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On August 09 2025 17:50 Yurie wrote:Show nested quote +On August 09 2025 16:36 Doublemint wrote:now that almost married my keyboard to my coffee. in a shotgun marriage, as coffee left my mouth prematurely and in explosive fashion. The US Air Force wants to buy Cybertrucks for target practice because they may start showing up on the battlefieldhe US Air Force wants to blow up some Cybertrucks.
It's looking to buy two of them to use for munitions testing as they will "likely" soon start appearing on the battlefield, per documents posted on a US Government contracting website on Wednesday.
The pickups are part of a larger order of 33 vehicles for "live missile fire testing" at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The contract stipulates that the Cybertrucks need only be towable, not functional, and their batteries must be removed. The procurement documents were first reported by the defense blog The War Zone.
In a separate document justifying why the Tesla vehicles were specifically required, the contracting officer said that US adversaries were "likely" to begin using the stainless steel-clad trucks on the battlefield due to their durability.
"In the operating theatre it is likely the type of vehicles used by the enemy may transition to Tesla Cybertrucks as they have been found not to receive the normal extent of damage expected upon major impact," the document says.
The Air Force and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. you end the EV mandate but buy those hideous, badly engineered an cheaply made man-child Trucks. for target practice. gloriously spent tax dollars. Isn't one of the major problems with EVs their reliance on electrical infrastructure? I guess having a generator or two and then feeding a fleet of vehicles with less maintenance demands could be workable. But if you depend on the regular grid for basic mobility it will be removed from you in long term combat.
Yeah, you would need to consistently build forward pylons and shield batteries.
That being said, integrating EVs into the military-industrial complex is something that could still be considered as the technology improves:
https://hypercraftusa.com/optimizing-electric-vehicle-batteries-for-the-defense-industry-the-future-of-military-mobility/
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On August 09 2025 11:44 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On August 09 2025 11:40 WombaT wrote:On August 09 2025 11:21 BlackJack wrote:
If only there was someone that was warning people for years while Biden was leaning on social media sites to ban anti-vaxxers or Trudeau was freezing the bank accounts of protestors that, "you're not going to like it when the other side is back in the white house." If only. I do vaguely recall someone saying such things at the time, but when the shoe was on the other foot thinks crazy leftists complaining about Sydney Sweeney is more worthy of comment than like, all that other stuff. ‘Hey I was right about x, but I show no inkling to actually give a shit about x’ really isn’t the flex you think it is Show me the defenders of Trump targeting universities over supposed anti-semitic speech and I will go after them. They don't exist here. Just because I don't like to have imaginary arguments against hypothetical conservatives that don't visit this site doesn't mean I don't give a shit about X.
Introvert immediately disproving this was extremely funny.
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On August 09 2025 17:03 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On August 09 2025 11:21 BlackJack wrote:
If only there was someone that was warning people for years while Biden was leaning on social media sites to ban anti-vaxxers or Trudeau was freezing the bank accounts of protestors that, "you're not going to like it when the other side is back in the white house." The Trudeau case was ruled to be authoritarian overreach. But the Biden case was a nothingburger according to the (conservative leaning might I add) Supreme Court. Show nested quote +The Supreme Court has rejected a case claiming the Biden administration illegally coerced social media platforms into taking down posts about Covid-19 and the 2020 election that were considered misinformation. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c100l6jrjvno
They correctly ruled that it wasn’t illegal but that doesn’t necessarily make it a nothingburger. It’s just not a good place to be to punish people for their speech to appease the White House, whether it’s legal or not. Hell, people just finished complaining that Stephen Colbert was fired because Paramount wanted to placate Trump.
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Northern Ireland25392 Posts
On August 09 2025 11:44 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On August 09 2025 11:40 WombaT wrote:On August 09 2025 11:21 BlackJack wrote:
If only there was someone that was warning people for years while Biden was leaning on social media sites to ban anti-vaxxers or Trudeau was freezing the bank accounts of protestors that, "you're not going to like it when the other side is back in the white house." If only. I do vaguely recall someone saying such things at the time, but when the shoe was on the other foot thinks crazy leftists complaining about Sydney Sweeney is more worthy of comment than like, all that other stuff. ‘Hey I was right about x, but I show no inkling to actually give a shit about x’ really isn’t the flex you think it is Show me the defenders of Trump targeting universities over supposed anti-semitic speech and I will go after them. They don't exist here. Just because I don't like to have imaginary arguments against hypothetical conservatives that don't visit this site doesn't mean I don't give a shit about X.
Last I checked there’s not posters demanding to be called zhir/fae in here either, that somehow still comes up. Or folks outraged at Sydney Sweeney’s good tits genes either.
To my knowledge, the only trans semi-regular in here left because trans discussion was so prevalent, and she felt hurt that her actual life and lived experience was merely an intellectual exercise for others. IIRC that was the stated reason either. Incidentally, not a dig at you, I believe she was sick of the thread’s posters in general on that topic, myself included I presume.
You can’t have it both ways man. If you don’t want to post just what you believe and value most, and want to exist as some reactive force depending on the composition of the room, fair enough both are valid. But if you are going to do the latter, you can’t then interject various things that nobody in the room is talking about.
Coincidentally shortly after this Introvert made a reasonably lengthy post building off yours. So there’s some conservative balls on the table as we say over here, what do you think on his takes?
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Remind me where Colbert was spreading hard misinformation that could kill people like antivaxxers do?
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Northern Ireland25392 Posts
On August 09 2025 14:22 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On August 09 2025 11:44 BlackJack wrote:On August 09 2025 11:40 WombaT wrote:On August 09 2025 11:21 BlackJack wrote:
If only there was someone that was warning people for years while Biden was leaning on social media sites to ban anti-vaxxers or Trudeau was freezing the bank accounts of protestors that, "you're not going to like it when the other side is back in the white house." If only. I do vaguely recall someone saying such things at the time, but when the shoe was on the other foot thinks crazy leftists complaining about Sydney Sweeney is more worthy of comment than like, all that other stuff. ‘Hey I was right about x, but I show no inkling to actually give a shit about x’ really isn’t the flex you think it is Show me the defenders of Trump targeting universities over supposed anti-semitic speech and I will go after them. They don't exist here. Just because I don't like to have imaginary arguments against hypothetical conservatives that don't visit this site doesn't mean I don't give a shit about X. I'll just use this post to make another point. I'm all for deporting foreign students who blockade universities or take over buildings, set up camps, or say blatantly antisemitic things. That's where the hard part of the line is. Tufts girl, probably not. Mahmoud Khalil, probably yes. I'm not sure that even 10 years ago any country would have put up with the types of things these people are saying and doing.There's also the issue of non-compliance with civil rights laws, ala things like discrimination against Asians. I will point out though that you are right. The legal statutes the Trump administration is doing this are ones that the left explicitly wanted, because they wanted to use them to go after schools for their own things. See cases like Bob Jones University v. United States. But also to hear people who were pro banning COVID "misinformation" complain about censorship is.... But your warning will always fall on deaf ears, because as KwarK below you demonstrates, there are people out there who believe that once they got institutional power, were never going to lose it. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, they find out the don't like it. No lessons will be learned though. The left controls all the relevant institutions part of this discussion for decades and yet they still whine about abusing institutional power. What happened were two things. First, the left finally pushed far enough for long enough that the right stopped considering the alignment of higher education and other institutions as something to be lived with and started seeing it as detrimental. I will bring up again Buckley's God and Man at Yale. It took us a LONG time to get here. Second, Trump spent four years fighting the government he oversaw as they decided that he wasn't legitimate enough to have his policies carried out. It started before he was even sworn in with Russiagate. Now that he is back, and had 4 years to think about what he wanted to do and got a growing coterie of advisors and ideas people, he's decided that if the bureaucracy and these other institutions were going to go to war with him, then he was going to go to war with them. They played a dangerous game and lost. The lefties that control these places think it's their God-given right. It is not. And it's not fun to imagine what happens when the side that normally errs on the side of preserving the status quo decides maybe it's not worth preserving. Of course that's not to endorse everything that is done or how it is done (as I have said before) but the problem and underlying reason is right there, but correcting it would require a little humility from those who haven't had to practice it in their lifetimes.
Didn’t the US used to? I’d say versus many comparable nations it’s perhaps not got quite as strong a record in things like strong unions, and mass political movements as some others. But actually quite a strong history in terms of colleges being organising hubs for protest on all sorts of issues, often ‘leading the charge’ as it were before wider society caught up.
It also seems to me a very specific clampdown to stifle dissent on a particular issue.
I would still personally disagree, I mean First Amendment and all that, but we going to see international students deported for being huge racists, or sexists? Let’s just say I’m skeptical. If it were really about dragging colleges back to being places of learning where all students can feel safe etc, as framed, then why the inordinate focus on one specific area?
The general problem I have with this idea of this epoch being some kind of course correction is thus:
1. The left’s supposed dominance of all these spheres was grossly exaggerated. In certain domains, yeah, absolutely a thing.
2. It’s not a course correction to any position of neutrality, it’s a concerted attempt to wield political power to swing the scales in completely the opposite direction, and neuter avenues of oversight or opposition.
I’d totally concede, for example that as fucking unpalatable the man is, Trump did have a mandate, as did his party at times. And some attempts to block him weren’t really in the form of legitimate uses of the checks and balances of various institutions. Plenty on the other hand, were.
If Trump 2.0 was frustrated by the former, I think there’s some legitimate right to counter that. The problem is he wants to neuter the latter as well, which is abundantly clear.
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On August 09 2025 15:05 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On August 08 2025 22:06 oBlade wrote:On August 08 2025 20:02 Sermokala wrote:
Also my uncle is alive because he got an mrna shot to treat his cancer. That is fantastic. I'm glad your uncle is alive. Is it the only treatment he got? Is he the only one that got it? Because obviously the US government can't afford $500 million per life saved, so please expand the anecdote or its significance. On August 08 2025 20:02 Sermokala wrote:
The idea that curing cancer going to profitable to pharma companies is silly. What is this sentence supposed to mean? Are you saying pharma companies are intentionally keeping people sick with cancer to get more money? Or curing cancer would be a loss for them? I don't see how any company that "cured" cancer wouldn't be worth over a trillion dollars overnight. On August 08 2025 20:02 Sermokala wrote:
The misconception that research dollars invested should be diverted to only known technologies and science is very ignorant and not how any of this works. This is a great rebuttal to something I haven't seen argued. It is a mistake to presuppose that the word "research" necessitates any government anything whatsoever. The research isn't banned, is it? If it's so promising, why does it need public dollars? If it's such a long shot, why would it deserve public dollars? Stuck on level 1 if this can't be answered. Nor is mRNA unknown anyway. Billions of doses worldwide. Should we fund it just because it'd be really nice if it worked out? There are thousands of proposed treatments for everything that have fallen by the wayside. Okay? Cost benefit. For example, it'd be really great if the world had a cheap source of nearly unlimited clean energy. It just so happens I'm working on it, it's called cold fusion. Do I deserve $10 billion in taxpayer funds, maybe not. Yeah its the only one he got. Why would you think that he was the only one who would receive the treatment? Do you think that there wouldn't be other lives saved through the advancement of mrna shots? My uncle isn't rich or exceptional, but he was able to get a genetically tailored shot of tuberculosis that killed his cancer cells really well. If the funding didn't go through he would have to get radiation therapty and other worse treatments. Curing cancer through one shot is less profitable than a series of treatments. Yes, it would be less profitable to cure cancer quickly instead of slowly over time. Why would a company be worth trillions of dollars if it only sells a cheap cure to a problem? If the government funds this research instead of a Pharma company that means that the patent can be used for the public good so we can have that cheap cure instead of an expensive series of treatments.
You have assumed for some reason that the one company with the competitive advantage of a cancer cure that was probably expensive to research would sell it cheap, and also that the cure is one shot. I have no idea why you have assumed that.
Your uncle's targeted therapy was probably not cheap, and it's not mass producible because his cancer and everyone's cancer are different.
If a company had a "cure" for cancer, either one-size or individually tailored, they would profit off it. Either could be more expensive than the other, but either way they would drive down the cost of competing alternative treatments.
Cancer sees no respite from this by the way as it's mRNA programs for respiratory viruses that are being phased out.
On August 09 2025 15:05 Sermokala wrote:
Its exactly what you were arguing. If the government doesn't fund a line of R&D that doesn't show profitability, a private company won't pay for it either. It deserves public dollars beacuse it potentially can be something. The greatest innovations and leaps in science come from public funding of things that don't make sense for a private business to fund. Dwarf wheat, or what you think wheat is, only was discovered to be so good beacuse some random guy was testing every kind of wheat he could find to see what would work best. If you have Cargill funding this research, this technology never makes it to India and pakistan, after Dwarf wheat spread to the subcontinent the wars between them stopped.
Yes, the government should fund broad simple research that isn't directly investible or translatable as a big project. Dwarf wheat didn't cost half a billion. The point you're making has to face scale differences here.
On August 09 2025 15:05 Sermokala wrote:
Like yeah, if you can make experiments about cold fusion the government should be putting those billiosn to it, it would make everything a lot better. thats how cold fusion has been developed so far. Mrna vaccines were only created beacuse there was such insane funding given to it by the public. Even in the middle of the plague the government had to fund the research to cure it. Was there not enough of a profit motive for big pharma to fund it before the plague? Would it have been great to have mrna tech before it was needed? If it turned out so well for the covid vaccine why didn't the private sector fund the research into it?
Yes cost benifit, great argument. If there was an agency that could generate 3 dollars for every dollar invested should we fund that? If cold fusion only cost 100 billion we should pay that instantly. You only get to cold fusion though by spending money on thousands of lines of research that lead nowhere. One potential line is by generating the fuel in orbit useing solar panels uninhibited by the atmosphere, and then bringing it down to earth.
Cold fusion hasn't been developed. It's not going to be developed. It's a complete pseudoscientific scam.
"Generating the fuel in orbit using solar panels uninhibited by the atmosphere" is something so divorced from reality it makes me feel cruel for having vastly overestimated what I'm dealing with. Solar power is not cold fusion. Solar power is good, which makes it different than cold fusion. Solar panels create electricity, which is different than cold fusion devices, which do not create electricity, but can be measured to create electricity if you plug them into a wall outlet. Solar panels in space are good at powering things - if the things they are powering are also in space. Otherwise spending millions to billions of dollars making solar farms in orbit and beaming shit with lasers is not more efficient than just putting panels on Earth. Every cent on cold fusion is PURE waste. So the government shouldn't be the one wasting. Every cent spent on putting a solar panel in orbit and beaming the electricity can give you electricity, but is nonetheless a waste because money is limited and you can get the electricity by using the same money to put far more solar panels on the ground.
mRNA vaccines for covid were something the government and pharma had no choice but to do. It's not ideal at all. Ideal would be the government having funded non-mRNA vaccine programs for SARS/coronaviruses over the previous 2 decades so we would have been at a better starting point when the pandemic broke out. As it is, they made a therapy with nonnegligible side effects that possibly cuts your chance of getting the virus in half for a few months. That's fine. And now we have it. Now we need other things.
On August 09 2025 16:54 Acrofales wrote:
E: and I forgot to connect this back to mRNA research. Do I think public funding is needed for mRNA vaccine research? I don't know. I am not a medical researcher. Nor are you, Sermokala, and most importantly, nor is RFK. Mostly public funding is approved or denied by a panel of established researchers who evaluate the project based on a number of criteria. Some of those criteria are political, but I can't think of any other bans on the use of technology for idealist reasons. The only one that springs to mind was W's ban on stemcell research. And it was criticized by many many people, including myself, at the time. But at least the ethical argument was clear at the time. That argument doesn't even exist in the case of mRNA vaccines. It is a ban based on RFK's personal dislike of the topic. And that is not a reason funding should be cut.
You are appealing to an authority on the basis of their imaginarily unassailable integrity as being part of the system. A researcher will always be biased towards research. A rocket scientist will always be biased towards rockets. A bridge builder will always be biased towards bridges. That's fine but there's a limit when spending someone else's money. So who watches the researchers? Oversight? HHS is the system. RFK is the expert. You don't have the luxury of saying you're just a layman, you have the obligation to listen to what a government agency says and then learn actually more about it. Because it's not a "personal dislike" by him it's a determination by multiple people that they are not good enough for public money to continue to pursue when it comes to respiratory viruses. Put it this way, the $500 million covers 22 mRNA vaccine programs for respiratory viruses. Why couldn't we get away with 21 before? Why would 23 be superfluous?
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United States42704 Posts
On August 09 2025 23:35 oBlade wrote:
RFK is the expert. You don't have the luxury of saying you're just a layman, you have the obligation to listen to what a government agency says and then learn actually more about it.
1. RFK is objectively not an expert. He doesn't believe in germ theory, he's more into the 18th century miasma idea.
2. This is weirdly bootlicky, even for you.
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On August 09 2025 23:35 oBlade wrote:
RFK is the expert. False.
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Yeah RFK's belief that healthy people who aren't constantly eating shit are healthier and have stronger immune systems means he doesn't believe in germ theory.
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United States42704 Posts
On August 09 2025 23:48 oBlade wrote:
Yeah RFK's belief that healthy people who aren't constantly eating shit are healthier and have stronger immune systems means he doesn't believe in germ theory.
He literally doesn’t believe in germ theory.
Also if he was under the influence of some sort of brain worm then isn’t “go outside more, walk around in the wilderness, eat more raw foods” exactly the kind of advice we’d expect him to give?
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On August 09 2025 17:03 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On August 09 2025 11:21 BlackJack wrote:
If only there was someone that was warning people for years while Biden was leaning on social media sites to ban anti-vaxxers or Trudeau was freezing the bank accounts of protestors that, "you're not going to like it when the other side is back in the white house." The Trudeau case was ruled to be authoritarian overreach. But the Biden case was a nothingburger according to the (conservative leaning might I add) Supreme Court. Show nested quote +The Supreme Court has rejected a case claiming the Biden administration illegally coerced social media platforms into taking down posts about Covid-19 and the 2020 election that were considered misinformation. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c100l6jrjvno
Mp it was not, it is under review if the rules should change, but it was legal.
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On August 09 2025 23:48 oBlade wrote:
Yeah RFK's belief that healthy people who aren't constantly eating shit are healthier and have stronger immune systems means he doesn't believe in germ theory.
You can have many beliefs, some right and some wrong. RFK has mostly wrong ones.
Eating healthy and moving more is a good take. Doesn't mean he is correct on other topics.
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United States42704 Posts
Also RFK made himself extremely sick by following his own advice. He’s an anti expert. He’s like the bear expert who was convinced that grizzlies are safe and got eaten by one. He knows an awful lot of things and none of them are true.
Also he’s responsible for the deaths of dozens of Samoan children and really should have just killed himself after that. But instead he insists that we can’t really know what disease it was that killed all those children during the measles outbreak caused, in part, by his efforts.
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EPT
