Tag Archives: what we’re reading

The Someday Papers (Apr. 26, 2022)

The Quarterly Review? The Whenever-I-Get-A-Minute Times?

Russia/Ukraine

Other Defense

Big Tech

  • Reddit is the most popular search engine; or, Google search is dying – Why? Because Google results are uniformly trash, unless you’re looking for something technical, in which case they’re only mostly trash. “[search term] reddit” is taking over as the way to find out what real people think.
  • I recently came across a top-[things]-guide article about the PC game Warframe that had clearly been written by an AI, with zero retouching. It fused some lingo specific to the game with a bunch of nonsense that appears in the genre of ‘articles about game mechanics’. That’s the downside to large language models: the more niche your interest, the more likely it is you’ll get pablum out of an LLM.
  • Cloudflare stays in business in Russia, with safeguards – Its Russian datacenters have a sort of dead man’s switch, if I’m reading this right, and they’ve also taken measures to protect their clients’ SSL keys.
  • Russia is running out of cloud storage space – Or they were, as of March 15. I haven’t heard an update since.

Guns

Science and Technology

The Economy

Grab Bag


  1. I will continue to spell it this way, because ‘Kyiv’ makes stupid Westerners say ‘Keev’, and that just won’t do. 

The Someday… er, Sunday Papers (Feb. 13, 2022)

I think the Sunday Papers experiment is now definitively a failure, unless I start doing the posts at lunch on Friday.

RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE

Defense

History

Guns

Wu-Flu

The Markets (Black and Otherwise)

The (Cyberpunk/Science Fiction) Future Is Now

Grab Bag

Crowing

It’s still Sunday, and I got this done.


  1. This is, regrettably, not the etymology of the currency now known as the Brazilian real; real means ‘royal’ in Portuguese. It is a clever, and perhaps even intentional, play on words, at least. 

The Sunday Papers (Dec. 19, 2021)

Where do the months go?

Merry Christmas from your Soapbox hosts.

Defense

History

Coronavirus and Related Economic Disruptions

SPAAACE!

Christmas Gift Ideas

Computers

Grab Bag

The Sunday Papers (Nov. 21, 2021)

Defense

Grab Bag

The Sunday Papers (Nov. 7, 2021)

Defense

Grab Bag


  1. I mean, a lot of what I post here is unsourced, in the formal sense, but this is ‘retweeted by natsec people I follow on Twitter’ territory. 

The Sunday Papers (Oct. 31, 2021)

Well, readers, it’s been more than a month since the last one of these, for which you have my apologies.

October was a busy month for me: three USPSA matches, one of which yielded a trophy, and my birthday toward the end. Now that the summer’s winding down, I should be more able to do these regularly.

Defense

Defense-Adjacent

Science and Technology

Finance and Economics

Guns

Grab Bag

The Sunday Papers (Sep. 19, 2021)

I swear I’m not trying to turn this into a monthly feature—there’s been a lot going on, and news items (that we read and share in our links channel) have been following a drought or flood pattern.

Projects

  • The Glockblaster 3D, which I mentioned way back in… wow, February… is almost done. Expect a series of posts following the build later in the year.

Defense

Science and Technology

Guns

The Rona

The Economy, Stupid

Grab Bag

The Sunday Papers (Aug. 22, 2021)

It looks like The Sunday Papers are here to stay.

Defense

Science and Technology

COVID

  • Prepper, libertarian-ish guy, and Ars Technica founder (since departed) Jon Stokes is starting to get worried about COVID again, which is maybe a canary. He’s a fairly clear-eyed dude. We’ll keep you updated.
  • Plastic barriers probably don’t help – Ventilation is the COVID-killer, which is why airplanes are quite safe despite what you’d think. Plastic barriers can interfere with ventilation.

History

Grab Bag

The Sunday Papers (Aug. 1, 2021)

Oh dear, it’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?

With the increasing business and attendant busy-ness at work, I’m considering making this week’s tongue-in-cheek change a permanent one. We picked Wednesday for the What We’re Reading back when we had a post from me on some Saturdays and a post from parvusimperator most Tuesdays and Thursdays. It made a lot more sense when Tuesday through Thursday was a solid block of content. Now that that condition no longer holds, I don’t know if I have much reason to carry on trying to carve 45 minutes out of my Wednesdays to whip this up, when Sunday is a whole lot more open.

Projects

  • I did buy a new reloading press. It’s a Dillon XL750, and I quite like it.
  • The revolver technique content I promised is delayed, because we had a pipe leak and the attendant plumbing and remediation work to contract out and do, respectively.

Defense

Science and Technology

  • A Chemical Hunger: why are people so fat these days? – A review of the evidence in favor of chemical contaminants being the cause. Particularly compelling: county-level maps of obesity are very similar to maps of watershed catchment area. A long read: it has at least eight parts at the time of writing.
  • Should social media platforms be regulated like common carriers? – Eugene Volokh argues that some kind of common carrier-like regime may be correct. We have a fair bit of editorial independence here, because we’re not beholden to Big Tech, but there are plenty of ways we could still get shut down given a substantial enough pressure campaign.
  • China seizes UK’s largest microchip manufacturer – Barely even hyperbole, that headline.
  • China also cracks down on its equivalent to US big tech – Content warning: a pundit who is, in my experience, frequently wrong. That said, I think he’s right on this one: China isn’t hitting companies that make tangible things, just its domestic software industry. Which is dumb, given that a domestic software industry helps encourage the development of the software engineers you need to make tangible tech, but central planners never got high marks for making good decisions.
  • Big earthquake in Alaska – Right next door to the Cascadia fault, where we should be expecting the next Big One.

Grab Bag

The ‘Rona

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Jul. 7, 2021)

Reloading press update: I’m looking now at a Dillon XL750, which seems to hit the right balance between price, size, and capability.

Projects

  • Lots of stuff around the house.
  • Parvusimperator remarks that he’s been engaged in planning the plan for a committee to lay out the vision for the forthcoming plan for architecting a future project. $GOVERNMENT_CONTRACTOR life!
  • The Glockblaster 3D project I wrote about earlier in the year is nearly done. I need to write a progress update. I’ve been sharing more frequent, less formal updates at a semi-private forum for a collection of centrist and right-leaning tech enthusiasts. It’s a pleasant place, and if you find the tenor of the less politically neutral grab bag pieces agreeable rather than aggravating, you might like it there too.

Defense

Science and Technology

Guns

Grab Bag