HakFoo

There are two issues with human rights.

One is selective enforcement. There are a long list of countries with abysmal human rights records, but it's too strategically convenient or economically essential to look the other way. Whrn was the last time they made a fuss about Jamal Khashoggi? Human rights only gets invoked when sabre-rattling is useful, not as a solid and consistent moral framework.

The other is that it's a "luxury product". Can every country support a modern human-rights model, or does it require a certain level of economic and political stability? It's hard to maintain rule of law amid active insurgency, or if you can't even deploy the bureaucratic state. Once you've gotten past that threshold, will both leaders and the broader population be eager to switch from the system that got them where they are? You've got to convince people that being able to write an anti-government op-ed is more important than security, or the price of eggs. This is a long term soft sell: berating countries for not measuring up to Western standards isn't going to get them to make that choice any faster.

I'd wonder if the existing amateur presence would make the bands hard to sell for "pollution risk". There's a lot of kit in circulation, and getting it off the market, including secondhand, would be difficult.

Yeah, they could blow a lot of time and money on FCC enforcement, but it feels like trying to unring a bell. As a telecom, would you be willing to pay for (for example) 148MHz on just the promise the existing users were displaced on paper? That doesn't mean much when some untrained/curious person finds kit at the Goodwill and tries it out in the middle of your service range.

Of course, obviously fight for every nanometre of spectrum, but that's probably a legit argument against reclassification: all they'd get is damaged goods of low resale value.

500% of every "replace the legacy system" project is even discovering what the legacy system does.

There are no specs. Well, they are, but they're wrong and onsolete, and never encompass use cases that you didn't even know were going on and only appear when you switch over and people scream that the tools that use an embedded copy of Opera for the Nintendo Wii to access their financial services break.

Can't PS1 discs be imaged on ordinary PC optical drives?

I could see not wanting to try to pair a premium device with the fading remnants of the optical drive market in 2025. Is there anything you can buy new in quantity at any level over "placeholder that will be lucky to last the length of the warranty?"

Let the user pick their own lemon, or use their old trusty Plextor or Pioneer drive from their Sandy Bridge PC.

If it was 1931, wouldn't that be George V still? Did Edward have time to do anything other than muck around with a politically unacceptable woman and make awkward gestures towards Germany?

No, because Hegseth is incapable of learnding. He'll be sharing the nuclear codes on MSN Messenger next week.

I think they lost the lead to an extent when the ecosystem exploded.

They don't have anything comparable to Kailh's click-bar or Gateron's click-leaf switches.

I figured that when the DOGE fiasco imploded, he would scream "treason' and make Musk the fall guy to placate people. Wouldn't roll back anything but a few symbolic changes, but it would let him look the hero.

I wonder if the way to go is to start with the premise of "It's a way to communicate" and work backwards. Better tooling could make it more amenable to new users, and also help make specific use cases more compelling. Once users have he reason you want to be in the ecosystem-- which I suspect, for many people, might look more like a community than a bag of one-off contacts-- then it justfies going deeper into better equipment and technique.

Discoverability is a huge thing. For example, a cheap SDR, even receive-only, is a magical thing, but you end up getting a waterfall full of "what's this weird burst" and jumping around the dial trying to chase where the action is. I suspect better software could really help there-- a UI that decodes digital modes and CW in the right place, and archive received signals might make it easier to track the activity and reduce the problem of "I tuned elsewhere and missed something interesting"

If you start with one of the cheap 2m/70cm HTs, you might be able to find a local repeater, and once you work your way through the fidgety UI, even send a transmission. but are you just going to find empty air much of the time. Again, it's hard to find the action, and make sure you're actually being a positive contributor. I think this has been a problem for me; I got licensed, got my little HT, but now I have the choice of either listening to static, or waiting for a conversation and hoping I have everything configured right enough not to be an annoyance. Maybe better guide websites and scheduled events can help minimize "listening to static" disappointment times.

I could see a fun community project being an autoresponder bot-- in idle times, it would listen to an advertised frequency, detect speech and CW signals and respond with signal quality reports quickly and conveniently to make it easy for a new user to make sure they've got their equipment set up right without barging into a conversation. I know there are ways to test propagation, but a lot of it is "go find a second device and pull up a tracking website"

There might also be room to think of ham radio more as a "transport protocol" than as the main draw. CW and some digital modes feel like they could be packaged up in tools that more resembled modern IM/chat tools to increase accessibility and encourage understanding of best practices. (For example, let the software handle things like regular identification and responding to requests to change transmission characteristics automatically, or at least by providing helpful affordances) Or even a "dashboards and logs" paradigm for recieve-- let the software decode hundreds of hours of signals and then you can crunch it into interesting and useful visualizations.

I admit some of this could be seen as "dumbing down" or steering towards specific narrow paradigms, but that doesn't have to be the entire universe. It could be the equivalent of AOL or Compuserve to the open internet-- making sure that you can get value out of the experience early on, so people can transition to the broader open platform as their needs and skills grow.

Once you have a display, calculator mode isn't hard. There's no excuse for at least "transcribe the calculator's registrr onto the host PC".

Operation Bernhard is a literal example. The Nazis tried to flood thr UK with counterfeit notes to undermine their economy.

I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that's college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.

Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.