Archive for the ‘video’ Category

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Joe Rogan on the Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict

Sunday, November 28th, 2021

This interview with Jocko Willink was recorded last week, but put up this week, and here’s them talking about the Rittenhouse verdict.

Note the “two different movies on the same screen” analogy Scott Adams has used before.

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Posted in Crime, video | 1 Comment »

Things To Be Grateful For: Salt

Thursday, November 25th, 2021

Happy Thanksgiving! While enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with your family, you probably won’t think much about that humble shaker full of salt on your table. But it took a lot of hard work and industrial machinery to get it to you, as seen in this Mike Rowe video:

I haven’t found part 2 of this video online, but here’s another Fox video that includes some of the same footage, but much that’s different:

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Posted in video | 1 Comment »

The Battle of Cambrai: November 20, 1917

Saturday, November 20th, 2021

104 years ago today the Battle of Cambrai was fought on the western front in France during World War I, marking the first mass use of tanks in battle. Though the British offensive thrust failed to reach their main objective, the battle did see tanks successfully break the deadlock of trench warfare.

A few takeaways:

  • Crewing a British Mark IV tank was absolutly miserable, between lack of suspension, lack of exhaust (carbon monoxide poisoning was common), hot exposed engines that crewmen could be tossed into at any time, and mechanical noise so loud that commands had to be given via signal flags or hand signals. It was still far preferable to attempting to charge out of trenches against machine guns over hundreds of yards of no man’s land.
  • Lead tanks pulled the huge thickets of barbed-wires away from the enemy lines using anchors.
  • Norman Margrave Dillon was the reconnaissance officer who picked the path out for the tanks. He lived to 1997!
  • “Every tank that was available to the Tank Corps attacked at once. There were no tanks in reserve.”
  • The tanks achieved their initial objectives and had to wait 15 minutes for the artillary barrage to lift.
  • The commander stopped then for a smoke break, only to find that all his troops were looting!
  • Flesquires Ridge is when the tanks finally ran into heavy enemy resistance. Their own infantry had fallen back due to exhaustion, and the tanks had to fall back because they were running low on fuel.
  • Another set of tanks reached their canal bridge objective just as the Germans blew it up.
  • Despite the failure to reach the main objective, the five miles the tank corp advanced was one of the largest western front successes up to that time, and the first successful attempt to breach the Hindenburg Line.
  • There weren’t enough infantry to exploit the success, and the cavalry were never ordered to exploit the breakthrough.
  • Half the tanks were out of action by the end of the first day.

    • Though the British Army was unable to exploit the initial success, Cambrai secured the future of the Tank Corps and gave the world its first glimpse of the potential effectiveness of mechanized warfare.

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    Posted in Military, video | No Comments »

    Drone Swarm Boogaloo

    Sunday, November 14th, 2021

    Let’s talk about drone swarms.

    Relatively cheap, quickly deployed swarms of autonomous drones are probably going to be a major factor in short- to -medium-term warfare. There will probably be (at least) two different types of autonomous drones: Suicide drones for hard targets like tanks, and anti-personnel drones using light weapons. The later could either return to base, or just fall to the ground for later retrieval and refurbishment when their fuel or power run out.

    Both will pick out targets using AI.

    I’m not much interested in the central question posed by the following video (are drone swarms technically WMDs), mainly because China doesn’t give a rat’s ass about international law. But it shows a variety of different drones being developed in various countries:

    Speaking of China, here’s a short video on China deploying drones via a MRLS:

    China is investing not only in drones, but also in counter drone technology.

    Here’s a look at the Navy’s LOCUST system from four years ago:

    LOCUST had a successful test earlier this year.

    The advantages of functional drone swarms for armored or naval warfare should be obvious. If you can kill a $10 million Abrams or Type 99 tank and crews with a $100,000 drone, that’s a clear win. Whether such drones can overcome current active protection systems like Trophy is an open question. And Germany’s Rheinmetall just released a video of an anti-drone platform shooting some down:

    The problem, of course, is that their system hasn’t demonstrated any autonomous mode, and real battlefield drones will probably quickly adopt a variety of evasive maneuvers rather than hovering nicely in a row to be shot.

    Welcome to the AI drone arms race. Make your own SkyNet jokes in the comments below.

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    Posted in Military, video | No Comments »

    Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro on The Virtual Metaverse

    Thursday, November 11th, 2021

    Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro discuss Facebook’s announcement of a virtual reality “metaverse.” Some interesting discussion, though little that will be of surprise to anyone who read cyberpunk in the 1980s:

    Shapiro: “I wonder with this stuff if we’re innovating ourselves out of existence as a civilization.”

    Shapiro:”Let’s just take this on the most baseline demographic level. None of them get married, none of them have babies. In two generations, this ain’t gonna matter. You’re gonna have a good time in the virtual reality and then they’re gonna be no babies to carry this on and the only on earth are going to be religious Jews, religious Catholics and religious Muslims and that’s it.”

    Knowing Facebook, I can only assume their Metaverse will be plastered with annoying ads and “features” you hate. Also, just as soon as you get comfortable in the Metaverse, they’ll change the interface…

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    Posted in video | 1 Comment »

    Joe Rogan and Michael Shellenberger Discuss How and When San Francisco Became A Shithole

    Saturday, October 23rd, 2021

    So how San Francisco become the homeless, crime, drug and feces-plagued wonderland that it is today? Michael Shellenberger (an author and journalists who has argued for technological solutions to environmental problems) discusses with Joe Rogan how it came to its current state.

    Some takeaways:

  • San Francisco has always been friendly to illegal drugs, and in the 1800s it was the last city to shut down opium dens.
  • The movement (well-intention) to treat pain with opioids.
  • When that was restricted in 2010, a lot of opioid addicts switched to heroin.
  • After that came fentanyl, which is much easier to overdose on than heroin.
  • Meth was (is?) a separate epidemic.
  • Occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless community in 2011. “The activists just gave the tends to the homeless.”
  • “Women are rapped in those camps, mentally ill people are taken advantage of, people overdose and die, people are killed when you can’t make payments on their drugs, drug dealers stabs you with a machete. These are really violent, dangerous, terrible places. You get hepatitis from all the feces.”
  • “Progressives have badly misled people into thinking this is a problem of high rents.”
  • “The idea that all black people are victims is a racist idea.”

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, video | 1 Comment »

    A Pilot on the Southwest Vaccine Mandate SNAFU

    Saturday, October 16th, 2021

    Here’s a pilot discussing the recent Southwest Airlines issues.

    His points:

  • Southwest was already running their entire operation too lean, too understaffed, too many hours for the people who are there, and thus the small disruptions spreads out everywhere. “Eventually you have to call in either sick or fatigued, and that’s gonna snowball.”
  • They’re running a lot of overtime to keep the operation running.
  • Too many pilots/trainers laid off during the pandemic, so getting them back up to speed has been a challenge.
  • The mandate is a real issue, because major airlines are considered federal contractors, and the mandate goes against union rules. “It’s a big problem.”
  • Mandate deadline is December 8.
  • Southwest is in the middle of negotiations with their pilot union.
  • The union can’t be leading the strike, because that would be illegal. But individual pilots are a different story.
  • $15 an hour airport support personnel may indeed just quit and work somewhere else.
  • A lot of older pilots (and pilot trainers) are just going to retire.

    • Time to haul this out again:

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    Posted in Regulation, unions, video | 1 Comment »

    The System is Down…The System Is Down…

    Monday, October 4th, 2021

    Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all down right now. Botched upgrade? Misconfigured router? Expired signing certificate? Who knows? I’m just going to assume its a problem with their latest SuppressAllPostsQuestioningTheHolyVaccineMarrative.yml file. But it’s a reminder of how deeply interconnected all online systems are these days, and how many different things can go wrong at different layers.

    Expect a sudden burst of productivity from American companies.

    And just in case you didn’t get the reference:

    Edited to add: Additional detail:

    Facebook—and apparently all the major services Facebook owns—are down today. We first noticed the problem at about 11:30 am Eastern time, when some Facebook links stopped working. Investigating a bit further showed major DNS failures at Facebook…

    DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service which translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn’t know how to get to the servers that host the website you’re looking for.

    The problem goes deeper than Facebook’s obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook’s own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 (no server is available for the request) failures instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services’ load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.

    A bit later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht reported that all BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. (BGP—short for Border Gateway Protocol—is the system by which one network figures out the best route to a different network.)

    With no BGP routes into Facebook’s network, Facebook’s own DNS servers would be unreachable—as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.

    DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service which translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn’t know how to get to the servers that host the website you’re looking for.

    The problem goes deeper than Facebook’s obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook’s own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 (no server is available for the request) failures instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services’ load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.

    A bit later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht reported that all BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. (BGP—short for Border Gateway Protocol—is the system by which one network figures out the best route to a different network.)

    With no BGP routes into Facebook’s network, Facebook’s own DNS servers would be unreachable—as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.

    Speculation is that Facebook engineers have locked themselves out of their own network, meaning someone with physical access to the servers will have to fix things…

    Edited to add 2: Krebs offers more details:

    Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

    Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

    In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

    In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That’s because Facebook’s email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

    “Not only are Facebook’s services and apps down for the public, its internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, are out as well,” New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac tweeted. “No one can do any work. Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.”

    Developing…

    Edited to add 3: Seeing reports that Gmail is down for some people. It’s not down for me. I just tested and it’s working fine.

    Updated to add 4: Facebook appears to be back up, but is way wonky…

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    Posted in Media Watch, Uncategorized, video | 3 Comments »

    Profane Meditations On Current Vexations

    Sunday, October 3rd, 2021

    People are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. And they’re being increasingly vocal in their displeasure.

    Here’s rapper Samson on the many discontents of the Biden era:

    And here’s J. Random Australian on the country’s lockdown:

    And then there’s the now-ubiquitous “Fuck Joe Biden” chant:

    We are fated to live in interesting times…

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    Posted in Democrats, Guns, video | 5 Comments »

    What If There Was An Austin Shootout And Nobody Noticed?

    Monday, September 27th, 2021

    It took a while, but it appears that at least one Austin media outlet, Fox 7, finally noticed something that was bubbling on Twitter Sunday morning, namely that there were a bunch of shots fired in downtown Austin early Sunday morning.

    And there’s video:

    Looks like someone wanted to fistfight, a friend wisely pulled him away, and the other party decided to open up as they were walking away.

    A few points:

  • That’s like the third video of the shooting I’ve tried to embed, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that one disappears at some point as well.
  • I count something like thirteen shots fired.
  • Police response was quick.
  • Although this happened in front of the homeless ARCH building on Seventh Street, the perps don’t appear to be Adlers, but just those “youths” we hear so much about.

    • The Sixth Street district use to be an overpriced nightlife district that only occasionally got spicy, but in the last several years it’s gotten progressively more dangerous.

    (Hat tip: @Greggae512.)

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, video | 1 Comment »

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