You’re probably operating from outdated information, we don’t have the same budget we had 10-20 years ago. Here ya go:

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/

No.

Rome fell (among many reasons) due to overextension beyond their ability to maintain and concentrate sufficient forces, alongside military invasion by multiple groups over many years.

Germany was going to fall in one of two ways, either economic collapse from a grossly unaffordable military buildup that was on track to bankrupt them, or getting into wars with powerful countries in order to help pay for said military buildup. They went with option B.

The US has no issues concentrating and deploying sufficient military force to defend itself, and isn’t spending anywhere near enough on defense to make it unaffordable, spending about 13% of our budget on defense. (compared to over 100% [edit: of annual income, I mixed my figures inappropriately here] for the Germans) Most of our deficit comes from domestic expenses like health care.

People have freedom. This includes the freedom to run a Lemmy instance that they own, on hardware they own, and administrate it however they see fit.

I would say it is extremely natural to get a fairly diverse array of different ways to run things, depending on the opinions and feelings of each individual owner.

Being private individuals operating their own private property for whatever reason they feel like, (usually nerdy tech reasons in our case) none of them are under any requirement to be nice or accepting of anyone. It is 100% their choice to operate however they see fit, within the laws of their own country. (which can be anywhere on Earth that has internet)

It is odd to me that people feel they should have some sort of right to go onto someone else’s property and say whatever they feel like. That’s just not how anything works anywhere. You are on their digital property by open invitation, and that invitation can be revoked at any time they feel like.

I would overall dislike giving him one. However, I would honor his wishes to the extent that I would offer a compromise and offer to get him one by a certain not-too-distant birthday if he meets a set of conditions for getting good grades, or some other beneficial goal. He’s just getting to that age where he deserves some give-and-take.

Even then, though, I would let him know there will be limitations on its usage, such as no going to bed with it. (no cell phone starting an hour before bed time or something, it goes into some drawer in the common spaces of the house, maybe no cell phone during meals) Because of your compromise and deal, you should have enough leverage that he will not be too upset about comparatively minor restrictions like this.

The compromise won’t make either of you completely happy, but that can be a lesson in and of itself. For your part, I would try to look for silver linings, like despite cell phones being linked to certain negative health outcomes, these can be mitigated, and with information technology progressing so rapidly, there are potentially benefits to learning how to navigate it fluently at a young age.

Bullies get positive feelings for themselves by making others suffer. Who they target with this isn’t too different from how a predator selects prey–choose the vulnerable.

Your sister, for one reason or another, is vulnerable, meaning the bully is less likely to suffer any consequences for picking on her than if they picked on someone else. That “someone else” could have more friends willing to stick up for them and fight back, they could have a really sharp wit and be able to verbally humiliate the bully if they wanted, they could be huge and practice MMA, being able to physically knock all her teeth out with one swing, they could be a teacher’s favorite and able to go to an authority figure to get backup and inflict consequences that way. All sorts of possibilities.

But one way or another, your sister has been selected due to having fewer plausible defenses than any of the potential alternatives.

Best way to resolve that is to bolster her defenses in some way or another, so the bully picks a different, more vulnerable target. Making the bully actually stop bullying everyone isn’t very likely, though. As someone else pointed out, the bully is most likely suffering a lot themselves, and participating in bullying is how they themselves are surviving their own difficult circumstances. The easiest fix would probably be the “sharp wit” route, as verbally tearing into someone in a humorous way is a learnable skill. Otherwise a physical intimidation route, where your sister or another makes them afraid for their teeth remaining in their mouth if the bullying continues.

To answer your direct question, yes, jealously could be a part of it. There isn’t much use in wondering about it, though, there’s no real solutions to be found down this line of thinking, that I’m aware of.

Yeah, I think people need to recognize that this arms Kuwait, Tunisia, Lithuania, Oman, Netherlands, Chad, Yemen, Bulgaria, Tajikistan, Rwanda and Cameroon all with nuclear weapons. (Ranks 91-100 if we just go by number of military personnel, active and reserve, an imperfect but very convenient way to measure.)

If I’m not mistaken, two of those countries are currently involved in conflict. (Yemeni Civil War and Rwanda involved in Congo)

If you don’t have access to medication, the only thing I can think of is exercise. When you feel an episode coming on, perhaps it’s possible for you to manufacture a dose of brain juice for yourself by stimulating some natural release.

If you’re not the jog-a-mile or 50 pushups type, perhaps something like yoga, dancing, swimming or tai chi could work.

I doubt you’ll get the same degree of effect as a prescription, but it might be worth a shot at least.

Yeah, the whole cast really crushes it.

Heresy in the 17th century actually wasn’t as big a deal as it was in the past. This was a couple centuries after the Protestant Reformation shattered the Catholic hold on Europe, leading to decades of war in which millions died, eventually resulting in the shitloads-of-denominations we see today, where almost all of them are “heretics” of some sort to all the other ones. I mean, modern day Mormonism isn’t really even a monotheistic religion anymore. This all has its roots in the breaking of Catholic domination back in the early 1500s.

Moon landing is even more recent. Didn’t like Buzz Aldrin or one of them deck a guy one time for insulting him and getting up in his face about faking it all?

It’s become necessary. If the important preventative work we do is devalued, then the only solution is to allow the most severe problems to reappear so a new generation can directly experience life without those mitigation measures. Since they won’t listen to anyone without directly experiencing something themselves, then direct experience simply becomes necessary.

You very well might be able to, actually, though I’m not going to guarantee it. Regardless though, if the line is commonly parroted by a certain group, then the claims are not particularly wild, are they?

And yes, there are lots of very useful tips that can identify most propaganda based off of common traits. This is not foolproof though. Still very good to know, though.

Nothing about the term tankie does or should deny their right to live. Advocating for the deaths of people who disagree with you is profoundly against everything liberalism (the freedom-based guiding principle of what we’d call “the west”) stands for.

To the contrary, as a pretty standard liberal American I fully support their rights to advocate for whatever they wish. Since there is no realistic way to accurately and objectively determine what is or is not propaganda, I support their right to create that as well.

Regarding the utility of recognizing where propaganda comes from, it can occasionally be useful to know, as it tends to follow certain patterns based on the goals of whoever created it.

Actually the goal of terms like that is efficiency. We could say “supporter of aggressively implemented authoritarian communism” if we wanted, but tankie is shorter.

Helps if you have the background to understand the specifics of what different “isms” support and thus what they disagree on that leads them into genuinely fighting each other. A fascist, a lib and a tankie really do have very core disagreements that cannot be realistically compromised on. At the most basic, a fascist wants a unified society with a strict hierarchy, the tankie wants a unified society with no hierarchy, the lib doesn’t want any kind of unified society. If any one of these people gets their way, the other two do not, which leads to conflict.

Left/right are more economic arguments with some wiggle room due to being more or less a spectrum, but also tend to feature significant real world disagreements.

Anyways, I do agree that it’s important to have conversations about these underlying details, but when you’re talking amongst other people who know the background already, some shorthand terms are going to start appearing. Since these are overarching governance philosophies that any person can adopt or discard at will, they’re also a little different from more inherent divisions, like ethnicity for instance. Being a tankie, lib or fascist is a choice, where being Arabic or gay or something is not.

Somebody needs to put this guy in charge of all the branding elements.

That’s a region. It’s also not what you said, you said rust bowl. You know bowls and belts are different things, right? Belts hold your pants up, bowls are dishes you eat food out of.

You read too much bullshit. The US is the second-largest manufacturer on the planet, after China. We have quite a lot of industry still. Nor was “rust bowl” ever a term, which you’d know if you were an American.

If Russian production is so plentiful, where are all the T-90s? Seems to me a major producer of materiel wouldn’t be needing to field its T-64’s in a modern conflict.

… remember the Rust Bowl? lol You should do your homework a little better.

Now I will agree that it takes years, absolutely. Not decades though, which is what you said earlier. Also, fortunately, the process of scaling up armaments production was already started, about two years ago.

Scratch? No, not even close. A reduction and an elimination are not the same thing.

Decade? Probably not, unless you’re trying to spin up domestic production from nothing.

Few years maybe. Depends who you buy them from and how developed their industry is. S Korea does a lot of artillery production. US has its fair share if you want jets. Everyone’s got small arms, trucks, stuff like that.