Happy Thanksgiving! If you aren’t an American, you can overeat and nap tomorrow anyway. We’re very egalitarian that way.

Books

• I’m going to be spending my time on When Tigers Ruled the Sky and Empires of the Sea this Thanksgiving.

Defense

• India thankful for US sale of MK-45 naval guns – Special Black Friday deal: 13 guns, along with ammunition and supporting equipment, for $1 billion.
• Marines thankful for 1940s innovations in minesweeping – They’re bringing back a Crab-style anti-mine flail, except that it’s on the front of a robot instead of a tank.
• Israelis thankful for good electronic warfare – Video seems to show Syrian SAMs flying directly into the dirt during some Israeli raids.
• Aerial mercenaries thankful for private aerial refueling companies – In this case, though, the USAF is likely to be the most thankful. Existing private aerial refueling company Omega Air bought a boom-equipped tanker.
• USAF thankful for the long and storied career of the conventional AGM-86C – The nuclear AGM-86B soldiers on.
• Tinpot dictators thankful for new Turkish entrant into the attack helicopter market – Roughly Apache-class in takeoff weight and power. Roughly Ka-52-class in weird radar placement.
• Indian soldiers thankful for new rifle-class helmet armor applique
• Germans thankful for 40 years of the Leo 2 – Also, they’re going with Trophy as their active protection system.
• American arms inspectors thankful for New START – They had a gander at Russia’s new Avangard hypersonic boost-glide jobber.
• Think tanks grateful for the opportunity to weigh in on logistics and great power competition – Short version: you never have enough trucks.

History

• British and Argentinian carrier crews thankful for mild winds on a May, 1982 afternoon – If Veinticinco de Mayo had a little more wind to turn into, she could have launched a Skyhawk attack on the Royal Navy’s task force approaching the Falklands.

Science and Technology

• 80s cyberpunk buffs thankful for Tesla’s Cybertruck – This is a story about why it has bolsters on the side of its bed.
• Potential anonymous hackers potentially thankful for the FBI’s misattribution of the Sony hack to North Korea? – I’m stretching the established headline form a bit here, but give me a break. This isn’t easy.
• What We’re Reading author thankful for updates to old stories – Do you remember QuadrigaCX CEO Gerald Cotten, the hundreds of millions of dollars of cryptocurrency missing from his company, and his alleged death in a part of India where buying fake documents is a popular cottage industry?

Sport

• Rams and Chargers not thankful for one another – The marriage of two teams in one stadium is a rocky one.
• Small Texan high schools grateful for six-man football

Guns

• Virginia gun rights advocates thankful for sanctuary counties – And, because elections have consequences, more onerous regulations are in the pipeline.
• Gun rights advocates everywhere thankful for a former Brady Campaign president joining their team – Dan Gross switches sides.

Grab Bag

• California DMV thankful for easy access to tasty driver personal information – Which they sell, and which they made $50 million on last year. Other DMVs do it, too.
• Pro-democracy camp in Hong Kong thankful for council elections – They now hold a 17-to-1 advantage in districts controlled, up from 0-18.
• German jewel thieves thankful for lax museum security – They took the Green Vault in Dresden for items valued at a billion dollars.

So, Winter Wargaming is Rule the Waves 2. For those outside of the know, it covers naval architecture and battles at sea between 1900 and 1955. I’m thinking France for this game, given that it has a clear route to dominating the Mediterranean, and that’s always a fun place to play.

Defense

• The Economist slams aircraft carriers for the usual reasons

Guns

• Join the American Suppressor Association, get a chance to win a can
• Colorado’s standard-capacity magazine ban is going as well as all such things do – Whoever could have guessed that widespread noncompliance would be a thing?

Science and Technology

• More Hubble parameter uncertainty – But only because the LambdaCDM model predicts something which clashes with actual observation, which is further evidence for my heterodox claim that modern cosmology is all wrong. Epicycles and the luminiferous ether also fit observations really well.
• Supreme Court to hear appeal in Oracle v. Google Google v. Oracle – That is, the zombie case that never dies; that is, the case in which the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit declared APIs copyrightable; that is, the case which has been hanging over open implementations of proprietary APIs for the past year or so.
• Magnetic, reflective carbon? – We’ll see if it holds up, or if it was merely a case of contaminated samples.
• Wind turbine blades can’t be recycled – That doesn’t seem very sustainable.
• GPS spoofing levels up – In Shanghai, individual vessels are having their positions individually spoofed, which is some next-level stuff if you remember how GPS works.
• Boeing’s current difficulties are McDonnell Douglas’ fault

Grab Bag

• New York City has a bustling black market for food cart permits – Also, they permit food vending and food carts differently.
• Californians surprised at backlash when they start ruining other states
• Related: $800 a month to rent a coffin-size pod in LA
• Ford and GM abandon all cars smaller than SUVs, immediately run into trouble – I was kind of considering a Ford Focus someday, after the Mini bites the dust, but that’s not going to happen anymore.
• A 55-foot mega-truck, built to explore Antarctica, was a failure, but a cool failure – 16-minute video.
• Conspiracy theory Twitter thread of the week, Deep State edition – Why are diplomats so big on canning Trump? Because they’re probably embezzling from foreign aid funds.
• Democrats candidates’ tax plans include uncapping Social Security taxes – Makes perfect sense to me, if they want the rich to pay their fair share, but the howling from the Bay Area and New York City will probably kill any chance of it actually happening.
• The leisure class is now the luxury-belief class – That is, the social status that once affixed to good manners and attending formal parties nonstop now affixes to having fashionable beliefs.

Protests, Rebellions, Etc.

• Bolivia protests inspire Chilean protests? – I didn’t actually read this one. It just indicates that there are protests going on in Chile.
• Hong Kong protesters not driven by hope – “They talked about Xinjiang, and what China had done to the Uighur minority. I’ve heard about the fate of the Uighurs from so many protesters over the months. China may have wanted to make an example out of the region, but the lesson Hong Kongers took was in the other direction—resist with all your might, because if you lose once, there will be a catastrophe for your people, and the world will ignore it.”
• Scenes from Hong Kong, again

No votes were forthcoming on the Winter Wargaming topic, so I’ve unilaterally decided it’ll be Rule the Waves 2. I think I’ll probably post it over at Many Words Main, so as to avoid leaving it so barren.

Defense

• Low-velocity 40mm grenade launchers are for wimps – This one shoots the full-fat version.
• Concurrent Technologies Corporation to build prototype GCV hulls – They have some new kind of welding, Parvusimperator notes.
• Twitter video: HMS QE launches an F-35 while receiving underway replenishment – Look at that! The Brits have a carrier again, even if they had to rely on the Americans to make a reasonable STOVL jet. (Yes, I know the British operate/plan to operate the F-35 as a pure STOL plane with that rolling vertical landing thing.)
• Laser mounted on USS Dewey – Nobody’s quite sure what it is, but The Drive puts its money on ODIN, a laser dazzler system, rather than a full-on weapon-class laser. We did report on the Lockheed HELIOS, I believe, en route to Florida (maybe?) a week or three ago.

Science and Technology

• Dysfunctional corporate culture a contributing factor in the self-driving Uber pedestrian death case – Shower thought: I bet there’s money to be made in being ‘startup X, except with morals’. The product isn’t (say) ride-sharing, but rather a warm fuzzy feeling in the hearts of riders.
• “We made a profit last quarter if you ignore all the things we lost money on,” Uber says
• Galileo, the EU GNSS system, had a long outage this summer – And this guy, a GNSS monitoring hobbyist, now knows why. In short: since Galileo is supposed to be very high-accuracy, it needs to do frequent ephemeris and clock updates, and if you fall behind on those, you can find yourself in a case where the issue might be either an ephemeris or a clock problem, and you can’t tell which. A full reboot takes a long time.
• Computer people: why is AI so focused on race and gender?
• People people: stereotypes are usually accurate
• AIs which do unguided, random exploring can solve certain problems better – They don’t get trapped in local maxima, because they don’t have a conception of ‘maxima’ until the researchers decide to stop the random learning.
• Wafer contamination at a Samsung fab loses it half a billion dollars – America got the happypunk dystopia, with friendly-faced private panopticons; East Asia got a more classic cyberpunk dystopia, with huge megacorporations with fingers in every pie. As such, Samsung is expected to shrug, clean out the bad wafers, and start again, and the only effect on the world market is a pause in the drop in DRAM prices.
• Is Google’s quantum supremacy claim, which we reported last wekk, actually valid? – The thrust of this ZDNet article seems to be, “Mathematically, it might not be!” Which, to me, sounds like the answer is, “Today, practically, yes.”
• Intel vulnerable to yet more timing-based data-leakage flaws – And this one has been around for a year. The consensus, as far as I’m aware, is not only that Intel is vulnerable to these kinds of issues (widely reported), but also that AMD, owing to some architectural decisions they made, is less so (not widely reported). As a longtime Team Whatever Color AMD Is Now booster, I’m maybe not the most trustworthy source, though.

World Politics

• Bolivia’s socialist president is out – South America maybe turning a corner? cf. South American GDPs over time.
• Hong Kong heats back up: pro-democracy protesters shot – Or never actually cooled off.
• Widespread chaos across the city – Pictures from CNN.
• The Beeb says on the ‘brink of total collapse’

Sport

• The hometown Steelers are emerging as a playoff dark horse? – Defense doesn’t always win championships, but it sure does help.

Grab Bag

• California’s housing crisis is entirely a density crisis – Well, except for the parts that are a land management crisis and a water crisis.
• Iceland’s Bitcoin mining heist – There’s a lot of organized bitcoin mining in Iceland, because it’s cold and has a lot of cheap geothermal energy. Some enterprising crooks thought: why not steal the mining gear? That way you’re stealing a money-generating asset, for a given value of money.
• The ‘Razzle-Dazzle Game’, a rolling-marbles scam – Proposed alternative name: the Fireball scam, because it amounts to rolling 8d6 (and you only win prizes only on very low or very high rolls).
• Video: onetime jewel thief (or robber, per his stated preference) rates movie heists – It’s an intriguing watch.
• Mooney Aviation ceasing production – Most worryingly for current Mooney owners, that’s production of planes and parts. In other news, Mooney is owned by Soaring American Corporation, a Chinese investment company which sounds like it was named by a committee of Chinese guys trying to pick an American-sounding name with no input from anyone who speaks English natively.

With the Armored Brigade review now posted, I can ask a question I’ve been waiting to ask: for Winter Wargaming this year, what’s the commentariat’s feeling on Armored Brigade vs. Rule the Waves 2?

Defense

• Russian schoolchildren taught how to assemble AKs in class – I guess it’s a sort of shop class, and also makes it really easy to change the placard from ‘Primary School 3357’ to ‘Small Arms Factory 3357’ in case of war.
• Correction alert: last week’s Challenger 2 photo did actually have a Brimstone launcher on the turret – A two-missile box on top of the turret. We aren’t sure if it has any capacity for reloads, but it’s quite a large missile and not likely to be easily manhandled within the confines of a tank. We did a little further digging, and could find no information whatsoever on ground-launch range, and only turned up the very vaguest information on penetration, but it’s definitely better than the gun.
• What happens if China gets old before it gets rich? – CDR Salamander¹ ponders.
• USAF ponders arsenal plane options – A B-52 for the modern age?
• A puff piece on the Navy’s next-generation jammer – Still, it points out how it’s better than the old one, which is better than nothing.
• A bog-standard concerned-about-A2AD-missiles article with an interesting metaphor at its heart – Namely, that such weapons systems take us back to the Age of Sail relationship between ship and fort.
• Navy cuts next batch of Virginias from 11 to 9
• Laser-guided Carl Gustaf munition gets a test – Coool.
• Small fleets of aircraft have a big impact on USAF budgets – There are high fixed costs to operating a type of aircraft, of course, and the Air Force operates a lot of types.
• How can we build force structures to be resilient in the face of battlefield surprise?
• LockMart cuts F-35 prices
• Deploy the Ford, shock test a later ship – No reason to delay it any further, and shock testing the first ship in the class has been the exception rather than the norm ever since the requirement went into place.

History

• The US rushed an MG42-to-.30-06 conversion through following the war – Here’s the report on the trials.
• Petrel finds USS Johnston (probably) – Or something else from the same class. Either way, it’s the deepest shipwreck ever located, at 24,000 feet down.

Science and Technology

• Modern open source is largely corporate philanthropy – That is, the bazaar mostly comprises people being paid by the cathedral, to revive an old metaphor.
• What is quantum supremacy, and why is it important that Google demonstrated it? – This guy is evidently one of the better commentators on the subject.
• Super-optimized dirt keeps racehorses safe – Unfortunately, it’s a story that looks like it’s going somewhere and stops before it does.
• Voyager 2 reaches interstellar space – Scientists are fascinated by the sharpness of the heliopause.

Hong Kong

• Xi Jinping still backing Carrie Lam

Grab Bag

• New York City homeless services are too expensive, so NYC rents apartments for its homeless population in different cities – … without telling the different cities.
• Whatever happened to Internet atheism? – Not the quiet sort where atheists use the Internet like the rest of us, but the loud, argumentative sort prone to blaming organized religion for all the evils of the age. Scott Alexander at SSC speculates that, ironically, it was a competitor to become the civic religion of left-leaning culture, and lost to the social justice movement.
• Why is California on fire? – Well, power lines, primarily. Witness these aerial photographs from similar altitudes, one over our native Western Pennsylvania and one in California. Here, we clearcut around power lines. There, they do not. (Granted, in California there’s typically a lot of dry brush on the ground, and here there isn’t, but still.)
• Taran Tactical range burns down – Speaking of.
• Whose fault is Eastern European nationalism? – I don’t think I quite agree with the premise of this article, but I share it nevertheless.
• What happened to Toys R Us? – The ‘leveraged buyout’ answer is accurate but, evidently, incomplete.