It’s a little known fact that Justice Gorsuch’s mother was the EPA Administrator under Reagan, and she resigned after an abysmal record of mismanagement.
I don’t usually use much profanity but this is a fucking travesty and the six conservative justices are traitors to the American people. They should all be impeached for blatant corruption and for being bought and paid-for by industry interests. They’re not even going to be embarrassed about their scientific mistake except that they got caught out on not understanding what they’re ruling on. They know they aren’t the experts in everything. They just want corporations to have free reign and for them to be able to trample the rights of citizens.
This is going to allow the courts to rapidly unwind decades of progress that has been made on some of the most important subjects including environmental regulations, workplace regulations and employee rights, antitrust law, and anticorruption law to name a few. Between this and the Jarkesy decision we’re going to go back to the days of burning eyes in Los Angeles and Lake Erie on fire, deadly workplaces and no employee right to organize, anticompetitive corporate practices with no oversight, and rampant corporate fraud. There is no longer a reasonable enforcement mechanism due to Jarkesy and there is now no real rule-making authority.
As I said before, all six conservative justices should be impeached for blatant corruption and working against the best interests of the American people. I’d settle for impeaching Alito and Thomas, but they should all be impeached. They are traitors to the American people.
I could be totally wrong here since I don’t have a great understanding of how these processes worked. So downvote if you will but I’d like to be corrected.
Does this even really matter when in a lot of cases the ‘experts’ were often paid to say whatever corporations wanted anyhow? See the current climate crisis and all the ‘experts’ that guided policy and enabled it.
Obviously letting the courts just go by whatever their guts tell them isn’t the answer, but some sort of a best guess based on a large enough scientific consensus?
This isn’t a random expert. He’s a supreme court judge. The courts should be independent and impartial. In the US this is not the case, and it is endangering democracy.
Having some experts be paid shills while giving other experts the chance to actually legitimately affect change is not the same as handing every decision over to non-experts who incidentally just made defacto bribery legal for their positions.
Ladoga –a Russian armoured personnel carrier. Initially called Debut, this APC is designed for evacuation of Soviet government from Kremlin to airport under nuclear/chemical/biological attack. Ladoga uses tracks from the T-80U as well as suspension system and gas-turbine powerplant. The crew is 2 soldiers. It also has a four-seat cab equipped with a crew life-support facilities to protect the passengers against the radiological, chemical and bacteriological contamination of the environment. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladoga_APC
with life support facilities to protect the passengers against the radiological, chemical, and bacteriological contamination of the environment, but not a $1,000 USD drone fitted with an explosive device.
No fault of the design. It was meant for a particular role. It is being brought out and borderline misused in a different role. I can get behind loling at Russia, but this is like laughing at an M4 Sherman for not having ECM built in. I’d laugh at the people who rolled it into a modern conventional fight, but the design seems competent for the time and role.
Compared to a golf-cart or dirt bike, a Ladoga is much better-suited for mechanized warfare.
I don’t know. Like, yes, by definition, a dirt bike isn’t what a mechanized unit uses; that’s a motorized vehicle. But…I think that there’s a fair question of how well the roles can match.
Specifically for nuclear war, then yeah, obviously the Ladoga is better. It’s got environmental protection.
But I’m not sure that light armor will necessarily have the role it has over past decades in the future.
The point of light armor is to deal with rifle and machine gun bullets – as in ambushes – and near-miss artillery fragments. It will work well for that.
I don’t know what portion of actual damage to Russian forces is presently coming from those, though. I mean, if the armor isn’t stopping what’s killing the thing, it might not buy much. It won’t stop top-attack ATGMs. It won’t stop drones carrying heavier munitions. It won’t stop guided munitions like GMLRS or guided artillery.
If we can provide enough tube artillery and shells, that might change. But if warfare here is characterized by mostly highly-accurate, long-range weapons capable of penetrating the armor that vehicles have…that armor might not provide much protection.
For an analog, think of how it used to be common for individual soldiers to wear heavy armor up until things like crossbows and firearms, long-range weapons that could penetrate it, killed it:
As firearms became better and more common on the battlefield, the utility of full armour gradually declined, and full suits became restricted to those made for jousting which continued to develop.
It’s not impossible that the same phenomenon could affect vehicle armor. Maybe not all vehicles, but it might make it a lot-less-valuable to have light armor.
And unarmored vehicles tend to be faster, which helps limit their time in a dangerous zone.
I think that a dirt bike, which might be good as a vehicle for a single person, maybe two, has some serious limitations – it can’t load up anyone if they do get hurt. It can’t pull towed equipment. It has a limited ability to carry supplies.
But it can also traverse trails that four-wheel vehicles cannot. It can be easily hidden. It is inexpensive and can be easily provided in large numbers. It is light and can be delivered via air. Many people each on a dirt bike are less of a concentrated target than a group of people in an APC; against a weapon that light armor doesn’t stop, the dirt bike may be more resilient than light armor.
In World War II, there were some very substantial successes that various militaries pulled off with bicycle infantry, which is pretty analogous; Japan’s rapid movement in the Battle of Singapore is probably the poster child for that:
The capture of Singapore resulted in the largest British surrender in its history.
Conventional British military thinking was that the Japanese forces were inferior and characterised that the Malayan jungles as “impassable”; the Japanese were repeatedly able to use it to their advantage to outflank hastily established defensive lines.
Despite their numerical inferiority, they advanced down the Malayan Peninsula, overwhelming the defences. The Japanese forces also used bicycle infantry and light tanks, allowing swift movement through the jungle. The Commonwealth having thought the terrain made them impractical, had no tanks and only a few armoured vehicles, which put them at a severe disadvantage.[25]
E-bikes can be very quiet.
There have been a history of unarmored vehicles that we’ve used in combat. And I don’t mean the Jeep, but in contemporary times.
Bikes or motorbikes can also bypass unexpected obstacles. If your APC is rolling down the road and there’s a tree fall you most likely need to stop your vehicle and get out and clear it. Bikes or motorbikes may not even need to slow down, just bypass the obstacle entirely. Think of that scene in Children of Men with the fallen tree and the flaming car rolled down the hill, that ambush relied entirely on stopping the target, but probably wouldn’t have worked as well on a group of bikers.
Intentionally misleading headline, but not technically incorrect.
These are designed to carry troops through an irradiated battle space and keep them safe from the fallout. At least while they’re inside and the filtration systems are functioning properly.
That doesn’t mean they were magically enhanced to be impervious to antimaterial weapons, or other types of kinetic damage that happen in combat.
Thanks for this, I didn’t know people thought that nuclear-proof meant that it could literally take a nuke. I certainly hope people haven’t been thinking that a MOPP suit will make one a super soldier impervious to nukes or anything considered a chemical (which could be interpreted as all matter).
I know I was assuming that the Russians claimed that they were nuclear bomb proof, at least for the 30 seconds that I knew about them before I read this thread. Seeing the picture I didn’t believe that they were in in actuality.
Plus, even if it was that kind of nuclear-proof, all that really means is that it can take the pressure of nuclear explosion over its body. Devices based on point pressure, like the kind used in anti-armor rounds or bunker buster bombs, can and do punch through nuclear-hardened targets.
As an example, RPGs use shaped charges to send a jet a molten copper through armor steel. Even though the devices may seem antiquated, they are extremely effective at burning holes through tanks. If that molten jet happens to come in contact with ammunition, it’s generally game over.
I have heard a few things, TBH. Everything in the range from simply vaporized and hot to the vaporized metal being in a near plasma state. Shrug.
Wikipedia gives a few numbers ranging from 660K to almost 1200K (copper melt temp is 1358K) from testing it quotes. It seems to be dependent on the cone alloy and the explosive type.
In practice, it’s probably is all over the place in regards to temperature. If you can round up a few RPGs, I would totally be down for some testing…
It has gotten more fun grinding at extreme for samples, and helping out lower level players, since the buffing patch. The endgame is just kind of flat.
(edit): The article doesn’t go into how and why there was a decline, how Sony and Arrowhead kinda shot themselves in the foot with account linking. I think this would still be a fast moving train had they not tried to do that, and had the man power to focus on bugs, balance and battles at the same time.
Account linking happened May 6th. It is on the graph as point “A.”
There is a small increase in the decline of the player count, but you had already lost almost 200,000 players since the last peak on April 1st!
So between April 1st and May 6th the game went from around 370,000 players to around 170,000 players, and the current player count literally can’t drop the same level because that would be less than zero.
So, the bigger drop came way before account linking, friend. The game was already dying, and the account linking just firmly put it out of its misery.
You make mostly good points but its stupid to call the game dead or dying. They don’t currently have a bunch of players they never expected to have in the first place. They still sold their product to those people which makes it a huge net win for them. It’s a wildly successful game by any reasonable metric you can choose to evaluate it against.
Yea this is pretty much it. I meet online weekly to play something with some friends, after the third or fourth session I was just completely done with the game. It doesn’t feel like there’s a whole lot to do after you’ve tried every mission type.
I hate how every game want to compete for current playtime.
I got way more than money’s worth out of this game, but I haven’t played in over a month. I hope that when I go back to it, there’s still a playerbase.
But like, the developers planned for at best to get 10% of what they did…
If they dropped that extra 90%, I don’t see why that should spell the end of the game. It’s the playerbase the game was designed for.
There’s just this weird “first or worst” mentality with a lot of studios. I hope this game is just given the room to stretch it legs over a decade or so. Something people might not always keep installed on their console, but still download once or twice a year to get some games in.
Games like that can be a success. Just because a lot of people burnt out doesn’t mean they’ll never play again.
It’s just games like that don’t maximize investor returns. They want to churn out hits that people play exclusively for 3 months then drop, only to buy the new one next year.
The game has lot of shitty online only mechanics, so while it would make a solid co-op game, it has the live service model and live service games need to keep a playerbase or they get shutdown. These types of games exist for one reason: microtransactions. They want to sell you bullshit.
That's why they need to compete for playtime. Their next game might not go viral, so losing a massive chunk of your playerbase like this is a problem.
But honestly fuck live service games and people shouldn't expect anything from them. They are made to milk your wallet.
Yeah, but their battle passes never expire, and you don’t have to spend real money to get one.
They never expected it to go viral, they budget to go at least a year of story driven campaign and they probably made enough to pay for that times 10 already.
They don’t need to nickel and dime the user base, if anything they can sell less premium shit.
The article’s premise is that this is a vehicle designed for a very particular role, which is now being brought out and used outside that role, illustrating how deep into reserves Russia is scraping for vehicles.
forbes.com
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