won't happen for now, drones are generally too slow for that. Unless it's stationary/on the ground. Ukrainians did manage to shoot down 2 russian KA-52 helicopters mid-flight last week though.
Ukraine is currently building 4.5 million drones per year. That's one drone every 30 seconds. Lockheed Martin delivered a record 191 F35s in 2025. That's less than one F35 every 1.91 days.
Iran has thrice the population of Ukraine and 1.5x (nominal) to 3x (PPP) the GDP. With Ukraine building 23560 drones for every F35 the US is building, it would be quite reasonable to expect Iran to be able to build a few thousand per F35 ass well. Iran already has a fairly mature drone industry supplying the Russian side of the UA-RU, after all.
In other words: If it were to come to a race of attrition, the US can't afford to lose a single one. Even ignoring the massive cost difference, F35s simply cannot be constructed fast enough.
This assume that all F35 are sitting on unprotected fields waiting for all those drones to come. Which is utter BS. Sure the US can loose few in unfortunate circumstances and it wont matter much.
A squadron of F-35s is worth more than the Moskva. Russia had to fight hard to regain the title of biggest loser and it could lose that in a single incident. But more than the financial loss the loss of having invested in something stupid is felt when you can't use any of the related blunders as you intended and have to keep them at a distance from the cheap practical warfare.
It's even worse, actually. This attack seems to be done by a regular quadcopter, so suddenly you have to be worried about your $100M aircraft being destroyed by a $500 drone if your base security isn't absolutely perfect.
The US has plenty of bases in the area, but considering the ease of an attack and the general anti-US sentiment of the region, projecting power into the Middle East is going to become an awful lot more difficult...
V-weapons were also an encounterable weapon which could strike from beyond range. Massive boondoggle though, just a very expensive expensive way to deliver very few explosives; waste of industrial output.
Look into how much current war costs already. And there is no end in sight yet. Loosing one F35 is insignificant (well maybe it will hurt someone's ego but that is about it).
What else would anyone expect from a combative elderly person? It's always "I don't need help!" as they continually find something new to fuck up. The only difference here is there were a bunch of fools who thought it was a good idea to put this type of person in charge of our country instead of forcing him into a memory care home.
Unfortunately many people now strongly dislike receiving unexpected phone calls. You may (i have) genuinely upset some people by calling them. Yes, I’m rolling my eyes too, but that’s how they feel
That was my first thought as well, and I am one of those people. I strongly dislike being called, especially unexpectedly, and much prefer a quick text message to maybe meet up in person, if the opportunity presents itself (e.g. if one of us happens to be in the town of the other one)
Yeah, that's one of the reasons calls out of the blue are mostly reserved for emergencies in my family and friend group. Texts eliminate that factor, and are more polite. A phone call represents immediacy / urgency ("this merits interrupting whatever you might be doing right now"). A text like "hey are you free for a quick call?" lets the recipient pivot from what they're doing and engage on their terms. IMHO it's more considerate.
You're about one step away from sending an email to ask if you can send a text to ask if you can make a phone call.
It's not "more considerate" - you can ignore a phone call the same you can ignore a text. It's merely asking other people to optimize for you convenience only. That's perfectly fine to ask for, but it doesn't help with making friendships easy.
Disagree with this. Sending a text saying "Can we call when you're free" is more considerate of the other persons time than a random call. It sounds like you're trying to make it sound absurd by your 'send an email to send a text', rather than focus on _why_ the text makes sense.
Thanks, yes, exactly. (I didn't respond to parent bc borderline trolling.)
FWIW, when I do make the occasional unexpected call, I make sure to start the call with "sorry to interrupt, everyone's fine, got a sec?" or similar.
Contra the other commenter's assertion, phone calls to friends and family are typically NOT as easily ignored as texts, precisely because they're not screened. Close friends and family leave themselves open to direct contact largely to account for potential emergencies. Their phone is going to ring and/or buzz, and (for at least some number of seconds) they won't know why. During which time they might reasonably fear it's terrible news. So you're starting the interaction by having interrupted and scared them. For no good reason. Failure to understand this is maybe just a sign of immaturity. Live long enough to be on the receiving end of such calls and it'll hopefully register.
texts and emails are asynchronous. If they want to email me to call me, sure. I'd find it weird, but it's just as accessible as a text.
>It's merely asking other people to optimize for you convenience only.
no, it's compromise. Maybe they're free right now. maybe they are swamped all day with work or errands. Calling out of the blue is asking people to optimize for my convenience.
That’s the reason I started reaching out to old friends. A friend had died and I knew no one else would tell them. One I even had to track down through email and ask for their new phone number. But now that I’m in regular contact I find calling easier and I don’t have worst-case-scenario fears anymore.
100% this. Apart from my SO and scammers, no one randomly calls me. If my brother would call me out of the blue I'd assume the worst. (Also, the one random call I vividly remember getting the past years is my mom calling me to let me know my grandfather unexpectedly passed away).
It's just needlessly anxiety-inducing. Not to mention it's a major inconvenience to interrupt someone randomly for a chat.
Is it? I think the exact opposite is true. Most people's life is a walking calendar. these days if someone can't "schedule" something they're losing their minds. Life was spontaneous when people didn't monitor every second of their day, when someone walked up to your house and asked you a question to your face, there wasn't a "I'll reply in ten minutes when I'm comfortable" button.
We're living in a comfort obsessed society where, when you can't run away and plan your reply, people have a panic attack. Dating for young people is terrible because it's about as spontaneous as a legal appointment.
Spam phone calls have become so horrendously common here in the US (multiple a day) that I just keep my mobile on do not disturb 24/7 with exceptions for those in my core contact group. Maybe I'll miss a call or two that actually had substance, but I'd rather be slightly more isolated than constantly annoyed. Find me on various online platforms with text chat, voice or video if you really want to reach me. Or don't.
Same here. Spam calls have really picked up these last couple of years, I also get multiple per day. Here in Switzerland you need to register with your ID to get a mobile phone number, but somehow these spam callers still manage to appear to be calling from a mobile phone, which used to be a strong signal for “not spam”.
It’s gotten so bad that I completely ignore unknown numbers, except if I’m expecting a call. This has its own downsides of course.
Tragedy of the commons. :-(
Maybe call screening can help, but at least on iOS it isn’t available yet here.
Did you get laid off over the year? My spams always skyrocket on a job search. Just shows you what they are really doing with your resume (despite my LinkedIn profile being 15 years old and mostly updated. It's not hard to get my resume).
Also, AI acceleration the last few years. most of the calls I do answer are clearly fake voices trying to sound real, as opposed to some TTY.
For me it's been down the last couple years, compared to a surge under the previous president. That means he's responsible, right? Or it could be I bought a house and financial institutions leak phone numbers like a colander
It cooled under Biden for me, but who am I to say. I wouldn’t be surprised if current admin stop prosecuting against the spam callers. Some times these outfits are connected to politicians. Have you seen the 3-part documentary, Telemarketers?
Bill 936 which would have required 1:1 expressly written consent to call was struck down in the 11th circuit court of appeals right before it was set to go into effect in Jan 2025 [1].
Trump flipped the 11th circuit by making a number of judge appointments in Jan 2020 [2]. As you correctly guessed, these two things are not unrelated.
There are also heaps of people that love getting phonecalls, or love to get a nice voice message.
There's a whole other world of people that call and enjoy calling!!!!
Why let a subset of people rule your behaviour towards others not in that subset?
When people call, I try to encourage that. Unless I'm busy or they're too needy, so I don't answer.
I am especially encouraging towards anyone that struggles with text messages (one of my oldest friends was illiterate, and I've got other friends that would call themselves dyslexic).
I undermine that by messaging when I should call, because I like the written word.
N=1 here but I love getting out of the blue phone calls from the couple of friends that do it. If I can't pick up, or am too busy to chat, I just swipe up on of the prebaked "sorry, can't chat now" SMS responses.
It's them who initiate 90% of the calls too, and nobody cares.
many people are now unable to discuss personal things at all, as I have a small business that is growing, I have interviewed hundreds of people seeking employment, and flat out refuse to even talk about resumes or past qualifications, as what counts in this case is an ability to comunicate verbaly about a combination of technical specifications, and then the mundane details of achiving them, so a verbal interview,that focuses on there full skill sets, and youth, mentors, and other influenced, many choke and hand up, sputter and repeat the speel they have practiced, one in 50 can
roll with it cheerfully.
I feel that's more an issue in a job interview. You want to use every minute to make yourself look good, and the general "wisdom" is that employers don't care about your hobbies or social life or passions. They want someone to do the job right now.
I wonder what is driving this. I too sense that people are really guarded these days. For me, I work remotely and it's hard to build true rapport through Slack.
Why would I open up on a company chat? I don't want my life on record to be used against me by HR later on. I'll tell some friendly coworkers about vacation details, but certainly not on a paper trail.
Lack of barrier breaking. Fewer people call and talk outside of slack so it becomes the norm to not talk outside of slack. When you do it seems weird. Break the norm.
This is an IS statment, not an OUGHT statement: Artists are very high-status / high-prestige. As such, their work and livelihoods are more important and more deserving of protectionism.
I love the idea. It's bold. But, I hate it from an information architecture perspective.
This is something that is, of course, super relevant given context management for agentic AI. So there's great appeal in doing this.
And today, it might even be the best decision. But this really feels like an alpha version of something that will have much better tooling in the near-future. JSON and
Markdown are beautiful simple information containers, but they aren't friendly for humans as compared with something like Notion or Excel. Again I'll say, I'm confident that in the near-future we'll start to see solutions emerge that structure documentation that is friendly to both AIs and humans.
Like a compiler, we could optimize this by doing no work at all! Once you realize no one will look at any of the results, final or intermediate, there's nothing left to do.
I agree it's mostly only used in conjunction with bullshit, but during a hype bubble a lot of the users of that phrase don't fully realize they're spouting bullshit, and it's used in earnest.
It’s still wild because it’s mostly useless. Rewriting a few core components might improve security a bit, but otherwise it’ll not change anything for end users. This is the typical attractive but useless project for bored programmer with no product or business vision.
