It's slightly more sinister than that. If you had to be a member of a Nazi organization to get ahead or get the government off your back because you might be viewed as politically unreliable the SS was a common choice. Members would do some paramilitary exercises now and then and be otherwise left alone. For things like Einsatzgruppe or Totenkopf you had to volunteer. The guy knew that well enough.
Yes. Also: that's common knowledge now, but probably wasn't in 1959 (certainly the distinction wasn't apparent in newspaper articles of the time). I don't think it was crazy for OPRF to assume, regardless of any documentation Kulle provided when he was hired, that he'd been vetted at immigration, and wasn't a war criminal. Of course, it was crazy for administrators to come to his defense in 1983 when the details were flushed out! But the village as a whole appears to have wanted him gone.
It was the great success of the Allied firebombing campaign that inflicted suburbia on the United States. US construction is just as flammable but fire is less likely to spread when the houses are farther apart.
(Let's rephrase the success part. The campaign was destructive and deadly for the civilian population but did nothing to end the war earlier. Bomber Harris and the Lord Lindemann got a career boost, though.)
There are many contemporary sources on the Japanese side that suggest the firebombings did hasten the (inevitable at this point) surrender. The US certainly had a strategic desire for Japan to surrender to the US rather than the USSR.
Yeah it turns out the whole idea of morale bombing is pretty flawed, it largely just galvanizes the population it turns out; Japan, England and Germany all reacted similarly, maybe for different cultural reasons but it was ineffective everywhere.
Really? To assert this, you need to show not that Axis production didn't decline, but that the damage done didn't prevent production from increasing even more. How does one show that?
Which, of course, proves nothing. What matters is how much it would have increased without the bombing.
Actually, it's even worse than that, since one must also subtract from this production the resources Germany was putting into air defense. This effort was massive.
I did. He was critiquing theories that airpower could win wars. This doesn't mean airpower can't help win a war. There's a large space between "useless" and "all important".
The Germans ended up devoting 1/4 of their war production and a million men to antiaircraft defense.
You are completely ignoring Japanese mindset during that time. Absolute devotion to emperor, casualties could be in millions and that wouldn't change anything. Their suicidal charges and not giving up alive are pretty famous and this comes from certain place, same as kamikadze. Some rational counting of outputs may be for bureaucrats but those were not holding any real power in Japan empire.
There is a lot of speculation why emperor and generals surrendered, even atomic bombs may not have been the triggering point as much as soviet declaration of war to Japan at 8 August 1945. Most probably it all compounded.
It's not impossible we have internal documents from the time, the US was actively reading all of the diplomatic traffic and basically anything broadcast via radio anywhere in the Japanese government. One big sticking point that appears in a lot of discussions is the demand for unconditional surrender, a lot of effort diplomatically was spent around getting past the allied agreement to only accept unconditional surrender. One big factor in that from the primary sources was the possibility of the emperor being executed or completely dethroned.
The war in Europe is highly arguable in both directions.
To assert that the bombing campaign did nothing for the war in the Pacific flies in the face of recorded history. We literally have the imperial Japanese equivalent of meeting minutes where they talk about this stuff and toward the end the sheer destruction of the bombing campaign did affect the credibility of the militarists "yeah we can still pull this off" claims in the eyes of many of the others.
in every case they have their bomb squad disarm and remove it
They would do that, the pencil detonators the Allies used to disrupt rescue and firefighting efforts after a carpet-bombing run become ever more touchy as time wears on. A bomb that is found is disarmed or exploded, else there will be a repeat of this incident down the line.
There had been longstanding concerns about fumes in the building that made one faculty member sick enough to seek medical attention and workers comp, then they clean up a little and send in a janitor to go and mop, and the following day he is found dead. The photos from the newspaper article are something, cleanup crew in full-body suits with respirator.
It's doubtful that anyone will lose anything over this incident, the hypocrisy and double standard is not acceptable.
That does not make the slightest amount of sense - Starlink is a US goverment asset, it's Brilliant Pebbles, the dishes are geolocated, a dish knows if it's moving or standing still because it needs to receive from the right satellite, there needs to be an uplink station nearby, they would make very sure not to be working for the enemy.
That's the theory, and the practice is that there's a serious undersupply of entry-level housing. There's simply not enough housing of type 3 BR, up to 1500 sqft being built, and the existing stock is deteriorating.
People will say, yabbut, airplane hangar houses out on the bajada, but you cannot subdivide those monstrosities into apartments.
If zoning was fixed as GP was saying, then more housing people want would get built rather than what pencils out best for developers.
Zoning issues like low height limits, and high parking requirements etc. contribute to the shortage by making it infeasible build a lot of 3BR/1500sqft units because returns are better by building 2 smaller units in the same footprint, and because there's a shortage of housing, they'll be able to sell less than optimal units to people that need them.
Can there be enough entry-level housing? Parcels of land near me are like $200k and I'm not in a swanky suburb... ? Every new house built out in the hinterlands (1hr+ from MPLS) is like $600k. I'm in MN which is considered affordable.
This is because of zoning. When it takes a year+ to get approval there's no reason to ever build anything but luxury. If we allowed more to be built and but red tape lower cost buildings would make sense.
There is, however, in any market a small number of big players, all politically connected, who will conspire against newcomers building new units. A couple years ago stories about that "historic laundromat" in SF were making the rounds, that is very typical.
That, and people who were born this century have no idea about the immensity of housing inflation.
In 2007, a 1-BR apartment in Hanover, NH was USD 750. With official inflation at 3 % that would be now something like USD 1325. Good luck finding anything below USD 2250 these days. That's 7 %, more than double headline inflation.
It's a complete policy failure, also because housing is about the most unproductive kind of investment there is.
Let's talk about how the lack of universal healthcare in US makes founding a company a risky endeavour, even with Obamacare. Can't give labour a break, employees need to be shackled to their job through employer-provided healthcare.
I don't think it would be quite the same as in explosive ordinance put into a device but it is very similar in that a mass hack could use the navigation system to target pedestrians and calculate the speed required to plow through them without losing control to maximize victim count. All that would be required in another remote hack as has been demonstrated on live highways in the past [1] combined with some form of AI or gaming engine. A mitigating control could be more bollards near sidewalks and more hydraulic bollards on intersections that have a lot of foot traffic to confine the hacks to smaller blast zones. This won't protect the occupants but maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of physical friction brake.
A parking garage full of electric vehicles properly compromised (at least some of them) would be very ... energetic. Burning lithium batteries aren't precisely explosive, but they are still very angry. It is plausible that you could destroy a building with a chain reaction of battery fires. That is one of the safety concerns I think might not yet be fully accounted for (what happens when a bunch of electric cars are in a full closed lot and one of them starts on fire).
Any of the smart plugs or other devices plugged directly into the grid could be intentionally compromised to start a house fire. Millions of homes simultaneously catching fire would be catastrophic. Apartment buildings where a fire starts in 10%+ of the units.
This is a strong statement that probably isn’t true. The power transformers in those devices usually aren’t controlled and the things which are controlled will only sometimes be able to start fires. No doubt that some “smart” devices will have vulnerabilities that could cause fire, but just because there’s an available controller does not mean there’s an avenue to set fire to a device.
In short, unless a device is profoundly poorly designed, there’s no way to blink an LED so incorrectly that it starts a fire. (And many smart devices really aren’t doing much more than that)
The greater concern is lithium batteries catching fire while they are being charged. NYC seems to have a problem with dubious e-bikes already. If a few hundred or thousand battery controllers become compromised and the battery pack is charged with too much current it's like the bat bomb on testosterone.
> maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of physical friction brake
It depends on the manufacturer, but I think this is already the case with Tesla cars? The brake specifically isn't drive-by-wire, it's an electrically assisted hydraulic brake - so even if a malicious actor could get the car to not do the assist part anymore, you can still stop by pressing the pedal hard.
I feel like bollards and other form of separating roads from pedestrians are unviable on the large scale. I hope manufacturers start focusing more on sandboxing any internet-connected parts of their software and leaving the whole car-driving part inaccessible from any of that.
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