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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Before the age of 20: Made gunpowder and made our own enormous firecrackers/hand grenades, played with matches, climbed to the very top of very tall trees, whittled with knives all day long, cutting into high pressure car tyres with knives, made “bazookas” with firework rockets and shot them after other kids on the street, made petrol powered go-carts and raced them on public streets, disappeared out to play all day and came home for dinner, swam in lakes, climbed rocks with sheer drops into the bay, disturbed enormous ant-nests and got bitten all over (I’m sorry ants, that was a shit thing to do), dipped our fingers in melted wax, placed small stones on train tracks and waited for them to get pulverised, played a crazy game that involved throwing knives into the ground right next to bare feet, chopped firewood with sharp axes, burnt large holes in the carpet in my room (turned out a piece of tin foil was not sufficient insulation for burning sparker powder), did a lot of sleeping outside, threw each other into forests of nettles for fun, crawled through drain pipes running under the road, skateboarded down hills on country side roads, built our own skateboard ramp out of doors and nails that were sticking out ready to impale us, walked on thin ice because we liked the cracking it caused, did night time hikes through swamps, wild water rafting, sprayed burning gasoline out of bicycle pumps, played with aerosol cans and lighters, flew gliders age 15, got drunk a lot from 15 onwards (not at the same time as flying), took down the school computers with a homegrown “virus” (that’s being generous, a few scripts that modified autoexec.bat to make all the school’s computers print “teachers are dumb” instead of booting; it still caused them to call in “the experts”, got into fights and ended up going to A&E after being hit in the head with an iron rod, raided countless pear and apple plantations, played with magnifying glasses in the sharp sun and lit up a great deal of forest floors, rode cars down old train tracks, shot guns, shot air rifles, shot bows, shot cross bows, shot sling shots, maced each other, built large swings that threw us over a cliff side and four-five meter drops into water, played around inside a nuclear-protected naval bunker and accidentally activated the emergency lock down alarm, tipped over an army truck after being let out to to “do a bit of terrain driving” by our staff sergeant, set up and blew up 600 kg of TNT to demonstrate the effect of a MRLS cluster bomb in front of the Danish Queen (fun story, it blew her hat off from the pressure wave), fells asleep behind the wheel after a full day of firefighting training and ended up putting my army jeep into a field, made friends with a Soviet diplomat who tried to pump my brother and I for information about our dad’s job as a military attaché (unfortunately the colonel got sent home to Russia after being made persona non grata) - though he did teach us how to ski in the process, set up our own 380V electrics for a enormous LAN party we organised and electrocuted myself, dialled into a lot of weird BBSes to exchange all sorts of pirated software with anonymous network users, war-dialled various remote systems and tried to hack our way into them, drove all over Europe in various wrecks (accidentally smuggled weed over several international borders, which was especially frustrating as I didn’t touch the stuff and didn’t even know it had been brought), did magic mushrooms and had amazing times and dreadful bad trips (fuck MAO inhibitors), went exploring in a fenced off zone that carried nuclear warning signs (Paldiski, not long after the wall came down), detonated gas canisters of all shapes and sizes, etc etc

    It was a fun childhood, to be honest, and I’m grateful for it.


  • Det afhænger jo af opgaven. I Nordatlanten skal der mere end en korvet til, hvis du har planer om at være derude i lang tid.

    Planen om at gøre de nuværende fregatter til Østersø skibe er fuldstændigt idiotisk. Minimum 100 besætning. De oprindelige patrulje skibe havde været perfekte til den opgave, hvis de var armerede nok.

    Ubåde og mål. De er de enste skibe der findes.




  • This isn’t necessarily a market answer though. In a well functioning country, government could intervene to disrupt the status quo. For example, in Denmark, the government mandated a very, very low fee card system (imaginatively called DanCard) that basically ran at cost rather than profit. While it’s a fully private system now, regulation still governs a maximum charge which is far lower than the fee for using a Visa or Mastercard or, worse, Amex.

    In a world where government works on your behalf, actions can actually occur to benefit the citizens.





  • For Darwin sake, everybody can read this, right?

    First Trump showed Ukraine that he can make Ukraine lose without US support. This brought them to the table again.

    Now he aims to show Russia that they can’t win when Ukraine has US support. Trump will support Ukraine with new weapons and even more intel, possibly with permissions to use US weapons in deeper strike missions. This coincides with Trump getting Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire position (that Trump still doesn’t understand Russia will never agree to).

    This will go on for 4-6 weeks, then Trump will realise “math is hard, yo” and properly give up on an attempt, blaming Russia, Ukraine and/or the EU.

    Then by end of 2025 the recent Trump induced EU panic that caused Europe to react will have created a rapid expansion of European capability and will. Then the US will exit and the war will go on for another couple of years.