To be fair, right around 50% of us are vehemently opposed to this sort of thing. Far from all America

I love how most of them are kinda risqué with the clothes partially removed but hiding everything, but then every once in a while it’s FULL NUDE or HERES SOME NIPPLES

There are also rumors about… other stuff.

In the early 2010s there was a guy who would park in downtown San Diego with a van covered in accusations against the US government. He’d stand outside the van with signs and tell anyone who would listen crazy stories about military experiments. I talked to him a few times and he was always going on science ethics, mind control research, and shadow plots to radically change the viewpoint of the American people.

After we talked, I had a good chuckle and assumed he was just a crazy loon.

However, some local journalists thought he seemed a bit too coherent for the far fetched nature of his claims, and spent some time digging into his past. He held a doctorate in mathematics from an ivy-league institution. When they interviewed his grad school advisors, they gushed about how he was the most brilliant student they’d ever had. They were able to confirm that he left academia to take a research position at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), where he held a Top Secret security clearance.

When interviewed, he told journalists that his research at SPAWAR revolved around dolphin consciousness. The military allegedly had him experimenting with mind control on live dolphins in the hopes that it would improve their utility.

He says the guilt over the unethical cetacean experiments drove him to blow the whistle on the program. Nobody believed him, and it devolved into him standing on the street hoping someone with a bit of power would take him seriously enough to bring national attention to the experiments.

Is any of his claims true? No idea. He was probably crazy. However, he has just enough credibility to make you think…. maybe he was trying to blow the whistle on something real.

Yup

I think the most under appreciated aspect is that ink can dry out just from sitting around. A lot of the time and “empty” ink cartridge just evaporated off its solvents

Toner lasts forever. Perfect for occasional use

The key is to buy a brother laser printer

It’s black and white but most people rarely have a need for color. Meanwhile, the toner doesn’t dry out like an inkjet printer will

You buy that one $150 inkjet printer and you’re set.

Simplicity and precision.

Who said it was only measured as an integer? Seconds are a decimal value and many timekeeping applications require higher precision than to the millisecond. Referencing an epoch closer to our current time allows greater precision with a single double-precision floating point number.

Want to reference something before J2000? Use a negative number.

It’s independent of earth rotation, so no need to consider leap second updates either unless you are converting to UTC. It’s an absolute measure of time elapsed.

The BEST way is to use the number of seconds after the J2000 epoch (The Gregorian date January 1, 2000, at 12:00 Terrestrial Time)

Oldest F-16 I have seen in the air is no more than 50 years old. Oldest biplane I have seen flying was over 100 years old

Ergo, wood and canvas is the superior construction method

That’s where a lot of American nuclear assets are. Silos, mount cheyenne, etc

The main downside of any delayed blowback system compared to gas operated systems is that it doesn’t actually lock close, it merely slows the backwards movement of the bolt at the beginning of the cycle using mechanical advantage. This causes bulged cases and more difficult extraction with high pressure ammo. You also get higher bolt speeds with higher pressure, creating bolt bounce issues.

You can still run delayed blowback with rifle ammo using clever design (fluted chambers, anti-bounce mechanisms, etc) but gas operation is more sensible

Unfortunately, contrary to popular belief, military helicopters don’t actually run on kerosene or avgas

They run on snow-shovels of cash flung into the intakes as fast as you can manage

If we are talking realistically, star trackers in space are just good for orientation data, not position. Modern ring-laser gyros have low very drift rates. ICBM flight times are short.

Assuming the military cares to retrofit a modern IMU, I doubt a star tracker is the least bit necessary for a good navigational fix.

Perhaps we just need to generate a little excitement.

Gladiators worked nicely for the Romans, maybe we could generate similar hype with a reality show to choose the governor of each new province. I think “Love Island, Argentinian Governor Edition” would be a real hit.

Hard to argue we don’t have the appetite after spending our first 150 years conquering territory roughly double the size of the Roman Empire at its peak

Can you imagine the Italians running everything? Sure there’d be plenty of good pasta and wine worldwide but I doubt we’d stay productive with three-hour wine lubricated lunch breaks every day

I say the USA needs to have a proper go at an empire. People could serve in the legion (navy) for citizenship and everything