mrspaz

When he gets hit by the 6000 SUX and liquefies was a great shot.

My family bought in to cable television very early on, and we had HBO as part of the service. My parents forbid me from watching it alone, but of course that just upped the intrigue and I would sneak viewings when they weren't around.

The first mistake was The Thing. I had no idea what the movie was about, and so the first part of the film seemed unremarkable; they're at an arctic base, there's the shootout, all relatively tame. Then the dog scene. Holy crap that one is burned into my memory forever. I was utterly terrified but glued to the screen. That gave me screaming nightmares for a bit but I could never admit what the issue was, since I wasn't supposed to have watched it!

The second a few years later was Aliens. Wasn't nearly as bad of an experience but the scene with the people glued to the walls in the tunnel was a bit much. I recovered from that one much quicker than The Thing.

"WORTHLESS!!"

Your first paragraph reminded me of a short story: There Will Come Soft Rains.

It is a matter of scale and tactics.

For scale, the US Army has ~4700 tanks according to the internets. Assuming they have a matching number of crews and can put them all into service, that's 94 tanks per state. That sounds like quite a bit until you consider the coverage of a state. If we take NY as an example, that's 0.0017 tanks / square mile. The military will be pinning down only small areas at a time with armor.

For tactics, no reasonable person expects to take on a tank with a pistol. The deterrence of an armed populace is in the scale and ubiquity of resistance. There are ~3M personnel in the US military from cooks and secretaries to special forces. They are outnumbered by firearms-owning civilians 76 to 1. The odds are bad. The military has force multipliers (tanks, bombers, drones), but deploying them effectively against the civilian population is not easy. Who are the combatants? If no one is standing outside waving a rifle, where do you drop the bomb, or fire the cannon? You could level an entire neighborhood and hope to destroy some of them. Will the non-rebellious populace remain on your side if you do this? An effective resistance will wait until the tank or plane is stopped to refuel and resupply, and then destroys the operators.

There is also the question of logistics. When operating abroad, part of the formula for success of the US military is their unbreakable supply lines. They bring everything from fuel to food to tools and don't need to rely on local supplies. But all those things are sourced and shipped from the US.. When the fight is on home soil, these supplies cannot be guaranteed. Sabotage of roads, bridges, pipelines, and railroads could significantly hinder the operating capacity of the military.

When speaking as any one person remaining armed as opposition to government tyranny, it is not as "Rambo," but as a thorn on the vine. Collectively there are many thorns and any attempt by the government to crush the vine will result in a lot of pain. You make the option as unattractive as possible.

They did call her the "Queen of Mean." She was an unrepentant asshole in her own time.

I daily a 1996 Jeep Cherokee. Manual transmission, manual windows, manual door locks. The basic radio was broken before I got it. It does have computer engine control with OBD2, but even that is simple in comparison.

When something breaks or maintenance is needed, it's a straightforward fix with typical tools. I've come to appreciate the simplicity.

I wrote a program to figure out what day of the week this landed on (assuming it is in fact October 2nd, 151441).

It's a Saturday.

Real downer on the start of the weekend.

I work in an office that was built in 1980. There are built-in ashtray slots in the restrooms. They've all been glued shut now, but it's very obvious what they are.

There's a main atrium in the building surrounded by the wings of space for cubicles. I can only imagine the smoke cloud that must have hung in the air back in the day!

"There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. But there are few old, bold pilots."

More like he got a drift letter... 😁