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Many animals (including birds, dogs, horses) like the sanctuary and comfort of a cage and choose to use them, but obviously it shouldn't be used like a prison.

I would agree with that in most cases. They treat them like their personal house, unless the owner decides to reinforce their use as a form of punishment. Not really any different than building a dog house for a dog.

How did you arrive at the conclusion that birds like cages?

Not OP but of some bird owners I've see that let their birds hang out in their house / on their shoulders and such the birds willingly go to their cage to rest.

+1 to this. My birds all have open cage doors and they mostly stay in their cage. That's where their food and water is, and they only come out of their cage to go into another one

That's a little different, no? A cage that is open that you can willingly access and leave versus being locked in a cage.

Many birds with anxiety problems do much better at night in covered cages. The anxiety may be temporary (e.g. a new person/animal in the house) but nonetheless there are good reasons for it, and quite common in some species.

This just seems obvious to me, but I've been around animals my entire life.


Most birds roost in trees to minimise exposure to predators. Is it possible that birds that are used to living with humans might similarly see a cage as a place of safety? For rest or just taking a break from watchfulness?

(I'm personally uncomfortable with birds being caged for long periods or in confined spaces, and I'm not offering the above as a justification. I don't own or live with any animals.)


By watching them, and advice from experts.

How did you arrive at the conclusion that they don't?

I'm not the one making the claim..

Well you kind of are, because you're claiming that just because birds willingly spend time in a cage with open doors, it's different than a bird in a locked cage. That's a claim that you're making. So, the question stands, what are you basing that off of?

Even prisoners walk back into their cells. Comfort doesn’t erase confinement. A bird’s world is the open sky—so an open door doesn’t make a cage any less of one.

That's oversimplifying the topic to some catchy lyrics' lines level.

Birds burn a ton of energy flying (at least the birds in question here, other birds can glide for long times), it's not something they would willingly do to no ends.


Why do blue tits nest in tiny boxes with tiny holes?

Tree hollow analog? Small birds worry a lot more about predators.

I reckon that’s right (though maybe its mostly instinct rather than explicit worry), and I imagine there’s also the risk of being kicked out by a larger species looking for a nesting site.

Plenty of small birds do not nest in tree cavities. Chipping sparrows[1] for example do not and are of similar size. Hummingbirds also do not. Meanwhile, owls live in nest cavities and most are larger than songbirds.

That said, the going theory about why some birds choose to nest in cavities is lower mortality rate in their young. Birds who nest in boxes typically have more babies per clutch than those that do not so perhaps that's it? I take that more as no one really knows why one species does while another of similar size does not.

Another random observation is most large birds walk and smaller birds hop. That's not always true either, since blue jays hop and crows will walk and sometimes hop. Hummingbirds cannot do either and just shuffle side to side on perches.

I guess I'm trying to say there's exceptions to the rules in bird behavior, but they're more outliers.

[1] https://brighamstephen.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...


> The price for wholesale electricity is set by a bidding process, with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce a unit of electricity.

Without mentioning how Contracts for Difference (CfD) works, this is a slightly disingenuous oversimplification.


Gas is the yang to winds yin. What other dispatchable power source is there that Britain could use?

Whatever the dispatchable power source, it would have to last weeks at a time in the coldest months of the year.


The issue is that if my electricity I am using now is 99% renewable and 1% gas then I am paying as if 100% is gas. That is why prices are so high.

The video goes into much better detail but the keyword if you want to search yourself is "marginal cost pricing.

You can still have dispatchable gas without this pricing structure.


You can have dispatchable gas without that pricing structure, but having a grid without that pricing structure can't really function without major nationalization of power generation.

Marginal pricing is one of those things that at first sounds crazy, but when you delve into the topic, it's the only sensible way to have market pricing on electricity generation. The only real alternative would be a fully nationalized grid where the government buys up all the dispatachable power sources.


Do you have anything I can read on why marginal pricing is the only sensible way to have pricing?

EDIT: Ah, apparently it aligns market forces well, by making cheap energy sources massively profitable to run, so more and more get added.

Perversely, though, it seems to me that it also incentivizes an entire renewable grid to not expand to 100%, so they all enjoy a much higher price.


As long as there's a large variety of producers competing with eachother though, there's not really any good mechanism for them to collude to avoid expanding to 100%, especially when you add battery power providers and private persons with rooftop solar into the mix.

I think more likely than deciding to stop building more renewables, the renewable providers are just going be incentivized to start installing large batteries wherever they install renewable generation, so that they can flexibly decide if the current spot price is worth selling to the market, or whether it's better to just store the electricity that they generate so that they can sell it in 10 hours or whatever when the price is higher.

Which is great, because it creates a market pressure to build more storage, and at the most efficient place for that storage to be created (right next to where it's generated).


Hmm interesting, so it does seem like marginal pricing aligns incentives well.

I know less about the UK's electrical grid, but at least in Germany, if renewables plus batteries are enough to cover electricity needs for normal day-to-day weather, there is more than enough biogas production in the country to save and store that biogas for the weeks-at-a-time periods where renewable shortfalls happen and batteries won't be enough to cover it.

On any given day Germany generates 7-8% of its electricity from biogas, which means that if instead of burning that gas each day for electricity, we stored it in our network of gas reservoirs, then every 13 days of the year that we don't dip into those reserves, that's a full day of electricity generation in gas that's stored.

____

Even if this is done with fossil-gas instead of biogas though, simply having enough renewables + batteries to cut gas out of day-to-day electrical generation, and using it only for backup would be enough to drastically lower prices for the majority of the year.


Much above $80 and shale oil becomes highly profitable. So swing producers like the US act as a soft ceiling.

That’s how it worked 10 years ago, that’s not really how it works now. The wildcat shale drillers of a decade ago all went bankrupt when prices fell, and lost a bunch of money for their investors. They’ve since all been bought up by larger firms with way more capital discipline, who don’t ramp up drilling just because prices have a little spike, especially when we all know that TACO. Do not expect shale drilling to soften the blow of oil price increases this time.


> That way you are actually in control

Programming in Rust is a constant negotiation with the compiler. That isn't necessarily good or bad but I have far more control in Zig, and flexibility in Java.


Yes, there is a learning curve to Rust, but once you get proficient, it no longer bothers you. I think this is more good than bad, because, for example, look at Bun, it is written in Zig, it has so many bugs. They had a bug in their filesystem API that freezed your process, and it stayed unfixed for at least half a year after I filed it. Zig is a nice C replacement, but it doesn't have the same correctness guardrails as Rust.

Assuming we're talking about the same bug, The filesystem API freeze wasn't caused by Zig's lack of correctness guarantees, but a design flaw in Bun's implementation.

Maybe I'm stupid, but I never actually understood people who blame programming languages for bugs in software. Because sure, it's good to have guardrails, but in my opinion, if you're writing a program and there's a bug, unless this bug lies somewhere in implementation of compiler/interpreter/etc, you can't blame the tooling, It's you who introduced this bug. It was your mistake.

It's cool when your tooling warns you about potential bugs or mistakes in implementation, but it's still your responsibility to write the correct code. If you pick up a hammer and hit your finger instead of the nail, then in most cases (though not always) it’s your own fault.


When millions of users constantly make the same mistake with the tool, there may be a problem with the tool, whether it's a defect in the tool or just that it's inappropriate for the job. Blaming the user might give one a righteous feeling, but decade after decade that approach has failed to actually fix any problems.

That's why I say "in most cases" - so not always, actually. There might be problems with tools, I'm not trying to deny that. And by the way, what if some (or even most) of the users just don't have enough skill to use the tool properly? Again, there could be a problem with tool, yes, but you can't always blame only tools for mistakes users make.

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/18192

I am talking about this bug. It looks like it is still unfixed, in the sense, there is a PR fixing it, but it wasn't merged. LOL.

Regardless of whether this specific bug would be caught by Rust compiler, Bun in general is notorious for crashing, just look at how many open issues there are, how many crashes.

Not saying that you cannot make a correct program in Zig, but I prefer having checks that Rust compiler does, to not having them.


I live very close to one of the USAF's largest European airbases.

While Trump was trolling European leaders about their security posture (by threatening to relieve them of sovereign territory which the US already has extensive access to) the USAF was already moving assets in the opposite direction to the middle east (this was mid-january).

It's fairly easy to work out what's happening if you ignore the orange man and listen to what serious people are saying, what they've briefed on, how they contradict one another, and where the assets are moving.

Obviously European leaders have to pretend to take the orange man seriously, but the reaction in the media was bordering on hysterical.


> It's fairly easy to work out what's happening

off you go then, what is it?


Dunno, start by reading the national security strategy and count the number of times it mentions the words "Arctic" or "Greenland"? (hint: it's zero).

Then maybe look at the Nato chain of command and who was interviewed and what was said in mid-Jan?


Please lessen the snark and dictate what you're saying here. Sources to published docs would be even more preferable.

I'm not going to serialize the past 60 years of US foreign policy in to a pithy post on a meaningless internet forum. For free.

aw man, I thought I would finally find out whats really going on :(

Well, thanks anyway.

Amazing how outdated that document became. We all knew it was written for an audience of one, but still such transparent Emperors New Clothes vibe.

im still waiting to find out whats happening...

This is exactly right. The liar who lies to control the narrative is lying again. The chance he’s lying is high but as adults the (likelihood * hazard) of an invasion is worth preparing for.

The narrative he wanted to control was about Epstein. Denmark could have simultaneously prepared for that, but it wouldn’t be on OSInt Twitter.


The problem is that his "lies" and "jokes" sometimes suddenly turned out to be not lies and jokes.

More precisely, propaganda is always fake. After verification it’s possibly true, but it still began fake. Trump could try supporting his utterances with fact, but he doesn’t.

It’s rational to prepare for his propaganda to sometimes accidentally turn out true. Hence this relatively modest response. But the narrative most reliably supported by fact is that Trump hasn’t kept his story straight about Epstein.


They're just a systems integrator with extra marketing full of empty promises. Think IBM, but less shit.


It doesn't support const enum, unlike esbuild which supports them well enough to be credible.

https://github.com/oxc-project/oxc/issues/6073


The Kuwaiti air force doesn't use F-15E. The F-15E looks quite similar to the Iranian Mig-29 especially from above. I've got no idea how Kuwaiti fast jet pilots are trained but it's not inconceivable that pilot had never seen an F-15E in the flesh before.


>> it's not inconceivable that pilot had never seen an F-15E in the flesh before.

This is such a joke I cant even imagine how you can formulate this thought...

- Exercise Marauder Shield 26.1 (Nov. 2025) "U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft assigned to the 391st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron takeoff during Exercise Marauder Shield in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, Nov. 8, 2025. A key element of the exercise was the sharpening of combined fighter capabilities between the U.S. and Kuwait Air Forces. This included joint training exercises and hot-pit refueling operations."

- CENTCOM Bomber Task Force mission (July 2022)

"..During the BTF, two B-52H Stratofortresses, assigned to the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command, conducted theater integration training and operations with a variety of U.S. Air Force, partner and ally aircraft, including F-15/18, RJ-135, E-3, KC-135/10/46, FGR-4, and A-330..."

"The bombers’ flight originated at Royal Air Force (RAF) Fairford, England, and flew over the Eastern Mediterranean, Arabian Peninsula and Red Sea before departing the region. The mission included fighter escorts from the Royal Air Force and the Air Forces of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia...."

"...“Communication is critical,” said Wong, who also serves as the Deputy Director of Combat Operations, Combined Air Operations Center. “By enhancing lines of communication, we are able to establish a clear and direct line in real time amongst the Air Operations Centers of all nations participating..."


> A key element of the exercise was the sharpening of combined fighter capabilities between the U.S. and Kuwait Air Forces

Well, the Kuwaitis seem pretty sharp? Three shootdowns is a lot in the modern era. The F-22 program only has two air to air kills in its whole history.


> Well, the Kuwaitis seem pretty sharp?

Do they? If they shot down 3 friendly aircraft that would be a catastrophically stupid mistake which would imply they are, in fact, not that sharp (or at least this specific unit and chain of command).

> The F-22 program only has two air to air kills in its whole history

A very poor comparison point given that the F-22 has had limited opportunities for engagement. And just a poor comparison overall.


It is very easy to shoot down friendly aircraft because they don't usually shoot back. They fly in nice straight lines because they don't expect to be shot down at any moment by their allies. They don't employ ECM against you. They don't terrain mask. But, maybe you are joking?


None of the other air forces involved shot down three F-15s, so I don't think it's that easy.

If I'm skimming this page [1] well enough (find: "shot down"), there's only 6 F-15s that have been shot down, and only 4 or them were air-to-air. If it's so easy, should be more than one other incident, and that guy only got one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_F-15_losses


I think that is more likely evidence of their competence.


Given Kuwaiti air force pilots would have dealt with Saudi/US/Iraqi F-15 operators, that seems highly unlikely.


Kuwaiti air force F/A-18 pilots receive most of their training in the USA so most likely they would have seen some F-15 model in flight. That doesn't rule out a case of target misidentification but it's very odd and suspicious.


That would be a pretty huge GCI failure


My bet is ground control tasked him, and he saw them from the rear and at great distance, and thought they were F-14s.


I do not know how F-18 controls work but from what I understand lots of jet controls include the equivalent of a "safety" that can be used to prevent the weapon from being launched. Maybe the pilot thought he had it engaged?

The secondary thing here I've realized is that the missiles in question must not have been using active homing. If they were then the pilots of the US aircraft would have taken evasive action as soon as their radar warning receiver lit up.


That could explain one accidental shootdown. It cannot conceivably explain three.


How easy is it in an F-15E to modify a friend to a foe in the targeting systems?


The IFF system will trigger warning symbology on various cockpit displays but it won't prevent the pilot from employing weapons. At this point we don't know for certain whether IFF was enabled and working correctly on any of the aircraft involved.


> I've realized is that the missiles in question must not have been using active homing.

This is covered in the article so it's weird to present it as an original thought.


The words "active" , "homing", & "receiver" do not even appear in the article for me


> I've realized is that the missiles in question must not have been using active homing

Sorry, but it's totally funny that your nick is literally "Sidewinder".


I don't mean to be rude, but you write like a chatbot. This makes sense, to be honest.


Yeah, you're absolutely right. I was just thinking yesterday ... that because the majority of reading I do now is output from chatbots, I'm starting to think and write like a chatbot.

A little terrifying. Probably the solution is to read 19th century literature before bed.


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