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One other crazy thing about reading Parable of the Sower in 2025 is a passage so casually talking about the discovery of exotic planets in around other stars, some of which may be life bearing. Fiction never predicts the future, but this one hits close to home!

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American Bushido has locked the U.S. military into a futile chase for an unworkable force structure wholly unprepared for a conflict with a “near peer competitor,” supercharged by the cult of lethality and VC-backed defense bros pushing AI and drones as one-size-fits-all solutions. Part II ⬇️

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Though one thing I will say, with this vast bureaucracy also came the most hilariously common cause of corruption in military's throughout history. Commanders would say they had more men on paper then they had in reality and pocket the difference when it came to pay.

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Good evening! New video for the patrons. www.patreon.com/posts/130144...

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This week's video will be about one of my favorite forms of art: Satire Maps.

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amazon scam caller just got yelled at by Robert Edwin House from New Vegas

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In this same vein, armies of scale only come along with decent population density and the thing that infuriates everyone equally, bureaucracy! There's a reason China could field large armies when Europe struggled with keeping 10,000 men in the field for a single campaign season!

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My old GP was in municipal healthcare and he told me his greatest battles were with bureaucrats and developers who seemed to believe that too much funding in healthcare might be wasted against potential community development. "But you probably don't need that this year" was a common refrain.

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It's grimly humorous that in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower she's writing about a measles outbreak in 2025 that I'm currently living through.

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Once again the bad use case for AI. This is literally a case of people being so lazy they couldn't be bothered to string images and text together to celebrate a massive historical event that has an enormous amount of documentation.

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The more I fall down the AI hole recently the more I come away with its main use is either 'plagiarism' or 'Google search with extra steps' from my interactions with its users. I'm not saying these things can't be useful tools, but what people use them for seems to be very stupid.

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Scale is often something writers can get wrong. In person 1,000 men seems like a lot. On the battlefield, it's less than you'd think. The Battle of Hastings had anywhere from 12,000 to 25,000 men present. Four hundred years later Azincourt had upwards of 35,000 on either side!

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If AGI were imminent (and for the record its not) then a not insubstantial number of concerns about education could plausibly be erased. That would of course assume that all the wildest wet dreams of AGI were true from the get go. And for the record, they probably never will be.

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The Last of Us season finale, not good. Season 3 is starting from a low point and positively clawing its way from the bottom up.

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Live shot of Canada considering the offer

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Two weeks after Andor, it's the turn of the other series about a revolution that's coming to an end. Except that The Handmaid's Tale started in 2017, over 8 years ago! I think it's the oldest series I'm still watching (I probably won't watch the last episodes until this summer). Nice oral history:

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With the Season 2 finale of The Last of Us out, we have one important question, does the it deliver a good revenge story? My argument is definitely not! matthewstienberg.wordpress.com/2025/05/25/t...

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more broadly you can't lean into 'things young men like' when those things - crypto, gambling, AI porn, online misogyny - are bad. you have to identify the good or at least neutral things - self-improvement, team sports - and lean into them.

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What is eternally forgotten in the "Ukraine gave up its nukes" discourse is that Ukraine did not in fact control the weapons and neither Moscow or Washington had an interest in letting them attempt to do so. The probability of sanctions or outright military action to secure them was high. 1/2

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Yes "spheres of influence" has never had any downsides whatsoever. Let me just quickly check the history of the 20th century and... oh... OH NO!

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I'm discovering that an author can err in the direction of thinking too small. It is extremely difficult to believe large nations can only muster about 1000 men to go to war! Medieval armies weren't miniscule!

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“Didn’t these AI chuds think about use permission???” I think they did. I think they were like:

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Military science fiction? ✅ Space battles? ✅ Power armoured marines? ✅ Things blowing up? ✅ High and noble ideals? ✅ Good people making the best of bad situations? ✅ Stand alone fiction? ✅ If you like any of the above, please check out THE VIRTUE OF BATTLE in the link! www.amazon.com/dp/B0DTFKXZX9

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Hyper individualism and main character syndrome did not mesh well with the sudden snap back of having to be socially responsible for a lot of people.

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One of the reasons I'm less scared or a modern robot uprising is planned obsolescence makes it so that our AI overlords would have to buy a new drone army every five years because even they just click accept on the terms of service.

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I've got a laptop from 2012 with a dead battery and fan that sounds like a jet turbine, but you plug it in and it runs beautifully. Meanwhile there's a laptop from 2019 that's cooked after less than 5 years!

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It is amazing how, despite at one point killing a 9/11 of people per day, so many have chosen to memory hole the human cost of the pandemic. Meanwhile the worst people you know won't shut up about masking mandates or vaccines.

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With the Season 2 finale of The Last of Us out, we have one important question, does the it deliver a good revenge story? My argument is definitely not! matthewstienberg.wordpress.com/2025/05/25/t...

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So, Ugh, Apparently I got my am and pm mixed up when I scheduled this, So enjoy waking up to discussing firearms in DND in a Sunday morning. #nerdling #dnd #history youtu.be/8HjE8SFQxdM?...

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