Echo Dot

Alternative history is sort of difficult because we don’t know what the capabilities of those powers would have been. In order for the Nazis to have won the war a lot of people on both sides would have needed to make quite radically different decisions.

However it doesn’t take much theorizing to suggest that Nazi Germany would have probably had nuclear weapons in that scenario (the Germans were moving in that direction towards the end of the war, but were never really able to make much progress because by that point they were losing badly and didn’t have the resources anymore).

I can’t see how Japan would have ended up with nuclear weapons though. So I suspect a certain amount of power imbalance would have existed.

You could say that some of the national borders as they exist right now are needlessly artificial.

Take Spain and Catalonia for example. The only reason that Catalonia is not an independent country is because Spain won’t let them be. There’s no real reason other than Spanish national pride and if there was a war between the two you could classify it as a civil war or you could classify it as a war between two countries, it’s entirely a matter of opinion.

But I don’t think that US politics has any real bearing on whether or not that happens. Political instability in the United States doesn’t really lead to any obvious change in internal politics for other countries. External policies obviously would change but not internal ones.

A slight nitpick but Japan didn’t side with the Nazis. They had their own thing going on with China and simply saw the Nazis as an opportunity for some payback. It wasn’t like they really bought into the Nazi ideology as didn’t really apply to them. The Italians were all in on it though.

Had the war turned out differently there would have been a radical cultural difference between Nazi controlled Europe and Japanese controlled Asia. In the long run it would have probably led to another war because of the extreme cultural differences.

The USA will be treated as even less trustworthy than Russia and China. Russia and China are of course untrustworthy but at least they are consistently untrustworthy. Everyone knows to give them a wide birth.

But the USA, they insinuated themselves into high-level defence pacts and international military cooperation. Then they decided to turn fascist and destroy everything for no readily apparent reason.

If there is going to be any repairing of fences, it’s going to have to start off with the US paying for all the damage they have done to the world order and all of the renegotiating of contracts that has had to be done because they didn’t feel like fulfilling their international obligations. And also justice, if the Trump admin don’t end up in prison then the rest of the world is going to see that for what it is. An attempt to defend the indefensible, and therefore an indication that they have not truly changed.

I’ve played enough Battlefield to know that a war in a oil field is not in short a spectacular.

I’m starting to see how he managed to bankrupt the casino. It’s because he won’t stop committing pointless crimes that don’t in fact benefit him in any way.

Even if Trump hangs around as a dictator there’s still no point investing in Venezuela. It’s not as if there is even a global oil shortage so why would you want to build more infrastructure.

He’s so bad at business that he doesn’t realise that companies won’t want to oversaturate the market and lower their margins. This is a concept of 12-year-old should be able to understand.

So when he was on air force one and said that he’d spoken to the oil companies before the invasion. That was obviously a lie.

Is brain really is mush isn’t it.

If someone were to actually assassinate the orange one, you guys are way more fucked.

Why? Who would be ordering it, Vance? MAGA have one figurehead and a bunch of background characters that no one really likes. If Trump died it would be over. The GOP knows that, which is why you’re starting to see some pushback against Trump and his more insane ideas. They have started to realise that they need to be politically palatable in a post Trump world.

Why would Trump leave that’s antithesis to his entire personality. Sticking around long after it’s clear that everyone hates him, claiming some sort of conspiracy, that’s more his style.

They’re not experts they’re just some random think tank milane actors with a political goal which means they’re just arrogant people who like telling everybody else what to do largely with zero qualifications.

It’s not that I’m boycotting FIFA as much as I’m just not going to the US because I’m not a self-destructive idiot with a death wish.

I wouldn’t have minded quite so much if they made everything voice controlled. But all my speech recognition system can do is just call and text people. It can’t turn on the AC, you can’t even navigate to a destination with the GPS unless you go into the GPS app first.

Also it would be really nice if the activation phrase was something other than the word “hey”, you know perhaps they could go with a word that isn’t said 5,000 times a day anyway.

If VW made a car that randomly exploded every time it went over 40 miles an hour they would still sell it if in some way that saved the money.

US and EU regulators announced last year that cars with touchscreen controls could get worse safety ratings.

Yeah that’s the real reason they’re moving back it’s got nothing to do with the complaints from the customers because they’ve been ignoring those for over a decade. They just know that people won’t buy their cars if it receives a substandard rating.

But hey I’ll still take the win.

MAGA is actually currently having a bit of a crisis of confidence. One of the promises Trump made was to stop the empire building and international interference. Now he’s going around causing an international incident every 45 minutes.

He has gone from saying that it was a single strike, to threatening more strikes against Venezuela, to threatening yet other countries in the last 24 hours.

This also gives justification to North Korea. They’ve been arguing for ages that they should be allowed nuclear weapons because otherwise the US would come in and force a regime change, and now Trumpsky has just handed them the evidence.

What is going on with the focus in that image?

The fan looks like it’s a tilt shift, with a very narrow focal range, but everything else in the image is perfectly clear. It looks like the result of some very crappy AI object deletion but I can’t work out what they would want to delete.

There’s a shoe repair shop in my town. People absolutely do get simple things repaired what you can’t get repaired are things like TVs anymore.

But things don’t break like they used to, it used to be that a component would fail and you could just replace that broken component but everything’s integrated these days so if one thing goes down the whole thing is dead.