They did make a good launching pad for him.

When Chinese companies do it, then it is evil price dumping.

When US companies do it, then it is just good business strategy, investing in growth for future profits.

Do US companies have free access to Chinese markets?

More than vice versa.

I love this sort of reply.

Yes, the bastion of free market capitalism is no much different than the evil communist countries.

One mechanism by which the US encourages free market capitalism is requiring reciprocity. China is not evil - they are just self interested - and it is the responsibility of the US government to negotiate a trade agreement that benefits its citizens.

China has an awful lot of billionaires for a communist country.

Neither appellation is true and probably never was.

Which just proves GDP is a low IQ metric to measure how good a country is to live in.

I certainly would rather live places like Mallorca or Donostia than in many places that are ahead of Spain in the silly GDP game.

Speaking of low IQ, it's pretty amusing to read that someone thinks that Spain came out unscathed from the events of 1930s and 1940s.

Nuclear Gandhi would never have been a thing.

Nuclear Gandhi is an urban legend. Turns out there was no such bug in Civ 1.

And in more recent games where there is Nuclear Gandhi it's because of that legend.

If you write a game in a decent language where such a thing won't happen by mistake you can still have it be present on purpose and in some cases that even fits the game's lore.

Random glitches are confusing and bad. Falling off the world in Blue Prince due to collision bugs is annoying for example. However "glitches" which are intended behaviour are fun. I've enjoyed every time I saw somebody get that note and gift from Mrs Babbage because they drafted that particular room in that particular place and it had an effect which in hindsight they now realise was both foreseeable and regrettable...

I know. The urban legend would still not be a thing.

It would’ve been debunked by Snopes on day 1: “impossible, the game is written in Rust”

(I can’t think of one language that defaults to saturating integers)

> So with the re-newed interest and a willigness to seriously mess up the NATO alliance - what does the US want in Greenland this time around?

This assumes the US has a plan. It's a bold assumption.

I think (perhaps naively) that we do have a plan? Regardless, I have been trying to tell people in my life that the "really truly scary outcome" is not "what if everything falls apart" but "what if this works?"

I was thinking about this last night. I think the goal is "spheres of influence and Monroe doctrine stuff" and troublingly i think we might end up with more annexations in the next little bit.

If the US wanted to have more military control in Denmark, it wouldn't need this sort of ridiculous dance and a new deal.

It always could put military bases in Greenland. NATO was a thing, and Denmark never really bothered itself much with US military bases there. Greenland was not annexed by the US.

This is pretty much the same shit with the Iran war, the US now is scrambling to convince Iran to open the strait of Hormuz, just to get things in the same state they were before the war started.

> It always put military basses in Greenland

I don't think this is unilaterally true, from the first glance at this, it appears to be significantly more capability...

If the USA kept the status quo of being an ally it would never be a problem. It could only be a problem if the USA was hostile so the Danes could block additional bases (which had never happened, the USA built multiple bases in Greenland during the Cold War).

Leaving only one reason for wanting to rip apart the old agreement: in case the USA wasn't an ally anymore.

I mean, I ain't saying you're wrong. I don't like it, but the idea of non-transactional international relations is probably over...

Except Switzerland and EEA exist?

The UK could absolutely pursue some form of association with the EU if it so desired, it doesn't need to be in the EU for increased cooperation. The problem is that the UK people overseeing brexit wanted very much to cherry-pick only what was advantageous for the UK only and cede on nothing that the bloc desired.

As for Canada, we will have to wait and see. Is it a Switzerland style deal (an endless torrent of asterisks)? Is it something similar to EEA but lighter? Something that is more focused on trade and mutual defense and less on freedom of movement and financial ties?

Probably the main advantage of the EU is that it is much stronger at negotiating these sorts of agreements than any of its individual countries would have been.

It is a deal, both sides bring something to the table and try to negotiate what comes from that.

Eh, as much as I might dislike the government of my country, I think I believe I would hate a lot more the country that decided it was a good idea to blow schoolgirls from my country into minced meat.

> If the US military was unethical, it wouldn't have lost in Afghanistan

You can be unethical and still profoundly incompetent.

Smoking out villages and shooting everything that moves with cutting edge weaponry doesn't require much competence.

Which is why the US famously won the Vietnam war...

If that was the case the My Lai Massacre would be meaningless, because the entire war would have been that.

The entire war was that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange

Genocide is usually not an efficient way to wage war. Even ancient armies usually did not slaughter entire towns, not because of ethics, but because fighting sucks and if you slaughter everybody you come across, nobody is going to surrender and every person you come across will fight you to the death.

I say usually, because there are some exceptions and nukes are one of them, they make genocide a viable war strategy. But even nuking Vietnam would not have worked, cause you will simply get nuked back.

Its more that you make it clear that you will kill anyone who doesn't surrender. Then most people end up surrendering.

In modern militaries though, the expectation is that you will just leave civilians alone.

There are some terrorist states that indiscriminately kill civilians though, such as Israel and the USA.

The worst thing people would do is surrendering in those cases.

As opposed to who? Iran fired missiles at Israeli (and Arab) civilian areas, so did Hezbollah and Hamas when they used to have that capability.

>account created 1 hour ago

Nice. https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-inf...

That's precisely what I expected. That people would pop up defending US atrocities by equating them with the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah.

And you know what? You're right. Those are all terrorist organizations.

> Highly unlikely an entire chain of military personnel knew it was a school and was like, "yeah get em good, and lets see when they come scrambling in for their kids corpses".

When you phrase it like that, I firmly believe that's exactly what happened.

Wealth, like gravity, distorts everything around it with excessive concentration.

It matters little how wealth is created. No one has to lose anything for the excessive concentration of wealth to cause the lives of everyone to be worse.