The US Army. Given the history, you might expect it to based on either the French or British model, but no, they mostly took notes from Prussia.

You might also think it’s a very top-down authoritarian model for a military, but also no. That notion mostly comes from the legacy of Nazis. Both before and after, the German model of the Army is one of the least top-down authoritarian militaries.

There’s some aviation and boating uses. Air pollution regulations have killed it for almost any automotive use.

That is the rub with it. It assumes full employment. Capitalism produces a surplus, and because of it, people just plain don’t have to work very much to get all the basic needs met. Keynesianism was the liberal attempt at fixing this, basically by throwing their hands up and looking for ways to dig ditches to have them filled back in again. The leftist solution is to reduce working hours so you can focus on things that aren’t work, or just letting people not work altogether.

Keynesianism is the only thing that’s kept Capitalism going this long. The right is trying their hardest to dismantle it.

The Talos Principle.

So we use a black hole to bend space time and look into the past where it isn’t. We know where it isn’t in the past.

Playing hopscotch over the line between clever and stupid.

The hostage was freed. Truly freed. Of everything.

Not always voluntary. Some tried for a third term and failed. Theo Roosevelt tried for a third term in 1912. Though his first term was taking over after McKinley was assassinated, but it was only some months in, and that would be covered as a first full term under the later amendment.

So it’s a “ask forgiveness, not permission” sort of thing?

N=1 self studies are somewhat common historically though, right? Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD in his lab and took the first documented LSD trip. More recently, I seem to recall that one of the Modena founders took their Covid vax the moment they synthesized it in early 2020 (having trouble finding a citation on that, though).

It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’ll probably do the job. Depends on what you want to do with it. There’s fewer people choosing this path, which means that when things go wrong, you’ll have fewer sources of information to help.

Some old Dell office PC with a good amount of RAM and an SSD would be just as well.

Yes. Those laid off workers aren’t going to a world where they’re free to engage in their desired pursuits. They’re making hard decisions to keep their family alive. That second part is important.

They were labor heavy because they (and all the other tech giants) overhired during the pandemic assuming that record profits would continue forever. Then they had Surprised Pikachu Face when that didn’t happen. That’s not doing his job. It should have been obvious the spike was temporary.

You follow the rules of war because it’s in your interests to do so. You treat POWs fairly, because you want your opponent to treat your own captured people fairly. You don’t pull a false surrender move, because that will come back to haunt you when you need to actually surrender. You don’t use chemical weapons, because using them would mean your opponent starts using them.

Granted, this tends to work better with peer powers. When there’s an imbalance, the larger power often gets to do whatever they want.

There are several countries who gave up WMDs, either deployed or in development. Iraq, Libya, South Africa, and Ukraine. Of these, only South Africa was left alone. And to be clear, two of the remaining three were attacked by the US.

So what we’ve done here is signal to the smaller powers that they should never negotiate away their WMDs. You’re just going to get invaded, anyway. I can’t blame smaller powers for going that way at all.

Edit: and to be extra clear, this also applies to Iran and N Korea. They have no incentive to give up their nuclear programs.

But only one of those people gets a book deal.

Not sure that’s right on all phones. Browsing on my Pixel 6 shows noticeably fewer ads when I’m at home compared to anywhere else.

It’s not like we have great options here. Safari isn’t supported on Windows or Linux. Opera has its own issues (like predatory loan apps) even if you’re willing to pay for it. Crossing my fingers that Ladybird will work out, but it has a long way to go (though it did better than I thought it would when I tried it a few months back). Everything else is some variant of Chrome.

If you need to be on the web at all, Firefox still seems like the best of the shit pile.

Highly recommend setting up a PiHole. It may not be quite as comprehensive as uBlock, but it cuts the ads way down, and it’s not something that browsers can easily bypass. You do have to make sure to shut of DNS over HTTPS, or setup a separate solution for that to tunnel into PiHole.

For most people, yes.

For my best friend, no. The reason is that he and his wife really wanted a kid, and they got everything together and had one. He is the happiest new father I’ve ever seen.

My wife and I don’t want kids, and have taken permanent action to make sure we don’t. In part, this is because we understand the responsibility that would be carried for years. We have other things we want to do with our lives. So for someone else to have full knowledge of that responsibility and embrace it gets respect from me.