You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:

1. Stick it in the freezer for a short while.
2. Take it out.
3. Boot it up.
4. If it works, get all the data off it as quick as you can.

So, Gary Brechner wrote an article about this, like 20 years ago: Basically, that the combination of expense to build, and vulnerability to specific asymmetric threats, that huge ocean-floating warships represent, means that in the long term they are doomed as a serious military platform. They should go on the shelf alongside that thing the Nazis did with trying to build small-building-sized tanks, as something that just doesn’t make sense when all factors are considered.

It might seem that the submarinization of the Black Sea fleet proves him out, but as it happens, I coincidentally got to talk recently to an actual military strategy expert on the topic and this was his take:

• Deterrence is a relevant factor. Lots of expensive military kit is pretty vulnerable. The issue is, if you do start taking steps to attack it, what’s going to happen to you in response. That’s at the heart of keeping a lot of big powers’ naval forces safe, more so than them being invulnerable. Real no-holds-barred war is pretty rare in the modern world; most military kit goes around most of the time being used for force projection or little proxy wars, usually not full-scale war against peer enemies.
• It may be that the big ships are becoming more vulnerable as time goes on, yes, but it’s not like that’s new. Once it does go past the level of “we don’t want to do that / provide weapons so our proxy can do that because we’re scared of the response,” and proceeds to a real fuck-'em-up war, losing big battleships and carriers at a shocking rate has been part of war since around World War 2. They’re hard as fuck to defend and navies tend to be super cautious with where they put them as a result, and once it comes to a real war, they start sinking yes. It’s not like land warfare; it only really takes one day where something goes wrong to sink billions and billions of dollars worth of your navy irrevocably. Adding a new way that that can happen doesn’t necessarily change the shape of the war because it was already happening and was already part of the calculus.

I think, as some other people have said, that most of it is bad strategy and tactics by the Russians, of putting their big naval assets within range of the weapons that can fuck them up and for some reason not reacting (until very recently) when as a result they started sinking like pebbles in a pond.

Fun fact! They think that because of some kind of electromagnetic issue, Kessler syndrome or its precursors could maybe destroy the ozone layer too.

I don’t think anyone is saying they shouldn’t be allowed to do it; just that they think it’s going to go poorly

Also I would add that it’s a moderately dire sign as far as the state of Russia’s manpower levels. Every country at war desperately wants more soldiers at all times but some desperates are more desperate than other desperates.

100% agree

And yes the media in the US is mostly a big corrupt grouping of useless bleating dickholes

I don’t think most people feel their buying power has caught up with the greedflation we saw over the last few years.

I think you are right about the perception (what most people feel) part of it. 20% cumulative inflation is going to hurt when you go to the grocery store however you slice it. On the other hand, the country’s most vulnerable people are making 32% more (un inflation adjusted), i.e. beating inflation by quite a bit. So I think you are right about the feeling (particularly for someone who’s closer to the top end, where wages have kept pace or fallen behind inflation.)

There’s actually an important caveat even to the perception side of it – if you poll people about how the country’s economy is doing, they say it is terrible. But if you poll them about how their state is doing, they say it’s beating the average by quite a bit, doing not too bad.

This, combined with any which way you measure the economy in terms of actual dollars showing that things are actually moving in the right direction, makes me lay the blame at the feet of the media more than anything. I don’t think the media gives a shit about autoworkers’ unions or manufacturing jobs; like I say high-end wages actually haven’t kept up with inflation, which I think is most of where media people and the people important to them sit.

Statistics can be made to say anything.

So can anecdotes

I am constantly seeing news about the crunch that the lower economic classes are feeling

I believe you on the news part yes

We are inundated with evidence that younger generations can’t afford housing, can’t afford groceries, etc.

Yeah, it’s still bad. Me saying things have ticked up by 12% isn’t anywhere near enough to say that things are okay yet.

The economy may be booming per statistics, but who is it benefiting, people who need the benefit, or no?

The answer is low wage workers, i.e. exactly the people who most badly need the benefit, who unfortunately aren’t in charge of the news networks that shape most people’s perceptions

That’s the real question and I think the dissatisfaction a lot of people feel is a marker that it’s not as simple as what the numbers might show.

John Stewart did I think a fairly compelling illustration, pertaining to crime statistics, of why this type of argument isn’t a good reason for rejecting quantitative analysis of what’s going on. I mean the statistics can always be misleading in any one of a number of ways but I don’t really agree with the idea “we can’t ever look at the numbers to see what’s working, because I want to stick with just asserting that everything’s bad without doing any big attempt to see beyond a vague impression based on what I see in the media.”

Not saying you’re doing that (or by any means that things are “done” and in good shape for the average working person) – I’m just saying that the impression you may have gotten from the media about how things are changing for the really vulnerable people in society may not be a fully accurate view of it. Of course things are still bad. My thing is just that it’s important to be honest about what is and isn’t working, to identify the stuff that works and be able to do more of it, instead of just going with feelings and the media presentation.

Yeah, I know. It’s so diametrically opposed to the narrative that’s in the media that people start acting like you’re crazy when you talk about it.

This is a chart of the GINI coefficient, one of the best bottom-line metrics for overall “level of inequality” as a single simple number. It’s irritating that it cuts off in the middle of the Covid discontinuity, but everything I can find is that it’s still at around 40, i.e. still holding steadily at levels that haven’t been seen consistently since the late 1990s.

To get a little more into the details instead of just an abstract number:

The IRA and stronger support for unions led to an absolutely historic increase in wages at the bottom end of the scale, comfortably beating inflation and then some. The level of inflation was absolutely historic, and there wasn’t an equal income gain at the high end of the scale (e.g. tech jobs); I suspect that most of that manufacturing-worker gain was totally invisible to the average Lemmy user, so all they see is the inflation, so it feels like things are getting worse overall for the economy, but for the actually vulnerable people, it’s going in the right direction for the first time in quite a while. Not anywhere near where it should be, of course, but going in the right direction by a pretty significant tick.

• Wages at the 10th percentile (and, for that matter, in the average) are up (12% above inflation for the 10th percentile)
• Wages at the median are steady (big wage gains eaten up by big inflation, no real change in real wages)
• Wages at the top actually are falling (losing ground to inflation that is)

This is one source for all that stuff about wages at different income levels

I know, it’s very different from the narrative.

Yeah, if only we’d had the Democratic Socialists in charge we might have had a strong NLRB backstopping a bunch of union gains, income equality finally going down for the first time in God knows how long, and blue collar wages growing due to big investments in manufacturing and infrastructure funded by a massive corporate tax increase

That would have been fuckin great

Or, wait, hang on for a second

You are actually the majority

military has repeatedly said it is not deliberately targeting the media

“ There is no policy of targeting media personnel,”

These are actually two different statements, with a very small, very subtle, but profoundly important difference between them.

some within the IDF appear to have viewed journalists working in Gaza for outlets controlled by or affiliated with Hamas to be legitimate military targets

“affiliated with”

This comes right after Israel sending a delegation to the US to “talk about” the war in Lebanon and the so called war in Gaza, too. Presumably to talk about hey you’re gonna bankroll those into the fall, like always, right?

But… why? I am honestly baffled as to the business reasons behind the decision. I don’t think people are sick of propaganda. People love propaganda.

But it’s hard for me to say you are wrong, also, simply because like I say I have no idea what the thinking behind it is.

That’s what I mean. It’s like they are trying to get at an honest presentation of the facts of the story.

It’s fuckin weird from ANY corporate US news outlet but from those two it’s like bizarro world

It’s a fairly impressive propaganda double dip

DON’T explain the context, beyond “synagogue” and “antisemitism” and some vague language about how violence “evolved” into existence. Thus, anyone who isn’t pro Palestinian sees the story in a very particular way that will reinforce a particular wrong perception of the protestors.

But DO bring Biden’s name into it for literally no reason at all, so that the people who support the protestors and are able to realize that there’s probably more to the story, will have their particular wrong perception, that quite a lot of them probably have, that he’s anti protestor, reinforced.

It’s a rare and cunning story that can simultaneously communicate “look at these scumbag anti semitic protestors” and “look at Biden thinking these protestors are anti semitic scumbags” simultaneously, with each population receiving the message which is exactly appropriate to misleading them and them specifically.

CNN and fucking USA Today have been doing quite a bit of actual complete and honest reporting recently.

I have no idea where it came from, but I’ll take it

I don’t want the water you gave me. I want the water I hunted for myself.

A lot of times they don’t like the food source to be near the water source. Sometimes if you put the food bowl and water bowl in different rooms they will become a lot more amenable to the water bowl.

Of course sometimes not, because they are just bein little weirdos

I hadn’t fully been aware of the changeover, but yeah I saw season 7 and it was definitely more coherent and solid and less wandery and desperate than some of the middle seasons, absolutely there was an uptick in quality to me yes

It has yet to pass the Senate, and Biden said he would veto it.

Of course, Biden is still swearing to everyone that he is still sending shipments except for the one that he paused because of Rafah, and that he plans to keep doing it. And, his administration conducted an investigation which somehow managed to conclude that they “may have” been committing war crimes but that it’s not clear enough that we would have to stop shipping them weapons or anything which we would be legally obligated to do if they “conclusively” were doing anything criminal.

Fuckin assholes

In general, they get grants of cash from the US which they are required to use to “purchase” from US suppliers more or less any weapons (with few export restrictions). We’re giving them weapons but they still get to pick out what they think they need. This is a pretty good overview which seems like it’s mainly missing:

• The fact that congress authorizes aid, and then the White House is generally responsible for actually sending it. That’s important in cases like the most recent aid package congress passed, which Biden is at least partially simply deciding not to provide, which he is more or less able to do (the “more or less” is complicated and I don’t really understand it).
• A detailed breakdown of what shipments got “paused” and what aid has actually been delivered since then. Presumably, the White House is able to keep the details of this information secret. Currently, Netanyahu is claiming that they’re cutting off a lot of shipments they should be giving, and the White House is claiming that that’s wrong and they’ve been delivering aid as normal (and as far as I know not saying how much that is); it would be nice to know the detail of what’s being sent and who is lying (although I have a theory).