The cycle repeated
As explosions broke in the sky
All that I needed
Was the one thing I couldn't find
And you were there at the turn
Waiting to let me know
We're building it up to break it back down
We're building it up to burn it down
We can't wait to burn it to the ground
Comment of the Week
Jack Baruth in Avoidable Contact Forever:
In the grim darkness of the far future, there are only drones and phones
Christopher J Feola has what I think is a remarkably insightful piece on the free side of his Substack:
tanks are now about as effective as horse cavalry.
Let’s look at the Ukraine. After years of warfare and Russian missile attacks have ground down an infrastructure that wasn’t exactly cutting edge to start with, how is Ukrainian drone production?
They are on pace to produce 1 million drones in 2024.
But surely we have lots and lots of tanks, right?
Well…
The US currently produces about 140 M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks a year. The M1’s production peak was 1986-1992, when 5,000 were built. That’s about 700 a year.
So even the M1 was at peak production, that’s 1,429 drones per tank. That’s pretty much the definition of overwhelming odds. Which is why the few tanks remaining in the Russian-Ukrainian war pretty much spend all their time hiding.
Emphasis mine. Drones are the new poison gas: ruthlessly effective at the squad and platoon level, and capable of clearing territory even if they are incapable of holding it. Of course, right now drones are dangerously close to old news, because the new news is Israel compromising global supply chains to turn everyday devices into bombs. Even the NYT is a bit upset:
No similar claim of minimizing risk to civilians can be made for the decision to explode the devices. They were not distributed by Hezbollah in order to put its people at risk. This was not a plot to force Israel to kill or injure civilians. The plot was Israel’s, and the plotters had to know that at least some of the people hurt would be innocent men, women and children.
Feola closes his piece like so:
Look around. How many battery-operated devices are currently in your room?
You may not be interested in Information Age warfare.
Pray Information Age warfare is not interested in you.
When you consider that 99% of our electronic devices are sourced from either China or Korea, it seems unwise at best to think that some of them might not blow up on command if President Harris gets her wish for military confrontation with China. (It’s not her wish, but the people who operate her from behind the scenes would love it.) No, it’s not likely that iPhones have actual explosives in them — but here’s the thing about iPhone batteries: they’re dense energy storage devices. Which is to say they’re bombs, needing only a command from their operating systems to overheat and catch fire.
The same is true for EVs, only a thousand times over. Any modern EV can lock your doors and initiate an almost instant battery meltdown, thus making you the star of your own rotisserie-chicken show. No plastic explosives or secret bombs required. We are rapidly approaching the Neuromancer future of instant tech street violence, only without the cool parts.
Thanks Jack! And I agree about EVs. No worries for me, though — I won’t even buy a care with one of those new-fangled automatic transmissions!
Perfecting Equilibrium Stories
Easter Eggs
My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Friday September 27th - Foto.Feola.Friday
Sunday, September 29th — A Million Word Summer; Substack is sending out notes telling readers how many words they consumed this summer; my total is more than a million. Which led me to immediately think I wonder how many words I wrote? It’s the age-old tension: When I’m reading I feel like I should be writing, and when I’m writing I make lists of more things I need to read…