Post
Region: The Confederacy of Free Nations
Banana and Covfefe please.
>Laura Dern
I don't know her, lol.
>Krakatoa Eruption
Well, I don't have all the details right now, but it's always amazed be to consider the amount of energy that goes into the daily activities of planets and stars. I've said it before, but a Fast Blue Transient is an event where a star violently sh!ts out up to 20% of our mass as relativistic jets and bursts of energy. Whether you're an Astrophysics or Weaponry nerd makes no difference, that's fjcking cool.
>Nihilism V Absurdism
I've grappled with them both, and I can say that Absurdism isn't a different thing so much as an outgrowth of Nihilism. "Pure" Nihilism is so rare because it's hard to put it into action, if there's no meaning at all (even personal reason) then there's no reason to eat food that makes you happy over some sawdust that you found on the ground. I'd argue, then, that Nihilism is mostly a transitory phase to things like Absurdism since it adds a "but" to the original argument of Nihilism.
Really the IQ-240 move is to embrace being absurd so much that you gradually lose bits of your own wits like Roland. Or you can just believe in the Orbiting Berserker like I do, owo.
>Military Industrial Complex
Ostensibly none.
The US has a long standing urge to pull a hot-take out of it's butt, dismantle it's MIC, and then Just In Time (Tm) surge money back in to create a good industrial base before the war ends and fifteen years pass. After that, the Hot Take Urge takes over again and we return to being as little prepared as possible.
The issue is that this thinking is so old it's actually become akin to a foundation for how we view most frankly vital industries. COVID, for instance, strained what little PPE we had left, and despite the clamoring to use the Defense Production Act (Signed in 1950) there was difficulty in surging the amount we had because the industry for it was a part of the MIC and got defunded just like it in the most recent version of the cycle.
Another issue is that having a big MIC isn't actually a real problem. The problem is what happens when specific companies get too big for their britches. If you have seventeen different companies capable of producing fighter jets, you still have to be wary of corruption but can generally trust that the companies will perform their job fairly competently (if only because peeving the Government off means less contracts in the future. When we defunded the MIC for the Peace Dividend...that just killed 90% of the companies we had and let the remaining ten percent absorb their broken shells. This meant that we had practically one company per production role (Lockheed makes Fighters, Boeing makes transports, BAE makes....etc) with obvious deficiencies since they're led by Business Majors who'd prefer to cut slack from things like "Supply Quality" over "Managerial Incompetence". They also, of course, experience the full brunt of whatever funding surge we send thereafter, making them reliant on large contracts, which leads to the usual "MICs are bad for peace!" arguments.
Finally, space travel was probably only possible because of the US and Russia throwing sh!tfits at each other, and as someone who hopes to one day leave this cursed planet, that's important.
TL;DR if you want to fix the MIC replace the leadership with a higher mix of Engineers to BMs, break up some of the assets of the Biggly Companies, and keep funding the little ones you produce. You'd have to actually stand them up at first and it won't be cheap, but we won't have a rotting industrial base either.
E: Oh and very carefully avoid the Hot Take Urge.
