I’m a US army infantry, I don’t have a great overall picture of geopolitics, but I’m generally a pretty anti-war kind of guy. My personal take is that while we’ve mixed ourselves up in a lot of deplorable wars, we also get utilized a LOT to prevent large threats from brewing in the first place. I just spent the last year on a NATO peacekeeping mission, and my job was 100% “be visible so Russian backed actors can’t operate openly”

So no, we haven’t fought wars that directly expelled hostile armies from our territory. But we do project a strong presence in dark corners that further the goals of stability for the US and Western Europe. By the way, NATO is mostly the US armed forces, other countries supply token, under equipped forces. That’s changing recently due to Russia’s aggression, but most of Western Europe was completely dependent on US NATO forces to maintain peace.

I was just thinking about my 16 hour flight back to CONUS from a deployment a few weeks back. We flew in uniform, uncomfortable as fuck, all I did was put one headphone in and listen to an audiobook while staring at the in-flight map. Even after a few weeks back in the states I don’t think I could do that again, but I was still riding the deployment mindset of “sit and stare at the wall til I have to do something”

It depends how you define reality working consistently. Dark matter was first theorized by observing how galaxies and star clusters etc don’t seem to have enough mass to produce the gravitational footprint that holds them together. So dark matter was theorized to account for it. Invisible, intangible matter that only interacts with “normal” matter through gravity. Kinda strange 🤔

Super interesting read. Points out that the main strategy for gobbling up open source protocols is to adopt the standard, then expand on it, creating a “better” version for those using their ecosystem (and driving out those who aren’t)

I just wonder, hope, that this ecosystem stays innovative and big enough to always be better than corporate alternatives. We’ve sorta hit the point in my mind where the major players in social media have made all their products… Awful. Just terrible to be on. The tracking, the ridiculous amounts and types of ads, the constant censorship and rule > changes, all in pursuit of monetization. I just hope they continue to shoot themselves in the foot too much to draw people back in even if they’re federated. Reddit sucks now, Twitter is failing, everything of Meta has sucked for a long time. Hopefully people agree moving forward that open source replacements are good enough and being enough benefits to push these turds out. I’m sick of the internet being controlled by massive corporations.

I like to think myself open-minded, but I’m also a meat eater. It really is just a matter of self control and convenience. I know humans eating meat in most developed countries is completely unnecessary. I know farming methods are cruel and environmentally damaging. It’s just tough to shake off the habit of craving a nice chicken breast or steak, especially since I lean towards a very high protein a diet.

I’d go far enough to say it used to not be murder, but now we only kill animals for luxury.