I would not have pronounced that as Artifact is all I’m saying. Not nearly as apt given that the actual evidence of this project seems to have vanished in exchange for saving the grifters some money.

Rat fucked is still an apt name, to be sure.

In what world is crypto free and open? Never mind the fact that the public ledger is undercut by the difficulty of tying a wallet (or wallets) to specific people, which is possible enough to make transactions traceable for the average person while letting sufficiently motivated bad actors hide their behavior from observation in a way physical cash doesn’t, the entire infrastructure is controlled by either whoever happens to have the biggest share of the crypto token or whoever has the most real money to buy server hardware and electricity.

Unless you want to talk about actual private block chains like they seem to be suggesting here, in which case you’re literally dealing with a wildly inefficient but otherwise unremarkable database. If you think that replicating the ledger across multiple servers at different HUD locations is somehow more secure or open then I’ve got bad news for you about how modern IT infrastructure is already set up.

I don’t know that it holds enough of an edge for a golden guillotine, but it’s dense and heavy enough that we could probably create a workable alternative if we give up on clean cuts.

It seems you have some familiarity with the gold trade. Tell me, have you seen those new laser cutters up close?

I mean isn’t that A16z (Marc the mark and the funky accounting bunch?) whole business strategy? Eventually they gotta just cut out the middleman, right?

Nah, at that point you have the same problem that Bitcoin does. Well, one of the many problems that Bitcoin has. Okay it has another one of the many problems that Bitcoin has.

In any event, you can’t realize that kind of gain without crashing the asset price and rendering it all worthless. I would like to repeat the proposed solution from Auric G. Et Al to instead detonate a dirty bomb inside of Fort Knox, possibly with an English misogynist handcuffed to it, which will allow us to instead reduce the global supply and earn significantly higher returns in appreciation of our existing holdings.

Godspeed, David.

I think history justifies a sufficient level of jadedness and cynicism to believe that, at least at the scale that a government can operate on, foreign aid as a soft power tool is kind of the best we’re ever likely to see. And if we’re going to be looking for soft power I think it’s better for everyone to do so by doing good things and making us look less like goddamn supervillains.

I think the bigger problem is that it assumes that the CIA is the center of US foreign policy and that all other parts of the government are fronts for it. Obviously USAID is a vehicle for US soft power, and the CIA is absolutely a bunch of ghouls and vampires masquerading as a government agency. But a legacy of villainous stupidity doesn’t make them the shadowy secret masters of the world that the kinds of conspiracy theories that call USAID a “front” would suggest they are.

The road is actually in Belgium you don’t know it’s not.

I’m guessing you still have the problem of getting even a little bit of dust into a ‘clean’ wallet to make sure you don’t get any direct links back to you, though. Whether that comes in the form of your own wallet/account getting shut down for the same flag or getting on some financial compliance radar for the same shenanigans that your victim is getting linked to.

“There is nothing to enjoy here, but join us and revel in the despair” is a pretty good line for the next couple of years.

Machines with a lot of precision parts that need to hold up to the kind of wear and tear either a Marine or a maniacal quilter are capable of dishing out. So many layers of fabric…

I mean the Kharkiv offensive of 2023 showed us how effective tractors can be in capturing heavier-armored vehicles in certain situations.

Oh wait, there’s one! How could I miss it when it’s got an RCS as big as a 747! In fact, it looks exactly like a civilian airliner. Huh.

Oh well, still a plane so missile goes bwshhhhhhhhhhh

I mean, if you’re talking specifically in context about people with vaginas instead of women then using the gendered term does exclude both women without vaginas and men with them who are probably a relevant group in that context. But seriously how often does that come up for you? How often is the most important part of the woman you’re referring to her anatomy?

And while “females” is probably just as accurate in most contexts it’s also been poisoned with incel vibes at this point and it’s gonna be some time before it can be salvaged for general use outside of specific biological contexts without sounding like you’re about to unload a whole lot of baggage into the thread instead of getting therapy.

Not gonna lie, “enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce” isn’t the sort of thing I’d expect the government to be into, but I guess I’m not mad about it?

Gotta be cheaper than buying new planes which would also have new engines. Generally there needs to be a pretty substantial increase in capability before it’s worth retiring an existing platform, especially in a logistics role where you don’t get as much benefit from the bleeding edge because nobody’s supposed to be shooting at you in the first place.

I think the missing piece here is that B-52 isn’t just a pretty good cargo hauler, it’s a pretty good cargo hauler that we don’t need to buy a whole new airframe to get. Think of it less as “we’re commissioning these B-52s” and more as “hey look we found a way to use all these B-52s we already had” only this just keeps working forever.

I mean a lot of the services that companies are using are cloud-hosted, meaning that especially if you have branch offices or a lot of remote workers a normal firewall in the datacenter introduces an unnecessary bottleneck. Putting the logical edge of your organization’s network in the cloud too makes sense from a performance perspective in that case, and then turning the actual firewalls into SaaS seems much less absurd.