Yes it does.

What specific crimes did the bankers commit?

the failures of the Obama bank bailouts, which set all of this into motion

I think it was more the temerity of Barack Obama for being born black that was a bigger issue.

As for the rest, of course Democrats will take back power if the right fractures. In a first-past-the-post system with only 2 parties that’s just what happens. It doesn’t matter how incompetently run the parties are, as soon as one leaves power, the other gains it. They may do nothing useful with that power, and it might just be a short time before it swings back the other direction, but they’ll have power when the GOP collapses.

The unfortunate thing is that democrats will most likely use the fracturing to cement their power. What would be much better is if it was used to get rid of first past the post voting, to put rules in place so that government institutions are non-political, make gerrymandering illegal, get rid of the electoral college, reform campaign financing to get the money out, etc. Instead the democrats are going to think “it’s our turn at the trough” and try to do everything possible to ensure they stay in power and get paid.

Far more than that.

I expect that when Trump dies the “movement” will shatter. One of the main things Trump has done is to make sure that nobody can follow him. Everybody who has stood up to him now either bows to him or is irrelevant: Desantis, Pence, Liz Cheney, Rubio, Cruz, Christie, etc. Nobody is going to follow Vance once Trump dies. Some fraction of Republicans still like Tucker, Oreilly, Candace Owens, etc. but some hate them with a passion. There’s no way that they’re going to unite behind them.

Even if Ukraine “wins” the war, they’re in massive trouble. A big fraction of their working-age population is dead or severely injured. A lot of their infrastructure is badly damaged or destroyed. For a short time they’re going to have a niche as one of the few countries that has expertise in fighting a war against a big, modern, well-equipped opponent. Maybe they can find a way to generate money from that. But, if they’re not careful it will just result in Ukrainians emigrating with that expertise to take up consultant type roles in other countries.

I think the last think Ukraine wants to do after a conflict like this is to maintain a large standing military. They can’t afford that either financially, or afford taking prime-age people out of other jobs. So, I think they’re hoping to have a small military and have the UN or NATO take up the slack of defending their borders.

My guess is that since Russia invaded Ukraine there have been a lot of Americans and other NATO people spending time in Ukraine, teaching and training. Most of it is probably done in a quiet, plausibly deniable way. Like, former soldiers hired through a private foundation that has a secret donor list. It would be very cheap for NATO countries to do, and it could be very effective. Even if countries can’t get their public to agree to ship weapons to Ukraine, European leaders almost certainly know that Russia is a major threat, and as soon as it defeats Ukraine that threat will be aimed at them. A small investment now to keep Ukraine fighting means less needs to be spent later if Russia wins.

Anyhow, my point is that that’s one of the few modern conflicts where there are near-peer forces fighting each-other. In the earliest days of the invasion Russia’s advantage over Ukraine might have been as big as the US advantage over Iraq. But, since then with training, arms, ammunition and tech from NATO countries, Ukraine is probably on par with Russia in some ways, and ahead of them in others, though still way behind in total manpower. Because of that, I think it’s one of the few conflicts where the conflict won’t simply be decided by the side with the newest tech or the side with the biggest army. Instead it’s one where disrupting the opposition’s surveillance, analysis, planning and execution can have the greatest impact.

As such it really does come down to doctrinal differences

Not for the US. The US hasn’t had to face a near peer enemy since WWII. When was the last time the US didn’t have air supremacy in a conflict? They had it even in Korea and Vietnam and since then the advantage has only grown. Plus now it’s not just air, it’s satellites and drones. That allows the US to use GPS-guided weapons, or use GPS to move forces, with satellites and drones to verify that the path is clear. Also, US air supremacy means the US can strike any enemy target in any position from the air, knocking out enemy communications, radar, power, ammo dumps, etc.

For instance, in the First Gulf War, Iraqi C2 was crippled via precision attacks which severely hampered their ability to respond to Coalition ground attack

Yes – attack helicopters vs. phalanxes. How was the US able to perform these precision attacks? Its overwhelming advantage in firepower, tech, etc. meant that it quickly established air supremacy and was able to strike Iraqi targets at will. It’s not that Iraq didn’t think of crippling the US forces in the same way, it’s that it was completely unable to do that because of the US superiority in numbers, tech and firepower.

Yes, the Abrams and the Challenger tanks heavily outclassed the Iraqi armour, however, it was due to the Coalition having overwhelming situational awareness

Which was the result of a massive difference in tech, plus complete air supremacy allowing them to completely disrupt any Iraqi communication. The US could have been using WWII Sherman tanks and still would have won because they had control of the skies and were able to use that to isolate Iraqi units. And, that’s not to mention that the US tanks had night vision systems while the Iraqis didn’t, so a lot of engagements were designed to happen at night when the Iraqis were blind and the US forces could see clearly.

The US victory in the first Iraq war had nothing to do with the US being clever and disrupting Iraq’s “OODA loops” and everything to do with the US having a massive advantage in tech, firepower, etc.

If you wanted to look at a conflict where the side with the better doctrine is having a better result, you could look at Ukraine vs. Russia. Russia has a huge manpower advantage, and started the war with a huge advantage in equipment. But, Russia is famous for having rigid command structures and top-heavy decision making. Ukraine isn’t winning the war, but just not losing is a major achievement given all the advantages Russia has. And, at least some of that comes down to Ukraine having much better visibility into what Russia is doing (thanks in part to US and European tech) allowing them to make better decisions, so that when they act they have a better chance of success. Russia’s ability to see what Ukraine is doing is weaker because they lack the latest NATO tech, and they make worse decisions and make those decisions slower because of the structure of their military. So, Ukraine’s information and control structure advantages are helping offset the disadvantage they face because they’re so much smaller than Russia.

Aside from it being a decent icon, the original 3.5 inch floppy actually had amazing ergonomics.

Compare it to the things that came before and after:

• Punch Cards
• Magnetic tapes
• 8 and 5.25 inch floppies in flexible sleeves
• 3.5 inch diskettes
• CDs
• USB drives
• Memory Cards

Punch cards are fragile, even if you could somehow change them so they could hold gigabytes of data, cardstock is inherently not ideal. Magnetic tape can get dirty, it can stretch, etc. Flexible floppies have an open window so they can get scratched, get dust in them, etc.

Skip forward to CDs and you have something much more fragile that can easily get scratched. Then after that there are USB sticks that are pretty good, but because the part you plug in has to be able to make electrical contact with the USB port it can get dirty or bent or something. Often there’s a cap you have to take off then have to avoid losing. Or the plug part can be retracted, but that has to be done manually. They’re also all different sizes and shapes, so you can’t have a standard sized box to store them neatly. Plus there’s the notorious issue of trying to plug it in upside down. Finally memory cards. They’re small and easy to lose, they’re fairly fragile, and they also can be plugged in upside down.

3.5 inch floppies were a good size. They were big enough to be hard to lose, but small enough to be easily carried. They were nice and thin so you could have a stack of them. Because they were a standard size and shape you could have a storage box to contain a lot of them. They had a dust cover to protect the sensitive bits, and it moved aside automatically when you put the disk into the drive. They had a very obvious top side, so it was hard to put them in the wrong way, unless you had the drive mounted vertically which wasn’t that common.

I would hope that eventually if there’s another removable medium for storage, that it has a lot in common with those 3.5 inch diskettes.

A not insignificant part of battle planning is to try and disrupt the opposing side’s OODA loop

That concept has existed long before anyone had ever heard of an “OODA loop”. Sun Tzu wrote about “disrupting the opposing side’s OODA loop” centuries ago, using different terms.

Even in WWI it was smoke to prevent them from seeing (observing) clearly. Artillery to disrupt things so they can’t make good plans (which was labelled as “orient” for some strange reason). Barbed wire to prevent them from moving, thereby disrupting the “act” phase. Fundamentally since OODA is such a non-obvious acronym for such an obvious and all-encompassing subject, you can frame everything in terms of “disrupting an OODA loop”, but that doesn’t mean talking about OODA loops is insightful in any way.

Also, fundamentally that’s all secondary to having more troops, greater firepower, more range, etc. If one side has a phalanx and the other side has an attack helicopter, the battle isn’t going to come down to whoever has the least disrupted OODA loops.

I think it’s more that in countries without major social upheaval, power becomes concentrated and centralized. The lack of social upheaval allows the powerful to maintain power without overt use of force. Also, when people from those countries compare their lives to people in chaotic and violent countries, they can be made to think that a conservative system where a select few hold wealth and power is better than chaos.

On the other hand, when there’s a struggle for power, upheaval, disorder, etc. the wealthy have to use violence to maintain their hold. That opens up opportunities for socialist or communist voices to say that it doesn’t have to be like this, and that the rich have no right to use violence to maintain their power and wealth.

I grew up calling those (save icon ones) hard disks to distinguish them from the floppy ones

This was just you. I’m also from the before-times, and was using cassettes as a storage medium before even seeing my first floppy drive. But, nobody called the ones with a sliding window “hard drives”. Diskettes, maybe, but more frequently just floppies, or 3.5 inch floppies to distinguish them from the bigger ones.

IBM PCs introduced computers with hard drives before they even switched to the 3.5 inch format. The earliest IBM PCs only had 5.25 inch floppies, often 2 drives. But the XT from 1983 came with a 10 MB drive by default, but still used 5.25 inch floppies. By the time IBM switched to 3.5 inch floppies, the hard drive was well established. That was in about 1987 with the PS/2 models.

The earliest Mac computers took a surprisingly long time to come with a hard drive. The earliest model Macs starting in 1984 came with 3.5 inch drives and no hard drive. It wasn’t until 1987 that Macs started coming with hard drives. So, I could maybe imagine someone who used macs not knowing what a hard drive was during that 3-year window. OTOH, someone who only used Macs wouldn’t have known about 5.25 inch drives because Macs never used those, so there wouldn’t have been a need to distinguish between 5.25 inch drives and 3.5 inch ones.

Did people care enough about the Best Buy commercial for this to be on Gamestop’s radar? Did she have a fan club or something? She’s fairly attractive, but not in a memorable way. It seems like good casting in the sense that she looks like she might be someone who works a retail job.

OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act)

Or, as it was known in non-military circles back in the day: “Look before you leap”.

how a conflict was to be prosecuted until you were victorious

Or dead.

if you could get through your OODA loop faster and more correctly than the opposing side you would outmaneuver and outfight them.

Suuuuure…

Which is why I tend to advise “an okay plan applied immediately and vigorously is far better than a perfect plan ten minutes too late”.

Which obviously depends on what you’re planning. If you’re planning D-Day, another 10 minutes to get a perfect plan is worth the wait. If you’re planning how you’re going to attack a machine gun nest that’s currently shooting at you, 10 minutes of being shot at might be too long.

I get that you need to find a balance between completely winging it when planning or fighting a war, vs being caught in analysis paralysis. And, that the more experienced you are, the more you can figure out the optimal balance between the two, and that allows you to be more predictable, which allows higher-ups to have more consistent plans. IMO, this just makes the idea of using AI in your “battle rhythm” even more stupid. Take something where decades of institutional experience allows you to predict a certain “rhythm”, now throw AI into the mix and its ability to quickly spit out a plausible looking output that’s answer-shaped and you either have to explicitly trust the magic 8-ball’s output, or you have to spend an unpredictable amount of time going over the output to see if it is flawed. Either way, you disrupt this rhythm that’s apparently so important.

So, not battle related in any way? It’s like one of those guys with wrap-around shades who records tiktoks in his truck talking about his warrior mindset?

He uses that term as if it’s something that people in the military say. Maybe it is, but it sure seems like a bullshit term.

But, even if it’s a term they use, is “battle rhythm” sounds like something that might happen, I dunno, during a battle? And if you’re in the middle of a battle, is that really a time when you should be using AI? “Hey ChatGPT, what – BOOM – coordinates should I tell them to use — ratatatatatatat – for the – POW – artillery strike!?”

Do you think in feudal times things were better?

Why?

I never signed up, mainly because there was never any need to sign up. You could just go there, paste an image, and get a link to it.

Why would you sign up? It would be like signing up to use a URL shortener.