Weekly Roundup

SKH Roundup: April 6th 2026

The US is increasingly unable to fly aerial operations over EU airspace, so instead we launched a rocket to the moon

Endeavorance

06 Apr 2026 — 7 min read

Microsoft Would Very Much Like You to Use Their AI Now, Please, Thank You

Microsoft is desperate for folks to use Copilot, their AI offering which does something but I'm honestly not entirely sure what. Maybe it helps you play Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Anyway, people aren't. Doing that. They're not doing that.

I wrote about it here:

War Stuff

We are still very much at war with Iran despite what our esteemed leadership may say. In my (albeit limited) experience in life, exchanging munitions from various ships and fighter jets while losing combatants on both sides of a conflict seems—in its own way—like war.

No Fly Zone

Five nations in Europe have denied or significantly limited access to their airspace by US military planes. While France and Austria have cited that they're not entirely banning aircraft, Spain has fully said "this war is illegal and you're not using our airspace."

There is some precedent here, kinda. Countries have previously closed their airspace to the US military for example when Reagan bombed Libya or at the start of the Iraq war. However, this time around has seen a much more rapid and coordinated response with more countries getting involved than before.

Here's a table of the countries currently putting a nonzero amount of pushback on the US military's requests for zoom zoom:

Country	Status	Details
Spain	No-can-do	They don't want the US using their airspace for the war, straight up
France	Confusing tbh	France is reportedly preventing Israel from using their airspace to transport US weapons for the war
Switzerland	Obviously	Switzerland is doing their neutrality thing. Though, it's not a total blockade of all US airspace usage, but for most cases they have denied permits
Italy	Will-They-Wont-They	Italy has denied landing access to the US for some military aircraft, but hasn't outright denied airspace
Austria	Comin' in hot	Following a similar route to Switzerland, and is the latest country to join in at time of writing

Lost and Found

Iranian forces shot down a US F-15E Strike Eagle jet, forcing both of the crew members on board to eject. The pilot of the aircraft was rescued after a few hours, and the weapons officer (the other guy) was rescued about a day later after a fairly intensive rescue operation.

During the rescue operation, another US aircraft was downed, this time an A-10 Warthog. The pilot of that aircraft also ejected and was also rescued.

A few other aircraft took some fire, and several service members were injured, but the details remain scant. That is, of course, unless you want to read all about how heroic and amazing the US was to have pulled off this operation, which seems to be the leading line for most US-based major outlets.

Brace yourself for the movie release in a decade or so.

Everyone involved in the operation is back at one US base or another, according to US officials. Iranian officials claim the operation went a bit worse than the US claims. Iranian officials claim the operation included more downed aircraft and at least five killed in action.

I don't tend to take any one state officials' word at face value, and would note that the US has claimed total air superiority over Iran, and has claimed we've annihilated their defenses, yet they took out an F-15E. So, I mean. I'm gonna continue assuming we're not getting the whole picture.

Hegseth Blues

Pete Hegseth is getting renewed attention as the war continues on. His now well-documented history of announcing, endorsing, and carrying out literal war crimes has a few patriots around the country asking, "hey, so anyone else think putting an alcoholic, abusive, ex-fox-news host with no meaningful experience into one of the highest seats in the military was a bad idea?"

1. Purpose: to inform you that a public statement you made on Mar. 13, 2026, may be construed as counseling, commanding, encouraging, ordering, or threatening the commission of a war crime.
—General Counsel, Department of Defense ("Department of War")

In addition to the average, run-of-the-mill Hegsethery we've been seeing, we also saw him recently inject himself into a bizarre scenario where members of the US Army seemed to collab with Kid Rock to make a video of them flying helicopters near his mansion so he could post a video to Twitter. Army officials quickly suspended those involved in the stunt, only for Hegseth to declare, "No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots."

This is because we live in a fucking bizarro world where Kid Rock gets special treatment from the US Army who is in turn run by an unhinged white supremacist whose own mother hates him.

Hegseth would then go on to fire several top generals, including the Army Chief of Staff. During a war. And reportedly due to petty squabbles like a "personality dispute," according to Axios.

To top it all off, Financial TImes reported that an investment broker for Pete Hegseth apparently attempted to make a huge purchase of shares of a defense equity fund from BlackRock right before the start of the Iran war. The fund wasn't yet ready, so the deal didn't go through. The Pentagon has denied the claim.

Sure, guys.

Data Center Strikes

Iran has successfully done what boycotts have failed to do for decades: hit Amazon where it hurts.

Multiple Amazon data centers in the region around Iran have been struck, taking out entire AWS regions. Like, hard down with no timeline for recovery.

For the non-technical folks in the room, Amazon Web Services (or "AWS") is Amazon's cloud and technical infrastructure platform. It's a thing used to build apps and services. It has several "regions," which are complete, self-contained sets of infrastructure around the world.

So for example if you want to do business mostly in North America, you might mostly use an AWS region in North America. Simple.

Well if you want to do global business, you need to be in several regions around the world. As of now, two of those regions (there's about 40 in total depending on how you wanna count) are fully down: "ME-CENTRAL-1" and "ME-SOUTH-1", located in UAE and Bahrain respectively.

If you were running stuff in those regions, you're just kinda up shit creek right now. Original reports were very light on details, claiming that there was "minor damage" or "a fire," but as time went on, a cursory glance at software developer discussion boards showed a very different story.

Gib Moni

We will end this segment by just noting that the White House proposed that for the 2027 fiscal year, we could cut non-defense spending by TEN PERCENT and increase the military budget by FIVE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS.

Sounds swell.

Just.

Swell.

(Note: the White House making a budget proposal is not the same as an actual budget being passed. It's instead an indicator of what they want to see funded.)

We Went to Space Again

We done went to space again. Just for the fun of it, I guess!

The Artemis II mission—the first crewed Lunar mission in 50 years—is currently very far away from my house.

The mission lifted off in the evening of April 1st and the spacefolk will splash back down to San Diego on April 10th.

As they were heading up into the far sky, mission commander Reid Wiseman took a photo of Earth to send back to us so that we could all shut the actual fuck up for a second and remember how small we really are.

Truly amazing photo. I can't get over how you can see the atmosphere and multiple auroras. Incredible.

Of course, no space journey is without its bumps. In addition to some toilet trouble in the capsule, there were reports of some technical difficulties with—of all things—Microsoft Outlook.

Apparently one of the astronauts was handling a computer and talking to ground control when he asserted that he had "two Outlooks, and neither of those are working."

It's good to know that no matter how far we come, Outlook will still be a pain in the ass.

A big ol' "good luck" to the four crew members on this mission:

Reid Wiseman (Commander)
Victor Glover (Pilot)
Christina Koch (Mission Specialist)
Jeremy Hansen (Mission Specialist, dedicated good-luck Canadian)

Just a Note on this…

I also want to note that while it can be very easy to see something like a space mission launch by the US and see it as a huge waste of time, resources, pollution, etc. I get it. Especially as we're bombing the ever-loving hell out of West Asia again. But consider that these kinda missions, while mostly funded for the purposes of dick-measuring and satiating the ruling class' desire to further colonize things, are massive programs that have major impacts beyond "we went to space."

The research that goes in to carrying out these missions takes decades and produces myriad beneficial discoveries to the general public, like water filtration technology and medical infrastructure advancements for things like imaging.

It's a silver lining. But hey, I'd take some silver right now.