A sensible response, indeed. Investing is about finding the right balance of risk vs reward. When a country becomes less reliable, it becomes a less attractive investment, until the interest they pay rises enough to compensate for the additional risk.
Not sure if you are familiar with the built-environment in America, but there’s effectively no biking infrastructure and people are openly hostile towards cyclists who try.
Depends on where you live. There are a lot of cities in North America that have biking infrastructure. As a general rule, the worse the winters the better the biking infrastructure. (you need to get to Minneapolis or Canada to see it)
There's a lot of bike accidents in my city in Europe too. Yearly deaths too. Still only commute by bike if the trip is through the city center since it's the only way to bypass city traffic and without dying of old age from waiting on public transport.
Life is short enough, I don’t need to waste it providing power to travel to work and back when I can save 1.5 hours per work day driving. (And more if I go to lunch.)
Yes, plenty of people choose active transportation. Once they give it a try they see that not only it is about as fast as driving, but it feels great, too.
I don't know your particular circumstances, but unless you have tried riding a bike to work you probably don't have a good sense of how long it would take you.
Many people realize that they'd rather spend an hour biking every day instead of half an hour driving each day, because they enjoy riding a bike. "Providing power to travel" is such a weird way to describe using your own body and enjoying the outdoors
Yes, it's disingenuous to insinuate through that comparison as if bicycles are replacements for cars, or that all car trips can be replaced by bike trips. Both are good for different kinds of trips. Hence why cars still have a place, even in bike dominated Netherlands, and why your comment was in bad faith and why Ic alled you out for it.
>Plenty of people live without a car.
Plenty of people also live without a home, that doesn't mean it's a good situation to be in.
> President Donald Trump has renewed his efforts to take over Greenland, and tapping into the Danish territory’s natural resources is a key part of the strategy.
It is not "taking over" or "annexing". It is invading. A military ally, at that.
And it is not "tapping into [...] natural resources". It is plundering their natural resources.
None of these hypotheticals are consensual. There is no plan for a freely agreed-upon bilateral agreement. This is about invading and pillaging a foreign land. Whether it is Greenland, Canada, or any other country.
the end strategy is controlling trade between europe and china. the NW passage and eventually the arctic ocean will be opening.
the US shares its current control with russia for these new trade routes, but it wants to be able to unilaterally decide what china can do at sea. thus it needs control that isnt shared with russia or europe.
its the same thing with panama, the US needs to recapture control to ensure that china cannot ship through without US permission
Whatever the U.S. feels it needs to do in that regard can be accomplished with the current arrangement. It doesn’t need to invade or unilaterally annex or violate international law.
Nobody is talking about how less than 1% of the Epstein files have been released weeks past the deadline after Venezuela, ICE in Minneapolis and Greenland.
They don't care. No one is punishing them for not complying with releasing all of the Epstein files, and no one is going to punish them for anything in those files. Jeffrey Epstein was the first and likely last person to suffer any consequence beyond reputational harm.
There are numerous reasons why the US will probably go to war with Iran at some point (it's part of the "Axis of Evil" after all) but distracting from Epstein isn't one of them.
Europe going forward is going to be treated the way the US treats and has always treated Latin American and African and Middle Eastern countries. That you see a conspiracy in further coercion of a non-consensual empire indicates how sheltered and "white identity" oriented you are.
Apparently the Lauder billionaire mentioned it because he has a mineral water bottling plant and some other insignificant business there. But Trump liked the idea so it’s basically all this is for some spring water.
More consequentially it’s an attempt to destroy NATO so Putin can have his way with Europe.
Considering how quickly he moved past taking Canada I almost feel like he didn't want it that badly but now he's blustered about it so much it would be embarrassing so not get it.
The meeting with Zelensky in Oval Office wasn't some kind of convoluted strategy, a tease, or a bluff. It was fully serious and a preludium to something very nasty. That nasty thing hasn't happened yet.
If I threatened someone until they sold me something that they made very clear they did not want to sell noone would call it "Buying" and we shouldn't either. It would be extorting. Under no circumstances are we buying Greenland at this point, anything that happens is something else.
The problem is that virtually the entire new world and much of the old world was acquired by force and threats of force that has been legitimized over time. So yes, I think this is clearly extortion and any sale that takes would be coerced.
For sure in the future I'm sure the US will teach that it was a fair deal and nato was corrupt anyway but I hate to see the whitewashing of it going on already like it's a casual land purchase offer
> It’s not invading, yet. Just buying or psyopping is more likely than fighting NATO.
Threatening to invade (which the Trump administration has been explicitly doing) is about as damaging as invading in the long run, either way we have sent the message loud and clear that the US is no longer a reliable ally and everyone has to shift away from the post-WW2 world order.
I have worked alongside with Iranian and Russian tech workers. I hope they all have a green card by now. Other countries will now benefit from the brain drain instead.
My son-in-law is from Brazil, came to the US for grad school, has an Ph.D. in ML and a good job in the US. He got his green card via marriage a couple of years ago and was planning on probably getting citizenship in the next year or two. He is very worried about what all this might mean for that plan.
In his first term, I anticipated that one day he will wake up and say “any body with a green card, get the F out of the country”. I applied for the citizenship as soon as I was eligible to. I know it’s a matter of time until GC holders are somewhat affected.
That and the current administration has repeatedly said they’ll do that if citizenship was obtained “fraudulently” without really defining what that would look like.
At this point, it's fair to assume that Stephen Miller et al. are willing to pull any "get non-white people out of the US" lever they can find, and Trump (naively or otherwise) signs off on it.
The US government now has an explicitly racist immigration policy. (True at many points of US history, but we'd managed to avoid doing it for a bit)
> Don't criticize how slowly immigrants adapt to a new country, until you've been an immigrant in a foreign culture.
I am an immigrant and find this line of thinking to be a cheap rhetorical trick, a thought-terminating cliché. Yes, people who are not immigrants can share their opinion on the behaviors of immigrants. Maybe we can all learn a little from each other instead of gatekeeping anybody who has had a different lived experience.
> it's also clear an economically disadvantaged country benefits mutually from this, and if it wasn't they'd be restricting tourist visas, etc
Countries are not a monolithic entity. The people in control of the flow of tourists are a tiny minority, and whatever incentives they have to open or close the borders do not reflect what the people who deal with tourists on a daily basis want.
It depends on the county of course, but in my experience service workers at many “touristy” countries seem to benefit directly from tourism.
For example, some of the workers at resorts in Thailand went to college and studied Tourism, a major I didn’t even know existed, and their wages come directly from the tourist industry.
What countries in particular are you thinking of where the locals are very unhappy to see more tourists? I’ve heard Japan might be in that category, and the United States certainly feels that way, but did you experience this yourself?
Hawaii, Barcelona, and some cities in Latin America like Medellín have had a few incidents to suggest that people are unhappy with tourists there.
A city I have stayed in banned AirBnBs to address an affordability crisis. Tons of locals went wild reporting houses they expected to were circumventing the ban. I remember looking at the press release and finding that all of the AirBnBs in the city amounted to less than 2% of the city’s housing stock.
From what I can gather, these sort of attitudes are an appropriation of reactionary xenophobia directed to an appropriate target in Barcelona, a cultural inferiority complex in Latin America (which receives virtually no tourists compared to all the expatriates they send to the developed world), and a legitimate existential crisis for the Hawaiians.
> The people in control of the flow of tourists are a tiny minority
The people ultimately in control of this policy are usually elected officials, so I’d (idealistically) say they have at least some incentive to make decisions that the general public wants.
Economic benefits by themselves are just one metric by which we can evaluate desirability, but do you have any reason to suggest that existing policy towards tourism is contrary to the prevailing opinion among those who interact with tourists on a daily basis?
> The people ultimately in control of this policy are usually elected officials
Even assuming we are talking about democracies, you still face the same issue: policies regarding tourism are decided at the national or supra-national (e.g. EU) level, while the effects are concentrated on specific neighborhoods of specific towns.
> do you have any reason to suggest that existing policy towards tourism is contrary to the prevailing opinion among those who interact with tourists on a daily basis?
Have you not heard of any popular protests against tourism? Speaking the local language helps here, but sometimes it is also reported in English.
> Have you not heard of any popular protests against tourism?
I mentioned in another comment that I know of vandalism that has occurred in Barcelona, some demonstrations in Medellín, and a long history of nativist sentiment in Hawaii, but I’m not convinced that these people represent a majority opinion even in tourist destinations. Have you seen any surveys or anything of the kind that would suggest a substantial portion of people are opposed to tourism?
By elderly people wo are already dying from natural causes and ask for a medically assisted death instead of unnecessarily prolonging their suffering. It is telling that so many people who suffer choose a dignified death once they are legally allowed to.
Thhe "God helmet" was likely a placebo device. From the very same Wikipedia article you linked:
> Other groups have subsequently found that individual differences such as strong belief in the paranormal and magical ideation predict some alterations in consciousness and reported "exceptional experiences" when Persinger et al's experimental set-up and procedure are reproduced, but with a sham "God helmet" that is completely inert or a helmet that is turned off.
I think this is the wrong way around. There might be an economic incentive to keeping something closed source, for example having licensed other closed source code. And remaining in control without oversight also might be an incentive. But the incentive to making something open source is that someone might improve your work, making your product better. It is somewhat arrogant to assume that nobody else out there could possibly improve this code or add value. Just like it is arrogant to assume that your competitors don't already know your 'secrets' and haven't reverse engineered anything they found interesting.
Speaking from the perspective of somebody who used to do this for a living.
> But the incentive to making something open source is that someone might improve your work
Device drivers, particularly on mobile, aren't evergreen sorts of software. New hardware is released several times a year, and maintenance after shipping is limited to critical issues. By the time it hits the market, the people who developed that driver have moved on to newer products.
> It is somewhat arrogant to assume that nobody else out there could possibly improve this code or add value
Whatever they did would have completely missed the release schedule. It may provide value to people who want to keep using a 10 year old phone, but how does that benefit a company that only makes income when they sell new models?
> Just like it is arrogant to assume that your competitors don't already know your 'secrets' and haven't reverse engineered anything they found interesting.
This made me laugh. You would be surprised by how minimal reverse engineering goes on in this space. It boils down to the same reason as before: by the time you have made any progress, the product you are reverse engineering is semi obsolete. The vast majority of the time it makes more sense to invest those resources into developing your own stuff.
That's my $.02 from having worked for four major GPU vendors out there. Upper management knows what they are doing, even if outsiders don't get it. The incentives simply aren't there for most GPU vendors most of the time.
Edit: Yes, I am being sarcastic.
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