I’d say GOAT should be a Council of greats, like the Jedi Council but without the religious extremism and child soldiers. I’d like to nominate a couple for this council:

Wilt Chamberlain- go look up his records

Andre the Giant - his drinking records alone should put him on the Council, but reportedly he was a very nice person as well

Dolph Lundgren - he plays a meathead in Expendables movies, but he’s a legit genius, as well as a literally massive human

Steve Wozniak - he managed to build the PC despite Steve Jobs being a colossal dick

Saint Olga - she took vengeance and raised it to an art form

Chomsky is the guy that said Ukraine should just surrender to Russia, right? Truly a great example of living king enough to become the villain, and not in a Batman way.

The slave owning flying guy from Tatooine with a gambling problem?

I’ll outright say it. Other than The Prestige and the later Batman movies, Nolan movies have been very disappointing to me. They’re not clever, they’re pretentious. If you ever saw that Netflix movie where the woman dated Keanu Reaves, the part where Keanu asks the chef for a meal the plays with the concept of time is every Christopher Nolan movie in a nutshell. Also, the action sequences in Batman Begins were unnecessarily choppy, and the idea that it was somehow how a bat would see them is just silly.

I have a really good sense of smell; trust me, you smell after one day and just can’t smell it yourself until day four. I’m sorry if this comes as a surprise.

Four monitors plus the laptop screen. It’s…a lot visually, but my productivity is significantly higher than when I only had two and the laptop screen.

They’re arranged in a square so clockwise from top right:

1. Work entry screen - this is where I’m typing a lot

2. Reading screen - this is the general source of what I’m working on

3. Outlook - I’m fully remote, Outlook is life

4. File folders - I work mainly with two or three folders all day so it just makes sense to have them uncovered

Laptop - Teams!

Of note, I use a ton of keyboard shortcuts and have generally optimized my workflow so I’m not hitting the mouse nearly as often as my coworkers. Having Outlook and Teams each have their own screen means I can keep them open and see what’s coming in while still working on my stuff on other screens. Final thing I’ll say about the arrangement, because you’re probably visualizing this making for a good gaming setup, no it wouldn’t because of how the screens are placed.

No matter what, get yourself a mirror. I don’t like people suddenly appearing by me, and since I’m using noise-cancelling headphones with music/podcasts 40+ hours a week, this keeps me from jumping out of my skin.

Autistic James Bond would have a martini with fifteen directions including, but not limited to the number of ice cubes in the shaker and the length of time to shake it. Autistic James Bond, you see, would know that stirring a martini is all wrong.

Good Excel users think themselves better than a beginner. Great Excel users think themselves somewhere between Intermediate and Advanced. Excel Masters, and I know one who placed in that Excel data modeling competition, know they’re somewhere in the Intermediate to Advanced range.

It’s crazy they go to that much work to avoid using an optic by default when they have a Pic rail right there. It’s not like they’d need 10 million red dots because this gun is so common it’s handed to every conscript, these went to “elite” units, right? The least they could have done is a red dot or a fixed 4x scope. Iron sights are fine in the absence of other options but this gun isn’t that old, and the iron sights being so far forward meant this thing was inherently inaccurate for anything past 200 meters, making it a suppressed version of a spray and pray like an AK-74u. Shouldn’t they, at minimum, have fixed power scopes like the one used by Lady Death?

Also, and I hate to be nitpicky, but isn’t gripping an AK by the magazine a bad idea, especially with the vertical grip right freaking there? Isn’t his thumb right where the magazine release sits?

No visible rear sight, hard to think it’s gonna be an accurate shot with neither irons nor an optic.

I’d love to hear more about the frequency hopping thing. What devices would I need, and how difficult is it to program?

Reasons to hate it:

1. Bullpup rifles sound good because of their longer barrels in compact packages, but the reload motion is awkward to say the least, and the accuracy is almost always worse than a cheap AR.

2. Just try to stabilize this thing against an improvised barrier as configured. Almost guaranteed is banging your hand into something hard/jagged. The Tavors are actually designed for combat usage because they protect your hand. You can tell China hasn’t actually used these in combat because they haven’t applied that lesson to improving the design.

Many jobs in Finance (Accounting Finance, not customer facing like banking) are remote at this point because they’re all done via email, spreadsheets, PDFs and corporate systems, none of which require a physical presence in an office building.

It’s a fantastic podcast and I point people to the one on the V-22 Osprey frequently just because we live near an airport and Ospreys practice touch and gos before getting lunch nearby.

What did the box of potatoes do to you to deserve that?

The Battle of Athens is one such occasion. The outcome can’t be considered 100% positive, but what future ever is? I should mention that the Second Amendment exists as the last resort, a sort of “break glass in case of emergency”. That those weapons are also useful in everyday life in a dangerous world is a side effect, but in the end, civilian weapons exist in case a despot/party gains enough power and starts to wield it against the citizenry, as at least one presidential candidate has promised to do if re-elected. It’s incumbent on all of us to vote our conscience, but also to be ready to respond effectively in case voting doesn’t do enough.

I also wonder how much ammo the thing can even carry, and if it would be better suited for the role to use modern rockets. A turret with four rockets on each side would have eight shots and still stay nice and low profile, especially if the rocket tubes were 2x2 or 4x1. Maybe that’s the next generation of reconnaissance vehicles, though maybe the whole concept is obsolete in the era of cheap drones. Kamikaze drones and drones spotting for artillery have to be the biggest change in warfare since smart bombs and cruise missiles, if not bigger.

For something ostensibly designed for “sneak and peek”, that giant gun barrel sticking out is going to draw some serious attention. I guess it’s reconnaissance in force, but that barrel is like putting a 30” barrel on a scout rifle: it just seems at odds with the stated purpose.

Very low profile, I can see why it’s well suited to reconnaissance.

Slightly off-topic, have you ever seen “The Pentagon Wars” about the Bradley fighting vehicle? This having reconnaissance in its name reminds me of that.

Same. I replaced a Dell color laser multifunction with a Brother color laser and the Brother easily weighed 15 more pounds. Since there’s a cost to shipping such weight, I knew it has to have better materials, probably with metal gears instead of plastic. That reminds me, I need to find a video on giving it some lube in the important places. I don’t want it getting all fussy on me.