Kind of interesting. You can google map yourself to within a few 100 meters of the thing. I suspect the people who "found it" were really just pimping it? If there isn't already there will be trash around it soon. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Green+River,+UT/38.3431111,-...
Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert
341–350 of 515 posts
Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpSec is (largely) a red herring. What you want is impunity.
[citation needed]
I don't have a citation, just inferences based on years of observation.
I also didn't lay OpSec is mostly useless. I'm not convinced that's true, though it may be.
OpSec alone is useful but brittle. If it's all you've got, you'll probably eventually have a bad day. Looking at entities considered "masterminds", what I often find is ... some intelligence, yes, but a lot of shielding from, or disregard of, risk.
Impunity is actual or believed freedom from consequence.
There are a few categories:
- The proficient: extremely good at their game. Effective, so long as it works. Covert.
- The well-protected -- friends in high places. State actors and their contractors, generally. Often under diplomatic covered. "Too big to jail" and politically-conneccted (Brock 'Stanford Rapist" Turner https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-jail/...) The Mossad team assassinating Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Ma...) (though most of the team were effectively burnt). May include some non-state actors: warlords, terrorists, narcotics gangs, though most of these fall below. Covert, but can retreat quickly to safety, or are at low risk if caught.
- The brazen. Operations with overwhelming force, whether shown or used. Military campaigns, many criminal organisations, warlords, militias. Overt.
- The uncaring: those who have no care whether they live or die. Most suicide attacks, 9/11 bombers, the original "hashīshīn", etc. 2008 Mumbai attacks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks Overt or covert.
- The ignorant: Simply unaware of the risks. Child soldiers, the Boxers (China), "wrong way 'round" Pan Am flight 18602 landing at Surabaya, Dutch East Indies, unknown to the pilot, in a heavily-mined harbour. https://medium.com/lapsed-historian/the-long-way-round-part-...
- The expendable. Assets who need only be used once, whether burnt (retired) or killed afterwards. This includes a segment of the consulting or management workforce, who have a certain ablative funtion. Martin "Pharma Bro" Shkreli. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
The relatively recently disclosed Crypto AG case, where the Swiss manufacturer of a widely-used manufacturer of communications encoding equipment was shown to be a CIA-owned front is a case in point. Signals intelligence relied not so much on exceptional decryption capabilities, but on the widespread use of a backdoored technology. The strong focus of US intelligence policy on similarly backdooring networking hardware (Cisco), telecoms switches (Greece), computing hardware, operating systems, and softwaare, speaks to the probable usefulness of this method. It's not OpSec but influence and immunity that enables this.
Update: Parent's question, if brief, was entirely fair. Which is why I answered it.
Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert
#343(deleting, because now my comment is getting pasted all over the Internet, and though it was not to my knowledge misleading, it didn't actually provide any useful information)
> And the sister of the brother who died there is asking for people to delete the post and to please not go there. That's an unreasonable request without an explanation.
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Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert
#344(deleting, because now my comment is getting pasted all over the Internet, and though it was not to my knowledge misleading, it didn't actually provide any useful information)
Fellow Utah County man here. If I was you, I'd contact the BLM with the full story and share the confidential information with them at least to try to convince them not to remove it. I really feel for the sister, probably her worst nightmare for this story to blow up like it has. Curiosity can be destructive.
Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
UHF! I caught that reference. It took me years to understand that reference fully. When I saw UHF originally it bugged me that I knew it was a reference to something but I didn't know what. Finally, a decade later I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind and I finally put two and two together.
For those of us who don't know: what does "UHF" stand for here?
it's a comedy movie starring Weird Al Yankovic
Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
UHF! I caught that reference. It took me years to understand that reference fully. When I saw UHF originally it bugged me that I knew it was a reference to something but I didn't know what. Finally, a decade later I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind and I finally put two and two together.
For those of us who don't know: what does "UHF" stand for here?
The Weird Al movie from the 80s.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f9/f7/bd/f9f7bd6cd80f1db36a07...
Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just, like, your opinion, man. There's clearly a market for, say, JRPGs, and that market is comprised of people who fully disagree with you. Ultimately what you're saying is "there's no need to make games I don't like". Personally, for what it's worth, I love games where you neither generate nor are told stories, but rather where you uncover them. Outer Wilds is the best recent example I know of-- the entire g…
Ultimately what I'm saying is that computer games are wasting an opportunity to be good what they do best: interaction and simulation. No one condemns basketball, soccer or chess for having poor story. They are however good at generating stories people tell to each other later. Computer games do that even better.
Unfortunately not - there's too many of them, so they don't work as social objects in most contexts anymore.
I could tell endless stories about the crazy flights I've done in Kerbal Space Program - like that time when I miscalculated Δv in my moon lander and had to plot an emergency intercept on a suborbital trajectory, to let the crew EVA over to the command module before the lander crashed into the moon's surface...
... but nobody cares. I have no one to tell them to. Everyone has their own set of games they play, and the intersection of these sets contains very few games, if any at all.
Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any machining, metal forming, etc. would require specialized large equipmen, and would quickly drive the cost up, potentially an order of magnitude higher than material costs. It seems unlikely that there are serious tolerances to be kept here, couldn't this just be cast messily using a sand/clay mould and then cleaned up with portable power tools? That way you don't need any special equipment and you can use whate…
Large scale castings are also tricky. You can't cast a rectangular prism and get good results. As the metal freezes (solidifies), it shrinks. You'd end up with a very poor surface finish at best, and chunks missing at worst. The shrinkage needs to be made up for with some additional molten metal. The fix is pretty simple though. You need directional solidification, meaning the freezing starts on one end and moved tow…
Just a note about aluminum recycling. Humans tend to trash things instead of recycling. Out here in the desert where people dump things I have noticed old steel cans rusted to nothing mixed with aluminum cans which seem to not degrade over time.
Arguably if you are worried about the environment and account for human laziness steel cans are better for the environment IMO
Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like the Focused in the novel "A Deepness In The Sky" by Vernor Vinge.
I can’t get into Deepness after reading Fire. Too different and my expectations for the scale he set up are too big...
You'd be even more frustrated by Children of the Sky. Not only is it limited in scope (to Tines' World), but it leaves a bunch of plot threads unresolved, presumably for a sequel. :/
Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
See: Edward Snowden
See Deep Throat, while you're at it.
Here, let me save y'all from the results of a Google search for that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat_(Watergate)