VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
Do you have any links to read more about that? I'm curious.
to other Axis powers like Germany.
Is there another Axis power you are comparing them to? I'll accept the overall premise of "Japan hasn't satisfactorily repented of its war crimes," but Germany is pretty much the only comparison here. Maybe Italy has some reflection, but I think the "and then we overthrew the terrible, no-good Mussolini" take is at least as common as the "we did bad things and supported even worse ones" take.
I haven't visited the more minor powers like Finland, Hungary, and Thailand, but I suspect the take there is closer to "it's complicated".
Pickup trucks outsell sedans these days.
There are surprisingly few "sedan" models on the market regardless. Everyone wants hatchbacks, crossovers, or full SUV/trucks.
while in Germany the counterparts to those are largely considered an extremely basic and plebeian pastime.
I think there are a few examples like this where "Euro" things are high-status in the US, but in actual Europe they're working-class signifiers. US soccer fans are generally either Hispanic or upper-middle class, with the implied perception of looking down on "American" sports like football (US), baseball, and basketball. Cycling is, or at least used to be a few decades ago, I hear, similar: fancy road bikes are expensive status symbols in America, while in Europe it's often less gear-driven and professional cyclists are often from lower-class backgrounds more like basketball in America.
I think there is probably some general pattern of status versus foreign-ness: the lower classes aren't well-traveled enough to know what goes on in foreign countries, and the tourist class doesn't always grok the cultures they visit to understand the actual class dynamics at play there.
There is presumably some point, which admittedly might be beyond Mars settlement, but I suspect isn't fully, at which a fully closed system becomes viable. For the ISS, it's easy enough to ship up food, oxygen (water) and replacement parts with a couple of months notice. For Mars, those timelines get longer and it is at least worth considering whether you need a full set of replacement parts, or the equivalent of raw materials and a machine shop (common on larger oceangoing ships), or whether a closed-loop environmental system (CO2->oxygen + calories->CO2) makes sense. I'll acknowledge it might not, but a Mars settlement needs to be self-sufficient for at least a few years without Earthside supplies.
I’ll be honest, I really wish space exploration was viable, but more than likely, humans will not leave earth and roam much farther than our nearest neighbors. Everything else is going to be robots and telescopes because traveling the stars is risky and expensive.
Humans were once bold enough that the first Polynesians set sail into the open Pacific with presumably no knowledge of what they'd find over the horizon several thousand years ago (Tonga, Samoa), and then, after several thousand years of a gap -- honestly, an interesting historical question -- as far as Hawaii and Easter Island. I don't think I can even really comprehend what would drive people to set sail in wooden ships without a well-defined destination, or how many anonymous brave souls likely disappeared into deep blue waters without a trace in the process.
Space exploration is, as is often observed, immensely more difficult given the lack of breathable air and such, but I can't help but feel that it sounds more technologically comparable with sailing the open Pacific before the Latins even moved into Italy. God-willing, maybe my descendants will look back upon us comparably while they board the equivalent of scheduled cruise ships, or even whatever analog the of air travel that fits into this.
EDIT: I'm not at all certain how I ended up responding to your comment twice. I must be done for the day.
Are there 15% of global GDP in minerals and metals on mars in such a way that it could be extracted with low enough cost to make this work?
My own spicy take is that Mars is a cute idea for a permanent destination, but the asteroid belt has a lot more resources that are more accessible on the basis of not hiding at the bottom of a large gravity well, and makes far more sense in the short term.
They should start by trying to build pleasant domed habitats somewhere marginally habitable like northern Minnesota first.
Biosphere 2 was a pretty notable boondoggle back in the 1990s (notably involving one Steve Bannon, later famous for other work): they failed to make their "separate biosphere" really work in practice, suffering a bunch of ecosystem imbalances and ultimately having to inject external oxygen. Now, their project was pretty ambitious, and I'm not going to completely fault them for the outcome there, but I do think it's necessary to revisit at perhaps slightly more modest scales to prove out long-term independent habitats elsewhere in the solar system. Other than that, there are a handful of Russian experiments I don't know many details of, the ISS (which sources water from the ground for oxygen, vents CO2, and isn't really "closed") and submarines (which have some documentation, but are "sensitive" for probably-good reasons, and aren't really intended as indefinite habitats WRT food and consumables) and at least one YouTuber trying to demonstrate viability.
Honestly, it's a good place to start. And I'm not sure you need a dome either: in theory your long-term space habitat should probably survive with just electrical power. It's really not clear what the smallest "functional" biosphere is, especially once you start leveraging technology ("why yes, we do pump all the CO2 out of the habitat and into the greenhouse to improve plant growth"). There is some fuzziness about "fully closed-loop" too, but let's assume you don't need to maintain the tools themselves indefinitely to start with. I can't imagine $BILLIONAIRE (or NASA, even) couldn't fund a serious project with some graduate students, equipment, and sealed space the size of maybe a studio apartment.
Sure! The universal requirement for ramp and elevator accessibility in most places is probably the biggest culprit. It sounds great on paper, but in practice makes it really hard build new things outside of greenfield construction.
- NYC is still trying to bring subway stations into compliance a generation later, and only plans to have 95% compliance by 2055. It's also clearly hampering expansion: of 472 stations, none were built between 1989 (the ADA passed in 1990) and 2009. Only five have been built post-ADA. New York is perhaps the most obvious example, but I think any older places will have the same sorts of issues.
- As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it requires scope creep for modifications to non-compliant (often historic) structures that can make landlords put off nontrivial renovations. ADA-compliant spaces are larger (wider bathroom stalls, wider hallways for wheelchairs to pass and turn, wider doorways, ramps) in ways that clearly add to the cost of a building -- this may be worth it, but it shouldn't be swept under the rug.
- It limits architectural freedom in subtle ways: split-level designs and walk-up apartments are hard to build. There is a certain "planar-ness" to ADA designs that, while I suppose functional, feels a bit grating after you see it everywhere ("the bar area is two steps higher than the dance floor, letting you see out over it to the stage").
The state of Texas is going to get its cut no matter which goods Amazon sells to Texans.
I'm old enough to remember a time before online retailers regularly collected sales taxes (apparently nationwide starting in 2017 after a SCOTUS decision).
Russia is sitting on the world's second most largest stockpile of nuclear weapons,
I'm pretty sure the (published) warhead counts actually have Russia with slightly more than the US, largely because of odd treaty wordings on specific delivery mechanisms.
how many Americans and even Mottizens display an astonishing capacity to rationalize bad foreign actors. China wants Taiwan primarily out of essentially hurt feelings;
I am curious how you feel about the War of Northern Imperialism Civil War: the American founding documents talk a lot about "just consent of the governed" but when some of the (state governments as proxies for) regions decided they no longer consented, Lincoln sent in troops. My own thoughts are complicated: I think the US is, for a variety of reasons (ending slavery, combined economic power) better off for the Union winning, but it does seem against the general principle of self-governance. It's not even hard to find takes today justifying curtailing the rights of the region on the basis of the actions of their forefathers.
I hope that hill isn't too poorly graded or sandy, then. :)
I have come across some interesting "The ADA is one (of several) well-meaning laws that keep us from building cool stuff" takes that, while I still endorse the broad principle, have made me question some of its aspects.
the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.
When did you start seeing this response? I don't remember any biting policy changes up until election season began in earnest. I think there were some local actions in NY and Chicago (and memorably, Martha's Vineyard) to the migrant busing policies, but I will admit I don't follow politics that closely and I might have missed something.
The vibe I remember felt more like "all in on open borders and accepting any and all asylum claims, up until they saw how that polled with prospective voters 24 months later."
So of the parents can not agree on what should happen with the child, the child will be deprived of the right of an US custody court deciding its fate. That would be irreparable harm -- unless Trump is willing to send SEAL team to repatriate the child.
I think that this sort of irreparable harm is somewhat unavoidable in such circumstances. Janet Reno was willing to send tactical border patrol agents to return a toddler from extended family in the US to his father in Cuba -- there is an iconic photo of a federal agent pointing an MP-5 at a screaming toddler in his family's arms. Or that time the Carter administration allowed a Ukrainian teenager living in Chicago to claim asylum when his parents decided to move back to the Soviet Union. All of those cases are, in some ways "irreparable harm". But so is the reverse, and I'm not really sure how you'd consistently manage to avoid all such classes. I'm open to suggestions.
Ordering a batch of prototype pcbs (something no US manufacturer has capacity / interest in providing)? That’ll be $200 extra.
My man, are you not familiar with OSHPark and DigiKey Red? The bare PCB options there are fairly cheap as long as you can use their standard stackups.
If you need something more complicated and/or populated, there are choices like Advanced Circuits, too. At least in my area, if you look, there are commercial shops that can populate SMT/TH boards. Admittedly, these might be more than $200 above the Shenzen costs today.
What has Trump got the power to achieve?
I am tacitly of the opinion that some of the executive orders might actually remain in effect into the next term. Affirmative action and friends (disparate impact, maybe) have long been unpopular (see California referendum results), but have hung on for half a century largely on bureaucratic inertia. Those haven't gotten as much press as some of the more dramatic actions on immigration, and I think EOs to re-establish that might actually be a hard sell for a future administration. Maybe also the Title IX sports changes.
He makes motions towards annexing Greenland and Canada but can't actually get it off the ground.
IMHO I think Trump might actually have been successful with Canada if he had pitched it differently: "I want to work with Justin to investigate forming a great, big, beautiful customs union and harmonization of laws -- we're gonna make trade so easy -- including a roadmap to a more formal union by 2050" sounds at least sellable. "Fifty-first state" really dishonors Canada by putting it equal with, I dunno, Delaware and Rhode Island: Canada has a population around the size of California.
Neoliberals broadly like nice-sounding ideas like "unity" and EU-style bureaucracies, but specific details never sell well (where's that combined EU army?). The only way that seems plausible is to sell the big picture, start the institutional inertia in motion, and let bureaucrats sort out the details down the road: Maybe the US decides to mark speed limits in metric. Maybe it's just a treaty combining military commands and establishing EU-like residency and border rules. What do we do with the existing national governance frameworks?
I'm not sure that I'd endorse the outcome if he had done that, but I don't have any particular animosity towards Canadians and am not gut-opposed to it either.
In this hypothetical are you a state or federal judge? Demanding the feds remand someone they've detained to state custody seems like something you at best could ask nicely for (see the precedent of Grant v. Lee on the subject). I would generally expect them to agree for major crimes absent other major political concerns. If federal (and assuming Article III), then no. If federal and Article II, then I think it's at least unclear which parts of the executive can order which others around.
Sexual norms in antiquity are a pretty complicated topic (and inconsistent over time too): I guess that I can't speak to the presence of children, but Roman parades with lots of phallic imagery are documented to have occured. I believe it was Augustus who tried to steer the Roman upper classes toward chastity and fidelity in ways that would probably look "Christian" today but largely predate that Jesus character's major set pieces. Not to mention ancient practices of homosexuality and acceptable age gaps there.
Honestly, I know just enough that I'd be interested to read a longer, more coherent take on the subject.
Article 25 allows publishing of print media in two or more language versions, one of which must be Ukrainian, provided that all language versions are identical in size, format and substance and are issued on the same day.
Doesn't Canada have similar laws regarding English and French?
By default any arrangement which makes it easier for NATO to defend Ukraine from a Russian attack in future is something that could, in theory, make it easier for NATO to attack Russia from Ukrainian territory.
Why not just attack from NATO territory in Poland, Finland (only decided to forego neutrality because of the Ukraine invasion), or the Baltics? They are closer to the presumable targets anyway.
In my darker moments, I wonder if "decolonization" in practice is somewhat genocidal. For all the lofty "self governance" rhetoric, there are uncomfortably many examples, of which I'd consider the Subcontinent one (also Palestine, Rwanda, and many others), in which some of the first actions with newfound independence were to start killing and forcibly relocating each other.
Even some places that set out with lofty rhetoric (South Africa) haven't really been able to realize those stated values. I recognize that the colonial powers weren't exactly saints either, so I don't have a better suggestion. Just the sad state of the world. On the other hand, there are success stories: Singapore, for example.
Since the easiest people to be declared outlaws are the visa overstayers and people entering not at point of entry.
Yeah, adopting this at the present time would seem to be a huge loss for the left: it provides an obvious way to convincingly argue against birthright citizenship because "outlaw" seems to pretty clearly to imply "not subject to the jurisdiction thereof" even within the physical borders of the US.
In this case, I'd be pretty uncomfortable with it regardless.
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Also watermelon is incredibly popular across the South. My (white) family, especially the older generations, really enjoy it in-season.
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