I mean, they’ve gotten way better at it, but most of their equipment and doctrine are still targeted at utterly destroying a near peer level threat. The f-22 wasn’t designed to fight insurgents, nor is it suited to that task.

I would think that the USAF would happily establish and easily enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine and could probably pull it off within a few days of getting the order conservatively.

There was the story a few years ago when a well equipped and trained Wagner battalion “accidentally” picked a flight with a US army unit or base in Syria and got immediately demolished.

Writing this out definitely feels like braggadocio and it likely is. But I would think the Russians don’t want to find out why we don’t have universal healthcare first hand.

No, that’s not how associations tend to work in the US. Very likely he came from an association in an adjacent field and is essentially the conduit to Leadership and in charge of executing their strategic plan and such. He is not paid by the companies is individuals directly he is paid by the association. If they don’t do well collectively he is probably out and would be working somewhere else potentially entirely unrelated.

In associations longtime professionals tend to work with the same sorts of groups, but very often their jobs and those of the Members are entirely unrelated and the specialization is more due to connections and being able to say you understand how to work with those sorts of people.

For example I have been working mostly with research scientists most of my career at at this point. I have no background in science, but I have a lot of contacts with people who work for scientific associations and I can say that I an very used to their personalities and have a record of success I can point at. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t go do a fine job for realtors or something since the jobs would be basically the same, but that I landed here and it’s the easiest fit at this point. K

Russia lost in WWI before it ended, they were essentially knocked out of the war before the revolution and Bolsheviks made the official.

At the risk of being jingoistic, this type of opponent is exactly what our military is designed to utterly destroy. If the US was an active participant it would have very quickly wiped the floor with the Russian army and would be dealng with Russian backed insurgents in the east.

Ukraine has been beating them with the stuff we routinely throw away (when the Republicans don’t get in the way), I am convinced they have no non nuclear answer to our actual military.

Chances are that Mark Patterson is not a medical service provider. I am sure he is very well compensated, but he would be association staff, not industry.

This is undeniably good and I would like to see more. I would really like to see the federal government seriously look at the issues with power transmission and storage as those are the main hold ups in green energy right now and a lot of that is regulatory hurdles.

We could pretty easily hit all of our renewable goals in 5 years if power transmission projects didn’t constantly get bogged down in NIMBY lawsuits.

I am not saying that the apparatus of government should be used to run roughshod over people with concerns about this, but we cannot let individuals stop vital infrastructure projects.

The comment you are replying to was dickish, but this is a porous argument. In general the price of materials per cookie is going to be very low and an equivalent batch to what you would get in a box is still going to probably be around 15-20% of what you would pay at the store. Most cookie ingredients are shelf stable, most of them are very cheap, and you generally don’t need a lot of them with the vivid that you will already be ahead material wise for the next batch.

Honestly, if they are extracting a resource from public land for private gain they should be paying way more or buying that land at the market rate. No more corporate welfare.

I really wish Biden would take a harder line to get that under control. At the very least it’s aid that ought to be going to Ukraine which is instead being used for that disgusting mess.

The only justification I can think of is that it’s the only leverage we have over them and without it they would have no reason to be “restrained” at all. Even then I have my doubts.

Most of them don’t actually spend very much time in DC. A lot of them spend half the week back in their districts or more on average.

I honestly think that Bibi knows if he tanks Biden then Trump will probably be better for his government. He has basically no incentive to be reasonable since nobody is willing to hold them accountable and he knows it’s very unlikely Biden will be able to.

Yeah, I was trying to be careful with my comment not to imply the reason for secession was “states rights” since there are still plenty of idiots who are happy to bang that drum.

They didn’t secede because they were told to stop slavery. They seceded because it looked that the national consensus was moving against the expansion of slavery to new states and territories, which would have limited slave states overall power in the long run.

They were very explicit that they were leaving to protect slavery as an institution, but to be fair nobody in power was threatening to abolish it when they did so.

They have to get usable at some point, but I got tired of the (shitty off-brand) smart watch I had after a couple minutes. I replaced it with a fully analog Seiko watch and a fitness tracker ring.

Way easier to manage and still meets the needs addressed by the smart watch.

I think I have seen Central America referred to as a sub continent, but that doesn’t really make sense other than to create a formal differentiation between them and USA/Canada.

North America is a continent.

I agree with you, but it would not have been within the margin of fuckery that allowed Florida to happen had Nader not be on the ballot. Gore did run a shit campaign though, all he really had to do was ask people if they were better off than they were in 92 and promise a continuation of the core of the Clinton policies and he would have won. Instead, he focused on distancing himself from a still very popular president and not being charismatic and largely allowed himself to be put in the position he ended up in.

It was my first election as an adult, Nader came to my college and gave his “both parties are the same” speech and I bought it because I was a dumb ass at the time and in fairness it was a lot closer to the truth then than it has been since.

To what end? Him running ultimately only helps the GOP. If the green party wants to advance progressive policy, they should focus on creating infrastructure to become an actual block that democrats need to work with. Siphoning votes away only helps republicans, Ralph Nader got George W. Bush elected as much as Gore’s shitty campaign did.

What does running as a spoiler actually accomplish? They are doing nothing but taking away votes from the democrat candidate* with no chance of being elected to national office. If you want better environmental policy, and actually want to accomplish it then the democrats are your only realistic option.

*I understand and respect that a good portion of Greens would not vote for the Democrat, but anyone who is likely on the fence is vastly more likely to vote D than R. I am also very happy to acknowledge that our voting system sucks and we should implement ranked choice nationally. I would like to the Green party as a viable option in the future, but it is not in 2024, all this candidacy is accomplishing is helping the republican nominee. I am still bitter that my first time voting was for Nader because I was dumb. I would honestly love to see examples of the Green party working to actually build up their base in local elections as that is the only way they are going to ever be viable and not just a spoiler.

The one good thing that W did was the do not call registry, that worked for a while at least.