Physics happens right in front of us all the time. If you think it’s wrong, you need to show how in order to be believed; a lot of people have measured it and gotten the traditional results.

however, i keep thinking that cosmic expansion will lift things out of a gravitational potential over time.

Heat death is about statistics, not gravity. A “typical” physical situation is a situation you can’t run a machine or a living organism on, basically. The universe started in a “weird” (low entropy) situation, but seems to be wandering back towards a typical (high entropy) one as things happen.

Black holes outlasting everything else is a different thing that might happen in the far future.

or, in case cosmic expansion does not continue exponentially (but slows down over time), then the laws of physics would change over time;

Not sure where you heard that. Cosmic expansion staying too small to really notice at normal scales, and physics running the same way as ever is a definite possibility.

BTW, in the future, you’ll get more nice, helpful replies if you frame it as “why doesn’t X alternate possibility happen?”. That’s usually a great question and an opportunity to learn, and it doesn’t disrespect anyone.

Each of those individually is still the most common.

Maybe you’re the time traveler, watch out for butterflies. :)

That would be a fresh take, on Lemmy.

The weird thing it that the most socialist stratum by far now (the upper middle class) is also the one that owns most of the capital.

The lower class is getting more and more right-wing, if anything. It’s definitely a new age.

Yeah, giving somebody’s personal manifesto as a source is always a bad sign. I don’t care if it’s Naomi Klein or Ayn Rand. TBF I learned a bit about the history anyway.

If they dissolved the crown corporation and made it part of some ministry again, I doubt much would change.

Yeah, it’s unclear if OP meant just daily delivery or mail in general, but there are still a lot of things that want snail mail.

It seems like “summer child” implies you yourself have experienced any of these possibilities. At the end of the day we’re both making educated guesses about the future.

You need a big, pricey, vulnerable piece of machinery to target your shells.

Are we talking about a dispersed group of guerillas, or a Le Mis street uprising kind of thing? If conflict ever happens the latter way is very debatable, but usually when someone talks about the people against the rich/elites/whatever, that’s what’s in mind.

In the guerillas case, shelling is very situational, you’re right. So is a motion-tracking drone. It’s cheap and portable, but there’s also a lot more countermeasures to it, and they’re both ultimately for area denial (or similar). In the end, a whole lot is riding on some human-level intelligence deciding who to target, particularly if you’re doing COIN, and that brings you back to piloted drones or small arms.

In the Le Mis case, the gun itself isn’t vulnerable, and you can assume every shell kills at least one person. This exact thing has happened, and I’ve never heard it described as a major expense for the government side. It goes at least as far back as Napoleon; being the one general willing to take grapeshot to protesters was his big break.

Now, your revolutionary drone operator saves you the trouble of tracking by broadcasting his location, assuming he hasn’t already been sighted on your universal surveillance cameras or been swept up by irregular purchasing habits.

The safe-er way would involve fibre or wires, either to an attritable antenna or to the drone itself. Maybe just getting TFO before a counterattack can arrive would work. It sounds like that’s frequently the situation in Ukraine, even though it seems really risky.

The surveillance networks could be bad, if the many gaps fill in. That’s not about drones though.

So when you stack up any belligerents [state vs state/non-state], the key math is who can deploy more drones from better positions with better range/targeting, better tactical intelligence and keep pressure over a longer period. A state actor will always have the advantage there.

That can be the logic of a fight with guns or muskets as well. Clearly, sometimes the ability to blend with the population beats better positioning.

There’s officers who think drones are entirely overblown, and Ukraine is the way it is because of the kind of battlefield and the exact asymmetry between the sides. Maybe they’re wrong, but the next big thing in warfare has turned out to be vapourware before.

Yup, the big Reddit exodus to this point, as far as I’m aware.

Lemmy is very slowly shrinking, so hopefully there’s another coming. Maybe geopolitics could do it.

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Glad to be here!

Weapons have been banned before, but nukes are the only things that actually don’t get used.

Well, you don’t hear a lot about blinding weapons or biological agents these days.

You could have looked at the first muskets and said "definitely an advantage, but not an insane amount compared to seasoned archers and siege equipment.

That’s a great example. You know what happened after muskets fully took over? The age of absolutism gave way to the age of revolution.

Like, both drones and muskets are real, game-changing innovation, but how they effect the geopolitical equilibrium is a complicated question. I’m reminded of some of the WWI-era designers who though a more deadly weapon would mean a shorter, more humane war. In practice it meant a very different, long-standoff battlefield, and a much slower war.

To that point:

These are cheaper to create, easier to run in undetected, and do far far less collateral damage.

Shells are really cheap, like as cheap or cheaper than a drone, undetectability is valid, but actually favours the little guy, and collateral damage depends. Some shrapnel marks on one hand vs. a localised explosion on the other. You don’t want to shell a big thin-walled tank or pipe, but on a normal building the drone may actually be more destructive.

So basically, this is an interesting development and different from a shell for sure, nobody’s denying that. But, that it favours central, autocratic power does not directly follow.

How does who saw it first effect if it’s right or wrong? It doesn’t.

Besides, monarchist mercantilists were doing it before unions were really a thing.

They did talk about it taking a long time.

I mean, that’s basically the government’s official policy right now, and they’re doing well in the polls.

He hates free trade, and is a “tariff man”. If you agree with him, okay. Don’t pretend you don’t.

No problem! Glad to hear someone else appreciates it the same way.

One explanation would basically be cronyism in a country where there’s endemic corruption and the government intervenes a lot, and however it wants. It’s a pretty classic story from economies all over.

The funny thing about that is that the CCP actually tends to leave certain sectors alone, more than the West even would. It’s like a hybrid Confucian/Maoist thing where they don’t want to concern themselves with the merchant class. (All I have for evidence on that one is hearsay, sorry)

Hey, weapons have been banned before. (And continuous genocide is kind of just the normal situation globally)

That being said, yes, a fully autonomous, self-supporting army would have massive, terrifying social implications. Few people are talking about it, but it has to be the biggest existential threat we’re facing over the next century or two.

This sounds like it’s just a drone that chases anything that moves wherever it’s deployed, though, not something more nefarious. Against a known, unarmed target shelling would achieve the same thing.

TBF land mines that deactivate themself after a few weeks are a thing now as well.

I guess a market killbot field wouldn’t be too much different during the conflict. It has the same indiscriminate nature for sure, though, and soft targets with no point defences like civilians will be extra vulnerable.

You can watch the beds shrinking in designs over time, because an ego never hangs over the back.

There’s vehicles that are literally just an SUV with a short segment of missing roof now.

TBF it’s Alberta, but like 80% of the ones I see are more on the brodozer end of the spectrum than on the practical vintage car side. Even tradies have to make do with the bigger, higher models these days because that’s what’s available, although they use and maintain them very differently.