Maithanet

Right. My concern (and I'm by no means an expert here) is that it would take a significant expenditure of ATACMs or other highly valuable strike capabilities in order to achieve even that much. If it were a matter of 1 ATACM = 1 month of disabling the bridge, then I expect Ukraine would happily take that exchange. But I don't think it's that simple or easy. I am sure that Ukraine has no shortage of targets that it would love to hit. But I wouldn't underestimate the importance of the bridge as a strategic target. Supplying Russian forces in Southern Ukraine is not easy, and severing one of the two main connections would cause a lot of problems for Russian logistics. It would also create the possibility of logistical bottlenecks in occupied southern Ukraine, which would make for juicy targets.

The problem is that the experience with the Kherson Bridges demonstrated that bringing down a bridge semi-permanently is actually pretty hard. It's easy if you can plant explosives on it, but otherwise whatever you send has the potential to just go right through and cause only modest damage. You can attack the supports, but those are both fairly small and very solid so you need a lot of explosives to bring one down. So you need a strike that is: 1. Capable of covering the ~100 miles of distance to the bridge 2. Is accurate enough to hit individual supports 3. Carries a large enough warhead to destroy said support 4. Can evade Russian defenses concentrated around the bridge Putting all those things together is a pretty challenging task. Back in 2022 a truck with hundreds of kilos of explosives went off on the bridge, and that knocked traffic out for a few months, but didn't do significant damage to any of the supports. So you're talking about needing a bigger explosion than that, which limits your options pretty significantly.

Aren't they seeking to get Columbia University (and it's considerable endowment) to divest from Israel? If that's the case, protesting on campus seems like the place to do it.

The protest at Columbia explicitly had one of the Jewish student groups as active participants. The argument that this is a protest largely run by anti-semites is a smear made by people who don't want to confront the actual substance of the anti-war protests. Now, I am sure that there are indeed some people who seek to either hijack the protests into something explicitly anti-semitic, or discredit the protests by associating them with hateful groups. Many of those people are not even students at Columbia, but just outside troublemakers. This is a problem of protests of basically any size - you cannot gatekeep effectively. All you can do is try and make your message heard and make clear that hate groups are not welcome (something the protest leaders at Columbia are explicitly doing). I remember at the Women's March, I saw thousands of signs, and not even one of them was hateful, but that night on Fox News they were happy to highlight some asshole who did just that. It made me angry that they were attempting to discredit the Women's March in that way, but that's the game they play. Everyone should remember (when viewing protests on both sides) that the coverage has the ability to highlight extremist members that probably don't represent the group at large.

D&W is gonna make a lot of money. Who knows if it will actually be good. Plenty of awful movies have great previews and there are a few red flags in that one. We'll see.

The problem is that scouting drones have better and better cameras. These units can often spot infantry and call in artillery upon them from distances that a shotgun will be totally useless. For attack drones, a shotgun might be more useful, but if you're talking about smaller models that just drop small explosives like grenades on infantry, they are again often high enough that they are difficult to spot or shoot down. If you're talking about kamikaze attack drones, they often go fast enough that an infantryman isn't going to have time to aim a shotgun and bring down the drone before it is on you. For example, the Russian staple loitering drone is the Lancet, and it weighs ~25 pounds and can reach speeds of up to 190 mph. If you imagine a bicycle flying at you at 300 km/hr, you can see why a shotgun probably isn't going to be much defense. Throughout this war, both sides continue getting better and better at bringing down drones, whether it is via electronic jamming, anti-drone weapons like the Flakpanzer Gepard, or anti-air missiles. The problem is that the drones are getting much better at evasion as well. Drones are getting faster to avoid anti-drone weapons. They are getting more advanced programs (some AI, some not) to continue on to the attack target even if they get jammed and lose contact with their operator. They are getting more numerous so as to overwhelm anti-air defenses. Russia is struggling to replace its losses of basically everything - tanks, IFVs, missiles, AA defenses. The big exception is drones - they are scaling up production in a massive way. Both sides are using drones at a pace that would have seemed impossible in summer 2022, and there is every reason to think that 2024-25 will only continue the trend.

These Ukrainians have no respect for history.

Was just gonna say that. I am really happy about this. I had been very optimistic about Ukraine winning this war throughout 2023, and it was only when support floundered that I began to have a lot of doubts. I think that assuming no disaster in the next month (unlikely) that Ukraine is past the second great danger moment (the first being the opening weeks and the possibility of the front collapsing in the South). Even if you assume that this is the last meaningful aid package from the US, I think Ukraine has what it needs to outlast Russia. European production is scaling up and by the end of 2024 will be prepared to match or exceed Russian capabilities. And if Ukraine can match Russia in military gear, they have vastly better leadership, training and morale. There is much less chance of Europe just abandoning Ukraine the way trump wants to, because russian victory would create a massive (5 million+) refugee crisis, and European Leaders want no part in that.

Ridiculously premature to say that. If this passes the House (without some kind of poison pill that Dems will never support), then it'll get through the Senate+WH in a matter of days. But I would personally put the odds that this doesn't get torpedoed one way or another at only a shade above 50/50.

Surveys found that the overwhelming reason why married with kids couples have less sex is because of two side effects of having children. Less alone time where spontaneous sex could occur, and less sleep which reduces the sex drive. I can't really speak for married couples with no kids, although I would say my wife and I had basically the same amount of sex before and after marriage. Marriage was not the big change, it was having kids.

I have read Fevre Dream and Nightflyers, and both were worth reading, although Fevre Dream was the better of the two. I would also check out Dreamsongs, his two part collection of short stories. There are some people on this forum who insist Martin is better at short stories than full novels, and I can see why. Short stories need to have an end in mind when you start, so you're never going to have meandering plot or bloated chapters about tertiary characters. Meathouse Man and Song for Lya are both excellent short stories.

I don't see any way he's outside the top 10. He's better than Kobe or Durant, so unless you just feel like the older guys can never be moved (not a perspective I share) then he's in.

That's odd, because I feel kind of the reverse on Johnson/McCarthy. I'm not an expert on this kind of insider politics, but from what I've read McCarthy was ousted because he was a liar. He would make a bunch of promises that were contradictory and when he failed to deliver he would just point fingers at whoever was convenient (the democrats, the far right, the Senate). People figured this out fairly quickly and nobody wanted to deal with that anymore. In contrast, Johnson does not make a bunch of idle promises. Not that this makes him some paragon of virtue, but he doesn't make one deal with establishment Republicans and then the exact opposite deal with the far right. Instead, he mostly just waffles around doing nothing much and trying to find something that his caucus can actually live with, even if none of them are particularly happy about it. That's basically what happened in the budget deal, where he ran out the clock and then got some window dressing to throw to his caucus so that at least he could claim he's "fighting for them" and not completely folding. That was enough to keep his job, although eventually MTG and co will tire of his milquetoast compromises and cast him aside. Then it's just a question of whether Democrats want to stick with Johnson or see what Speaker is in the Mystery Box. But in all likelihood, any priorities like Ukraine aid are dead if the House has to do another round of leadership wrangling, because it's an election year and nobody is going to be doing actual legislating after June 1.

I'm surprised that a guy with no kids in his 40s who makes 100k a year would be unable to afford an annual trip to Europe. Unless you are planning on staying at 5 star hotels the whole time, that seems extremely doable. I did international trips to Argentina, Thailand, England, Belize, and Tanzania in the 2008-2014 timeframe, and I was making a lot less than that.

Mike Johnson is a scumbag, but not a particularly noteable one. He willingly signed up for a position that has a lot of responsibility but very little power. He can be removed at any time based on the feelings of crazy people like MTG, and this is bound to happen sooner or later. Thus his tenure as Speaker is basically doomed to failure. The only hope is to get something passed before this happens.