If this comment saves only one person from wasting their money, it is worth it:

Do not buy Focal Bathys.

The build quality is super cheap, mine broke not even two years after purchase. The plastic surrounding the metal bits that connect the central part to the ear pads will break sooner or later.

This is also how they end.

I never specifically said “joining US military is bad”, I said joining the military in general is a bad thing. And neither did I talk about nukes, which are the ultimate evil.

I also never demanded to remove the military capabilities of one country, leaving it open for other countries to attack. I never talked about these things, about balance of power, about mutually assured destruction and all these geostrategic aspects of military logic.

All I said was - if you are a person who joins your country’s military, I despise you. Period. This is a statement I made completely disregarding all these other aspects you mention, and it is completely logically valid on its own.

You failed to get the point I was making. Just because the military is a driving factor to technological progress, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing all of a sudden. And all that progress could also have been made by science. Wernher von Braun didn’t care who funded his research into rockets.

Would we have the Autobahn if Hitler hadn’t built it?

Thank you very much for saying that, but in hindsight it was actually a great life experience. I met a man who was 103 at the time, in 1997. So he was 21 years old when WWI broke out. He later joined the German socialist party SPD, he resisted the Nazis and was forced to emigrate, he had such amazing stories to tell.

I think he played a big part in why I became interested in politics, German history and also why I became an antifascist and anti-militarist. Him and the fact that the Nazis executed one of my two grandfathers for “defaitism”.

Feeling you have no other option (despite a lot of other jobs being on offer) and totally not having any other option (because they’ll put you in jail for not paying taxes) are two completely different things.

With all due respect, but there is no reason to join the army unless they force you to. Even when Germany still had mandatory military service and they wanted to draft me in 1997, I opted to wipe old peoples’ butts in an old people’s home instead because that was the only way out. Don’t you dare tell me there is no other option.

If you read my first comment, I explicitly said “of their own free will”. I do not pay taxes out of my own free will, so your comparison is invalid.

We wouldn’t see images like the Iranian girl’s rucksack smeared with blood.

Yeah. Why not just lead a normal life.

I wish society would frown upon people choosing to become soldiers like they do upon prostitutes. But instead, all this glorification and militarism makes them think being a soldier is a commendable thing.

In my view, prostitutes should get the medals. They literally make love, not war.

Absolutely agree.

I happen to be German, by the way. My grandfather was forced into the Wehrmacht, he tried fleeing the battlefield, he got executed.

Anyone who works for the military enables politicians to wage war. And no soldier will ever be able to 100% prove their actions never led to anyone getting hurt.

Soldiers know and accept that and that’s why I despise them.

Working for the military makes you a war enabler. Best case. You help making it possible for some government asshole to wage war. Worst case, you become a murderer.

So whether you’re in battle or not only decides if you’re a murderer or helping murderers.

None of these possibilities are acceptable. Period.

You join the USN, you help with the logistics, someone you’ve helped in some way or another presses a button somewhere, a cruise missile is fired, obliterates a target and a few bad guys, some civilians die as collateral damage - to me, you’ve helped kill these civilians even though, admittedly, you’ve only played a very minor role. I very much doubt there are any contracts at the USN that 100% exclude that possibility and I’m not giving anyone a benefit of the doubt.

I despise anyone who becomes a soldier of their own free will. The moment you enlist, you accept that you could be obliged to kill, and that you will have no control over whether that killing will be justified.

In other words, you accept the possibility that you could become a murderer.

I’m a software architect. I work with large amounts of data. And a sizeable RAM disk is generally useful for many purposes. And yes, I also run AI locally, though that’s what my RTX 4090 is for.

IBM stopped their support for LTFS, unfortunately. Which I kinda want to use despite all the drawbacks. And well, the RAM disk workaround does the trick, so there’s not enough pain to compel me into investing more time into the issue.

Oh, there can be all kinds of uses.

For example, I own an LTO tape drive. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the IBM drivers to compile on my particular flavor of Linux, but I do have a dual boot system.

Now, Windows is a shitty, shitty OS that I only boot up when I really need to. It interferes with all kinds of stuff in ways I hate, for example - copying files. It just refuses to read large files in a continuous, reliable data stream without any interruptions from my SSD when backing them up to tape. This causes the LTO drive to slow down, speed up, rewind, which is not a good thing because it causes additional wear on the tape.

Fix: Create a large RAM drive, copy files to RAM drive, run backup with RAM drive as source.

“Degenerate art”. A term the Nazis used for all art they did not understand or like because it didn’t fit their ideology.

As a German, the first thing that came to my mind when reading this, was the term “Entartete Kunst”.

Built my new PC in late 2023… so glad I put 96 GB of RAM into it, despite several people asking me why the fuck I need so much RAM…