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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • If you have a good unit then most of the military experience is hanging out with your friends all the time.

    Except for the 5am PT every morning, and at 7am when you’ve got to get your truck ready at the motor pool, or 8am when you’ve got special duty to set up the range, or 9am when there’s a 2 hour briefing about keeping your hands to yourself and having a designated driver.

    Lunch at 11am is usually alright, except the base you’re at has the worst DFAC you’ve ever seen.

    That range you helped set up? It’s at 12am, and it’s fun to blast away at targets thinking about how much weapon cleaning you’re going to do tonight.

    There’s a lot of leftover ammo, but you only had to shoot 2 magazines, so your rifle isn’t going to be that hard to clean. (Any vets know what’s coming next?)

    First Sergeant says we can’t waste ammo, if we don’t use the 10,000 rounds they give us, they will only give us 5 rounds next time.

    So the next several hours is spent in the sun, loading more rounds to mindless blast in the general direction of targets on the range.

    7pm rolls around, it’s quitting time. Just kidding, night land nav, time to stumble around around in the dark with shitty NVGs and try to find all the points scattered throughout 2 miles, using nothing but a compass and a map.

    Except nobody ever gets all the points, so everyone gets together at the end to share the points they found.

    10pm, now it’s quitting time, except wait, some moron has lost their night vision goggles, so instead of going back to the barracks, everyone is going to spend the night on the land nav course until it’s found. In the morning it’s found right next to one of the vehicle tires.

    Those are the general events of a somewhat easy day in a combat unit. A day without overnight watch, hours of formations and drill ceremony, 30km ruck marches, endless briefings, flipping landscaping rocks because first sergeant doesn’t like the side you flipped everything to last month, etc etc etc.


  • Personally I know several people who have been to prison, and many of them absolutely needed some institutionalized treatment.

    Well, really they needed a strong community with support, mentors, and motivations to succeed, but in our broken society where community is all but dead, they needed prison.

    Prison is a broken hellhole system, but with total reform, it could be a positive tool for society.

    Maybe in a utopian society we could do away with prison, but there are a ton of changes we need to make before then.









  • They’re just voting for the only party who pretends to care about them.

    Democrats have spent almost no energy on making rural voters feel included.

    If you saw everything you’ve ever known decay into the shambles of globalization, then some orange guy comes and starts yelling about how he’s going to fight for your way of life, while the other guy is talking to the people who have been shaming you for decades, who do you think you’d vote for?

    If we want a better future, we’re going to have to get over all this hatred towards our neighbors. Waving your hands around a map and saying “fuck allll these (rural) people” isn’t going to work anymore, because China/Russia know exactly how to exploit that hate.










  • And the thing is, there are open source internet browsers that can be written to avoid any browser checks that a law might require.

    However, if Google’s browser DRM gets widely implemented, a browser-side content blocker would be effective, because all those open source browsers would be unable to access the wider web.

    I think if Big Brother Browser with Google DRM is our future, we’re going to see people using 2 browsers as standard. They’ll have one “corporate” internet browser, for Instagram, Amazon, whatever. And one “free” browser for all the grey area stuff.