Yes, but literally three quarters of the US presence is on Okinawa. Just saying I think Tokyo is okay with that, as they get a the full military force multiplier with, from their perspective, a 75% discount on awful American behavior because the Ryukus are physically isolated and culturally distinct.
The August report, titled “Fracture From Within,” was compiled by experts in the CIA’s Red Cell, according to two U.S. sources who described the contents of the report to Drop Site News. The Red Cell, which is the unit responsible for providing “alternative analysis” within the agency, produced the assessment through a combination of open source information and U.S. intelligence… The CIA’s “red teams” are tasked with developing analysis and ideas that challenge prevailing assumptions and expose groupthink or blind spots that can take hold within the intelligence apparatus.
Basically, this is “what’s the weirdest shit that is kinda plausible if things don’t go how our consensus expects.” Useful I assume, but by definition unlikely.
Bit of a square, though.
Although building on that, I think the “Mainland” Japanese have been pretty content to have the Americans corralled on one little island (Post WW2, it was bases on the home islands that were shut down), with their easily othered country-cousins the Okinawans being the ones who have to deal with the American troops day-to-day, many of whom are dumb kids on their first tour. I can guarantee you that neither my dad in the 60s nor my brother in the 90s was interested in good-faith cultural exchange while stationed there with the Marines.
Interesting as well that litre/liter isn’t even a “proper” SI unit; it’s just a nickname for a cubic decimetre/decimeter held over from France’s original metric system.
I also like to imagine that the path to working for the BIPM is not always a glorious one: “Jacques, you have spent the last three years of your post-doctoral fellowship trying to settle on the units you wish to use in your abstract. We think we have found the perfect place for your skillset…”
Yup. In any lotsa-kids area, they’re everywhere, and everybody drives really slow because of it, but with 20 times the kids out and about, it’s not unusual at all that there’d be two or three times more fatalities.
I know the guys sold out, technically, but man they had to be laughing their asses off at the very idea that somebody paid good money to redo the spongemonkeys for a sandwich commercial.
I think this says as much about the Americans willing to start going to a new church as it does anything else. What’s growing are suburban prosperity gospel nonsense churches with varying degrees of Christian Nationalist subtexts: strip mall churches on the one end, repurposed sports arena hyperchurches on the other. These tell white people in largely white areas that the lifestyle they already live, right down to the fact that they feel most comfortable driving to a pre-fab concrete box, is holy. They get to feel they are safely members of a strong community, and donating to their pastor and the GOP will keep the heathens who would take that from them at bay. The churches understand that people don’t inherently want to throw money into a hole, so they offer a combination of services (including simple socializing with “friends”) and threats, but they meticulously avoid anything boring or asking people to consider open-ended questions without simple answers. As committed evangelicals, they are also always selling this package.
What’s dying are the mainline Protestant churches who made the mistake of taking separation of church and state seriously and trying to earnestly engage with their faith. You’ll find many of them, even if they’re quite socially conservative, are much less sure that they know what their god intends for LGBTQIA+ and nonbelievers, and even if parishioners personally are sure, they will say that kindness and setting a Christ-like example is the best policy because that is the tack their church takes. On the one hand, people of goodwill take from this that they don’t need organized religion in their lives even if they’re still Christian in some meaningful way, and they’ll just show up on Easter or when they have personal spiritual crises. On the other hand, the aggressive culture warriors find it all to be unsatisfying because they want to be told not just what to believe, but that what they already believe is correct and should invoke a literally divine level of privilege.
While my sympathy for any given individual on death row is limited, it just feels yucky to be down in the mud lingering on how much someone who’s already in prison needs to get MORE punishment and die at our collective hands. Individuals feel what they feel, but it rots the soul of a community to fetishize revenge like that, even more so to profess some sort of satisfaction that it’s as painful as possible.
citizenship by naturalization can be revoked
Theoretically this can only be done if it’s proven the naturalized citizen lied on their application. So probably still applies to Elon.
And both are important, or you start taking Caesar or Plutarch, worse, the Historia Augusta at face value.
Yeah, Force Majeure’s other name is an “act of god” clause. Something like the Cuban Revolution or other truly significant regulatory upheaval might qualify, a human-made force majeure event in the same way that a war is human-made, but this is going to be a huge stretch, verging on bad faith. Oracle just doing Oracle things, I suppose.
As I understand it, New Mexico is basically just saying, “make sure you account for water and electricity use.” The developer’s lawyers are going to have a very doable task to show that pushback on unfettered datacenter expansion was a foreseeable business risk. I think this is mostly a cynical tactic to renegotiate early in case the RPOs from OpenAI don’t materialize.
I’ve soured a bit on Ed Zitron as he’s clearly making a brand out of how confidently he’s asserting that the bubble will pop any day now, but I do think he’s zeroed in on some of the bizarre developments in the business world that will eventually result in said pop. Ed’s fun for venting, but Cory Doctorow seems to have a slightly more measured take. It certainly vibes with my doomer sentiments, but also doesn’t feel like the preaching is the product.
Knopfler is literally a guitar god who makes every list of the top whatever rock guitarists. A few singles got quite popular at Dire Straits’s peak, but it’s loose to the point of being misleading to use “pop” as a modifier here.
For text, they kind of already are.
Each agent was given a name, personality traits, a role such as conflict mediator or resource strategist, and an overarching goal for its “life” in a shared town… By the end, each simulated world had undergone its own shift in language. The world inhabited by copies of OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 model, for example, compressed speech, removing grammar and shortening messages. “Friendly voltage counted. If the handle needs your mouth, it dies anyway,” one message read.
“Sorry, we were just confused by this very administration’s scheme to import tons of bribery beef!”
Very possible, and you’re right that nothing will be the same, but America will be a rich and powerful country for a good while yet, and I imagine that after a (very hypothetical) generation of good behavior, many countries would be happy to revisit some of the arrangements that worked for 60+ years post WW2, or at the very least stop specifically planning around how to do without the US like they are forced to do now.
Not permanent, but it’s gonna be a while this time. US foreign policy regarding its allies used to be predictable enough that they could make long term plans and expect things that were patently useful to both sides would not be indiscriminately torpedoed. Now, you can mostly hope that the Democrats are on board with that as a broad philosophy, though they’re navigating populist waters that could get rocky with isolationism, but right now the other party in a closely matched two-party system can’t even be trusted not to tweet the economic system into existential peril or threaten literal invasions of allies, to say nothing of their simply being quite bad at efficient governance or diplomatic messaging.
America’s allies will welcome any Democratic administration, and anything that can get better for the duration of one probably will (e.g. Visas, retaliatory tariffs, etc.), but diversifying from the dollar as a reserve currency, building trade networks that can minimize exposure to American political volatility, and even exploring security arrangements that imagine post-NATO scenarios, all that is going to continue unless we see a good two decades or more of non-insane foreign policy from both US parties. Not even humane or optimal, just not batshit crazy.
Well, you see, we’re going to put drones and ammo and snipers in those three chairs, so it’s military need, and you can’t say no to the military.
Because of the implications.
The main thing they seem to be doing that’s officially illegal is that they are taking their own databases of dubious quality, and then manually inputting that information into state voter registration verification sites. These sites by and large make the user legally certify they either are the voter or have their express authorization (e.g. “Hey, bud, will check my voter registration for me?”). They’re basically asking the entire staff to engage in a bit of light identity theft 40 times a day.
Star Trek Replicator Chicken fingers. It looks perfect and is always the same, but it’s the type of place where somebody probably got thrown out of a window for suggesting that a pinch of black pepper be put into the recipe. The sauce is pretty decent, but I hope you like it because it’s utterly necessary. Good lemonade too. Founder leans right, but not “Cathy-family” right.
If you live somewhere with a Layne’s Chicken, that’s way better. Popeye’s is generally better too, though it’s traditional fast food grimy versus “pretend we’re fast-casual” veneer that a lot of the chicken places like to do.