KingRamze

Coolest ghost ship I've seen.

Rubio: Imagine if Iran funded the well-being of its people, rather than its military Trump, two days later: We can’t fund daycare or Medicaid, we need more money for our military

@BaronDestructo @biancoresearch It's an expansion of the concept of "democratization of warfare." IEDs showed cheap improvised explosives could cripple invaders, but now every nation has access to drones - walking, flying, sailing, &/or swimming, guided, &/or AI-powered IEDs. Even wealthy nations must adapt.

"Every adversary on the planet will interpret American withdrawal as confirmation that cheap asymmetric systems work against powerful centralized platforms." - American withdrawal is irrelevant here. Like it or not, there is already confirmation that cheap asymmetric systems work against powerful centralized platforms. "The cost of staying is measured in months. The cost of leaving is measured in decades of economic drag." - In truth, there is no definitive measure of the cost of staying. Could be months. Could well be years. And the longer this goes on, the longer the economic drag.

I am not a military analyst. I'm a financial analyst focused on macroeconomic risk. That different lens might explain why I see something most military strategists and investors are missing. --- The New Rules of Warfare—And Why We Can't Opt Out For nearly a century, warfare belonged to whoever controlled the biggest defense budget. Aircraft carriers. Stealth bombers. Multibillion-dollar weapons systems. That model is changing in ways many aren't appreciating. Ukraine and Iran are showing the West what 21st-century conflict actually looks like: decentralized, highly iterative, fast-changing, unmanned, and cheap. Neither the US nor Russia—beginning in 2022—appears prepared. We might now have no choice but to show we can fight and win such a war. The Ukraine Approach Faced with a small defense budget, a much smaller population, and a vastly outnumbered army, Ukraine had to get creative. They couldn't match Russia's industrial capacity or spending. So they abandoned that playbook entirely. They developed an entirely new way to fight, highly decentralized, iterative, and most importantly, cheap. They also created Brave1—a completely new way to conduct war. Frontline commanders log into an iPad and bypass central command entirely. They spend digital points to purchase equipment directly from hundreds of (Ukrainian) manufacturers. When they encounter a new threat, they message the manufacturer directly and work with the engineers to find a solution, even if that means they visit to the front. The result is hardware or software upgrades that once took months now take days. Here's the crucial part: hundreds of manufacturers compete fiercely for these dollars by offering the best possible product as fast as possible. This isn't centralized procurement. It's a market. Competition drives innovation at scale. Weapons evolve as the enemy evolves in real time. Units are also awarded points for confirmed kills, uploaded from drone video—a powerfully eloquent way to grade effectiveness. But the real innovation might be how they decentralized manufacturing itself. Instead of building weapons in massive, centralized factories that make perfect targets for Russian bombing, Ukraine distributed production across hundreds of small manufacturers—workshops, machine shops, garages, and yes, kitchens. Each produces components or complete systems. This approach serves two purposes: speed and survival. You can bomb a tank factory. You destroy production for months. You cannot bomb ten thousand kitchens. If one workshop gets hit, ninety-nine others keep producing. The network regenerates faster than Russia can destroy it. This is why the manufacturing process includes actual kitchens—it's not a metaphor. It's a strategy. The Metric That Defines a New Era The result is staggering: at least 70% of battlefield casualties now come from drones. This is the first time in over a century that the primary cause of combat death is neither a bullet nor an artillery shell. Since World War I, industrial warfare meant industrial killing. Ukraine has broken that equation entirely. As a result, Russia is now controlling less territory than at any point since 2022 and going backward. In March, Ukraine made gains while Russia recorded no gains for the first time in two and a half years, and Drone-led offensives recaptured 470 square kilometers while paralyzing 40% of Russian oil exports. Ukraine has lowered the "cost per kill" to less than $1,000 per casualty—a 99.98% reduction from the millions of dollars that were common in the post-9/11 wars. This isn't an incremental improvement. This is a complete inversion of modern military economics. Yet the Western defense establishment is not learning from this. Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger mocked Ukraine's entire approach. In The Atlantic, he called Ukrainian manufacturers "housewives with 3D printers," dismissing their work as "playing with Legos." They are not studying this revolution. They are mocking it. And the "housewives with 3D printers" are beating the Russian army! Ukraine Is Now in the Middle East The US Military and Gulf states face an eerily similar problem. Iran's Shahed drones threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz—a chokepoint that funnels 21% of global oil. They cannot fend off Iran by firing a $4 million Patriot missiles at $20,000 drones. They need what Ukraine has discovered: a decentralized, rapidly adaptive defense network that doesn't require centralized industrial capacity. That's why Ukraine just signed historic 10-year defense deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Over 220 Ukrainian specialists are now on the front lines of the Persian Gulf—exporting not just weapons, but a completely new doctrine of how to fight. The precedent is set. The model works. Everyone is watching. Mosaic On April 1st, Trump threatened to bomb Iran "back to the stone ages" if they don't reopen the Strait within weeks. It's the classic 20th-century playbook: overwhelming offense force, massive bombardment, industrial-scale destruction. The problem? That playbook doesn't work against distributed, cheap, rapid-iteration systems—especially when your enemy is organized under a mosaic structure. Iran's "Mosaic Defense" doctrine is a decentralized command system where authority and capability are distributed across multiple geographic and organizational nodes. Each region operates semi-autonomously with overlapping chains of command and pre-planned contingencies. It's designed so that when you destroy the center, the edges keep fighting. You cannot decapitate a system with no head. You cannot out-bomb your way to victory when your enemy is not centralized; this was the solution for 20th-century industrial warfare. Defense Wins Championships 21st-century asymmetrical threats require defensive shields, not aggressive offenses. Ukraine has built exactly that: rapid-iteration defenses, decentralized manufacturing, commanders empowered to buy solutions in real time and rewarded for success. That same defensive model may hold the key to opening the Strait of Hormuz. Not through massive offense, but through the ability to adapt and defend quickly. Why We're Stuck Whether you viewed this as a war of choice or not, it has now become a war to keep global trade open. And that makes it inescapable. This is precisely why the US cannot declare victory and walk away from the Strait of Hormuz— or TACO. Every adversary on the planet will interpret American withdrawal as confirmation that cheap asymmetric systems work against powerful centralized platforms. And these adversaries might have sent us a message last month. In mid-March 2026, an unauthorized drone swarm penetrated Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, home to the U.S. Air Force's Global Strike Command. The fact that this happened not overseas but in the United States, and that these tests occurred just weeks ago, underscores how close this threat is now. They didn't attack. They announced their presence. Every adversary watching learned that cheap drone networks can reach into the US. The Global Supply Chain Risk If the US abandons the Gulf while Iran holds the Strait contested, markets will price this as validation that cheap systems can hold global trade hostage. The current market disruptions will become permanent. Supply chains will have to pivot from "just-in-time" efficiency back to "just-in-case" redundancy. Inflation returns as safety costs money. Trade routes diversify away from vulnerable chokepoints. The global friction tax becomes permanent. The Unavoidable Truth Once you prove that cheap, asymmetric systems can hold global trade hostage, that knowledge spreads globally and irreversibly. Every adversary learns the same lesson: you don't need a $2 trillion Navy—you need $20 million in drones and the will to use them. Withdrawing while the Strait remains contested would permanently validate this model. Supply chains shift to "just-in-case" redundancy. Insurance costs rise. The friction tax becomes structural—baked into every global transaction for decades. The cost of staying is measured in months. The cost of leaving is measured in decades of economic drag. We cannot leave unfinished business.

@theliamnissan The petrodollar has become such a small fraction of a percent of the eurodollar, that it doesn't matter. Countries need dollars because they pay their debts with dollars, & there are no viable alternatives suitable for the scale of international trade. UAE is selling gold for $🤷

Pam Bondi will be remembered as the AG who watched videos and saw images of powerful men raping kids and decided to protect the men.

@SamoBurja For Russia, you'd have to translate this a bit into something they'd be more familiar with, like: "Russian General found dead after falling out of a window."

A good exercise for interpreting news like this is to pretend that you heard it about a foreign country. For example what would it mean if the Russian or Chinese Defense Minister asked for the resignation of their army Chief of Staff a few weeks into a war?

“It can’t be THAT bad. You’re exaggerating.” “I’m really not. It is THAT bad.” “But what does that mean, in real terms?” …

Todd Blanche was Trump's personal fixer, and he was also responsible for Ghislaine Maxwell's transfer to a minimum security girl's summer camp. This is the Epstein Administration. Wake up you dipshits

@hollywoodscifi I'm usually out if I'm not hooked by the 3rd episode, unless I'm just that bored and need something to watch. I will give a show another shot if it gets good reviews after a few seasons and catch up - sometimes the first season or two can be a real slog before things get good.

We see a lot of talk about different TV shows that are canceled early, that if they had had more episodes or seasons, people would have liked them more. Can't you tell in the first episode or two if something is to your liking?

@WilliamShatner I hadn't heard the nasty rumors, but I'm very glad to hear that you are well just the same. 💜

My Daughter came over to tell me her daughter heard that I had brain cancer. 🙄 She took this photo and sent it to me to upload to prove I'm not ill. The people who are ill are those that are spreading these ridiculous stories. I'm fit as a fiddle. You don't have to worry.

@Sacb0y @SebAaltonen @AthenaPortly Do their own kind of DLSS and temporal tracking of objects, and LCDs are so consistent with motion, we see artifacts that aren't actually there, but black pixels between real pixels or a scan line refresh w/ blocks fixes the optical illusion that bothers some people.

@Sacb0y @SebAaltonen @AthenaPortly Yes! There's some odd things that happen when frames are generated with imperfect timing, buffers, and actual refresh aren't perfectly sync'd... and there's also a new tech with monitors that does something similar to scan lines of old CRT monitors b/c our brains /2

There's an infliction point. 1080p->4K->8K is 4*4 = 16x more pixels for a relatively small visual improvement. 60Hz->120Hz->240Hz->480Hz is 2*2*2 = 8x. We need 128x faster GPU to render identical graphics at 8K@480Hz versus 1080p@60Hz. Or do we spend some of that 128x GPU improvement on visual improvements instead and some of that 128x improvement to implement clever upscaling on both spatial dimension and time dimension. It makes sense because A*B scales differently as A+B when both numbers grow. This whole debate started when PS4 Pro added 4K support (over PS4 1080p) with a big marketing push to ship 4K games for new 4K TVs. PS4 games were struggling to hit 30Hz, and PS4 Pro only had 2x faster GPU to render 4x more pixels. Devs invented techniques such as checkerboard rendering. Ubisoft's For Honor was the first game with the modern temporal upscaler algo (instead of checker/scanline upscalers). If you don't have enough budget to hit your target resolution, you have to either simplify graphics or upscale. People didn't want PS5 Pro games to look worse than PS5 base model, so they chose clever upscaling (IIRC the Ubisoft TAAU algo took 3% of frame time).

@Sacb0y @SebAaltonen @AthenaPortly Totally get you with the rest though. Shame we can't just have it all 😉

@Sacb0y @SebAaltonen @AthenaPortly See, I differ - love HDR, but I can tell the difference between 60 and 120/144hz (not everyone can), but I also don't always care as most games and movies are fine at 30 or 60, it's just the occasional mismatch between fps and monitor refresh that gives an odd stutter

@Sacb0y @SebAaltonen @AthenaPortly Some of the best reasons for 8K are pixel density combined with close distance, so you may be right, but again, we're talking about gaming, and so many games struggle just doing 4K upscaled. I guess the devs will have to make that call on what to design for.

@DukeRamze @SebAaltonen @AthenaPortly Sure, but also TV's are getting larger, and even i use a 4K 55" TV as a monitor instead of having multiple displays. When a 90" TV is less than $2000 now days 8K starts looking better.

@Sacb0y @SebAaltonen @AthenaPortly But, still you hit a point where it's just not worth putting in the resources for higher resolution. There were plans for 10K, 12K, 14K, 16K etc... but most of those have been scrapped due to lack of a market has more or less decided 4K is fine for the foreseeable future.

@Sacb0y @SebAaltonen @AthenaPortly The majority of people in double-blind studies can't see the difference between a 8K content on a 4K TV screen vs an 8K TV screen at a normal viewing distance - like, at ALL. Studies show more people can tell the difference on computer monitors closer to their faces, though.

@Sacb0y @SebAaltonen @AthenaPortly Not that that couldn't change in the future - if we had wearables and VR where our eyes can distinguish the pixels because the screens are so close, and also more advanced, realistic gaming or holography maybe with gaussian splats or some such, but resolution only helps so much

@Sacb0y @SebAaltonen @AthenaPortly I'm never against shiny new tech, but for gaming, which still isn't photo-realistic, I'm highly skeptical that'd be the case. My bet would be graphics artists with their eyes very near the screen would find 8K useful, but at this point in gaming tech, higher 4K fps > upscaled 8K