In tech, we all know what this is, crapple lock in, adobe lock in, etc etc etc, and depending on what side of the wall you sit in, they are all either great professional tools so it’s not like it’s a problem anyway, or fuck that been stung once too often already.
Except of course, tech is a bigger subject that just the latest portable device, the F35 “wants to one day be a warplane” is a walled garden, it has the equivalent of the genius bar for servicing and the store for spares and shit and the mother-ship for software fixes and updates, and if it fails to do X, well, it’s probably your fault for holding it wrong…
I was today talking to a military armourer that I have known for some time, and if you think that just means guns and bullets, that may be 7 or 8 per cent of the whole, like me he lives in the guns banned klingon empire, and he has known me long enough to know that if I lived in the USA there are two guns that I would own, a silenced subsonic .22 LR pistol, and a lever action 45-70.
He used to mock me, in a friendly joshing sort of way, all the millions of different guns I could buy, and I’d have bought those two… today he went quiet for a bit, said you know what, if you could survive / avoid the initial firefight, you’d mebbe be last man standing, or last man standing would have killed you for those guns, which would still work, which is probably more than could be said for 95% of military equipment.
I laughed, and he started talking about the walled garden in mil-tech, his comment was if he had crypto or stawks or fiat to invest in a long term bet, he knows a sure fire winner, there will be WW2 era weapons like Lee Enfield still around and still working long after the last one of anything that is current issue has gone to meet its maker, and taken the poor bastard issued it with it.
According to him in 2018 rifles and boots and mess tins are about the only three things issued to a modern day soldier, or used as a required thing by the modern day soldier, that do not, somewhere, have a software component, and the rifles aren’t true field serviceable by the average grunt, like my choice of 45-70 lever action, and when I commented but yeah, modern military shit is a lot more accurate, his reply was yeah, when issued, provided you keep it clean, provided nothing goes wrong, provided you don’t find yourself in a firefight and start sending 90 rounds downrange in a couple of hours or less, and he remarked about the G36, heat it up to a paltry 30 celcius and 500 mm variation at 200 metres and 6000 mm variation at 500 metres, like he said, take a real real bad 45-70 to be 18″ out at 200 yards from what it shot cold, so bad he couldn’t imagine it could get that bad and be in one piece, maybe one shot through free air and one shot through brush might make you 18″ out at 200 yards on a 45-70, maybe not…
He told me that late last year he had reason to meet with some of the russian troops, he said every single one of the cunts could strip everything they carried into component parts in a few minutes, then they could move on and do the same shit with light vehicles, latrines, cooking equipment, power supply / battery / gen set equipment, and everyone basically carried a toolkit, he said it scared the shit out of him, he said for his side, 24 hours in the firezone it would be press 1 for ammunition, press 2 for equipment return authorization, press 3 for technical support, press 4 to report a problem, or press 5 to see the status of your ticket…. please wait… you are… 1,637th in the queue…
Kinda kidding, kinda not, apparently he has 6 different wheel braces in stock, because the military can’t standardise on a wheel lug nut size… and this is just the light vehicles…
Mean while apparently all the brass are asking for moar money because Putin, he says they don’t need more money, they need less disposable shit, less nickel and dime bait and switch shit, less walled garden shit, and….
… I’m sworn to secrecy, I cannot give details, he shouldn’t even have told me, but apparently *certain* military equipment that has electrical conductive wires therein to facilitate operation and function, apparently, nobody really knows if it was to save money or the environment or what, but the copper wires came clad in a soy based insulator, and apparently the rats on base are taking this equipment hard down, as in paperweight utility maybe down, 0% of design function remaining.
He is apparently walking around every day muttering “four more years…. four more years…” and then he is out.