The U.S. military was “effective” because:

After losing in Vietnam they never picked on a country that teeth to bite back.

They had allies that would follow them into their shit stirring and fill in the gaps in their support structure.

Had semi-qualified and only moderately corrupt military leadership.

This year they picked a fight with someone that could bite back. Pissed off their allies with trade wars. Installed extremely corrupt and incompetent leadership.

Not even going to bother trying to translate it. Their idea is fucking stupid with zero support.

English overtook French as the primary international language due to economic power of the English speaking countries. Even when French was the international language it was not that popular. Only the elites and well educated spoke the language outside of native speakers. Both Spanish and Mandarin have more native speakers than English today.

English has a huge amount of people who speak it as a secondary language. The total amount of people who speak it today is estimated to be 1.5 billion. It is the most common language spoke around the world.

The barriers to reverse this trend on a global scale and swap to another language is almost laughably difficult today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

Automation reduces repetitive common tasks. It always fails when a task is outside the average range. The more complex a task, the lower the probability is to achieve successful automation.

What the techbros and billionaires don’t understand is that most jobs that exist today are because of their difficulty in automating already. Seemingly simple jobs have hidden complexity.

Since my job is highly complex, non-repetative, with a very high degree of non-recorded specialized knowledge, my fear of a LLM replacing me approaches zero.

The “dead substance” for soil doesn’t exist on the planet. There is always something going on.

First off there is no “normal” level of soil microbial activity. Every native soil varies dramatically in species composition and activity. The highest species activity is usually undisturbed native soil. This is due the varied plant species producing a vast complex of chemicals that effect the microbiome & lots of plant material being decomposed (mostly carbohydrates).

All types agriculture causes massive environmental damage without exceptions. Organic agriculture is overall the most damaging to the environment per Kg produced. Next is conventional farming non-irrigated. Then is irrigated production in arid environments. The least damaging is protected culture (greenhouses, screenhouses etc) because of the massive increase in production/acre.

In agriculture the soil microbial activity and species varies dramatically with different crops and soil types. The amount of microbial activity is mostly linked to available carbohydrates and fertility. Soil microbial activity is only weakly correlated to agricultural productivity. High microbial activity can compete with plants for nutrients. Low microbial activity is usually linked to nutrients being unavailable.

FYI, Tillamook region is steadily a declining part of Tillamook Cheese. The main plant is a mega-dairy and farm outside of Boardman, OR. They have 93,000 acres of land (threemile canyon farms a subsidiary of RD Offut).

The reason: due to the arid conditions, hot temperatures, and access to irrigation water from the Columbia River, the region produces 2.5-3x per acre more feed than the cool, very wet, Tillamook area. In gross production of crops per acre, they are one of the highest production regions/acre on the planet. They use varieties developed for the southern Mid-west (113-120 day corn). However their average yeilds are 20% higher than the southern Mid-west.

Dairy farming in Tillamook is environmentally terrible. The large amounts of rain causes constant runoff and leaching of nutrients. Most of the nutrients from the manure they spread washes away with the winter rain. Because of the lack of heat units, they use varieties that are adapted to the northern Canadian corn belt (67-72 day corn).

Tax refunds act as forced savings for many people. It’s not a good way to save as the government pays no interest on the savings. The the people then blow the money immediately on major purchases or paying down debt buildup.

Personally, I always tried to make it so that I didn’t get a tax return. I always figured it cost me significant money in cash flow through the year. Always pissed me off to overpay in taxes when I could have used the money for critical things I needed during the year.

Not likely.

I setup a raspberry pi 5 minicomputer box with a small hard drive and Pi OS installed. I then browse to whatever pirate streaming service I want and use Firefox with the adblock installed. Works like a charm.

The RII K06 mini keyboard works very well.

I originally got the system to run tradeshow videos at the booth. It does that very well and is quick and easy to setup.

It’s called Bi-color corn. It’s made by creating a hybrid between white and yellow corn inbreds. The seeds are all yellow. The resulting corn (F2 seeds) display a yellow:white ratio of 3:1.

The color has zero impact on flavor, texture or sweetness. It’s all for visual impact.

30+ years ago in school I was tasked with writing an essay on Israel. In just a few days of researching I noticed that everything the Palestinians were doing looked like desperate guerrilla warfare against a superior force. Their tactics made no sense otherwise.

That’s when I asked… Why? And started researching what Israel was doing. Holy Fuck… Today it’s more obvious with their open genocide but they have been doing this shit for 50+ years quietly. This isn’t something new. This isn’t the current leadership. This is a fundemental cultural belief that they are superior and can kill, maim, abuse and steal from any other ethnic group. The zionist group is as bad or worse than any other extremist group around.

A-10 is live target practice for Iran’s domestically produced manpads. It should not be anywhere near this conflict. That they are using it at all shows massive incompetence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misagh-2

Taiwan “Hey Ukraine, got a few of those navel drones for us?”

Ukraine has shown that a traditional naval power is pretty weak.