The UK is a lot closer to that (though still has its issues). One of the main differences is the base mentality. America is “police by force”, the UK is “police by consent”. Our normal police don’t even carry guns. The mentality change this creates is huge. They default to trying to deescalate things, and dealing with things calmly. This makes people a lot more responsive to their orders, when required.

Though to note, our officers aren’t push overs. Most are fully capable of controlling someone aggressive. We also have armed response. Any mention of a gun involved, and they come in armed and trained to the teeth. We also have a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years for an illegal firearm.

Don’t commit war crimes. Instead, be the reason they became crimes!

Being ready for anything doesn’t mean planing for everything, that’s impossible. They’ve likely planned for the obvious. They also have the resources ready to go to adapt to an unexpected situation.

A swordsman is t ready to block every conceivable blow. They, instead, prepare to react. If it’s a known attack, they can fall back on a planned move. If it’s abnormal they can react by improvising, using the skills they already have.

Oh, and the swordsman’s issue isn’t the lack of plan, improvisation is a key skill. The issue of the inability to read the opponent. It throws their instincts out. E.g. an attack looks like a faint, since it would leave the attack open to a lethal counter, even if it connected. An expert would never use that. A beginner might.

Hey, at least drugs will now be lacklustre, and unforfilling. The factory must grow to meet the demands of the expanding factory!

A modern nuke is FAR from the “bang 2 rocks together” designs that were first designed. For a start, most are fusion devices. Fairly exotic reactions are used to make a small amount of fusion material to go critical. This creates a shaped charge on a fusion core. The compression wave sets fusion happening, which releases 95% of the energy. Most of Russia’s arsenal is of this sort.

The downsides of these is the use of exotic elements. They often have a short half life, e.g. tritium, with 12.5 years. This means they decay. Even worse, some of the byproducts will actually poison the reaction. E.g. Rather than producing a flood of neutrons, they absorb them.

If any of this chain fails, then your fusion nuke becomes, at best, a low yield fission nuke. More likely, it becomes a dirty bomb. It’s still nasty, but not the city destroying terror weapon it would be intended as.

It’s less being stripped, and more a lack of maintenance. Nukes have a shelf life. The elements inside then can decay, this means they need replacing. This is a highly specialist job. It’s also expensive, and can only really be cross checked by the same people who do the work (or detonating it).

Adrenaline with completely fuck up your higher brain functions, unless you’ve trained to cope with it. Its default effects are fight, flight, freeze or fawn. She went into freeze. She likely didn’t want to make matters worse, and couldn’t think it through, due to the adrenaline spike.

A rather dark survey I heard about years ago. Researchers couldn’t find anyone who has self rescued from a submerged car, who hadn’t planned for the eventuality. They had all worked out what to do if that happened to them. Many of the deaths had claw marks on the dashboard, and sometimes they hadn’t even gotten their seat belts off. In the moment, their monkey brain couldn’t even plan that far.

The issue is that carbon fibre is strong, hard, but brittle. When it fails, it fails catastrophically. It also doesn’t show many/any signs of failure, till it fails.

A carbon fibre hull, under those loads, could be good for 5 dives or 100, depending on the vagaries of how it was made. It won’t show the wear, until it fails. That is why most companies won’t trust CF under those sort of loads.

You can always introduce your other half to multiplayer mode… :D

Most people have an addiction button. The version for geeks and engineers is VERY hard to exploit at scale, to make money. Factorio pushes that button perfectly. It’s a sustained dopamine stream that little can match.

On a completely unrelated note. Less than a month now! 😀

E.g. a competitor “encourages” multiple individuals to open cases. Perhaps with some “financial assistance”. Suddenly, the company is dealing with the costs of 10 cases. Even worse, they can no longer use economies of scale to cope (e.g. have an in-house lawyer). They are on the line for the complainant’s cost. The cases don’t have to go far, the company pays the opposing lawyers either way.

Also, if you can’t see how ambulance chasing lawyers couldn’t exploit a guaranteed payout system (to the lawyers at least), I would question your imagination.

That would be very easy to weaponise, particularly against smaller companies. Once you’re dealing with lawyers, you need to assume that worst case scenarios will rapidly become the default. You also then end up with even more red tape, deciding who should pay what, prior to the trial even starting.

Now, how do you define what a reasonable budget is? That basically becomes a fee to sue.

If anything, that would be worse. Imagine, you sue, and have a single lawyer, on a discount rate. They respond with a team of 100 highly paid lawyers. Your now paying 50-500x what your own lawyer is actually charging. This could also work in both directions.

It’s a steal, even at full price, particularly once you account for the various mods.

FYI, I’ve several friends who veto playing, or even talking about factorio. They can’t afford to lose 100s of hours of their lives again to cracktorio, and dont want to be sucked back in again. Take from this what you will.

Of course not, that would be immoral. They’ll track trollies and baskets, then tag it to the till and your loyalty card. It would be a lot more consistent, and harder to dodge.

I can see multiple uses for the tech. Unfortunately, many are a but dystopian, but some are legitimately useful.

Nukes and ICBMs are extremely complex devices. They also require extremely specialist servi e work to remain functional. Even worse, the only people who can actually check that work are the ones doing it.

Russia hasn’t detonated a nuke in decades. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of their arsenal are now duds. The money embezzled, while boxes were ticked. Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of their ICBMs just wouldn’t launch.

Russia’s nuclear capabilities are likely a paper tiger, and Putin likely knows this. Until they try and use them, they are scary. If they try and they fail, they are in a VERY bad situation.

Putin is many things, but he’s not stupid. It would take a LOT more pressure from nato for him to even consider using nukes.

Ear wounds bleed spectacularly. They are also quite easy to fix cleanly, with appropriate care. A small wound would create plenty of blood, but be effectively invisible after a bit of work from a plastic surgeon.

Let’s face it, which is more likely? A shooter just missed, or Trump had the coordination to play act, without it looking like a 5 year old’s “my first magic act”, and then not brag about it?

The message wouldn’t be to Putin directly. It would be to those both in his power base, or capable of disrupting it.

The goal would be to push Russians to the point they deal with Putin internally, and/or put putin in a position where he needs to end the war to stabilise his own position. It’s all about making the right people feel the effects.

Oh, and as a European, I think the risk is acceptable. If Putin struck at a NATO country, the results would likely be swift and short. The only unknown would be Russian nukes, and even those are far more of an unknown than most people think.