Moreover, surrendering whatever Russia sticks a flag in is appeasement nonsense. We’ve already seen this strategy before WWII: *oh, Germany will be OK if we just cede Czechoslovakia. Oh, Germany won’t attack if we cede Alsace-Lorraine…" An aggressive power like Russia, who already tried to annex large portions of another sovereign nation in 2008 (they invaded Georgia and got their shit kicked in because they tried the whole “three day thunder run” strategy), almost certainly will not stop if you just “give them what they want”. Eventually, they’ll want more, and more, and more, and you wind up surrendering slice after slice after slice of your country.

Not these Teslas, from what I understand. The type of glass they use is EXTREMELY resistant to shattering.

Yeah, the big issue with saying “it’s your land do what you want” is that you start getting wildly-unsafe buildings and situations because “it’s my land I can do whatever” rapidly turns into “and I want to build something highly unsafe to live in because it’s cheap to do so”. This is how you wind up with tenement housing where one apartment catches fire and a hundred people burn to death because nobody forced the builder to consider evacuation routes.

Rage Against the Machine doing this concert would just be Tom Morello beating every one of them to death with his guitar.

Israel has plenty of their own homegrown defense industry, I do not foresee them running out of armaments any time soon, despite what your politicians may say.

The issue is that none of those have the energy density of nuclear power. A single mid-sized nuclear plant can power a small city, where that same city would need at least a half-dozen solar farms around the area (assuming there’s enough cleared land to support it - rooftop solar can offset, but it generally will not replace mains power), or tons of wind turbines (again, subject to area - not every place is a good candidate). Geothermal and hydroelectric are subject to that same issue - you can’t place them anywhere, there are very specific requirements to get one up and running.

I agree we should work towards 100% green energy, but nuclear is an effective option dollar-for-dollar and acre-for-acre until we figure out a good way to increase energy density of wind or solar to a point where we don’t need enormous tracts of land dedicated to them in order to support places where people live.

Pretty much this. It’s the radium craze, or the ozone craze, or a whole bunch of other fads - everything has to have AI/LLMs integrated in some way or it’s not “interesting” to shareholders.

Pretty much this. Elon was never interested in what he SHOULD HAVE BEEN: making an inexpensive electric vehicle that’s widely available. Tesla had the tech to do so, but they were being driven to make insane decisions like moving the gearshift to a touchscreen (gee, I love taking my eyes off the road to shift gears), or making “futuristic” doors that actually cannot physically open from the inside (whoops, guess those just can’t be recalled since DOT has literally no teeth).

Or they were just taking it home to store. Which, y’know, will likely result in that gas eating the plastic bucket in a couple weeks because gasoline is incredibly good as a solvent.

Also, I think Tesla saw the way the wind was blowing on standardization. Eventually, the DOT will enforce a standard plug, and if it’s not YOURS, suddenly you have to either remanufacture the cars you’re making, or otherwise refit them to work with the new standard.

Or they’ve changed. Martyrdom and suicide were both enormous issues in the early Christian church - so much so that church leadership had to establish the doctrine that “if you kill yourself, or you start the fight, you don’t go to heaven”.

Not just the DEA, we’ve built a whole economy around drug offenses staying illegal. Drug testing companies, technology firms that develop law enforcement gear, law enforcement seminars, to say nothing of the thousands of companies that profit off of prison labor for what is effectively free, and the fact that a lot of the nonviolent offenders wind up turning violent because nobody will hire or rent to someone with a drug conviction.

Not just that, but he also publicly bragged about how lax Romania’s laws and how they don’t care about rape during an administration that is attempting, at least on the surface, to change public perception of themselves worldwide from the corrupt governments of the 90s and 2000s.

Yeah, this guy is deconstructing his own argument. The argument put forth is “absolute immunity”, you can’t say “absolute immunity in certain circumstances”. Either the president can act with complete impunity or they can’t, it’s a binary.

I was about to say, you’re using language that sounds very different from “absolute” there, buddy. Absolute is an “all or nothing” word, you can’t say “well it’s absolute immunity but only for certain things”.

There’s also the fact that Russia never really seemed to account for most of its monetary and material taps getting turned off. When you’re (ALLEGEDLY) throwing conscripts out there without even a single full magazine of ammo, you’re burning through old post-WWII ammo stocks, and constantly having to beg old SSR states “hey can we buy/borrow some of your tanks and APCs please,” it doesn’t look great.

Also, they think they might need a decade to defeat a power that has a fifth of its military size, and which has, so far, roundly managed to make a laughingstock out of much of the Russian military.

And the Chinese ones almost always work exclusively on economic Swords of Damocles.

Don’t forget that Trump has pretty much called for a genocide right here at home in the US, against trans people, against immigrants, and against pretty much anyone who doesn’t share his views. This doesn’t even count the stuff that his donors and PACs already have lined up for him to sign as soon as he sits his ass in the chair, or the fact that several US states have attempted to decriminalize murdering certain groups of people.

One can seriously hope, and moreover hope that the trains are electrified. We seem to be pathologically afraid of re-electrifying rail in the US.