TheChurn

American hegemony was a conscious American policy choice. We didn’t want the Euros having an independent foreign policy, we wanted them reliant on American military protection. This was how the US kept those bits of its empire in line.

Notice how the only Western European country that even pays lip service to independent action is France, the one Western European country with a military capable of independent operation. And then we get “Freedom Fries” and all that shit whenever they don’t do whatever the current US admin wants.

The single biggest thing Trump fucked up for the US was pushing NATO countries to spend more on defence. This will drastically reduce US influence over the continent in the coming decades, speeding up America’s worsening diplomatic isolation.

Therapy might help with the childhood trauma but it imparts the poverty trauma.

Which one is better depends on the build you’re going for and whether you want to recruit all companions and get the true ending or are fine with the neutral.

That would give politicians another reason to raise the retirement age, in order to stay in power.

This would’ve been more believable if they left off the wheat. Oil I can imagine, but no fucking way are US troops stealing wheat of all things.

Do they think there is a mill at their base? What the fuck would they use it for? It has negative value.

One nitpick, Jesus was almost certainly a real figure. There are many records indicating someone with that name was in the area at the time, and that they were executed by crucifixion.

The religious stuff, obviously no way to prove. But as a person, the historical consensus is they existed.

While Finland lost, the difficulty the Soviets encountered during their offensive was noted by the powers at the time. It was another factor convincing the Nazis that invading the Soviet Union wasn’t as terrible and idea as the balance of resources and forces would suggest.

Historians still debate whether the Soviets intended to conquer all of Finland at the onset of the war. While the eventual peace treaty left Finland ceding more territory than the initial Soviet ultimatum demanded, Finland retained its sovereignty, which was incredible given the disparity in military power and the existence of a puppet Finnish communist government.

Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.

I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.

The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.

Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.

That isn’t what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.

This isn’t to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can’t sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.

The raw spending figure isn’t what is important, but the PPP figure. Russia’s economy is about 1/5th the size of the EU’s in PPP, and its defense sector is vastly more efficient on a monetary basis than the west - The US alone has given Ukraine close to $60 billion and it is a fraction of the hardware that Russia has produced with fewer dollars.

This isn’t a ‘Russia stronk, Europe bad’ post, it just bears emphasizing that Russia has a large industrial base and has brought much of it into arms production over the past two years. The West hasn’t, and defense procurement remains an almost artisanal process where high tech goods are bought - in low volumes - at inflated prices.

The terms seem agreeable?

The terms that restrict the size of the Ukrainian military, bar Ukraine from receiving foreign assistance to rebuild its military, forbid it from seeking security guarantees from any country or bloc, … The terms that would have made it trivial for Russia to further invade at any point in the future?

Those terms seem agreeable?

A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.

The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.

With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.

These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.

An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.

The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.

The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.

To make a crude concrete example:

Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.

Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.

Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?

One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.

Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.

Check it out to throw in the trash. Jared Diamond’s book is thoroughly condemned in anthropological and archaeological circles.

it’s not spontaneous

Spontaneity in thermodynamics refers to a process which occurs without external application of energy. In your description, a pile of ash becoming an apple is spontaneous.

So in a contained universe, it doesn’t matter if it’s an apple releasing energy and becoming a pile of ash, or a pile of ash absorbing energy and becoming a perfectly normal apple.

The net energy is still conserved. Just going from energy to mass unlike mass to energy.

There is no mass-energy conversion in an apple burning to become ash, just the release of chemical energy from newly-formed bonds.

Regardless, conservation of energy is only one part of how the universe operates. The second operating principle is (or at least from hundreds of years of scientific inquiry appears to be) the maximization of entropy. That is the ‘spreading out’ of available energy. This is the reason iron rusts, rather than remaining oxygen and iron - conservation of energy alone cannot explain natural phenomena.

Spontaneous reconstruction of an ashed apple violates the second law of thermodynamics, and the Second law is no less valid than the First.

Lastly, I was not writing specifically about Penrose’s views on consciousness. His entire theory that gravity is driving the collapse of a wave function, and that said collapse occurs retroactively, is untested and based on an appeal to elegance. This does not make it wrong, but it most certainly should not be taken as true.

Beyond consciousness, the second law of thermodynamics also implies the presence and direction of time. In fact, it is sometimes called the Arrow of Time as it appears to direct physical processes to happen preferentially in the direction that increases entropy.

A self contained universe with fixed energy and infite time will eventually see a pile of ash turned into an apple. And it wouldn’t violate a damn thing with our system of physics.

This occuring spontaneously would indeed violate the 2nd law. This is a core disagreement between classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which seems to re-derive classical thermo from probabilistic arguments over system states.

I feel it also warrants stating that Penrose’s theory is not widely accepted, has yet to be tested, and is based mostly on an argument to elegance - it “seems weird” for their to be uncountably infinite parallel timelines spawning at every instant. It is far too soon for it to be taken as fact.

Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.

That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn’t much for tech.

There are plenty of things that can cause fires that are not oxygen, and don’t contain oxygen.

The halogens, Fluorine and Chlorine in particular, are powerful oxidizing agents on their own and can produce flames in the same manner as common flames.

Here’s a report on the spectra of flames produced by combustion in a Fluorine atmosphere (PDF warning).

1. Hans has admitted to cheating in the past
2. Hans played a near-perfect game as black against the best player in the world who hadn’t lost as white in years
3. Hans made some suspiciously good moves quickly, without much time passing
4. Magnus played a very rare opening that Hans was somehow able to perfectly respond to without skipping a beat

From these, many people think he cheated. The vibrating butt plug is unlikely, but what is more likely is that Magnus’ prep got leaked and Hans was able to hyper-prepare for a specific line of play.

North Korea invaded the South.

Crippling sanctions and the military presence are because the war never officially ended.

Learn history.

Those without respiratory issues don’t have oxygenation issues while wearing masks.

The same air is going into your lungs, the only difference is your diaphragm has to work harder due to the filtering effect of the mask. If it can’t manage that, then you are likely already on oxygen due to low tidal volume and chronic hypoxia.

You can buy a pulse oximeter from CVS for like $20 and test this yourself if you don’t believe me.