charlie [any, any]

There’s a patch for the MM port that fixes the issues it has, highly recommended.

https://restoration.zora.re/

The new arms include biological weapons designed to induce sleep or sleep-related disturbances in enemy troops. The goal is to impair cognition and alertness.

The US military is doing a real bang up job of this without anyone else’s help. On a carrier deployment everyone I knew was running on maybe 4 hours sleep per day and that’s usually averaged out over the week because of all the times you only get an hour here and there and maybe like 6 hours straight on Sundays.

More projection that the next CO who’s tired watch standers crash their destroyer into a cargo ship can point to instead of the crumbling military complex around them.

So they fell off the side, or rather one fell and the other played lemmings. I kind of assumed they legit fell off a container ship, would make sense. If they were boarding a fucking small boat and “fell off” they 100% got killed in the attempt.

I’m pretty sure I read a resistance update that said they killed two US special forces

I work logistics now, this reminds me of a while back, around late 2020 when a truck driver showed up to pick up a load. He had never been trained to back into a loading dock so he asked to be loaded by forklift, easy request to oblige. He was also never trained on how to roll back his curtainside trailer so we looked up a youtube video and got it done together. He apparently was also never trained on securing loads because I got a call from the destination with pictures where he must have had to hit the breaks hard and one pallet shifted and squished so many cans of paint. That poor dude must have been having a terrible fucking time at that outfit, and they definitely did him dirty. The first email I get after my manager files an insurance claim is from that trucking outfit saying they fired the guy and that mistake won’t happen again. So quick to cut him loose to save their contract.

Dude needed some fucking training and some shadow shifts or something, not getting thrown to the wolves and hung out to dry.

For restaurant server jobs especially that’s a big reason they really only want to hire people that have tons of experience. That shit is really hard work, not intuitive at all, and especially for my introvert ass, very mentally exhausting, as well as physically draining. Most restaurants I worked at never had any sort of training plan, they just double up the new person with whoever has a slow section and wing it. It’s also not the type of job that incentivizes doubling people up on a shift, due to tips, which I think negatively affects any training program. Pairing someone up with a senior employee has been the fastest onboarding in my experience.

Even at my current job I only get a month, maybe 6 weeks if I’m lucky, to have someone shadow me on the job and get direct training before they’re expected to be pulling shifts alone. And my phone is blowing up for months with questions when they first start solo, so I know that time should be extended.

I now want to photoshop that, “I made this”, “…. i made this….” Meme but for a landlord. “I got a raise!” “… i got a raise…”

the tall man in the forest

Come again?

I think you might be my favorite poster, lol. Always interesting reading your posts!

It’s completely disconnected in that way though. Take for instance the Gerald Ford, the newest class aircraft carrier.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/craighooper/2023/12/12/facing-a-navy-wide-sailor-shortage-uss-ford-sheds-500-600-crew/?sh=31a982e051c0

Through organic cuts, not a predetermined plan, manning has been reduced to an all time low; 2380 when it was projected to have 2716.

“Most of the cuts appear to be organic, occurring while the USS Ford was on an active deployment, as the carrier operates on the fringes of a major conflict.” These are sailors that are leaving the boat, to another command or out of the Navy entirely and just not being replaced. The issue with using a draft to replenish those numbers is that our equipment isn’t designed to be quickly and intuitively learned and operated. It’s designed to need outside training and repair from people employed by these defense contractors.

Much like McDonalds realized they could shed expensive crew and still operate at profit, the Navy has learned the same lesson. “The Navy desperately wants to position the Ford carrier program for success, and, given that the extended deployment will delay key, high-profile testing events, shedding crew offers an immediate boost to the platform’s lifetime operational and maintenance savings, making the platform’s ragged business case far more viable.”

“But, rather than break down, the carrier is breaking performance records. In fact, the ship recently spent ten weeks away from port, in what appears to be the vessel’s longest uninterrupted period at sea since it was launched.”

Despite the crunch in crew, the gears are still turning, and neoliberalism is famously reactive instead of proactive. Since the war machine on paper appears as good as ever, these cracks will keep being bandaged over until there’s a sudden massive failure as the ripped apart seams can’t be held together any longer. A draft isn’t near enough to fix what is rotten here.

The same office politics control both. It’s even almost literally the same form. The difference being, enlisted advancement is done through tests and combining that with an evaluation score (where the office politics comes in, and if you don’t have the highest eval you aren’t getting enough points) that combines with points from awards, education, and other shit (and office politics determine who gets those awards, who goes to the extra schools, etc). Then anybody that’s above a certain point value for their job group makes the next rank. There’s a set number of billets and they chop the top scoring off to fill them.

Once enlisted hit the beginning of their “senior leadership” level promotions the form stays, but the tests go away and instead you have a board that you report to that gives an oral exam of sorts and then they all weigh in together and look over your packet and they have to majority agree. At this level you’re basically applying for specific billets and the rank promotion comes with that billet, so it’s like a job interview and all of the office politics that go into that combined with a permanent record of your military career that would make a high schools permanent record blush. You see where the good old boys club comes in here.

Officers are promoted solely through spending enough time at the lower ranks (no tests ever for the failsons, just show up on time buddy) and once they reach senior leadership levels they follow the same process as senior enlisted promotions except their board is mostly made up of the highest senior enlisted at the command and a couple officers. Same good old boys club, because it’s entirely dependent on the board and office politics who makes that promotion/gets that posting.

Whole thing is designed to insulate senior leadership and officers from consequences and discomfort while offloading the work onto an increasingly shrinking body of lower enlisted who increasingly aren’t giving a shit about doing things the right way with a leadership that has all but mentally checked out in light of increased struggles that don’t seem to have any coherent grasp of or plan for addressing.

I don’t care what’s killing it, I’m just glad it’s happening. We can sit around and talk for hours. It’s a huge combination of things that starts and ends with a “for profit” motive being the worst fucking thing possible to structure your military around.

It certainly isn’t due to “woke” ideology, but I find it very funny that even my lib friends have noticed that the empires military ain’t doing so hot.

I think it’s closer to like 95% if you pull back the layer of Chinese exports going to Canada/Japan/Mexico for assembly and then being imported to the US. Those show as Canadian/Japanese/Mexican imports in figures which I find misleading.

Queen.

Proton mail is currently auctioning three (3) one (1) character account names; the letters are a, m, and x.

a and m are at about 4k and 3k USD x is at over 1 million USD

I smell something musky…

Every single comment was removed within 30 minutes, lmao.