My wife is in the "they're false-flag psyops" camp, whereas my position is "the ourobouros is eating its own tail."
I did a little digging and it seems like there's a tiny kernel of fact at the core of this giant turd of a hype-piece, and that is the fact that they electrified this little spur line from Berlin to the new German Tesla factory by using a battery-electric trainset. Which is not a terrible solution for electrifying a very short branch line that presumably doesn't need frequent all-day service, even if it's a bit of a janky approach compared to overhead lines. But hand that off to the overworked, underpaid twenty-two-year old gig worker they've got doing "editing" at Yahoo for two bucks an article, and I guess it turns into "world-first electric wonder train amazes!"
For a second, though, I read the headline and wondered if Musk and co. had finally looped all the way around to reinventing commuter rail from first principles after all these years of trying to "disrupt" it with bullshit ideas like Hyperloop and Tunnels, But Dumber.
I have a friend who had a case before Cannon and told me that she was both one of the stupidest and the meanest judges she's ever dealt with, which is saying something since she practices primarily in Florida. As a representative of the caliber of judges the Federalist Society has to offer, Cannon is pretty damning... and if we get four more years of Trump, the federal bench is going to be stacked with jurists even worse than her.
It's not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for "microgrid" systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed -- and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don't want any of that communist solar power!
I've got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there's almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state -- contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it's a worse place than California to try and build something, and that's entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I'd much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.
They're flying these in very low and slow, which is hard for SAM radars to detect and lock on to unless you're right up next to them -- and once they're past the front lines Russia doesn't have many (if any) point defense installations.
In fact I imagine that the economic impacts of these attacks may be a secondary goal, and the main intent is actually to force Russia to pull SAM systems off the front line and redeploy them across the Russian interior to defend facilities they thought were safely out of Ukraine's reach. The fewer defenses on the front line, the more capable Ukraine's air force is to support efforts on the ground.
They've got drawbacks, too, especially since most examples of them in residential construction are the efforts of, shall we say, enthusiastic amateurs.
- Because soil holds moisture for an extended period of time, they tend to get saturated, and then excess moisture migrates down to the waterproofing system, which will inevitably leak over time. Most amateur-built earth sheltered homes are not using particularly sophisticated waterproofing materials, and rarely take a defense-in-depth approach to them that could mitigate a failure in one layer of the system.
- Maintenance is expensive: once any part of the waterproofing fails you are going to have to dig it up to repair it.
- Soil - especially wet soil - is heavy and the prescriptive structural parts of residential building code aren't really intended to address this kind of construction. You need an engineer to ensure the house is properly structured for the loads involved, and if you're building new that extra structure is going to cost money and limit design options.
- Building into a slope to allow roof access for planting, mowing, etc., limits daylighting options, and particularly in the US where bedrooms are required to have an egress window it can be nearly impossible to design a floorplan with the expected gradient of public to private space.
Don't get me wrong, I love the concept, and I've even drawn up plans for one I'd like to build on the lot next door to me once the nigh-derelict rental house currently occupying the space gets condemned... But this is one case where I absolutely do not want to be buying somebody else's project. I don't trust the other people who build them to do it right.
- No trigger discipline
- No hands on the wheel
- Open container of alcoholic beverage
- Speeding egregiously
- Driving a Nissan
All checks out.
This is called the "Johnson Treatment," ironically.
He's suddenly full of righteous indignation now that he's had a taste of his own medicine. Hypocritical fucknugget.
What in the generative AI nonsense is that header image? A mysterious man is lasering the moon, while his crotch ray attacks a low-flying jet and another beam shoots from his briefcase towards parts unknown, and a confusing late-night aerobatic demonstration takes place in the background?
All I know is that
targets[0]
returns "FV107 Scimitar" for some reason, and anytime I try to purge that entry from the array it throws an error.