The same is true for those other things. Adults have to enter the room at some point.
We've been needing a trillion-dollar class action lawsuit against social media companies. Long overdue.
I feel like this is the most natural layoff I've seen in twenty years (that is not the same as saying I feel good about it). Truly, most software companies need to cut their entire roster and re-draft quite frankly. You will need less people and have entirely new goals. This is beyond "economic" reality, AI has made it intuitive to restructure and reorient. Not doing so will just mean you will be blind-sided by any company that leaned down and re-envisioned their entire product.
So many products turned into feature mill factories. If things can get more concentrated and directed, then I think this will be better for all in terms of finding their true purpose in life.
> I think this will be better for all in terms of finding their true purpose in life.
I'm sure people losing their good paying jobs and being forced into shitty ones, or not finding replacement employment at all, will be just what they need to find their true purposes in life
This is the way I see it. A lot of people can already be replaced or should be doing entirely different work to boost productivity. It is going to be a battle between people fighting for inertia and those that are looking to be ahead of the curve.
If it wasn't for an ageing society we would probably be seeing things move along faster but people have children to raise and mortgages to pay so we will see more inertia for now.
I just have to figure out how to play a few of my games on Steam and I can move over. Unfortunately, a few titles are still PC only so I can't make the switch. I very much would love to, but I basically need a $600 PC at all times to play a few select titles that will never come to Linux due to anti-cheat.
In a large city in southern India, our house would get water supplied one day of the week during summers. Our small one bedroom flat had barrels of water drums stored inside the house. We even had one in the bedroom.
I was 14 and I would go down to the street to fetch ground water and fill those barrels up. This was in 2014.
The reality is usually less dramatic than "water completely gone" but more chronically exhausting.
For a sub-Saharan family, "severe water scarcity" often means:
Daily life shifts
Wells and water points yield less or run dry. Wait times at functioning sources grow from minutes to hours. Walking distances to water double or triple. Water quality drops as everyone crowds the remaining sources.
Who carries the burden
Mostly women and girls. During dry season, water collection can expand from one hour daily to four to six hours. Girls miss school, women lose time for farming or income generation.
Practical consequences
Washing, cooking, hygiene get rationed. Livestock often gets priority because it's the livelihood. Latrine hygiene suffers, raising disease risk. Conflicts at water points increase.
What "one month per year" obscures
The statistic sounds manageable, but that month typically falls during dry season when harvests also fail and food gets scarce. The effects compound.
Water rarely just "cuts off" - it's more of a grinding struggle over a shrinking resource, where the poorest have to walk furthest.
imagine a camping trip or a long hike and you didn't bring even remotely enough water; your shoes are extremely uncomfortable and your clothes are all soaked and dirty and you are constantly itching; heat, stress, kids, sickness, waiting lines, the crowds, noise, air pollution ...
but these people are not on a hike, and they didn't get their full set of nutrients, "ever" and they don't have the safety of "just a couple more hours".
you are constantly on edge. you are tired. there's work to be done. distances to be walked. through the dust and dirt and smog. children to be fed and old people that depend on your care. and you do get horny, and you fuck and you have to wash before and after ... with ... well, not really clean water ...
and did I mention the smell?
now that doesn't apply to all the four billion, of course but you should get the picture.
I know poverty, and some of the itchiness that comes with it but I don't know "severe water scarcity" ... even in townships in SA they'll tell you it's enough and they'll "hit you" if you waste any.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Quebec, Canada, we had a very dry summer in 2025 and some farmers had to bring literal truckloads of water to their farm for their animals to stay alive. I remember that they were saying to the press that the cost it incurred made them lose a lot of money, making these animals net negative for them, budget wise.
This year was an exception, I'm guessing it's going to become the norm. So, much higher food prices.
That's the British idea of a water shortage; I suspect that many people would be thrilled if their water supply was good enough to consider a lawn in the first place.
This has happened about every year in the past 10 years during Summer in France at least (I guess Spain/Portugal/Italy, all mediterranean countries are alike in this regard, even most continental European countries).
I feel like the period between 2019 through to today (2019-2026), human death tolls have paralleled prior twentieth century death tolls. Numbers that sound like tens of thousands, and even millions if you count Ukraine/Russia.
