u/ThereIsNoIInMapei

I'm already sad the UCI calendar is winding down! I have a block of free time during February and am tire kicking spectating one of these tours. I've been to GP Montreal and some Belgian Classics before and have really grown to enjoy watching cycling up close. I looked on r/oman and there's really nothing there about their Tour.

It seems like an interesting opportunity to watch a pretty good race and mix it in with sight seeing, but i can't really find any resources on the feasibility or "fun-itude" at either of these races

Apparently, he made the Team USA plan and sent it out to all the players before game time. The Worlds are always tough, because it's herding cats. No one is on the same team, so there's no "go along, get along". But "The Plan" was so good, everyone jumps on it and Team USA wins. SUPER rare that someone actively in the peloton has the same 30,000 foot viewpoint to direct a race. Matteo DS for Enzo Hincapie in 2030?

I was in the Army and know nothing about Naval "stuff", so forgive my ignorance. In the Army, the basic template is you want to attack at 3:1, ie defending is 3X easier than attacking. Now, obviously, there's lots of modifiers to that and 3:1 isn't by any means the end of the story, but that's the basic foundation.

I've just come back from a vacation where a feature was a fortification from the cannon era and i realized I know nothing about that. Presumably, firing from a stationary surface is easier than firing from a rolling sea. Did navies/coastal defenses at the time have their own version of "3:1"?

I appreciate that the coastal defense had a second layer on top, which was physical fortification (castle walls, etc) that complicate things. But just to get me started on this journey of understanding how sea battles work, let's leave those out. Asked in a complexity reduced version, did ships fire at ground targets with the idea that they were aiming at something on the resolution of "hit the city", "hit the castle" or "hit the target", and did shore defenses fire with an understanding that it took 100/10/1 cannon balls to reliably threaten/area deny/hit a seaborn target?

Really interestingly, I just learned the French had normal diplomatic relations with North Vietnam, and when the US withdrew, they had normal diplomatic relations with the United Communist Vietnam. So I could see them not wanting to rock the boat by helping the US too much.

On the other hand, the French would have TONS of insight into how to fight in vietnam, given they had just done it themselves. Everything from advising generals on which hill tops are deceptively easy/hard to attack to advising individual soldiers on what tailors or laundresses were spies all seem entirely plausible.

I'd honestly love some context for the knowledgeable people of RSP. As i understand it, it goes like this:

No one owns the open ocean, so there are no actual rules out there.

However, BECASUE no one owns the ocean and there are no rules, "sea people" have a really built-in "help one another" vibe because no one else is coming to help you when it gets bad. As a sort of game-theory thing, you're REALLY incentivized to help people when they are in distress because someday that might be you

There's some special channel that is only the "we are fucked" channel on everyone's radios. Custom has it that you have one radio tuned to whatever your "working" radio is that handles your daily business and one other radio tuned to the "we are fucked" channel on the very off chance that someone is fucked and needs rescue.

In bad conditions, radio can be pretty short. Also, it's not uncommon that someone gets a "we are fucked" message but can't help (like, "WE NEED A DOCTOR!" but you don't have any doctors on board). In this situation, you re-broadcast the message, which helps the original person get a wider radius

This is all the back drop to the Zuck story. Zuckerberg is way off the coast of Alaska for some reason in July. A boat hits up the "we are fucked" channel several times (externally verified by the Coast Guard). Zuck's ship doesn't respond. Not just that it doesn't help, it doesn't retransmit or even be like, "you can do it, we believe in you!" Now, this isn't a CRIME, remember there are no crimes in the open ocean, but it is against like 500 years of maritime lore and custom. Leaving a stranded boat in the Alaskan ocean is just WILD.

This also, though, sounds pretty "just so". I'd love it if anyone could correct this or add context or whatever. "Rich billionaire doesn't lift a finger to help distressed boat in danger miles from anywhere in the Arctic" just sounds too ghoulish to be real

Prof. Jason Clower at CSU-Chico makes a really interesting argument about the PLA using the Hand Grenade, rather than the Rifle, as the standard weapon of the individual fighting man. His version of the story goes, paraphrased, that the CCP looked around and saw that the rural regions of the outer edges of China, their base, didn't have the industrial savvy to make rifles. Stick grenades, though, were much easier to make, required way less tight tolerances, had way shorter supply chains, and could tolerate some pretty crappy build quality and still work. The CCP saw what was available to them, shrugged, and ran with it.

The PLA's strategy, therefor, was "sneak guys in close, use insane amounts of stick grenades to get suppression, and then use the one or two guys who actually owned a rifle to eliminate the enemy." This, to first approximations, worked and remained embedded in the PLA DNA for a long time after. The PLA was a Grenade Force, in the same way that the USMC said, "every man a rifleman".

a) is this version of PLA history correct?

b) are there other Militaries that, for their own idiosyncratic reasons, weren't "rifle militaries"?

in the old days (really as late as the 1930s), you didn't get your period until about 16 or even 17 due to low body weight. You were pregnant often (plus all the "pregnant for a few months then it didn't attach) and you breast fed for years when you had a kid. you had many kids, as well, so the cycle repeated itself.

anyone know of any studies on this? It seems really fascinating. If modern women took 3x as many breaths or 3x as many steps or peed 3x the number of times, it would be noteworthy. 3x the number of periods seems to go unnoticed, though

Every period tells a tale of a purer version of themselves that was corrupted and now we have to live in disgrace because of it. Eve's apple, the Kali yuga, the ancient greeks crying about how much better the Heroic age was etc etc. I unironically think Craigslist will be the story of human kind from 1600 to 2026, and genuinely wouldn't be surprised if we say some mythologized version of it a thousand years in the future.

-Dude gets rich in the 90s tech boom. Doesn't NEED to do anything, decides to make Craigslist for fun. He noticed that we could use "the internet" to solve coordination problems ("man, i'd love a couch, but i can't afford a new one" lives in the same town as "my mom just died, what am i gonna do with all her stuff!?!")

-Keeps it purposefully shitty and REALLY EASY to use/navigate. It's plaintext so although it's always laughably outdated, it actually plays nice with every system, even to today.

-Craig actually solves a genuine niche. There really WAS a coordination problem!

-Craigslist becomes one of the top websites ever, of all time

-Because he previously got rich, Craig allows ~99% of posts for free. He only charges for niche stuff, like apartments in big cities and certain job postings.

-It becomes the top 10 website in every continent, there is a craigslist antarctica

- Despite being free to 99% of it's users, it rakes in ~20 million per employee. This is unthinkable. Facebook, which history sees as the mother of all unicorns, is ~2 million per employee. The Dutch East India company is ~200k/employee. It pulls it off because it's so simple, there's very few employees.

-The head gets summoned to Davos. The Lizard People basically scream at him. "Look, you could be making SO MUCH more. Let us invest!" Craig says no, he prides himself on 99% free and is already quite rich himself.

-From about 2012 onwards, there's an entire world of venture capital that just takes little slices of Craigslist and turns it into billion dollar companies. Zillow, Monster/Indeed, Carvana/CarMax, EBay, you name it, are all for profit duplicates.

-One of the very few Craigslist employees hears the Sand Hill Rd sirens singing and sells. Craigslist, organizationally, is shocked. The dude was making BANK, and it wasn't enough. He sold it all to the devil. EBay ends up with 30% of Craigslist.

-They aggressively bid for monetization of everything, everything gets worse/destroyed.

-By 2026, Craigslist is dead and everything we got for free we now have to pay for and ger worse versions of.

the whole story has all the Jungian forces: a Kind Giver, a Coven of Greed, a Deceitful Turncoat, and a Clear Explanation of our current Fallen State

On paper, the Danube seems like it ought to be very important. It's a fantastic transit line through the heart of Europe and quite navigable all the way to Regensbourg. France of the Napoleonic era functionally held the headwaters. they fought in Ulm, Vienna, and Wagram. And yet they never seemed to think to control the river itself in a military capacity. There were no French gun boats going up and down. Like, doesn't Aspern-Essling look a ton different if there was a French River Navy with gun boats? This whole period seems really odd to me. In 1809, they are fighting near, through and around the river, but oddly never with or in the river.

Was it just that the technology wasn't there? That Napoleonic France was a land, not sea power? Is there quirks to the Danube that make it viable for merchant traffic but not for military traffic?

the winner of the polka dot jersey, at the end of the tour, is awarded 25k euro. Stage winners get 11k euro per stage. Keeping the polka dot jersey gets you 300/day. You get 800 euro for being first on an HC climb.

A REALLY good rider, who locks the polka dot jersey down, wins a few stages, is first on some big ticket climbs, might make 70k euro. That would be a strong showing.

You look at the suffering and misery to get that 70k euro and it's brain breaking how shoe string the finances of the TdF really are.

I was in the Army and know nothing about the Navy, so forgive my ignorance right off the bat.

As I understand it, the biggest ships in the Age of Sail were basically labor black holes. You needed huge amounts of man power and they were always dealing with being under-staffed.

This got me wondering! Suppose I need 100 people to sail a ship and I only can get 85. We can make it work but it's not going to be easy or fun. Then, we get orders to bring Army troops to The Colonies. While we sail, do we ask for 15 Soldiers to fill in the gaps of the 15 Sailors we are missing? Obviously, there would be a lot of tasks the Soldier couldn't do because he lacked practice/knowledge, but if we have Soldiers doing "easy" stuff we can reposition our Sailors to do "hard" stuff. And we both fight for The Same Crown, so on the highest level, someone could force it. On the other hand, I can imagine the Army refusing to follow orders from the Navy just as an institutional prerogative, and certainly refusing if it meant scrubbing barnacles instead of just playing cards or what have you.