Australians are now making pre-programmed single-use drones out of cardboard.
These drones were used yesterday to attack Moscow. They can fly for up to 120 km carrying up to 3 kg of explosives.
They ship stacked flat and then you assemble them by hand in minutes.
This is a huge transformation in our understanding of contemporary warfare.
“contemporary warfare”
Meanwhile, russia continues to be very, very…. russian….
https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1694468840296481272
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What prevents Palestinians from using them to attack Tel Aviv? Or my city?
Can they be programmed to attack specific exact places? With cameras too?
I hope Australians don’t sell the technology to everyone, but it’s a matter of time before every terrorist organization on Earth has them too. 😦
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Israel is some 420 km in length and about 115 km across at the widest point.
So 120 km is already sufficient to attack every point. 😦
They’ll fly further in no time anyway.
Now thought about organized crime, which is already more powerful than governments in several countries.
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” nobody can put that genie back in its bottle”
Meanwhile russia speeds up its journey to the past by shipping horses to the front….
I’m far more worried about the horses than russian soldiers.
https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1696069802282930487
These bastards won’t rest until they damage every living creature imaginable. How absolutely disgusting.
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they are already being used by organized crime on the US southern border.
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The scary thing will be when hundreds/thousands of these plan and attack in coordinated swarms.
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Nota bene: try to stay out of hospitals.
If the thing that sent you to one doesn’t kill you, the doctors might take up the challenge.
Sometimes they even leave something behind that doesn’t kill you, but instead slowly grows colourful pockets of “white blood cells” that are sometimes blue, green, purple, and even yellow, until it’s overloaded with pathogens.
Then sometimes they tell you that they got it all, only for the wound to open up enough so you can pull the rest out yourself.
Slap a Quick Clot over the bleeding hole, hope you didn’t grab one of the old ones that goes thermonuclear hot, and it’s back to the hospital so they can try to kill you again, this time with antibiotics!
Such fun times to be had!
I realise that I’ve likely been a pain in the ass for a few people, but right now I’m a pain in the ass for myself as well, so nobody should feel excluded here. 🙂
Anyway! [grumble]
The magic term you’re looking for is “tactical area denial” or TAD, and it consists of whatever technology is needed to stop anything from gnat drone swarms (these things) to flying lawnmowers to MQ-9s.
Some airports quietly own some TAD systems so they can force drones down that fly too close to restricted airspace.
One I’ve seen looks like a hilariously overbuilt movie prop shotgun that “shoots” a wide RF disruption beam so that the drone switches into a mode where it lands out of self-preservation.
But you could also do TAD where anything with a small motor in it that flies though the TAD field has to survive the surges that go through the motor, which is not something small DC motors are typically built for.
The future for this is in the past, specifically the sci-fi past, such as the one that Neal Stephenson dreamed about in “The Diamond Age” where the cities of the future are protected by clouds of weaponised nanotech aerostats that attach themselves to anything plausibly harmful so they can tear these things apart.
In that future, apparently the Grey Goo Scenario works for the good guys.
“Once an advance is made, nobody can put that genie back in its bottle.”
Not always.
What if I told you there’s something that can eat technology?
Oh, I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it exists, it’s often really hungry, but it moves very slowly, taking decades or even centuries to erase certain forms of technology.
You wake up one morning expecting the branch of futurist technology you’re on to keep producing new things, only to discover that this thing ate all of the knowledge of how you got that tech in the first place.
Think about how it works, that’s the trick to understanding what it is and how it manages to exist.
Here’s an example for Clarissa then: Ukraine still made vacuum tubes back in the previous decade, and it even made the types of high power amplifier tubes needed for such things as BBC Radio 4 on longwave (as in frequencies below US AM radio).
Did Ukraine still make vacuum tubes because it had the technology and never gave it up, or did these tubes get made with new factories, new tooling, and so on and so forth?
Many of those types of tubes are things that you can’t get made anywhere else because the companies who made them stopped making them, and yes, in theory, you can still make them.
But what about those refined pre-transistor 1950s and 1960s tubes made with the state-of-the-art materials?
That required specific skills, knowledge, and infrastructure … and it’s pretty much all gone except for that tube factory in Ukraine that produced the BBW Radio 4 LW amplifier tubes.
Oh, BBC will still shut down BBC Radio 4 LW, but it had several years to make the switch to DAB/FM and Internet radio that it didn’t have otherwise.
Pity the Shipping Forecast is probably on the rocks.
In another decade, few will understand what was going on with “Pharaohs” by Tears for Fears. 🙂
Sorry you’ve been dealing with the medical profession 😦 I hope everything heals up properly. If it’s any consolation, I’ve been on here way too much lately because I’m laid up with a broken appendage.
There was a time, long ago, that I almost went into medical billing/coding for a job. God, who is merciful and always working for the good of our souls, prevented it. A narrow escape! I can almost smell the brimstone on my heels.
On the loss of knowledge/tech: I think about this a lot. It is the payphone problem writ large. What do you do when the latest greatest thing– whose universal adoption has killed the previous tech so thoroughly that people hardly even know what it was, fails? We keep climbing the ladder of technology and sawing off the lower rungs. The internet has gobbled up such huge swathes of technology and know-how, that when it fails (not if– I give it 20 years max. Maybe as little as 10– not apocalypse fail hopefully, but gradual decline in usefulness until it’s not worth paying for)… it’s not gonna be a return to early 90s tech for us. The infrastructure for that is gone. The fall will be much steeper, in ways most of us can’t even imagine yet.
And so, perhaps it’s futile, but when we’re out at estate sales and thrift stores, I always keep an eye out for nice analog tools. My eldest uses a slide rule on his algebra and feels he is getting away with something naughty, because I’ve never allowed them calculators for school work, and (he thinks) I clearly don’t understand that it does the same thing. Ironically, we use the internet to find and print instruction manuals for these things. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s something.
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A surgery I had years ago was supposed to be sealed up with some kind of fibrin glue, maybe something like Vetbond.
Instead, the area was stuffed with surgical gauze and sealed up. That opened up years later, gave me septicaemia (yet again), and sent me to the hospital.
They thought they got it all out, and then sent me home with it all sutured up again. They didn’t get it all out, the sutures broke, and I pulled the rest of it out myself.
Fortunately we keep Quick Clot handy in case of serious puncture injuries, including bullet holes.
While all of the treatment was going on, they put me on antibiotics, but I was too out of it to know what they put me on.
What they didn’t do was that they didn’t read my allergies sheet that said what would cause adverse reactions.
Some of those reactions involve loss of memory, and so after the worst of the beta lactams I absolutely shouldn’t have, for which adverse reactions are guaranteed, there are everyday normal things I’d forgotten.
This is not the first time this has happened, and so I wrote a little Firefox add-on to deal with the problem of forgetting stuff to the point that I’d be dangerous to myself, and I turned it on shortly before going to the hospital for the first round of getting this infected mess out of me.
Anything walled off like that, such as every blog I’d visit, got stuffed into the add-on.
So what does it do? It randomly redirects me to a site in my bookmarks, and so if I bulk open a bunch of tabs, there’d be a few come up normally and then the rest would be redirected, and so I’d click the link for here and get sent somewhere randomly, such as a YouTube link for a video I’d saved to bookmarks.
The idea was that the last time this happened, being on the Internet really wasn’t safe, and so I shut down everything until I’d be able to notice what was going on.
That was yesterday when I noticed what was happening, and in my Firefox add-ons was the “Turn This Off When You Remember Why It Exists” add-on that I had to disable yesterday for everything to start working again.
The short version then: knowing I’d probably get mind wiped by antibiotics, I locked off this part of the Internet for myself, then forgot about this place and everyone on it existing for several months.
While this has been going on, we sold over two-thirds of everything land related, started construction on a new place outside the US, and have been shifting money and stuff around so that we don’t have to hole up in North Florida.
“… I almost went into medical billing/coding for a job …”
Years ago an ex-girlfriend tracked me down, presumably because she hadn’t any better ideas.
Back when we were together, she was actually brilliant, which of course was part of why we were together.
After we went our separate ways because of going to different universities, she thought it’d be a grand idea to go into something that sounded like a profession, but was actually a vocation, with the added problem that the good jobs in it were for people that we can refer to obliquely as being “in-network”, which she wasn’t.
It turns out she’d moved back near her old home town, but not in it, and was working at one of those kinds of medical billing and coding jobs.
You know that feeling when you reach inside yourself and all you blurt out is, “I loved you when you were beautiful and brilliant!”
Yeah, doesn’t feel grand, and of course it lands about as flatly as you might expect, but then you realise you’re OK with that because there wasn’t any other way for it to land?
So we both know what brimstone smells like, there’s that at least.
But I can’t fault her, because here I am looking at physical stuff, such as awards I’d won, and I’ve often had no idea how I did these things. I’ll go look at one of those, read about what was involved online, wonder how I’d managed to do that, and then bits of it would come pouring back to me despite how the antibiotics chewed away some of the links to those memories.
My current girlfriend is still a girlfriend mostly because while I couldn’t remember a lot of things, there was every conceivable justification for waiting until I could, so this is at least a step in that direction.
BTW, land is considerably easier to sell than houses, and so we got a reasonable amount for the land that we’ve sold, plus it helped that we had crops and other improvements on it that the neighbour who bought the land happened to like.
But it’s increasingly obvious that even if we sell the houses for what we paid plus the cost of improvements, it’s going to be a tough sale because the only people with cash to buy houses are institutional buyers and people with deep cash reserves, while the rest can’t afford the interest.
Back to loss of knowledge, it helps to have a kind of “memory cathedral” and actual stuff on hand to rebuild what’s needed to implement old ideas and old stuff, because you’ll never know when you’ll need it.
That sounds horrific. Would you mind being prayed for?
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I’m so sorry, Post. This is terrible. I hope you start recovering little by little. What a thing to happen. But you clearly still have your sense of humor, and that’s precious.
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BTW, I’m replying to myself because I hate how this blog’s comment indent feature works, especially on mobile …
“But at least you got to travel, Crackpot!”
The neighbour tried to look on the bright side, and while it’s nice, it’s just a little silly.
“Ah, yeah, you do know I was on a plane so I could reset a password?”
For several weeks I couldn’t remember the password to the encrypted volume that holds the KeePass and PasswordSafe files for all of my accounts, split into several compartments. It’s really good security, safe from governments, organised crime, and … me!
But couldn’t I put together some kind of “powers of attorney” document for that?
No, because that isn’t part of the legal code where I have that particular wodge of cash stashed, a place where there is also no such thing as the “public domain”.
Nothing automated ran out of the most important set of accounts from which I’d transfer money manually to the others as a security precaution. It was so secure that it prevented even me from breaking into it out of necessity.
When money started running low, that apparently put enough pressure on me to start waking the hell up.
But the neighbour’s still trying to make lemon curd out of lemons.
“Was it sunny and warm?”
No, it was noisy, dusty, and stupidly hot.
So of course the neighbour had to hear all about it. 🙂
Misery doesn’t love company, that’s a myth.
Misery admires other misery and aspires to be even more miserable than that.
Preventive measures are getting backed down, and so while prayers are nice, I’d feel a bit silly getting them now.
Some of these preventive measures involved making over-the-top payments to companies that do things for us, and so some of them have been contacting me about the not inconsiderable credit balances they’re holding.
I told the neighbour about these and told him that’s the bright side, that there are people who could take advantage, but in the main they haven’t.
But when the neighbour insisted that people “around here” are just like that, I hadn’t the heart to tell him.
The strangers who had the most patience with me and who protected that wodge of cash even from myself aren’t American.
I spent a few days nearby massaging my head with non-alcoholic drinks, eating surprisingly affordable American cuisine, and marvelling at oddly out of place food trucks serving essentially perfect meals while my new advisors helped me establish better procedures in the event something like this happens again.
What I can’t change is the fact that there are drugs some people can take for run-of-the-mill infections that will leave me with holes in my memory after just a few days. They have names, they are on a list, and most of the names on that list were conveniently ignored.
This wasn’t a few days I was on them, this was several weeks.
And the loss is selective: I can barely remember anything I did in Toronto but I can remember meetings with The Regime.
Plus The Regime remembers me, because their people showed up a few times.
Would never have expected that at all, BTW, and I am absolutely certain there are parts of why that I totally do not want to know.
The neighbour still tried to wrap his head around what’s been going on.
“Have you ever seen the movie ‘Memento’”?
Yes.
It’s a documentary.
Absolutely certain of it.
Ask me in a few weeks when I read my notes again. 🙂
Well, you still have your sense of humor. I guess some personality traits can’t be wiped off no matter what. 🙂
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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