sincle354

Yes

So it’s not that the Volkswagen cheated on the emissions test. It’s that running the emissions test (as part of the building process) MODIFIED the car ITSELF to guzzle gas after the fact. We’re talking Transformers level of self modification. Manchurian Candidate sleeper agent levels of subterfuge.

Oh shit we’re doing this again.

YT video I learned this from.

It’s one thing to be evil, but it’s another thing to be evil AND incompetent. Do one or the other, never both. Don’t do a Russia worse than Russia. People are counting on us to do the right thing after we exhaust all of the alternatives.

Without giving them the benefit of the doubt, it’s because they are being processed through the Israeli military court system.

Wait, military court system? Give me a sec here. Let’s check Wikipedia… Hmm…

Modeled on the British military court system?!?

1967-87: One in three Palestinians detained… 500,000… Children and women pleading with soldiers…

Indefinite administrative detention without trial… “secret evidence”…coercion…

Ok, claims of physical torture, lack of education, defacto denial of lawyers…

You know, I didn’t know what I was expecting from an entry called Palestinian prisoners in Israel, but I feel sick just reading this…

Valley bullshit aside, I do have to defend the expensive exploration of the generalized AI space purely because it’s embarassingly parallel. That is, it just gets so much better the more money and resources you throw at it. It couldn’t solve math without a few million dollars worth of supercomputer training time. We didn’t know it would create valid VHDL-to-csv-to-VBA scripts, but I got phind(.com) to make me one. And I certainly can’t tell Wolfram Alpha to package the math solution it generated as a Javascript function.

There’s a massive road block on the direct highway M-4 into Moscow. It’s getting wild!

It’s physics for computers, specifically the Direct Stiffness Method. The formal definition of what you send into a computer for stress analysis involves a whole lot of matrixes. You turn a structure into tiny little nodes not unlike pixels or voxels. Each point can be connected to other elements, and these connections have unique internal linear or twisting “stiffness”, like a spring has. Think how a spring and a stick of wood resist squishing and bending. They can be expressed as one massive square (important!) matrix. The equation in the third panel is essentially a mega version of Hooke’s law:

F = ku
“The vector of forces on the nodes = the matrix containing all information of the stiffness of the connections * the vector of positions of the nodes”.

This is a linear algebra problem, the easiest type of problem for a computer with a GPU. We can insert the known positions and forces on the bridge and solve for all unknown positions. If a truss on a bridge is calculated to experience too much force than it can handle, you can say that the bridge will fail under those conditions.

America will always fight wars because their interests in resources, political alliances, and ideological stability. It’s for the money. It’s always the money at the end.

America is the cultural and military hegemon due to the proliferation of free trade enforced through an unmatched navy. America becomes more powerful by maintaining this status quo. It’s why dangers to the oil supply have driven 3 out of the 4 examples you rightfully point out. Sadly the Middle East is the oilbasket of the world with the worst borders ever designed. If you want energy, you spread influence there.

However, there is one instance where the interests of the USA align with the general interest of the average Westerner.

People don’t like democracies getting invaded. And potential democratic trade partners getting invaded is bad for business. You can have both at the same time. I will not defend the Gulf War under this banner, but the faster that we can prove that land grabs are nonnegotiable in this Pax Americana, the better.

And also, you don’t have to convince me that war is inefficient. I’ve read Catch-22. But you do have to convince me that the destabilization of the breadbasket of Europe (and the world) is less important than the opportunity cost of a couple million lost to a few hundred corrupt officials.