I live a couple of miles from an airport that houses a fire-fighting air tanker base, and I am somewhat terrified of fires- 120K Acres has burned in my area of the state so far this year.
I've also been a ham radio enjoyer and had been looking for projects that work with radio. So I built a little antenna that works with ~1Mhz and hooked it to a raspberryPi running dump1090... it's amazing how far I can receive. 50-ish miles across a bunch of 12k-14k mountains.
However, I've switched to just using one of the ADSB sites because they have a lot more tracking info.
It's been super interesting to watch the tankers take off. Mostly c130 and md80, but there have been a pair of canadair float planes... quite a menagerie of aircraft.
Anyhow, the adsb stuff gets really interesting once you identify the spotting planes, as it's a little faster at identifying where agencies are looking at fires than WatchDuty (which also works very well).
I live in a very rural spot with a difficult-to-deal-with Electric Association, with a Ute reservation on one side and unpowered parcels on other sides; I don't think that the easement is a typical issue.
And to be clear, I didn't count my labor in designing or implementing the system. I suspect that would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of another $10K if I had to get a hands-off, turn-key version of this same system.
And at some point I will likely double much of the capacity, at which point I will be able to run a mig welder at night if I want...
Fortunately for me, I could just bop down to the bog box store and buy a more appropriate fridge from vevor; horses for courses.
I've never had to turn off my fridge, though it does have interesting-to-me usage patterns; it's weird what you can learn once everything you use has a watt-meter. I can look at the weekly graph and recall when I turned on a hammond organ or cooked in my instapot.
I am about 2 years in to my off-grid solar setup. The cost for the easement was looking to be about $25k, plus about 30k for the wire, transformer, et.
I live in middle of nowhere so I just built out a system myself. I am about 8k into it. It's not the biggest system (6kw inverter, 4kw panels, 15kwh storage) but it's fine for one old man living a 2kM in the high desert.
I have 15kwh of lifepo, and even if it weren't hooked to 4kw of solar I could still run my fridge, charge my phone, and run the fan in my fireplace for 4-6 days... longer if I dump the fridge.
It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.
So 2 x that isn't an entire shed-sized battery.
Though I'd happily have a shed-sized battery... I suspect that delivering and covering something that size would cost more than the batteries I already have, though.
If it helps, I have been in a work group on this issue locally for the last 8 months or so.
Most of the folks in that work group are to the left of Democrats, and most of the pro-flock folks here, locally, are Democrats and law-and-order GOP folks.
So to me, the (locally a-typical) political orientation of the person committing the politically-charged crime seems relevant.
A lot of us have very little love for authoritarian regimes.
At the same time, all through out my life I have seen folks in the US us their fantasies CCP as reason to accept a government that they feel is the gold standard for freeedom.
I submit to you that what you're hearing are folks who are even more concerned with not being oppressed than you are telling you that it's not that great here for those of us on, say, the anarchist left or among the black radical tradition or whatever.
If your history begins at the fall of the berlin wall and you are happy about the ecological destruction being directly created by the US and the carcerial state it represents then of course you're going to read things the way you do.
But the reality is that most of us are just tired of hearing how fucking free the US is when they just sentenced 19 of our people in Texas to what are effectively life sentences for participating in a protest that went sideways when one participant decided he didn't want to see the state summarily execute a kid for vandalism.
I think this view indicates that you have either had very few personal interactions with specific fascists or you don't have a very specific sense of how they are working.
It's easy to hide a lot of objectionable stuff in metonymy.
It feels reasonable to me to think of a "country" as the people who live there; doubly so when discussing a putative democracy.
But sure, I will entertain the idea that you mean something different that literally every other person I've encountered who has uttered that similar sentiment:
if the claim is that the owning-class of the US are seeing the results of their 400-year-long racist, genocidal campaign to enslave the world and exploit every crevice of the planet come home to roost in the form of a decaying ability to present themselves as ethically okay...
sure I can agree to that.
But honestly, I don't think that's what you're trying to say.
People say this a lot, and I usually think it's said by folks who haven't thought about it much.
As a person who makes a lot of music, I don't care if folks have fun. In fact I am having such a hard time caring hat folks do or how they do it I can't get motivated to book any shows this season.
But the part you're missing is when folks make these things and then say "yeah, you see this thing we're doing? That's what we think -you- are doing." LIke when someone sets up an LLM to shit out some song lyrics, I don't care if they are having fun doing it, but I think it displays a lot of contempt for [insert an songwriting artist youlike here] to claim that the LLM is doing the same thing.
Which is fine and all- I've got plenty of unmitigated contempt for my fellow humans.
And you don't even need a computer to do that- I've released a certain amount of music that is facile and boring and in retrospect understand why folks were dismissive.
But if you want to understand why folks who consider themselves invested in their craft (or even invested in other artists' craft) are dismissive of these things, then you might consider how radically dismissive of craft these kinds of cultural products might seem to artists.
When folks who live around me vote for things I find unethical, then I don't feel bound by those decisions.
Also, your position on weapons development is premised on the idea that at lease some of the folks developing the weapons are on your side and always will be.
It's possible that you're genuine in your confusion here; it is, however very hard for me to believe that there are people who genuinely don't understand that when the state spends money it -goes somewhere-.
Its fun for me to read these comments as a person who hates the US military.
Because I know the pipe hitters working for JSOC are really just as fucked up and superstitious as any boko haram nutjobs, and the magic that the "operators" believe in is just as idealistic and disconnected from material reality evn if it's stated "rationally" and scientistically as you've done here.
The "difference" that you're stating is purely imaginary, hoss. Those assholes are getting cranked up because it's easier to kill folks, and that's the same deal weather you're team "deus vult" or whatever odd stuff the Boko Haram folks are into- yall are all just into killing people at the end of the day.
"It's different because we have science"... get out of here with that LOL
"That said, it is undeniable that USA would have more issues pulling that off domestically, and, arguably, even internationally."
You think so?
I spend a lot of time working with (actual) anarchists in the US, and most of us are far more worried about the US gov putting us in jail (or murdering us outright) for our signal chats, protests, and "actions" than literally anything that the PRC might consider doing to us.
Yeah a lot of us are tired of it. I dislike the democrats intensely.
I also dislike the GOP folks intensely.
Which is why I dislike your line of reasoning here: -you- are playing the game we are all tired of.
Like, no shit the Dems didn't drop the files because it implicates folks like Bill Clinton.
But that doesn't make it the case that DT would be okay with the files dropping either.
And it doesn't make it the case that much of the highly spectacular actions his admin takes has nothing to do with achieving material goals and everything to do with keeping his base (which at this point should seem pretty damn dumb given how much damage he has personally done to them) entertained, angry, and confused.
And --you-- are the one who brought out the Dems here.
You. You are the person doing the thing we are all tired of.
I've also been a ham radio enjoyer and had been looking for projects that work with radio. So I built a little antenna that works with ~1Mhz and hooked it to a raspberryPi running dump1090... it's amazing how far I can receive. 50-ish miles across a bunch of 12k-14k mountains.
However, I've switched to just using one of the ADSB sites because they have a lot more tracking info.
It's been super interesting to watch the tankers take off. Mostly c130 and md80, but there have been a pair of canadair float planes... quite a menagerie of aircraft.
Anyhow, the adsb stuff gets really interesting once you identify the spotting planes, as it's a little faster at identifying where agencies are looking at fires than WatchDuty (which also works very well).