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Anyone else remember how in the fantasy material of the 1980s male characters were in outfits just as ridiculously skimpy as the female ones? An era of leather daddies and heavy metal. The armor was ridiculous with greased up muscles and armor plates that exposed 75% of their skin. Usually it was something like an armor plate covering a single side of their chest with the other side and their abdominals exposed. Outfits never made sense for anything other than looking sexy.

The US kill-death ratio is also telling.

During the Global War on Terror less than ten thousand US citizens killed in the conflict but around a million Afghans and Iraqis directly killed along with around 4 million people across the region indirectedly killed. Even the Vietnam war was something like 40,000 US citizens killed in exchange for around 3 million killed on the Vietnamese side. Hell… the US kill-death ratio in the World War 2 Pacific theater, some of the most brutal fighting the US has engaged in, was only 70,000 US citizens killed in exchange for 2.5 million Japanese soliders and somewhere around 1 million Japanese civilians killed.

The US has amazing kill-death ratios across all its wars excluding its civil war when busy fighting among itself. It’s disgusting really. The US will lose a few thousand while killing millions on the other side. Even in total war engagements the US loses thousands while the other combatants lose many millions. Since 1775 the US has only lost around 650,000 even when including both the US civil war and World War 2.

People always make the mistake of assuming during colonial adventures the US is doing anything other than smashing everything up (immediately wiping out the opposing military) then sitting back and milking any insurgency for as long as it is profitable to maintain a low intensity conflict. The US has really only ever fought two conflicts on a total-war footing (Civil War, World War 2) but managed to have hundreds of colonial adventures and so-called police actions throughout its entire history. For most of its history the US has been fighting one or more military actions somewhere, starting with westward expansion across North American then the so-called banana-wars advancing US corporate interests across Latin America and various colonial or cold war adventures across the entirety of the eastern hemisphere.

The Washington Post is whatever its owner Jeff Bezos wants it to be.

Symptoms of social alienation. Surrounded by people but all alone in an atomized society. No meaningful connections to form, a social contract where by default we owe no one and no one owes us. Social structures and communities we exist in rather than belonging to. Outside an isolated nuclear family every relationship is one where we are meant to be in competition rather than cooperation. Why not become a ghost in a society like this one, especially when one lacks the antisocial/psychopathic and narcissistic traits it rewards?

The interactions of negative vs positive freedoms is something rarely discussed in the west. The freedom to something or the freedom from something. Hell, they see concepts like being bound to family, community, and society as oppression because apparently being atomized into a lone individual who inherently is owed nothing and owes nothing is true freedom.

I swear this is why you see people in the US always “searching for meaning” in their lives. Alone and atomized. Not belonging to an extended family, community, and society around them, owing nothing thus owed nothing and vice versa. They want rights with no responsibilities.

but at what cost?!

my first thought was that this must be because Microsoft recently surpassed the $1 trillion mark.

Microsoft recently surpassed the $3 trillion mark.

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I was going to say… does Ukraine think everyone has somehow forgotten that Russia is the nation that has had globe spanning satellite surveillance longer than anyone else? To make this claim about the US, Russia, China, Iran, or India is ridiculous.

I guess Ukraine forgot which nations maintain fully integrated domestic space launch capability and large military satellite constellations. Then again they aren’t one of those nations and it’s a capability exclusive to great powers. Ukraine isn’t even in the slightly larger group of nations that have bought a few commercial mapping satellites.

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In California, Oregon, and Washington the state governments stripped cities of most of their powers related to zoning in regards to blocking conversions to mixed use residential. As long as there isn’t heavy industry right next door (aren’t crazy, no one wants Houston), mixed use residential zoning is hard for cities to deny.

Los Angeles has the problem (benzene, hydrocarbons, heavy metals) of all the oil wells, pipelines, refineries, crude oil storage, and other oil field infrastructure hidden behind facades all throughout the city. The city and county are an active oil field, something that should never have been approved when there is residential or light commercial literally 25ft away from camouflaged wells, pipelines, and crude oil storage tanks. Then again people over a century ago probably shouldn’t have looked at the natural tar pits and thought to themselves “this is a great place to build a city”.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/09/oil-wells-in-la-nearby-residents-grapple-with-health-problems.html

New residential arguably is unethical in this situation, especially if it’s lower income housing. Btw, this is the reason building new public schools has been almost impossible in Los Angeles and existing schools all have soil that if there were alternatives would mean shutting them down. Los Angeles and Houston are more alike than anyone likes to admit. Can’t do the type of super fund site remediation (clean up) at the scale actually needed because it would mean tearing the city down to the bedrock to replace all the soil.

Uhhhhmm… I think the prefer to be called “tech bros” or “founders”.

One senior Chinese finance official who speaks fluent English and is a regular fixture on the international conference circuit told POLITICO by email that he could no longer attend an upcoming event outside China and was unable to speak on the phone.

He joins dozens of senior finance officials who have been removed in recent months, often after being accused of corruption.

Hollyshit. This is quite literally the same response you get from any affluent person who is under investigation, regardless of nation. In the US it’s a trope at this point for people under active investigation when reached out to by media to respond that they cannot talk about it, especially over the phone and to journalists who are guaranteed to be keeping a record of the conversation. Media are filled with jackels and anyone with any sense of self preservation will refuse to talk with them, especially directly and not through legal counsel.

that he could no longer attend an upcoming event outside China

Yeah! No shit?! It’s called being flagged as a “flight risk” due to having the financial means and connections to leave the country where you have been accused of commiting a serious crime. It’s exactly the same in most countries, including the US. Hell, in the US they restrict your movement even within the national borders (can’t leave specific state) until your name has either been cleared or you are convicted.

Yeah. You build undersea HVDC lines. HVDC was pioneered for undersea cables because it allows smaller cables with lower transmission loss (greater distance) than AC transmission. The other reason is that HVDC is the only realistic way to import/export power between regional AC transmission systems that are not synchronized.

Infact the majority of undersea transmission lines are HVDC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable#Direct_current_cables

I hope this means the Chinese plan to create a High Voltage DC transmission super-grid connecting across over a dozen time zones moves closer to reality. It’s a development project needed for the renewable transition but a major issue is everyone believes both South Korea and Japan will never meaningfully get on board.

Who is pocketing the price difference:

Junshi partnered with California-based Coherus BioSciences to bring the drug to the US, and it is expected to become available within the first quarter of next year.

Gotta love how the US regulatory regime is structured so middle men always get their taste. It’s like how the US doesn’t produce much in the way of active ingredients, instead US companies import them from China, India, and Poland then package them under their own brand name into pill, capsule, or injectable formulation. During this process the price somehow increases 1,000% to 10,000% over what they paid for the active ingredient.

Russia secured the border between Ukraine and the break away regions where Ukraine had been massacring civilians. It has been mission accomplished for Russia starting at the point they expelled the Ukrainian military from those regions and fortified the borders to prevent Ukraine from retaking them. For almost a year now Russia has been using the Ukrainian military for live fire training exercises.

I’ve personally enjoyed watching all the admin meetings for the project on their YouTube Channel because it really gives an understanding of the insane inefficiency of the US system of private property rights and public-private contracting.