>My point was that the constitution of the US is based on ideas, and the country could be open to any territory, independent of location
It seems you do not know anything about Puerto Rico and its history of shameful US meddling.
1,554 karma · joined May 3, 2020
It seems you do not know anything about Puerto Rico and its history of shameful US meddling.
Ideally, you need a "pipeline" with one reactor being built every 2-5 years and streamlined regulatory environment where you can use the same project "template" with minimal adjustments. This way building expertise is not lost (i.e. the industry does not need to re-learn everything for every project, which is very costly) and even can be accumulated to reduce costs further. It applies not only to the building part, but also to regulatory bodies.
The problem is that you need to operate ~100 reactors for this, so it can work only for large economies able to provide the "baseline" demand. China and to a lesser extent Russia do this, which does result in significantly lower nuclear plant building costs for them. Europe, SK, and US have dropped the ball hard here.
Completely agree with this and IMO it's how the system should've operated from the very start. Unfortunately, I highly doubt that the CA cartel will let go of the power (and associated cash flow) voluntarily.
Nope, they do it primarily out of necessity, because of the mounting pressure on the previously used CAs. The MitM capability is just a nice side bonus.
>So I empathize with the sarcasm, but best not to offer MitM proponents (whether in Russia or the U.S. or elsewhere!) an argument that could be used against your viewpoint.
If browsers truly cared about user security they would've provided reasonable conditions for supporting national CAs:
- Limit its authority only to respective national domain zones.
- Mandate use of Certificate Transparency handled by an independent third party to prevent MitM.
But this debacle only shows that western-controlled (especially financial) systems can be and will be used as a pressure tool, so any large sovereign nation will not trust them as they would in the past. And the taken actions only contribute to further fragmentation of the Internet across national and block borders.
Surely this will improve user security and trust in the existing Web PKI system in non-Western countries. /s
Not quite. The "petrodollar" deal has helped to bootstrap and anchor the USD strength at a somewhat critical moment of history after the gold peg was "temporarily" suspended, which was effectively a default of the US government (second in the 20th century!).
Sure, today trade of oil in USD no longer plays a significant role in supporting its dominance, but it still plays a role. Together with other factors (such as increased weaponization of the USD-led financial system) rise of alternative settlement systems corrodes the network effects on which USD relies. Each blow in isolation may be insignificant, but their accumulation could become critical owning to the extreme non-linearity of the network effects.
I will not be surprised if China has a constellation of such satellites to track US carriers and it's why Pentagon keeps them relatively far from Iran, since it's likely that China confidentially shares targeting information with them.
[0]: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
It's related to it, but not "literally modeled" on it. This number is from experiments where people are asked to equalize perceived brightness of two lights with different colors. The results are than averaged out and interpolated using polynomials to create a color model [0].
Most of the world is perfectly fine with 12:00 not being synchronized with high noon [0]. And some jurisdictions still semiannually f*k with it further using DST. Generously assuming the current time keeping system will survive for ~6k years (looking at the leap seconds accumulation rate for the last 50 years) we can just shift timezones by one hour.
[0]: https://64.media.tumblr.com/4a9a4613f057d3b5f17ec548e6ac06d1...
>We convert timestamps to and from date+times all the time.
If you do not account for time zones during this conversion, then you are not qualified to implement such conversions.
It's fine to use 86400 seconds for durations (e.g. "this computation will finish in 1d 8h 20m 34s"), but it's absolutely not fine to use it while dealing with datetimes.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Phase-out_and_futu...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
The linked map is outdated regarding Russia. Here is an up to date map: https://64.media.tumblr.com/4a9a4613f057d3b5f17ec548e6ac06d1...
Because it's BS. In the modern fiat system the most basic form of money printing is expansion of the central bank's balance sheet. It creates the "base money". Sure, technically the government issues debt to "borrow" the new money, but everyone familiar with the system understands the the debt will never be paid out in the classical sense and it will be just re-financed by future expansion of the central bank's balance sheet. So the end effect is the same: new units of the base money enter circulation contributing to inflation.
But there are other forms of "money printing" as well. Every time a bank issues a credit, in a certain sense, it also "prints money". As long as the bank system functions as usual, it's indistinguishable from the printing done by the government+central bank. This is why bank de-regulation can have the same effects as the classical money printing, but with additional risks of potential credit contraction caused by bad loans (though they are minimized by central banks more often than not...).
I dunno if a class-action lawsuit is realistic or not in this case or how likely a court decision stating that all tariff revenue must be refunded.
IIRC there are several utilities in the UK which provide option to price electricity dynamically, but they are not popular because people do not want to play this game. They want reliable supply of electricity for reasonable prices. Trying to mold consumption to satisfy intermittency of generation is nothing more than shifting the externality akin to telling people "you must plant trees to offset CO2 emissions!".
2) Use marginal pricing model which effectively guarantees windfall profits for those sources.
3) Utilization of peaking power plants falls, but you still have to keep them because there is not enough storage capacity.
4) Peaking power plants rise generation costs to offset the lower utilization, further adding to the windfall profits.
5) You need more grid capacity to handle energy transfers from distributed generation sources.
5) ????
6) Act surprised when people loudly complain about electricity bills despite abundant "cheap" generation.
Intermittency of generation is an externality (same as CO2 emissions) and should be priced accordingly. People are willing to pay premium for supply stability, but the current pricing model does no account for that. Trying to change consumption habits (like smart grids, dynamic pricing, etc.) works poorly, especially for such vital resource as electricity.
I think there should be some kind of price penalty for intermittent sources dependent on total ratio of intermittent generation in the mix. At least until grid-scale energy storage technology will be advanced enough to store approximately week of total energy consumption.
- A lot of people participate in the gig economy instead of getting registered as unemployed.
- AI has eroded a lot of employment opportunities for graduates, i.e. people relatively active on social networks.
- Official data can be horribly inaccurate (phone surveys in 2025, seriously?) with grossly outdated models (remember the recent huge revisions?). Political pressure does not help here either.
- The unemployment stats do not account for significant downgrades in salary and working conditions. They will show the same picture for a person with a cushy office job and the same person working 2 jobs in retail from paycheck-to-paycheck.
Russia uses plenty of artillery shells daily even today. Its own production easily outpaces NATO countries and they buy a lot from NK in addition to that.
Though they try to increase amount of "smart" munitions like Krasnopol, since they can be more cost effective than "dumb" shelling when you have guidance from drones.
>both Ukraine and Russia know they are easy to jam
Tell that to fiber drones. They are used in such large amounts that entire fields get covered in fiber. Even radio controlled drones quickly evolve with wing-based drones acting as re-translators and carriers.
And in the near future (year or two) we will see mass adoption of drones which are able to fly autonomously with on-board computer vision. Initially it will be just guidance during final stages after the target is locked, but later we will see drone swarms launched into the enemy's direction which autonomously search and destroy everything what moves.
>They've only been useful on very soft targets.
Sure. And this is why on both sides shiny tanks and MRAPs from parades and military exercises now look like Mad Max vehicles.
>The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb program was about taking dirt cheap iron bombs and slapping commodity electronics on it for cheap precision
Meanwhile Russia found a huge success with its UPMK-modified FABs.
The situation may change significantly if an effective and cheap (kinetic or laser) anti-drone defense is developed and mass-deployed, but for now the sword is much stronger than the shield.
Assembly of civilian merchant ships is a notoriously low-margin industry (as opposed to manufacturing of engines/propellers/control systems). You could heavily subsidize it (by protectionism measures and/or by juicing up your Navy) like the US does in the name of strategic importance, but be prepared to pay heavily for it. If you want to preserve shipbuilding capabilities for military reasons, then chasing after the Asian shipbuilding countries may not be the most efficient way of achieving this, i.e. it may be better to just invest into building of military ships and manufacturing of higher-margin components without bothering with the low-margin assembly stuff.
Now, we can argue that playing negative-sum games is "stupid". And in most contexts of the modern human society such heuristic would be correct, but I would be really careful with a sweeping generalization, otherwise instead of a proper understanding of the underlying behavioral motivations you are likely to devolve into primitive explanations of someone being "stupid" or even "evil".
Though, personally, I consider the AI trade to be currently deep in the overripe bubble territory.