Ukraine built 8 million drones in the first half of 2026. Many different types, but the majority of them are designed to directly attack humans and light vehicles.

The limiting factor in their deployment is the number of operators - currently the most common operating model is 1 drone per operator at a time, which means there are only so many drones in the air at the same time. These kinds of hunting algorithms will allow the scale of drone warfare to increase by loosening the operator bottleneck.

There is force generation (recruitment, manufacturing, organization, etc.) and force employment (actually using those resources to achieve goals). Force generation for unmanned systems is already mature - again we are making millions of these things already - further advancement will come in force employment.

And what a fresh hell that will be.

Regardless of how wars are won, they are prevented by altering the risk picture for the enemy.

This is also why many smaller NATO states are scrambling to procure long-range missiles outside of US control. In a hybrid war with Russia, they would control the escalation ladder - I.e. be able to yeet some high explosives at powerplants and fuel depots - rather than relying on Washington to grant permission.

Ukraine has been doing similar with the flamingo and other cruise 'missile drone' projects. Iran as well - look at their response to US aggression.

The trajectory is clear, mass precision strike is cheap and corresponding defense is not. Having a stockpile of millions of flying problems for your enemy to consider is the best deterrent short of nuclear weapons.

I'd personally rather see her jump to the Senate for a term, or NY Governor, before trying for the presidency. I'd say the same for any House rep. Governors and Senators have the clearest parallels to the office, as executive and foreign-policy roles themselves.

I think AOC is a high-variance candidate - much the same way Trump was in 2016 - and she will either get much more or much less support than expected in the general election.

I think her biggest electoral baggage will be her statements over the years on the 'Woke 1.0' items that the electorate soured on. She has moderated her past statements here more recently, which leaves a lot of doubt as to her actual beliefs and policy goals. She'll be attacked for that from the left and the right, and it will take oxygen away from a progressive economic agenda that would likely be broadly popular if explained well.

Whoever the dem candidate ends up being, I doubt they can rely on the same level of support as the party received in the midterms. 2 years is an eternity in politics and 2028 will likely be defined by some new crisis that isn't even on our radar right now. If she runs, I'll likely vote for her (at least, based on who else seems to be running as of now).

We'll see these kinds of things in the next war. Russia and Ukraine would be there already if they had time to stockpile the drones rather than needing to deploy them as fast as they can be manufactured.

With a few years of peace to build a reserve, there will more than enough drones and cheap spring-assisted launchers to serve as a terrifying new arm of MAD.

There needs to be some distinction and nuance to this conversation.

Adult sports is and entirely different kettle of fish from youth sports. Studies have shown that after ~2 years on HRT, trans women have performance in line with cis women, rather than cis men. For adult leagues, this is about as clear of an evidence-driven requirement as there can be, and it helpfully eliminates the 'I'm going to identify as a women for the WNBA draft so I can make a political statement' stuff. Adult sports careers, even in the most demanding sports are at least ~10yrs long, giving enough time to meet the HRT requirement.

For youth sports, particularly highschool just post-puberty, there is not a clear distinction. If we stick the same 2-year HRT cutoff, that would effectively eliminate trans participation in sports already, as full medical transitioning is rare at that young of an age, and anyone who decided to transition after the start of the sophomore year season would be ineligible for their remaining time in high school. This would mean the child would need to commit to full medical transition by the age of 15-16 at the latest - in which case they could play one season in their senior year. I don't think this kind of time pressure would be healthy for young people making that kind of choice.

If we can't use that evidence-driven criterion, we are just out in the messy jungle of feelings and politics.

Frankly, I don't see a solution that satisfies every consideration for this case. All kids should get to play sports, but it should also be as fair as possible to every participant. Kids shouldn't feel hopeless because someone on their team or the other team is literally built differently, nor should a trans athlete be denied real competition and opportunities to learn through failure and effort.

There are basically 4 options:

1. Athletes are required to play in their birth gender until 2 years of HRT
2. Athletes can freely choose which league to play in
3. Exclude transgender people from sports
4. Case-by-case basis rife with potential for abuse, confusion, and resentment

Each of them will make some people very unhappy, and ultimately be unfair to some subset of the trans population.

Because the polity that survived to form medieval England, and from there the British Empire and modern United Kingdom, considered itself Saxon.

Wessex, Alfred the Great. 'The Last Kingdom' - the only Christian kingdom in England that was not conquered by the invading Danes. Future rulers would emphasize their historical ties here as a means to gain legitimacy.

Nuclear was the best solution in the 70s. If we had built all the plants then, we wouldn't be in our current mess.

Today, the economics don't make any sense. Energy from a fission plant is much more expensive than from renewables+storage, and nuclear plants that are operating often have to be curtailed in summer (when energy need is high) due to a lack of cooling water. The timeline to build a new plant is decades - far too late to make a difference if we started now.

There would also have to be global trust for literally every country to be operating multiple nuclear reactors, which does not exist today and likely never will. The odds that the US simply allows most of Sub-Saharan Africa - currently ruled by a set of characters ranging from (in the State Department's view) dictators to Jihadists - operational control over advanced nuclear technology do not look very strong.

Capsaicin can irritate intestines just like it irritates every other mucus membrane. When that happens, they will often decide to speed up the substances trip, which leaves less time for water to be extracted. Other food will get dragged along with the expedited.

So you are left with a spicy, liquidy, morass of poor choices that burns the starfish as its last 'fuck you' on the way out.

Doesn't happen to everyone, but it does happen.

Rubio is the Secretary of State, he cannot escape being tied to Trump's foreign policy disasters; foreign policy is the main job of his office.

It became somewhat inevitable once companies started buying mass amounts of Pis for every purpose because they were so cost-efficient.

It used to be an education nonprofit, but it effectively became an industrial SBC supplier.

There are a couple things that cement Steam at the top, imo.

The first is obviously familiarity and completeness - everyone knows Steam and it almost certainly has whatever game you are looking to buy.

The second is added value - very good controller support, mod support, (some) good community spaces, easy multiplayer sessions, proton integration, regular updates, etc. These are genuinely worth using the launcher for.

The third is the single-launcher desire (or the sunk cost effect depending on your point of view). People already have massive libraries on steam, keeping their collection there just makes it easier to browse and find whatever they want to play. Yes, there are other solutions for this, but that is an extra step - there will always be people who don't take that step.

Familiarity can't exactly be bought - Epic tried. Completeness can be bought (Epic, Gamepass) but it is hideously expensive. Added value is difficult to get to parity (mod authors aren't going to instantly port to a new launcher even if there is support). The single launcher effect is a massive first-mover advantage.

I completely agree that Valve having a monopoly on PC game distribution is unhealthy long-term, they also just offer a better experience to me as a consumer than the competition. Even when games have GoG versions, for instance, they are often not updated as frequently and mod support is often more difficult, controller support is hit-or-miss, etc.

In the most charitable light, his statement had merit. Same way as there is a resource allocation issue with cars - the vast majority of them sit around for the vast majority of the time.

If tech companies hadn't spent the last 30 years aggressively fucking everyone over for every penny they could get, maybe we would be more inclined to take the charitable view rather than see his statements as yet another attempt to add a fence and charge a toll.