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.
Reminds me of something that might interest you. I was replacing the brake callipers on my car, the parking-brake leaver was leaking, and when I put the new ones on – sure enough, the new ones were leaking from the exact same spot, even worse than the old broken one I was replacing.
The store replaced it with a part manufactured by a different supplier – but it’s telling that a major retailer is selling parts that are broken out of the box.
Comment by Davis M.J. Aurini — January 23, 2018 @ 5:03 pm
I work at a component manufacturer. It is a shit show. There are so many ways that bad parts can make their way into a device. The difference is you won’t have any clue since by opening many devices today you void
any warranty and they are often made to be impossible to fix yourself so why bother opening it up in the first place. In the past, there was an element of conscientious people who knew the holes and gaps and would let someone up the chain know about it. You really won’t get that anymore and you are lucky, and I do mean lucky, to get someone who gives a damn at all about sticking to procedures that help ensure a standard.
More and more managerial jobs, even the supposed specialized ones, are being filled with people who don’t know what the hell they are doing. There was once a common thing among workers in the US that stated just because you think you could do a job better than someone at a higher position doesn’t mean a thing. You don’t know the extra details, responsibilities, etc. There was once a real element of truth to that a long time ago but it was also a tremendous lie (it was always both and not understanding this is why people will never ‘wake up’. These days you are likely to find some of the best doing work that doesn’t use their abilities at all. More and more people who have any ability for critical thinking are saying to hell with it all. What you are left with are sell outs and morons, running more and more of everything slowly into the ground.
So I see people who do care getting lambasted for thinking they know better than their ‘superiors/managers’. It never enters the discussion whether or not the individual asking questions has a valid point. When you have manuals that give names to classifications and then use one of those names to define another entirely different classification………and no, they are not dependent on one another or in any relationship at all………….and you see people asking simple questions get told to just follow instructions or even talked down to like they are idiots for even questioning, you know it is not worth it anymore. How do you think people are going to fare with larger, more important questions?
None of these things matter. Harold Rosenthal told you much of what you need to know. It’s all a coincidence I’m sure. Things are actually becoming more and more obvious yet the delusion is strengthening at a much faster pace. Strengthen yourself and weaken your enemy is one simple maxim that shows much of who the enemy is. To come to any sort of logical conclusion requires years and years of reading and introspection, largely because it takes that amount of time to slowly root out conditioning. You can’t even get people to stop watching tv and start talking to each other again in an attempt to regain fellowship of any kind. There is too much working against them. If you told people that you need to look at everything from many viewpoints and be fine with things sorting out on their own they would think you insane. Their mind is capable of doing that sorting right now they think. The truth is simple and should be simple to say they think. Well, words are containers for meaning and the meaning being stuffed into them depends on the individual and what they have learned. This is what people can’t grasp anymore and I think it is one of the most important things. In short, some people are idiots because they choose to be on some level. To see anything real becomes more and more difficult and painful as time flies by. Good luck with that because it is so obvious now that you would think everyone would be up in arms. Nothing. You can see the differences in the faces of people today compared to twenty years ago. They look like beaten dogs. The only hope they have is to anger their masters enough that the beating becomes so brutal and direct that no one can deny it.
Comment by demiurgemadness — January 23, 2018 @ 9:45 pm
Interesting name there– demiurge. Have you read up on esoteric subjects? The demiurge, what it represents, who follows it, and alternative explanations for its origin and what might have come before it were fascinating reads for me.
Comment by undefined — January 23, 2018 @ 11:38 pm