No, pretty sure every western country is still racing to increase artillery production, though rheinmettal is not up to a million shells per year. The war in Ukraine fully demonstrated that when the enemy is actually at your level and not just some cave dwelling terrorists, it becomes a war of attrition with every weapon system possible.
In Ukraine, that was last year. The persistent drone surveillance and strike capability and fire radars have made them very vulnerable to counter battery/drone fires.
The failure of legacy air power to sustain in a hostile environment led to the WW1 style artillery duels. From what I gather in the public domain, drones have created kilometers deep kill zones where nothing can survive. That’s capability that I think is exclusive to the US sans drone.
It depends on who the offensive party is. Obviously it's not going to protect you from someone with air or artillery support. It still does wonders against roving militias of insurgents...
Technology isn't the problem. The problem is the generation in governing power through the last 2 decades has no problem burning down the country's future to maintain lavish retirement funds for themselves.
I think it's more nuanced than that. There surely are plenty of cases where that is the case, but it's also a natural effect of hyperfinancialization, which many really do believe to be a "net positive" for the stability it brings. There's also the natural tendency of consolidation and centralization of power, and the natural counter-balance to that has been suppressed. Then you have legislative incompetence, the general failings of scientific governance aggregating over time, and many other structural flaws that are deeply seated and long-running.
We shouldn't just be pointing at the (very much real) stupid greed, there are many rotten components occurring simultaneously.
Lol, I once sharpened my knives and went to cook. During the prep I said, "wow I wonder how sharp the knife is", next thing you know, i cut about 1/4" of my finger tip off, right through the finger nail with zero resistance.
Besides the blood getting everywhere and needing superglue to stop it, it grew back completely fine.
You shouldn't really sharpen kitchen knifes too sharp. And even if they're not super razor sharp (cutting a finger with no resistance), you should still warn people new to your kitchen or even family members/regular users right after each re-sharpening.
Additionally, too low angle will make the knife very suspectible to blunting and/or require constant drawing on the sharpening steel¹. Unless you have super high quality steel like Japaneese knifes or some craft smith knifes.
Butcher knifes, to be used along with a chainmail glove, are fine. Just don't test their sharpness on body parts. Or use them to shave a bit of hair, but very carefully.
It's totally true, and more so true in a slaughterhouse. Blunt knifes cause strain injuries on joints, and make people use much more force than necessary, which comes at a loss of precision. And then it turns out, that with enough force, a semi-blunt knife will still cut through a kevlar anti-cut glove and hit fingers.
BUT!, once the knife is sharp enough for a job, and I mean for comfortable work, not just barely enough, then it's enough.
Giving somebody who never held a sharp knife in their life a knife that is so sharp it will cut their fingers without them feeling it (or even close to that sharp) is like telling somebody to run a coding agent on their system and not in a VM. Things can get bad really fast.
Most people (at least in central Poland where I come from) used semi blunt knives* for everything. Some would have a household knife sharpener or maybe even low quality sharpening steel like the ones you get in a knives set. Maybe they or their grandma had a butcher in the family. They will have nice sharp knives that can cut tomatoes without crushing them.
But with a knife that is sufficiently thin, a throwaway leather belt, a little skill and an hour or more of time, you can get a mirror-like polished blade that is so sharp you can amputate limbs in seconds. Just need to go through the joint at a correct angle.
That's how our grandfathers shaved.
* just realized I was typing plural for knives wrong - with an 'f'
Non-nationalist parties that have been in power in Europe for so long are shitting their pants at the growing rise of nationalist parties and are absolutely planning to censor the shit out of them.
I'm not even taking a side here and what they are trying to do is obvious.
How is that happening? In the UK fringe nationalist parties are typically given as much airtime on main stream media as the governing parties. They've also setup their own 'news' stations to further spread propaganda. Any notion that they're being censored in the UK is ludicrous. They're pandered to.
This isn't an axis from freedom to control, with the country sitting at an identifiable point. All of these things are happening, antagonistically, at the same time. Right wing people set up a television station, government cracks down on the internet, courts protect people's rights to express philosophical beliefs, police record "non-crime hate incidents" for things written online. It's all chaotic.
But there’s no evidence that the UK government is going to disproportionately censor right wing parties on the internet either. It’s just a false analysis to link this possible age gating of VPNs with censorship of the political right.
Banning under 16s from social media is de-facto censorship of political views outside of those promulgated by mainstream media, and as the mainstream media in this country tends to be urban-liberal in orientation, this will have an effect. Perhaps the people who set up GB News were prescient to do so.
As other posters have pointed out, the mainstream media in the UK give Reform an incredibly easy time. Their leader is openly corrupt, but this barely merits a mention. Do you really think Keir Starmer is thrilled by the idea of young people getting their impression of him from current mainstream media reports? This just isn’t a plausible analysis.
(Also, it’s worth noting that the Conservatives support the same policy, and Reform support the principle while opposing the means.)
Somehow the "center"'s answer to the rise of right-wingers is stupid censorship, instead of fighting ideas with better ideas.
Alternatively, the center starts trying to attract right-wing voters by adopting right-wing ideas like anti-immigrant views or "well, we can sacrifice the climate a bit more" positions.
Keir Starmer is from a "left" party but his actions has shown him to be a centrist, Ursula von der Leyen is quite right. Then again, these are European positioning, as someone's said years ago, the European right-wing would be liberal in the US. And with the currently openly racist regime of the USA, even more so!
They will establish censorship laws to try to stem the tide only to be surprised Pikachu face when inevitably at some point in the future one of these right wingers will win and then use all these things against them. No one ever learns.
The colonized generations stopped fucking and even the replacement is in a procreation strike against the slavery with extra steps of generation vempire.
Look up what zersetzung is and how it works. It doesn't matter if the target is a political organization or an open source community, the process is always the same.
This is actually fascinating, and simultaneously unsettling. Recommended reading for sure, especially in today’s social and political climate with LLM agents running rampant.
How would proof even look like? I don't think AWS digitally signs their invoices, and everything else can be faked just as easily as the original assertion.
A person bumps into at the train station. They just need $5 to get home. Could you just spare them $5? They had the money, but they lost their wallet and now they just need to get home.
Yep, I think my megacorp's cybersecurity department is just a bunch of checklist punchers that now just copy and paste any of our technical writeups into ChatGPT, and I am not even joking. Fucking infuriating.
They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.
I know _for a fact_ that most companies don't care. There might be a select few out there that genuinely do, but most don't. I've literally reported numerous GLARING vulnerabilities to companies in various different industries, only for the vulnerabilities to remain unpatched for MONTHS. Few of the most comical examples, one major game studio was compiling their Linux binaries with FULL DEBUG SYMBOLS AND INFO plus they were shipping a 600M .sym file with practically full paths and all source info. Literally all the paths and function signatures to every single one of their functions was in there. I had to submit FOUR bug reports before they patched it (didn't even receive a bug bounty). The second one was with a major multinational telecom that was distributing routers that _had an open telnet port to the wide internet_ ... with a default password. And there were countless more. The telecom one I had to BEG them to ship me a new router, or to at least do an over the air update, because "they didn't understand what the problem was".
Shipping debug symbols isn't a security vulnerability. It might be sloppy, but we all know that security through obscurity doesn't work. Especially not with modern analysis tools and access to the executable code.
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