DjangoFett

Its a higher number than I expected. This country is proud of its ignorance.

Spending time with my kids.

Watching my children have that revelatory understanding of something that up until that moment was a mystery.

Spending quiet time with the wife and no kids.

Kids take over everything, don’t they?

Its almost like they completely ignored the actual words of the I vocation asking for clear, rational thought in all things and an upholding of nothing but the truth.

Or they heard it perfectly which is why they so desperately want to reverse it.

Or they can’t comprehend not being a fucking sheep like the bible literally fucking commands you to be, “one of the flock.”

May every believer who enforces their will on others in the name of a “higher power” suffer the worst their belief system has to offer. As an atheist, for me that means existing with religious zealots like that, so I’m already there. Your turn, believers.

Sure, but why can’t we attack a problem from multiple angles? Eliminating the source of the problem as well as attacking the bottlenecks exacerbating it is a far better solution than either one in isolation.

You could also just, you know, not use a straw at all. And if you need one for any reason, washable, reusable straws absolutely exist and would likely be the best solution overall.

Oh look, a badass.

/s

Third parties are immediately quashed by the machine.

Like them or not, DSA candidates have the right of it; infiltrate the parties and effect changes from within. You cannot simply erase one of the two parties without a vast majority responding to the blatant power grab violently.

Unless you want a full blow violent revolution. In which case do you boo boo, but I would much rather a more peaceful solution for my children to witness.

It is demonstrably a waste of taxpayer dollars.

I’m an aviation nerd more than a military nerd and think that the helmet HUD in that thing is the coolest thing ever. The sensor package is amazing and it can replace an entire AWACS by itself in a pinch. Thrust Vectoring and STOVL capabilities baked in to most variants just tickle all the right places in my flying brain.

If it is functional. Which it almost never is. And as a taxpayer, they can fuck off with that.

Designers and builders exist in two very distinct realities that usually have precious little shared space on the Venn Diagram.

The technology stuffed into that machine is impressive if and when it works, but those qualifiers are precisely why the machine itself is the pinnacle of US Military hubris and little more.

Its the flying version of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle with more variants and less actual operational use.

Using your same logic, quantum computers are totally unbeatable at everything. Pinnacle of computing. Except their operational parameters are just not feasible for daily consumer use, and even many governments can’t afford to consistently operate one. Oh, and there’s also the fact that while it can compute superpositions in record time, there are some very basic binary loops that - last I heard anyway - utterly destroy the quantum logic processes and effectively break the machine until it is reset.

So pinnacle? By a narrow definition, sure. Useful? Good? Worthwhile? No, not yet and at this rate - for the F-35 at any rate - likely never.

The F-35 isn’t the pinnacle. Its a ham-fisted attempt to replace several other aircraft whose performance is far superior to the 35 in nearly every individual area.

On top of that, look at the percentage of the F-35 fleet that is actually operational at any given moment. The majority is either partially functional or totally grounded. There aren’t enough parts and experienced mechanics to fix these perpetually broken machines.

That’s why we still fly 15s, 16s, 18s, and A-10s in combat missions. The 35 has yet to actually replace any of them in any real way.

The 22 is a far better aircraft, but it faces similar technical issues.

For raw performance data, the F-15 is still the best performing aircraft ever produced because of how the Israeli military has put it through its paces for decades. (Not a statement of support, merely reporting facts.)

And even to your point, if I’m now a marked target well over the horizon that means my stealth mission is entirely compromised. How are you going to eliminate a target that sees your sneak attack coming? Full scale invasion? Yeah, that’ll go well in China.