My guess is that the first bad report will be accurate, but once this administration gets caught with their pants down, they’ll fire that team and start releasing jobs reports that have been sharpied to death.

I think we are. If you can think of something awful for us to do, we’re already on our way to doing it. We’re probably a month out from shooting garbage and nuclear waste into orbit on spaceX rockets.

I’m worried, I’m afraid to say. Our government has been compromised, and the republic is dead, we will have no more legitimate elections and it’s likely (imo) that our legislature will soon dissolve. I wish I could say that we were ever the America you were taught about, but it was always a farce. I’m almost to middle age and I’ve never once seen my country try to be the place it tells itself it is. It’s always been a place that beats its chest while sitting on the couch and reminiscing about how cool it was on the high school sports team; that steps on the weak and the poor to satisfy the rich and the powerful. I’ve always believed we could do better, that we could be the place we tell ourselves we are, but we never choose to do the hard work to be that place.

Though Ukraine will likely persist as an ulcer for the remainder of Putin’s life. The good news is twofold:

• we still haven’t cracked immortality, and one day probably quite soon, Putin’s number will be called.

• Europe is stepping up to the plate now that the US has shit its pants and is currently waddling off the field. Take my energy, Goku!

Okay, here we go

• The US is fucking YUGE. Historically speaking, it’s very, very difficult to keep countries that span huge geographic areas together. There seems to be some fundamental limit of size per population that can be tolerated before your cultural and geographic differences start becoming significant enough to start forming separate identities. The US has like 14 such subregions, and each one has a little different idea of what “America” means to them. A strong single national identity is not the default case here, you’ve got to really work at it or have some big unifying cause, which we no longer have.

• We already have pre-fabricated governments in the form of state governments. State governments tend to be pretty strong, in the sense that they tend to have a whole lot of administrative capacity, much stronger imo than what I believe of European provincial governments. The whole original idea was that the states were mostly independent states joined together under a trade federation and its government. Of course, it hasn’t been that for a long time, but that’s the root that we grew up from.

• We have almost no history of state on state violence, and most Americans do share some sense of national identity. Maybe not a strong one anymore, but it’s there. I think most people would be pretty shocked about the idea of going to war with another state.

• This isn’t really an ideological separation, as much as the federal government is just, like, vanishing in a puff of smoke. There’s a lot of states where they’ve depended on the federal government’s administrative capacity to handle stuff, and that’s just going away in a real haphazard, scattershot way. At some point, these states will ask themselves “if we’re handling all this shit ourselves, what the hell are we sending the Fed tax dollars for?”

Hey, yeah, you’re completely right. I definitely didn’t mean to imply that they lived in some unspoiled wilderness or that they didn’t believe in touching the wilderness like a lot of the colonial narratives suggest. I’ve been reading Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson, and it does a lot of work dispelling those myths. What I mean is that they had relationships with the ecology here; California native tribes knew where edible corms grew and how to cultivate them to ensure a good bounty, they knew when to expect and hunt migratory birds, how to sustainably harvest roots and leaves for basketry, how to harvest and use acorns from the various oak species here, and how to get food and shelter from incense cedar and sugar pine without killing the trees. They also knew how to tend these local ecologies to ensure that these plants and animals continued to exist as long-term and renewable resources. In fact, another book I’m reading, Braiding Sweetgrass makes the case that the plants that native people used fare worse without human intervention. While the tribes, at least as early European settlers knew them, were semi-nomadic (they would move between the valleys and the mountains depending on the season) rather than agrarian, they still cultivated and shaped the lands they lived on. They helped to shape and were also shaped by the ecology.

European and American settlers blew almost all of that away without even realizing it in many cases. In California, all it took was introducing grazing animals and declaring land private property.

More than that, we completely transformed the native ecology of places such that they’re nearly unrecognizable from what they once were. Native plants only occupy a tiny, tiny slice of the ecology that they used to, thanks to invasive introductions that came either accidentally or deliberately with livestock and agricultural imports. I know that in California, many of the plants the native people depended on are difficult to find anymore, and are almost never deliberately cultivated. We also took deliberate, calculated steps over decades to eradicate their cultures, and since very little was ever written down, it was largely successful.

In spite of all that, AFAIK there IS at least a Dine restaurant that they’re using to try and teach their own people and others about their traditional culinary and food-ecology practices.

Okay, I’m not trying to be shitty with you, I’m actually interested. Why don’t you make your case for when you think the US republic died?

The problem that I keep seeing here is people saying “well, he can’t do that.”

Stop that. He can do it because nobody’s going to stop him. I mean, you surely don’t expect that little shit Mike Johnson to tell Daddy Trump no. The constitution itself isn’t going to rise up out of its case like Godzilla and crush him. The judiciary isn’t going to come and enforce their decision in person. That just leaves the military. They’re either going to coup him, or not, and I’m expecting the latter case.

X

Well, it depends on how you define the USA. You mean the Republic of the United States of America? Yeah, no, that’s dead. It is currently dead. It died when the SCOTUS made the president functionally beyond criminal prosecution, and everyone has just kind of been playing weekend at Bernie’s since then (though the Trump administration is dropping the pretense pretty quickly). Don’t get me wrong, it’s been dying for a long time, but that was the exact moment it was declared dead. No matter what happens, the republic as we knew it is dead and is not coming back. Nobody believes in the constitution anymore; among our leadership there are only either those who are in a hurry to destroy it, or those who are unwilling to defend it. I think a lot of the American populace haven’t sincerely believed in the constitution as an effective charter for governance for a while, too. Imo, we’re less than a year from the legislature being dissolved in some fashion of another, unless they just hang on like some ceremonial vestigial organ.

What we get to decide now is what comes next. That’s what nobody’s sure about. Are we going to have a middle-east style theocratic government? Italian fascism? Maybe the military defends the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic and we re-form the republic? German fascism? Neofeudalism? Peaceful balkanization? Hot balkanization? COULD IT BE?! BY GOD, it’s the ghost of Lenin with a steel chair! Or maybe we’ll get something entirely new? It’s frankly impossible to guess while we’re living in it. I think cold balkanization is both the most likely and most optimistic scenario. IN THE MEANWHILE, yeah, you’re still going to see all the window trimmings of the USA; the maps will still say USA, we’ll at least nominally still have the things that make America America (like the constitution still sitting in its fancy protective case, as though the GOP didn’t just wipe Trump’s ass with it), it’ll all look weirdly normal while they make the republic’s corpse do a funny little jig.

It’s probably no accident that those and the other two with “wedding” and “husband” are all northern states. It’s still winter right now, which means that they’re still getting really short days, which makes people feel sad.

Tbh, Zelenskyy, right up to the very last moment, believed that Russia wouldn’t really do it. The CIA was fucking begging him to take it serious (even broken clocks, I guess).

Poland, OTOH, seems to have a raging hate boner for Russia, and wakes up wondering if today is the day it gets to drag Russia to Hell with it. I also don’t think Ukraine will ever completely chill, it’ll probably remain an ulcer for the rest of Putin’s life. I don’t think an expansionist Russia gets much further than Poland.

Think of it like this. If our universe is a simulation, then the speed of light is the maximum speed at which information can propagate through reality. We know that for anything to move through space, it must move from one adjoining position to another, then another, then another, incrementally. Each one of those increments takes, at minimum, one ‘tick’ of the universe. That’s one tick to increment each bit of information, that is, the position of something moving at light speed from position x,y,z to x+1,y,z. Light moves as fast as the universe allows; if there was a faster speed, light would be doing it, but it turns out that our universe’s clock speed only supports speeds of up to 299,792,458 meters per second.

What you have here is sound. Motion propagates through material at the speed of sound in that material. That’s part of the reason why moving large scale objects quickly gets weird.

Edit: to be clear, I am not making the case that we’re in a simulation. I’m only trying to use computers to make it relatable.

Not really, no. It’s true that you aren’t going to be sniping anyone with a shotgun, and it’s also dependent on the shot you’re using, but shotguns are used to hit ducks in flight, turkey, and deer (among others), which are all usually going to be a bit further away than your average hallway. Generally, birdshot is worthless for people outside of very close range; I once ran a call where someone got shot with birdshot from across the street and they might as well have been hit point blank with an airsoft gun. If that had been buckshot or a slug, they would have been completely fried. The tradeoff that you do with shot is that a finer shot will have a wider and denser cloud of projectiles, but each of those projectiles has less mass (and therefore momentum) for penetrating power. Buckshot is basically throwing a handful of (smaller) old school ball shot at whatever you’re pointing at, and whatever you hit is going to have a bad time. I personally prefer the heavier 000 (triple-ought) buck to 00 (double-ought) buckshot, but either works great. A slug is going to have the best range and penetrating power; at close range, a slug will defeat any non-ceramic body armor, and people wearing ceramic are still going to be very unhappy. Of course, a slug also requires the best aim, because it’s just one solid chunk of metal. in either case, I would say that shotguns with buckshot and slugs are entirely appropriate for personal defense in or out of the home, and urban combat.

Thanks for the context. I was never interested in owning an AR myself, not to mention that it seems to me like they’re way overpriced due to a lot of them being glam guns. He did it for a living for years, so I took him at his word.

The only things that ever slowed the Nazis down was Russian winters and getting shot, and we’re all out of Russian winters.

I have a buddy who did gun repairs, he fucking hates AR-15s. If you want a gun that ticks all the boxes, get a 12 gauge shotgun. It’s a cheap, widely available platform that has cheap and widely available ammo, it just fucking works, it’s easy to care for, easy to use, pretty standard maintenance, and will kill what you need it to. They’re lethal much further out than video games imply, because otherwise they’d completely wreck the balance of the game.

Edit: I asked him for his specific beef with ARs, this was his response.

1. They’re a bitch to clean. There’s lots of places that need to be cleaned that can’t be reached easily, tons of little pockets and grooves you can’t get into; requires a dental pick, star shaped cleaning patches, and a shit load of cotton swabs to get through.

2. If it’s locked up, you can’t knock on the charging handle or emergency kick the charging handle to clear it. You will not be able to field strip this rifle if it’s jammed out of battery.

3. Aluminum gas blocks are apparently very popular, and they will corrode to failure at the gas tube port.

4. The extractor pin will often shatter in place, which causes intermittent failure while not looking wrong unless you know what you’re looking for.

Right, yes, but the joke is that it’s said in such a way as to sound like an outright fabrication.

So, the joke here is that you’ve got someone, presumably a Chinese official, saying a reality about America in a startling way that sounds like completely cooked up propaganda but isn’t.