I mean, if the US goes ahead with boots on the ground the cost could be immense. Like Afghanistan, Iran is extremely mountainous. Unlike Afghanistan, Iran has a population of almost 100 million, spread across an area almost 3 times the size of Texas. And you can bet the Iranians paid very close attention to the tactics that worked in Afghanistan, on both sides. Tunnels and caves are extremely effective at nullifying air power, and tanks and IFVs don’t do well in mountains. That means you’re mostly left with grunts and artillery, fighting in terrain they don’t know, and which their opponents know intimately. And that opponent has been preparing for this fight for quite some time.

Oh hey, look, it’s an object lesson in why being a reliable partner on the global stage actually matters.

THEY’RE BOTH FUCKING CLOSE TO WATER

OK. And Epstein said he wasn’t fucking kids. I don’t know why we would trust the public statements of the Russian government on the subject of whether or not the sanctions are hurting their economy. Seems like the least credible source possible in the circumstances.

Yeah, we’ve been through this exact same game with multiple iterations of Intel and AMD chips. When AMD first started doing consumer CPUs they badged them according to their equivalent Intel clock speed because one to one comparisons were misleading.

What’s the L1 and L2 cache? What are the bus speeds? How many cores and how are they architectured? Multi-threading? How many steps is the instruction cycle? There are so many factors beyond just clock speed that play into real world performance.

I think that’s 100% what this is, and it’s a very smart play if that’s the case. Intel are reeling from some significant setbacks, while Nvidia is swimming in cash. There’s never been a better time for them to make a play for the desktop CPU space.

And they’ve got absolutely no illusions about what’s happening with AI. They’re the ones who are literally paying AI companies to buy their chips. They know the space is collapsing. But as the guys selling the picks and shovels, they can ride out that collapse if they’re smart.

End of the day, if what we get out of this is a new, serious competitor in the CPU space, that’ll at least be some kind of win. With Nvidia’s money and expertise they could really force Intel to get their shit together. AMD chasing their heels is the only that’s ever kept them from completely going to shit, but more competition is even better. With all three major companies playing in both the CPU and GPU spaces, that could be really good for consumers.

Play Helldivers with my wife.

Excellent addition, thank you.

Yeah, Hitler understood that you needed the bread as well as the circuses.

That said, the degree to which he improved material conditions in Germany is overplayed in popular media. While the Nazis did push programs like the VW Beetle and cheap holiday packages, their relentless push to rearmament came at a serious cost to Germany’s ability to produce or import consumer goods, and the average German frequently struggled with empty shelves in the supermarkets.

This week, the president belittled the so-called special relationship with Britain for being “obviously not what it was.”

Gee buddy, can you possibly imagine any reasons why that might be?!

It annoys me that I can guarantee they’re doing this to make it easier for agentic AI to interact with the web, but I guess if we get some important accessibility benefits along the way that’s not a bad thing.

This is an idea that’s been toyed with, but simply doesn’t give the same kind of situational awareness that a human pilot directly in the situation has, not to mention the issues with communication links, which not only present the problem of jamming as you said, but also make stealth much more difficult. With a human pilot, the craft can shut off all radio comms for a much lower signature.

What we’re seeing instead as the expected path forward is a hybrid approach; wingman drones.

You build a top of the line stealth fighter, and then you give it two drone buddies, which can be remotely fed instructions by the human operated craft. You retain situational awareness, and from a flying platform you can fall back to laser communication; unjammable and undetectable. Pilot safety is significantly enhanced because they can hang back and let the drones engage, and each pilot (a very expensive asset) can now command significantly more firepower.

Saab are working on this for their upcoming sixth gen fighter, which I’d very much like to see us collaborate on developing.

ERE, LISSEN UP YA GIT. YOOZE EVAH SEES AN ORK WEARIN PURPLE? NAH, DATS RIGHT, YOU AIN’T. LOGIKALLY, DAT MEANS IF YOOZE IS WEARIN PURPLE, AINT NO GITS CAN SEES YA. DAS JUST KOMMON SENS IT IS.

Imagine you and twenty of your friends have ganged up on someone in a fight. Would feel exactly as confident if they were armed with a knife as you would if they were armed with nothing?

It’s not always about being able to win the fight. Sometimes it’s just about making the fight costly enough that the other party decides its not worth it.

This, by the way, is exactly why our military is still pushing for the F-35, despite the very high political costs and risks that it now comes with. When you get down to the brass tacks of what an air war between Canada and Russia would look like, the unavoidable factor is that Russia simply does not have any 5th gen fighters. Even on paper their only claimed 5th gen simply isn’t. The specs they’ve announced for the Su-57 it barely qualify as stealthy. And it’s well known that Russia overstates their specs (whereas NATO tends to understate ours). We also know from what’s been happening Ukraine that Russian radar is dogshit.

Everything in Russia’s current air fleet, including their grand total of 6 “5th gen” fighters, would get stomped into the ground by an F-35. Stealth is a huge force multiplier. When you can kill the enemy without them even seeing you, it’s not even a fight, it’s just a turkey shoot. Even a small fleet of F-35s would inflict unimaginable damage on the Russian air force. They’d be limited only by their ability to maintain locations to launch from, and their available supply of fuel, parts and munitions.

Something like that dramatically alters the calculations when it comes to considering any kind of attack.

Canada’s geography isn’t exactly conducive to relying on anti-air systems alone. It’s the same reason Trump’s golden dome is a fantasy; he’s trying to recreate Iron Dome, but Iron Dome only works because Isreal is tiny. Canada isn’t.

There’s also a huge cost to air defense systems. Just for some rough perspective, a single Patriot missile system costs as much as 10 F-35s. A Patriot covers a radius of about 160km, an F-35, without midair refueling, covers a radius of about 1800km.

You simply cannot create the same kind of air defence network with ground batteries only as you can with aerial interceptors, and when you need to cover a country as large as ours that makes a huge difference. Far from being a fraction of the cost, your proposal would actually be orders magnitude more expensive.

Even when you throw drones into the picture they’re simply not going to adjust that calculation in any meaningful way. A drone capable of intercepting enemy aircraft or missiles as effectively as a fighter plane is going to cost as much as a fighter plane. There’s really no avoiding that.

Well, I’ll grant you that.

They didn’t, either time. But reality got in the way of the meme so OP ignored it.

The first Iraq war was an unqualified success. There’s really no way around that. Should they have gone the whole way and removed Saddam from power? Maybe. But the goal of the war was to protect Kuwait and that goal was accomplished.

The second Iraq war was stupid, unnecessary, messy, pointless, badly mismanaged, and came at a staggeringly high cost. But it was successful. They achieved the regime change they wanted and ultimately created a puppet state in the Middle East. They’re using Iraqi bases right now in their attacks on Iran, something that would not possible if that war had been a failure.

Doesn’t make it a good idea. Getting what you want isn’t great if you massively overpay for it.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, absolutely counts as a loss. The US got nothing that they wanted - it didn’t even lead to the death of Bin Laden since he was hiding out in Pakistan - and wasted a tonne of lives and resources to ultimately just put the country back in the hands of the Taliban and give them a whole bunch of military hardware.

“Heartwarming! One twin wants to feed all trans people into a giant meat grinder, other wants to raise minimum wage by $0.25, but they still get along despite their differences!”

Yeah, it was a ridiculous question in the first place. Asking someone to speculate about every single possible future scenario that could ever be imagined is pointless and stupid. Carney gave the only reasonable answer possible under the circumstances.

Oh come off it. Like any of us can afford jamon ibérico.