• papertowels
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    14 hours ago

    Iron dome is only effective against dumb rockets and mortars, with minimal range.

    Nobody is going to shoot those at the us. What a waste of money.

    EDIT: I’ve read the actual executive order. Iron dome is a metaphor, he’s actually covering things like hypersonics too.

  • megopie@beehaw.org
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    19 hours ago

    This is story is rage bate for the news media to obscure the attempt to purge the civil service to make space for cronies.

    Just put out an ultimatum to 94% of civil servants. “Work from the office or else be fired” including “paid leave” until September.

    From what I know, they’re lumping a broad range in to this “end of work from home” order. Lot of people included work remotely as part of their job, such as USGS people who are doing survey work in the field or staff at embassies.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 day ago

    I think this is a great idea. After all, we have missile attacks on our nation all the fucking time. Wait…

    Also, the “iron dome” only works because there’s a very limited area that it protects. Israel: 8,630 square miles. USA: 3,809,525 square miles. Wait… changed my mind again. This is a great idea! Go orange man. Muricah. BOOM!

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        18 hours ago

        We can’t have trains because Elon is going to build some stupid underground shit. Wait, he didn’t do that.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
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      1 day ago

      Yeah. That’s one of like 5 fatal problems with it.

      Another one being that our whole approach is deterrence. No one is making continuous Israel-style rocket attacks on the continental US because their government, and possibly their country, would be no more after a week had passed after they’d done it. Although, give it a few years, and they might learn that it’s okay.

      Trump inhabits a world where people can take shots at you all the time, because no one respects you, and it hurts you, because you’re fragile, and so you have to put up these absurd over-the-top defenses to it all the time or else you’ll get crushed by the wailing, painful weight of it all. I suspect that somewhere in his affinity for this solution is that he projects that kind of model even onto geopolitics, when the US military has an infinitely better model for dealing with the threatening actors it has to contend with.

  • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    An iron dome to protect against what? If we’re going to spend money building one, it’s Ukraine that needs one, not the US.

    I’m guessing they included that to distract people from the other executive orders.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
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      1 day ago

      We also have some unbelievably fancy and unbelievably expensive ship-launched antiballistic missiles. Every time you pull the trigger, it costs the American taxpayer anywhere between two million to thirty-eight million dollars. The Heavy would be so happy.

      I guess I am relieved to think that Trump doesn’t have enough of a grasp of geopolitics that this means anything about what he wants to do, that he thinks might get the rest of the world shooting rockets at us nonstop like happens to Israel periodically. I think he just wants an “Iron Dome” because having an Iron Dome over your country makes it sound like a cool supervillain fortress, and he wants to feel like a cool supervillain with all this cool tech. He doesn’t actually care whether we need it or what it does.

  • unmagical@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Trump framed the actions as necessary to ensure the US has “the most lethal fighting force in the world”.

    When Harris said that people freaked the absolute fuck out. But now he’s building the most lethal force by reinstating a bunch of people that refused to get vaccinated thereby being more liable to fall ill to common diseases.

    • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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      1 day ago

      I’ve always been a critic of accelerationism, because I never believed a regime powerful and stable enough to obtain power through civic processes could actually be so incompetent as to implode themselves beyond repair. Fascist states tend to actually have pretty stable civic institutions, they’re just deployed in evil ways and for evil reasons. Trump is beginning to make me think that we could actually see the complete peak-to-trough crash of a superpower in 4 years or less.

      • ninjaphysics@beehaw.org
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        1 day ago

        It’s a stretch, but if I have ever had faith in that horrendous individual, he may just be perfect for this exact job… and maybe that’s one of the main reasons why the other “strong men” of the world like him.

        • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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          1 day ago

          Especially Xi Jinping, who’s the one best situated to exploit the power vacuum that Trump will create. I’m all for imperialism dying, but that’s not on the table right now, just US imperialism being supplanted with Chinese imperialism. Whoop-dee-doo.