.. zzzz z π΄
Joined February 2017
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gav generation jones β retweeted
Trump stuck our troops, out allies and bases in the grinder with no plan, no leverage and no benefit. #ETTD
A major @WSJ investigation documents the extensive damage Iranian missile and drone attacks have inflicted on US military bases across the Middle East, and how Iran's targeting has evolved over the course of the war.
The Pentagon privately estimates at least $5 billion in damage to US bases, potentially as much as $15 billion. That's on top of $47.1 billion in other war costs through October 16. More than 20 US servicemembers have been killed in war-related activity, with over 400 wounded before the July ceasefire collapsed, when the Pentagon stopped publishing war-specific casualty figures.
In the first two weeks alone, at least 119 buildings across 13 installations were damaged, particularly in Kuwait. Iran also struck radar, missile-defense, and communications infrastructure. The US largely evacuated several bases, including its Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and major installations in Kuwait.
Perhaps most significant is how Iranian attacks evolved. Following the July ceasefire collapse, Iran increasingly struck bases farther from its borders, particularly in Jordan, while hitting smaller, more specific targets, including buildings housing American troops. A July 17 strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan killed three US servicemembers and damaged at least 19 buildings where troops sleep.
The WSJ's satellite analysis suggests growing Iranian targeting precision and an ability to adapt its operations despite months of US and Israeli strikes. The Pentagon has been forced to disperse personnel, reconsider its regional basing posture, and weigh relocating installations farther from Iran.
All of this stands in striking contrast to repeated public claims by Trump administration officials that Iran's missile capabilities had been effectively destroyed. In March, Hegseth declared Iran's ballistic missile production capacity functionally defeated. In April, Trump said its missiles were nearly exhausted. In July, days after the deadly Jordan strike, Hegseth described Iran as "completely overmatched and crushed" and "combat ineffective."
Yet Iran continued striking US installations, inflicting casualties and billions in damage.
The broader strategic implication is that degrading Iran's military capabilities has not eliminated its ability to impose substantial costs on the US regional military presence.
The war has exposed the vulnerability of America's large, fixed bases to Iranian missiles and drones, raising difficult questions for the US about the sustainability of its posture in the Middle East and the consequences of another round of escalation.
wsj.com/world/middle-east/irβ¦
gav generation jones β retweeted
Buckminster Fuller, who was wrong about a lot of things in a way that was usually more interesting than other people being right, noticed something in the 1930s that still holds true.
He noticed that technology does not primarily get bigger. It gets thinner.
The transatlantic cable got lighter per unit of message. The building got lighter per unit of enclosed volume. The engine got lighter per unit of horsepower. Each generation of a technology tends to accomplish the same function with less stuff, and then with less stuff again, until at the limit the stuff approaches zero and only the function remains.
He called this ephemeralization : doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.
And here were it gets interesting. What got eaten, in the first wave, was objects: my door key became a fingerprint.
What's happening today is the second wave: the AI paradigm shift. Itβs our thought patterns, our decisions, our generative processes, our creativity, and our communication and coordination with each other that is being ephemerized.
And I think judgment abstraction has two consequences.
First, the output is not checkable at a lower cost than producing it. To verify a summary you must read the document. To verify a strategic recommendation you must do the strategy. The thing that made calculators safe (verification being orders of magnitude cheaper than generation) simply does not hold for the class of work being absorbed now. Which means verification won't happen because the economics forbid it. A check that costs as much as the work is not a check. It's a second attempt.
Second, the stairs are being removed as a consequence of using the lift. The way you stay able to judge a draft is by having written drafts. The capability is maintained by its own exercise and by nothing else. So the fallback and the thing it's a fallback for are the same muscle, and the system that replaces the muscle also stops the training.
This is Lisanne Bainbridge's irony of automation, which she wrote down in 1983 and which the aviation industry spent the next forty years rediscovering at great expense: automate the easy 99% and you have designed a job where a human with no recent practice must handle the hardest 1% with no warm-up, at the worst possible moment, on the basis of a mental model the automation has been maintaining on their behalf.
Airlines eventually responded by mandating hand-flying. No knowledge-work organization on earth currently mandates hand-thinking.
gav generation jones β retweeted
Pay attention:
Stinger missiles on a barge outside Mar-a-Lago.
Another battery where Air Force One parks.
60+ airspace violations since January.
Nobody's saying what the threat is.
Here's the tell: you don't park Avengers at a golf club for drones.
You do it when the people who know things are nervous.
gav generation jones β retweeted
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimerβs Disease Research Center Fund Β Β
alzresearch.org/giving/
Alzheimerβs Foundation of America Caregiver Resources Β Β
alzfdn.org/donate/
Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia
gav generation jones β retweeted
Europe and Canada are being connected by a direct undersea internet cable that bypasses the US.
The project will be called Leif Erikson, named after one of the first Scandinavian explorers to reach America.
It will be one of the first parts of Canada's "Sovereign Cable System" because a large majority of current cables are either passing by the US or controlled by US companies.
The cable itself will be built and operated by Bulk, a Norwegian digital infrastructure company.
Europe is building resilience into a global ecosystem that has many chokepoints controlled by the US.
gav generation jones β retweeted
Throwing a clever comeback at a professional troll, a fascist, or an operative bot doesn't make you a hero. It makes you their most valuable employee. You are literally paying their bills with your outrage. Every single quote tweet, "debunking" video, or angry reply you post
gav generation jones β retweeted
using a psychological warfare tactic called reflexive control theory. They feed you carefully tailored misinformation to alter your perception, making you voluntarily choose the exact reaction they want from you.
gav generation jones β retweeted
know better. At least half of these accounts aren't even real people, they are bots engineered specifically to make you lose your mind. Congratulations on arguing with a server stack in a warehouse. Iβm sure it really felt your sting. We donβt need to debate them. We don't need
gav generation jones β retweeted
Bruce Mactavish's recent visit to the Codroy Valley - a hot spot for birding in the province each fall during migration - has focused on learning more about hawk behaviour
saltwire.com/newfoundland-laβ¦
gav generation jones β retweeted
Just saw one of these on Kenmount Road. WANT!
Maybe it was a Citroen H cargo van. I think it had St. Pierre plates.
gav generation jones β retweeted
Every summer a patch of the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey goes dead, the fish and shrimp leave or suffocate, and the thing that killed it is the fertiliser running off the corn and soy fields of the Midwest that grow the protein on the plant-based label.
The Mississippi drains forty percent of the United States, and most of that is cropland: a hundred and eighty million acres of corn and soybeans, fed every spring with nitrogen and phosphorus from the bag because the soil under a monoculture has nothing of its own left to give. The rain takes it. It runs off the fields into the ditches, the ditches into the rivers, the rivers into the Gulf, and in the warm shallow water off Louisiana it does what fertiliser does: it grows a bloom of algae that dies, sinks and rots, and the rotting takes the oxygen out of the water from the bottom up. By July there is a layer along the seabed where nothing with gills can live. Six, seven, eight thousand square miles of it. The shrimp boats steam further out every year to find water that is breathing.
It has been measured every summer since 1985 and has never been fixed, because fixing it means putting less on the fields, and the fields are the economy. The plant-based industry's inputs are grown in exactly that basin: the soy for the burger, the pea for the milk, the corn for the syrup and the oil.
A cow on grass puts her fertiliser straight back on the field she took it from, in a form the soil holds, and the water off a pasture runs clear. The dead zone has never once been traced to a hill farm.
The shrimp that were there are the animal protein nobody put on the ledger. The soybeans are what replaced them.
gav generation jones β retweeted
Three stops for a slower California coast day:
Davenport β Pigeon Point Lighthouse β Pescadero.
Ocean views, a lighthouse stop and time for lunch. Pick one short walk and leave room to linger.
Save this route for a free weekend. π
ALT Pigeon Point Lighthouse beside the Pacific Ocean, with white buildings, a boardwalk and a garden in the foreground.