Buelldozer

Which is ironic because the United States has been dealing with the reverse problem for at least two years now! People get to Canada and then walk across the northern border and grab a bus / cab / uber into New York. Cash Jordan, a youtuber in New York City, did a video on this earlier in the year.

Huh, this is pretty interesting. I wonder if there’s a way to set an Android device to auto-reboot if it hasn’t had a network connection or been unlocked after a preset length of time.

Yes I do.

People are correct in not wanting to die for politicians and imaginary lines on a map.

It’s a great philosophy but if all of your neighbors don’t follow it then you end up being forcibly hijacked.

There’s no such thing as a market so controlled that it’s immune to inflation. The Russian Ruble is as controlled as a currency can be and Russia is teetering on the edge of hyper-inflation. It’s core inflation rate is over 9% and their version of the “Prime Rate” for lending has now jumped from 19% to a historic 21%.

China has more breathing room than Russia but it’s still not going to be pretty, especially if this “bailout” fails.

Don’t they have many trillions in reserves?

Right now China has about 3.2 trillion in ForEx of all kinds and currencies which means that this bailout represents nearly half of the total.

ForEx is an extremely complicated subject, way too much for a single post, but it is essentially the lubricant for trade. If you don’t have enough of it in the right currency on an hourly (or less) basis to support your imports and exports then the machine will seize up.

So what China is doing here is risky as hell and if it doesn’t work they will soon have the same kind of financial problems that Iran does and that is stupendously bad for an export based economy.

2016 was an absolute shit show on Reddit. It was a dogfight between the Bernie Bros and the Trumpers until Bernie got knocked out of the primaries then knocked off Reddit by CTR. Then it was a dogfight between the ShillDawgs and the MAGAts with the t_d’ers eventually coming out on top because of their willingness to endlessly game the Reddit algorithm.

Where do you go for such discussions anyway?

The closest I’ve ever found was a heavily moderated sub on Reddit. I have no idea if its still any good or not because I haven’t been there in over a year.

Voter turn out was much lower than 2020 and 2016 just like this poll predicted.

Say what? Voter turnout in 2016 was 60%, in 2020 it was 67%, and in 2024 it was 65%.

American isn’t buying Iran’s bombs and there’s no amount of hysterical hand waving you can do to get over that fact.

Or maybe the entire god damned world doesn’t make every god damned decision based on the US Election? Just sayin’…

Yawn. Got anything to add to the conversation aside from ad hominem?

I didn’t know about Canada and after thinking about it for a minute the United States does something similar for the States with .gov. Many, if not all, States have their own subdomain such as wyo.gov, montana.gov, and nebraska.gov.

Honestly it’s always seemed wrong and somewhat confusing that non-country specific TLDs, such as .gov, are dedicated to the United States.

The 2 percent of GDP target is imaginary.

The target was set so that no country would be able to join NATO and then just let everyone else pay for everything. You contribute to the common defense or you GTFO.

We can bicker about 2% being too high or too low and whether the target should have been adjusted Post Cold War but any argument that some target isn’t necessary is just silliness.

No amount of NATO bombs or tanks would have stopped the invasion.

Oh I’m fairly certain that NATO military power would have stopped the invasion in the first 24 hours. A single flight of F-35s would have made those original Russian convoy’s cease to exist à la the Highway of Death from 1991.

Even now NATO military power could substantially end the ground war in Ukraine before the end of the month.

It only would have fueled the flames and given legitimacy to Russia’s claimed insecurity.

So what? NATO didn’t do it and there’s STILL an ongoing war with a casualty toll well over a million and millions more displaced.

Economic power is much stronger than military sabre rattling.

Then the EU should have flexed them in 2014. They didn’t and here we are.

I fucking detest Trump, but there is a kernel of truth in his statements about Europe more or less just riding on the US’s coattails in terms of the balance of military power, instead of trying to be a meaningful and (taken together) a peer power to the US.

You don’t have to point to Trump. Literally every United States President since Bill Clinton has publicly said it. Hell Bush Senior may have said it too. I’d have to go look it up.

It’s been a sore spot for decades and has nothing to do with Trumperoni.

I’m assuming .io just stands for Indian Ocean in this case

British Indian Ocean Territory, it was just shortened to .io so it would fit into the naming scheme.

That’s a great question and the answer can be found in the wikipedia entry for the .uk domain.

In a nutshell the volunteer “Naming Committee” setup back in 1985 established a rule that entities needed to register into specific subdomains based on entity type such as .co, where the .co part stood for “Company”. They did this to make managing registrations easier and to provide an “at a glance” way to see what kind of website you were visiting (commercial, government, charity, etc). The “Naming Committee” was extremely strict about ensuring that domains were registered to a specific entity and in the correct subdomain.

By the mid-90s the volunteer “Naming Committee” was entirely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of domains being registered so that volunteer group was replaced by Nominet UK. Nominet didn’t open the .uk TLD to registration until 2014 and by then the subdomain thing (.co.uk) was so embedded into the United Kingdom’s internet structure that it had become tradition and NOT using was confusing to many people.

There’s more subdomains than just .co as well and both wikipedia articles I linked list them.

tl;dr .uk absolutely exists in the UK, it’s just used differently than almost anywhere else in the world.

I have to chuckle, I didn’t think anyone would take my comment about “count the hairs on someone’s head” so literally! You are correct though, there are no satellites with that kind of resolution. We have…other toys…for that. :)

The US intelligence apparatus had better information which is really no surprise. The US has satellites that can count the hairs on someone’s head let alone see missiles being moved around, fueled, and / or prepared for launch. Israel doesn’t have those, or at least not nearly as many of them as the United States does.

The IDF is now saying that missiles have been launched.