Attacking and occupying a distant island in this age is getting more difficult, not easier. Look at the Black Sea, where Russia's remaining ships cower in fear in port, as they try to avoid super cheap marine drones. Massive missile attacks on a country can only do so much damage, and they harden the population against the aggressor.
If Taiwan has been paying attention, and I don't doubt they are in an age when it's becoming clear the US is a paper tiger that will never protect them, they are well prepared to handle a good chunk of their own defense, using the brain trust they have inside their nation. They have everything they need for their own defense now.
Tiawan politics is interesting. from what I can tell those in power a an alliance of those who want China to take over with those who don't think China will try because they are friends.
The president is worried but his party doesn't have power.
I think it's led to a huge advantage for defenders. Nuclear weapons favor attackers, or deterrence. But massive drone waves allow defense of large areas with a very small number of people. It's not a race to build bigger missiles that go longer distances and are harder to shoot down, it's largely a coordination, communication, logistics, and information management problem.
I don't quite follow, can you explain a little bit about how drone waves allow for defense of large areas? I can see how they help in offensive attacks, but as far as I can tell they don't seem to have helped defend Iran from the US and Israel; they're just helping Iran lash out after taking a beating.
(Not trying to be smarmy, just genuinely curious.)
well two things: 1) Iran doesn't have much in terms of drones, but they are not using them nearly as much as even Russia, much less Ukraine. Look at US bases in the area: there's been a few flyovers by drones but no serious attacks, but US bases haven't even put up nets or anything to protect resources, they still have radar and high value targets just sitting out in the open unattacked. 2) Iran still hasn't lost any territory, that's the defense I'm talking about. The US and Israel can expend all their bombs, but that doesn't bring down Iran's government or lose them any land. At most it loses them economic power. So I don't think Iran demonstrates much at all about the modern use of drones.
I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here. There is a big change towards intelligent, small, and cheap drones. If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.
The drone manufacturing has gone so exponential that they now have a shortage of drone operators. It's completely changed the war in the past few months, with Russia now losing ground, at basically zero additional Ukrainian casualties, and with Russia continuing to have massive ground casualties from sending poorly trained troops to die while hiding in a 30 mile wide kill zone ruled by drones.
The quantity of drones allows new tactics, reminiscent of rolling wave artillery. And deployment of a wide variety of types of drones has led to the depletion of Russian anti-air defense in both occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself, allowing the destruction of much of Russia's oil infrastructure. The recent Baltic port hit will be felt for a long long time, and nearly completely neutralizes the lifting of sanctions on Russia. All from novel weapons, which are decidedly more sophisticated than slingshots both in their construction and application. And the US is way behind, and too proud to let Ukraine share their knowledge and capabilities.
Note that it is wrong to think that David was at a disadvantage. I know that is not how the story is taught today, but slingshot troops of that age we the snipers of their age: very deadly (not at the range of a modern sniper, but...).
If the fight between them was started at some distance, the David should have been the expected winner by pretty much everyone on the field. Think "bright a club to a gun fight" sort of vibes.
David had a sling, not a slingshot. They are very different tools. slings need more skill, but are easy for a shepard to learn. (I suspect more powerful as well but I'm not an expert)
> If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.
I'm all for good guys winning, but what are your sources? And why do you think Russia can't match Ukraine in this regard?
In terms of russias strategic goals Russia lost in month one when they pulled out of kyiv and admitted regime change wasn't going to happen. Everything since then has just been a very expensive face saving exercise and a hope thay somehow Ukraine would collapse.
It's been getting worse and worse lately, they have huge losses, hard to even think about it. With oil output dropped by 40% in the latest Ukrainian attacks on oil infra, it looks like they will probably miss out on the sanctions relief Trump handed them. Yeah, Ukraine is also quite well bruised up but somehow they are more competent to fight. But by the time the war ends, even if they won it'd only be their symbolic liberation victory because economically it won't look to good, also bad for EU, possibly a global crisis.
There's no single source, it's basically all the war reporting. My claims are not contentious. Even Russia's war bloggers are repeating the same now.
Russia could, in theory, use it's greater number of people towards producing drones. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, train its new recruits properly before throwing them into hopeless situations. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, operate by rewarding production contracts to the most capable teams rather than the ones with the best connections. But it hasn't. And even if Russia does, they'll have to catch up. They could!
Even the US could, in theory, start learning from Ukraine or even following in its footsteps, independently, but it hasn't.
Ukraine is fighting for its life, it's on Death Ground, in the terms of Sun Tzu. In Russia, perhaps only Putin is on Death Ground, and even then, there's many ways Putin could give up on the war and still stay in power. That produces far different results in people. And the cultures of Ukraine and Russia are fundamentally incompatible, which also produces very different results from people.
You're talking about the hardware. That is critical.
But what's evolving even faster is the software. And in real world use cases.
They arent paying for tank models and people to run around and try to chase to "test". They are very literally doing it live, with live fire testing day in and day out.
Furthermore they are rewarding results on both ends. Successful operators get to buy gear for kills in an amazon like store (talk about gamification). And there are paths for "innovation" to make its way to the front quickly: see https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/how-a-ukrainian-gam... for an example.
Ukrainian society is also very bottom up, and individual units are empowered to procure what they want, based on price or quality, from online systems that operate like Amazon. No general issue, just customization all the way to soldiers getting to choose from a wide variety of drone models from many manufacturers, and the manufacturers are competing to supply to the needs of individual units:
US military leadership is all about empowering units to solve problems on their own, at least whenever I read their books that's the message I get. Ukraine seems to have taken it even further.
You can even keep that Office365 subscription going on Linux via the web apps these days. They are buggy as hell, but no more buggy than the Mac versions in my experience (haven't used the Windows versions enough to compare...)
I used to do a lot of document and Office work. If you had told me that 20 years in the future MS would still be around, automagic piracy enabled coding bots were a thing, and people were having problems because the buttons in Office don’t work, I would’ve flagged the third as unbelievable.
I find it impossible to use the current diff view for most codebases, and spend tons of time clicking open all available sections...
They have somehow found the worst possible amount of context for doing review. I tend to pull everything down to VS Code if I want to have any confidence these days.
Rental cars as EVs are pretty much the worst possible case. We are at the transition where we don't have chargers everywhere, but we will soon because chargers are way cheaper than a gas station. Also rentals tend to be driven for longer trips, and for uncertain distances! And on top of it all rental companies tend to not give people any choice, education, or help with the EV.
I wouldn't bother with a PHEV for a vehicle I buy as I'm always going to buy EVs from now on, but for rentals a PHEV makes a lot of sense.
The two people I know who hate EVs passionately are people who decided to try it out as a rental, were explained nothing, just handed the keys, and as expected ended up stranded.
One didn't check if their hotel had charging, the other ran the battery down to 10% before deciding it was time to try and locate a charger.
I'm in Western Europe and while there are chargers everywhere, you need hundred apps to register to charge, some slots are broken (empty yet show busy), some refuse to charge my PHEV... we're not there yet.
Interesting. I occasionally rent EVs in Western Europe, and they just come with a single RFID card which seems to be accepted by all charging providers.
You can use the chargemap card which is virtually accepted everywhere but they add their own fees which can be ridiculous, sometimes it can even double the price of electricity.
That's good to hear! We had some visitors, and we went on a trip to the mountains, and the nearest Level 2+ charger was some 70 miles away. It was a bit stressful for them, as they had never used an EV before, and the Electrify America chargers at the time tended to be either broken or in use. It was a major pain and stress point.
This will all get easier as the chargers become more prevalent.
My annoyance with rental EVs mostly stems from the fact that the rental locations don't have fast chargers, so if the car hasn't been back with them long enough before you pick up, the odds of getting it with maybe a half charged battery are quite high, since the rental co doesn't charge enough for returning an EV without filling the battery up first. So every trip is likely going to start with a secondary trip to a fast charger, which costs a ton and wastes your time.
There's a big tradeoff here though: IT admins really love buying Microsoft. And when the dog tries to complain about the dogfood, the dogfood purchaser tends to not understand very well.
They don’t LOVE but they don’t have other options.
I’m at some legacy business that depends on some .Net Framework LOB application, some random SaaS web software along with usual office stuff. I need to manage Windows machines, identity for everyone include integration with random SaaS web software and enforce random policies that Security swears if I don’t, we fail PCI audit and that business ending. Oh yea, our funding and salaries for department wouldn’t cover one scrum team at FAANG. What is my solution, go!
For most, they default to Microsoft solution because it works well enough to collect meager paycheck and go home.
Silicon Valley likes to pretend Microsoft doesn't exist.
I... get it.
The FAANGS needed to scale to a level where paying per-core licensing fees for an operating system was simply out of the question, not to mention the lack of customisability.
As a consequence, they all adopted Linux as their core server operating system.
Then, as their devs made millions in share options, they all scattered and made thousands of little startups... each one of which cloned the assumption that only Linux was a viable operating system for servers.
The mistake here is the same one that caused "Only MongoDB is Web Scale" and "Microservices are necessary for two devs and a PC as our server".
Just because a trillion dollar corporation decides on a thing, it does not mean it applies universally.
Outside of this bizarre little bubble, Windows is everywhere and Windows Server is still about 50% of the overall server market.
This is definitely not it. If you want free use of an OS in CI/CD and testing, use Linux. If you want Docker or Kubernetes, use Linux. No one thinks it's the only option, but you'd have to have a really good reason to pay to use Windows on the server.
That may have been the story, but avoiding paying per-core licensing fees for an operating system is the only sane decision.
Operating systems and other applications that demand per-core licensing fees exist only because the people who buy them do not use their own money for this, so they do not care how much money they are wasting.
Most companies waste huge amounts of money not only for software, but for many other things, because those who have the power to make purchasing decisions have personal interests that are not aligned with what is really optimum for the company, while those who might have the best interests of the company in mind do not have the knowledge that would allow them to evaluate whether such purchasing decisions are correct.
The survival of Windows Server is not justified by any technical advantages. A few such advantages exist, but they do not compensate the huge PITA caused by licensing. I worked at a few companies where Windows Server was used and replacing it with either Linux or FreeBSD was always a great improvement, less by removing the payments for the licensing fees, but by providing complete freedom to make any changes in the environment without the friction caused by the consequences that such changes could have in modified licensing fees.
I was gonna say people have been hating on M$FT for decades. It started for me 20+ years ago. I'm glad to see that Azure is creating a whole new cohort of haters - just like good ol' Vista.
from my experience it's more of a business guy/executive thing, they see Microsoft as a reliable, low-risk vendor which can speak their language. "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" type thing
I guess it's not so much Europe but "non IT-core companies" might prefer it, also the convenience of having everything into the same bill (workstation licenses, cloud, etc)
I worked at a place where someone made the deliberate decision to migrate from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 / Outlook / whatever it's called today.
"Most of our partners use Microsoft", so we have to suffer with it, too.
Highly restrictive development rules, often sold as ways to stick it to those very rich developers, are precisely what make them so rich. Only those with huge amounts of capital to spend can make it through the gauntlet of the rules and have big enough asset portfolios to stay in the game. They can bank land for decades, speculating on the best time to take their profits, all while others live through shortages of housing and do not have access to that land.
Those very processes that make it hard to develop keep out the scrappy up-start competition, the contractors that could be building houses all over if they had enough lawyers/planners/specialists to help them get through the system.
Look, for example, at LA, which has super super restrictive rules on what can be developed where, and has huge amounts of discretion at the political level, so that NIMBYs can block what they want. The only people who can build housing are developers who bribe the politicians (there was a somewhat recent arrest in LA on this, involving literal bags of cash, by the FBI).
Having simple, straightforward rules that are completely objective is the only way to try to flatten out the playing field. However such rules get shot down by NIMBYs precisely because they don't want the shady developers profiting off apartments! It's all highly ironic.
Yes really, that deeper understanding is exactly what is meant when somebody says "the cost to build is lower than the price." If we're going to be pedantic, you're ignoring the huge amounts of uncertainty on costs that are inherent to any project, the amount of risk versus the expected profit.
And indeed that amount of uncertainty: will I be allowed to build eventually? How long will I have to pay interests on assets before I'm allowed to build? Can I actually build what's specified in code or will discretionary processes arbitrarily change what I'm allowed to do, 18 months into the project?
> Yes really, that deeper understanding is exactly what is meant when somebody says "the cost to build is lower than the price.
It demonstrably is not what people understand it to mean to "the cost to build is lower than the price." The cost to build can be well below the sale price and development still be a totally uninvestable activity.
There's a big difference between land prices and the building prices. When costs rise 5% per year for a house that's untouched, that's almost entirely the land price going up.
You can make housing cheaper by putting more houses on the same amount of land. In high cost areas, the price of land dominates the cost of housing.
Political pressure to change the investment nature of housing can come from various directions, for example establishing a land value tax, which eliminates the financial incentive to speculate on rising land prices by keeping people out of your area, redistributes all those unearned land rents to the population equally, as is only fair, and also results in a lot of people selling land to be redeveloped taht are otherwise hoarding it when the rest of society would be using it a lot better. Of course, in societies with high levels of land ownership, the voting public usually tries to vote away such extremely fair taxes.
Politically, we must stop prioritizing the views of homeowners at the local level. They already got their reward, massive unearned capital gains on their residence, there's no need to give them priority on land use over the general needs of society.
> Politically, we must stop prioritizing the views of homeowners at the local level. They already got their reward, massive unearned capital gains on their residence, there's no need to give them priority on land use over the general needs of society.
They are the majority of people in most areas, so it does make sense that they would be given priority in some ways.
The rest of your post is unsubstantiated vitriol, which isn't exactly convincing.
You quoted my vitriol to the homeowners, the rest is not vitriol, it's basic land economics.
> They are the majority of people in most areas, so it does make sense that they would be given priority in some ways.
In some ways sure. But in the ways that they are? Absolutely not, it's basic unfairness. The entire tax system is tilted in favor of home owners. We don't need to do that, we could make it more equal so that people with less wealth are not penalized.
It's not "basic land economics", it's your personal opinion about how things should be and whether you think current policies are fair.
The tax code does favor home ownership, because people want to support it. Less people will be able to afford their own home without that support, which seems to be the opposite of what you want.
If Taiwan has been paying attention, and I don't doubt they are in an age when it's becoming clear the US is a paper tiger that will never protect them, they are well prepared to handle a good chunk of their own defense, using the brain trust they have inside their nation. They have everything they need for their own defense now.
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