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Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

nytimes.com

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Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#441

Post by bilbo0s »

philwelch wrote: post #436
bilbo0s wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting a hold of Texas is a lot easier than getting a hold on pretty much anyplace in the MidWest. That's for sure. But it's irrelevant in modern warfare anyway. The right play is to just flatten most of our states outright. You don't fight hot wars with amphibious landings anymore. Hot wars between major powers would be over in a matter of hours these days.

Cities are beside the point. Occupying Texas (or admittedly the Midwest) would be like occupying Afghanistan or Iraq except the insurgents would have even more technicals and many of them would have US military training.

I mean, as I said, the planet's great powers don't plan wars with other great powers around the idea of an occupation. But as far as ease of implementation, it's obviously easier to conquer Texas because of the ginormous warm water coastline. Multimodal landings are not even possible in a place like Minnesota. You'd have to fight just to get there, and just like Russia, you'd likely freeze to death trying to take the place. Fighting is infinitely more easy in places like Texas or the south in general, than it would be in, say, Minnesota or North Dakota, with 4 to 6 months of bitter, far northern winter per annum.

But again, completely irrelevant anyway, because total war means total war.

If it weren't for the fact that most of them would be dead at the time, I'd argue that people who think in terms of occupations would be disagreeably surprised after the next war between great powers. A pretty common mistake in military thought has always been "fighting the last war" so to speak.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#442

Post by victoro0 »

PunchTornado wrote: post #429
brobdingnagians wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it would probably be one of the best things that happened to them if they could manage to do it peacefully. They are a completely different culture, language, economic prospects, etc. Spain just wants to keep taxing them to support the rest of the country. But how is that ever a good reason for keeping an entire culture subject to historical imperialism?

rubbish. completely different culture and language? I lived in Barcelona and you could do everything in Spanish. The same can be said about various regions in Italy. Have you been to Sicily? Very different language, culture, food etc. And by the polls ~50% of Catalonians don't want independence.

Of course you could do anything, it is a very touristic city and Spain forces Castilian spanish to be taught in schools.

Also, you can tell the polls are not that favorable or the central govmt would have made a referendum on the issue.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#443

Post by jki275 »

sehugg wrote: post #404

In a book slated for publication Oct. 29, retired Navy commander Guy Snodgrass, who served as a speech writer to former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, said Trump called Mattis and directed him to “screw Amazon” by preventing it from bidding on the JEDI contract, according to an excerpt of the book seen by Reuters ahead of its release. “Were not going to do that,” Mattis later told other Pentagon officials, according t…

Not sure what you mean by “put Amazon’s contract up for review” - the contract didn’t belong to Amazon, there have been multiple ethical issues with Amazon related to this contract, and there was an ongoing protest from Oracle.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#444

Post by jki275 »

jmckib wrote: post #160
mxcrossb wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this info not in the original article? It seems to be the most important point, yet nobody else is discussing it in the comments.

I was also wondering why it's not being discussed much. It could be because HN is mostly non-political, although when I see political discussions come up there is a noticeable Republican slant.

Here? This site has a decisive leftist slant, with barely a few dissenting opinions that are always immediately downvoted into oblivion.

If you think this site has a Republican slant, your own political perspective must be very badly skewed.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#445

Post by pintxo »

dwoozle wrote: post #258
philsnow wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This show felt like so many other shows on American TV in the last decade: somebody had the core of a good idea, but the writers had no idea how to turn that into a show. The first couple episodes of Jericho were tantalizing. The interesting part was the world and the geopolitical situation, but then so little about that actually changed over the course of the following episodes, it was just a bunch of small town pol…

This phenomenon arises from the way that TV shows are produced. The creators write ~6 episodes to showcase the concept and the funding/production decision is made based on these 6 episodes. So the shows are engineered for maximum drama during these 6 episodes, and the rest of the show’s run is trying to maintain a 100 meter sprint pace for sometimes up to 10 years. This is particularly bad for “conspiracy” type shows…

Why am I thinking about Designated Survivor right now?

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#446

Post by Slartie »

75dvtwin wrote: post #407
noelsusman wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot more absurd to make government contract decisions based on newspaper coverage the president doesn't like.

I agree that Bezos's/ Wash Post disposition relative to the anti-President coup, likely had to be important consideration. As I noted, 10s of millions of tax payers consider Washington Post is not a newspaper, but a propaganda agent actively involved in to the coup attempt against a constitutionally elected President of US. Just chucking it of to 'president does not like a news paper' -- is diluting the tremendous af…

Well, tens of millions of tax payers consider Fox News not a News network at all, but a propaganda agent actively involved in to the coup attempt of a loosely coupled conglomerate of foreign-nation stakeholders and private domestic stakeholders (of which one of them happened to become elevated into presidential office by a minority of the countrys' voters) against the Constitution of the United States.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#447

Post by philwelch »

bilbo0s wrote: post #441
philwelch wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities are beside the point. Occupying Texas (or admittedly the Midwest) would be like occupying Afghanistan or Iraq except the insurgents would have even more technicals and many of them would have US military training.

I mean, as I said, the planet's great powers don't plan wars with other great powers around the idea of an occupation. But as far as ease of implementation, it's obviously easier to conquer Texas because of the ginormous warm water coastline. Multimodal landings are not even possible in a place like Minnesota. You'd have to fight just to get there, and just like Russia, you'd likely freeze to death trying to take the…

Texas has coastlines, bayous, deserts, hills, and wide-open plains. It’s entirely possible to make that amphibious landing, sure, but then you’re in wetlands. If you’re hand waving an adversary capable of amphibious operations on the Gulf Coast, they could just use helicopters to insert into Minnesota, too.

But my point is that even if you allow, for the sake of argument, that the “great power” phase of the war entails a two-week blitzkrieg, that still doesn’t get you out of the counterinsurgency business. And Texas is land that an enemy would definitely want to hold just for natural resources and logistics.

As for fighting the last war, the last great-power war had blitzkriegs that resolved themselves within weeks, protracted operations along broad fronts, irregular partisan warfare, and every other form of conflict one could envision. The Battle of France is just as much “the last war” as the Eastern Front was. I think the only sure thing is that we don’t know what the next great power war will look like, unless it’s merely a catastrophic nuclear exchange.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#448

Post by m0zg »

belltaco wrote: post #439
shitgoose wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not from US, so I don't count for minority or majority. Specific reasons... Just watch 5 min of CNN, MSNBC, 30 seconds of Maddow or Don Lemon. Staggering amounts of venom and obsession. This is not news anymore. This is an alternative reality.

I like how you left out Fox News which is far worse. E.g The bogus Seth Rich story. There is nothing comparable. Maddow and Don are opinion.

Serious question: how do you know it's "bogus"? There's no evidence either way. For all we know the guy could have been Assange's source, which would explain the raging hard-on the current administration has for extraditing Assange.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#449

Post by 75dvtwin »

75dvtwin wrote: post #266
twoheadedboy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the Post is related to this, specifically?

10s of millions of people in US think that Wash Post is colluding with coup orchestrators, trying to overthrow constitutionally elected US president. With the above sentiment, giving Wash Post owner a 10 bln dollar Gov contract for work with military -- would have be borderline absurd. It is difficult to separate these types of discussion from political bias of commenters, but you would have to create your own views…

Could not modify to add to bullet points above, but Washington Posts' obituary notice to ISIS head Al-Baghdadi, seems to prove the point...

Washington Post referred to the now dead head of the terrorist organization as: 'austere religions scholar'.

I guess, for Washington Post, Hitler was a dog loving vegan and a self-taught artist.

(they have changed the article by now).

Giving Pentagon business contracts to owner of this 'esteemed news publication', hosting these 'journalists' would, definitely would be absurd.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#450

Post by shitgoose »

jmckib wrote: post #426
shitgoose wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not from US, so I don't count for minority or majority. Specific reasons... Just watch 5 min of CNN, MSNBC, 30 seconds of Maddow or Don Lemon. Staggering amounts of venom and obsession. This is not news anymore. This is an alternative reality.

I was talking about newspaper journalism though, which seems to be as solid as ever. TV journalism, on the other hand, appears to have become more polarized, though there's still good programs out there. I'd definitely avoid opinion hosts like Maddow, Tucker Carlson, Hannity etc, since they aren't even real journalists.

Here is the latest from WaPo that changed the headline on its Al-Baghdadi obituary from "Islamic State's terrorist-in-Chief" to "austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State". Religious scholar, my ass. So much for solid journalism.
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