I’d have a lot of studying to do if I was Italian. Judges and prosecutors being overly cozy sounds bad, but fascists messing with the judicial system also sounds likely to go wrong.

So then this would mean a 1 in binary is a decimal 5?

Does blowing up Iran’s supreme leader seem better or worse, then? I dunno, it’s all just war by international laws and norms. (Although Trump has to avoid calling it that for domestic legal reasons)

Colonialism was a whole other thing, though, it wasn’t just a lack of sovereignty. There was forceful extraction of wealth going on, which is why India went from one of the richest places on Earth to a very poor nation over the period of British rule. There’s “neocolonialism” where rich nations get an unfair deal in more indirect ways, but the scale is just dramatically smaller, and at the Western end amounts to shaving off cents.

The thing with Chinese investments is they are happy to front the money sometimes, but eventually they call in their debt. Places in Africa are finding out about this the hard way right now. I also question if powering all of Cuba is really something even they could do in a span of weeks.

I think there’s a degree of ego there. If the “leader of the free world” can be an obvious moron and non-subtly evil, what does that say about whether they got whatever fancy job they have on merit?

If they had said “arrested” or something maybe you’d have a point, but “whisked” isn’t far off.

I mean, they have trouble paying for basic stuff. I’m sure they’re setting up solar as fast as I can but it’s not going to solve the current crisis.

I’m surprised they still maintain an embassy.

Hmm. You know, if it’s something like an MBT it may remained sealed in some way, for all I know. A bunch of aluminum at mach 1.5 is going to have significantly less cutting power than a rod of depleted uranium at mach 3. A whole plane might have a crushing effect that no normal-sized munition would, though. And then there’s the fire raging over top of whatever is left.

Except you definitely win over the long term instead of definitely losing, because Meta is a real company that gets real money off of it’s customers.

Basically, it’s based on the value of a bunch of big, publicly traded companies. The whole “when the markets go up it means more economy” thing is an oversimplification, but it kinda works in that when things break profits go down, and so does the value of shares in ownership of them.

Banning export means everyone would charge import price -0.01$ per unit for their oil products, same as it is now.

I’m not quite sure I understand. Import to the US? Obviously, nobody’s importing from the US if there’s a straight up ban.

Well, Iran has goals, but just ruining the world isn’t one of them. Probably they’ll charge fees and let traffic through selectively.

Negotiating an official solution to reopening it with other regional nations it is also a possibility. They can always shut it again if the US comes back.

A whole new transit network is not going to be there in time for the midterms. Venezuela’s oil industry isn’t what it used to be, and the US is a net exporter anyway, like you said.

Banning export might actually cure the symptom. The costs would not be zero either, though.

I mean, TACO is a meme for a reason. Invading Greenland would have seemed pretty corrupt to me.

Lots of managers don’t understand the tech, and an outright majority have no way of measuring productivity beyond in-seat time, which is supposed to be their whole job.

Oh, okay. AWS is actually a good analogy. It’s a huge pillar of the existing infrastructure, and if it was gone it would be a pretty huge, unprecedented crisis. The internet would still come back, though. (Since I’m on all alt platforms already, I actually didn’t notice it was down until I saw it on the news!)

Similarly, NATO would be in a bind, but I have every reason to think the considerable power and common interests of the remaining parties would see it through. One big question I’ve seen mentioned is the American officers that staff parts of it. Either they could keep working there even if the US is not a member, which is possible, or there would be just be a period of interruption to it’s coordination functions while the ranks are refilled. Since Britain and France are nuclear powers, just article 5 is a strong protection already, though.

Oh, so there is more than the US’s say-so at play.

It’s almost like it’s a voluntary agreement to coordinate and defend each other. One which doesn’t intrinsically depend on the US in any way, but just happens to have the US as by far the largest member.

If NATO is just the US, why wasn’t it in Iraq? Because the US didn’t want help? I was there, that was not the message they were putting out.