This is Briefcase Carrier Disease but for "innovation".

I mean, most serious proposals I've seen pair removing ICBMs with continued arms-control reduction of total warheads. Not sure that's more unrealistic than fully building out Sentinel (not to mention the opportunity cost to the AF budget).

So good. They even have a subtle reference to a real IARPA program that was being run during the show. Those of us working on it went nuts lol.

A super interesting conversation to be had by contrasting Bujold and CJ Cherryh's visions of how patriarchy would intersect with uterine replicators...

This is great, wish we saw more of this (especially with the quantum VC hype cycle picking up steam again)!

? His unpopularity has almost nothing to do with foreign policy. And the lack of tighter EU integration/sovereignty seems more driven by internal politics as well (cf french rejection of EU constitution) rather than "psychology".

Not really! For one, not all fields are noncommutative (EM). The field is more like the differential that connects different points in spacetime to keep the physics consistent.

Truly befuddled how this is a hard concept for people, have they never participated in any kind of real life organization??

This is also true for the primes (despite the perception).

This was great, thank you! I'd love to read something similar about Roger Moore, which to me has always felt like the central Bond that all the others are responding to.

Anti‑militarism without pacifism What attitudes should socialists and trade unionists have to war?

I've found this to be a good framework for discussing these issues with more skeptical friends: internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?art...

My nuclear hot take is that we should explicitly adopt counter-value targeting, and drop GMD and silos. LOAC issues and too French to make this feasible...

Makes sense, thanks!

I don't know enough to be sure, but it seems like the postdoc system in some science fields (where it's exceedingly rare to be hired out of a PhD) could be a useful model.

Lmao my parents could I think have afforded it, but UChicago tuition 20 years ago could have paid for me to go to State School for 30 years after the (pretty small!) scholarship I got.

Seriously think doing this was the best decision of my life vs going to the "better" private schools.

My take is that it is in fact totally downstream of domestic politics, and downstream of thinkers trying national security as a preserve for "serious people" that has nothing to do with politics.

I don't think this is right, I think it's pretty much all explained by the failures of the GWOT (and twenty years of that kind of conflict being the only type of war in the public consciousness).

Sorry if that came off as aggro, and I don't disagree, just wishing there were more people thinking/writing about the intersection between domestic politics and international relations instead of talking past each other.

That's fair, but I do think pro-Defense Spending people need an actual positive political program to sell this, because it's clearly not getting through, and there are real financial tradeoffs that EU countries will have to make to reach even 3.5%

It occurs to me that a lot of this is certain people thinking that "science" is just another form of software "engineering".

I agree it's a stupid take, but as a working scientist the main effect of LLMs has been to make the proposal process 400% worse as the funding agencies are drowning in slop. At least for now (and the foreseeable future) you do in fact still need people to do the work.

I think it's just the contrast with the media picture of the air war/precision bombing. I'm sure someone has written a good book or thesis on how war is constructed through media images (if anyone has any recommendations...)

Super Puma with Exocets

Almost!

Eh, there's a reason there will be more F-16s in the fleet until 2030, and it's not because of LockMart's amazing program management prowess.

Fun fact, from the same company (BBN) that won the contract to build the ARPANET infrastructure. They still do work for TRANSCOM.

To me that's the most interesting aspect of the film: director and script acting at cross purposes...

Yet another victim of the GWOT and the refusal of National Security types to think in any serious way about domestic politics.

I'll just have an LLM summarize it to me, maybe make a 3 bullet point slide.

Real talk: it's quite frustrating to hear from the SV Whiz Kids that we don't Respect the Mission when the building is full of guys and gals working the third shift building actual hardware, not PPTs.