Ah, choosing to ignore the territorial annexation that took place during the war or annexations that failed? And China?

To be fair on that one, Puerto Ricans seem torn on what they want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_political_status_for_Puerto_Rico

Up until Trump the US has been reasonable about independence questions since WW2, for the most part. (Highlighting that independence is different than being free from interfering)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_changes_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_occupations_by_the_Soviet_Union

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_territorial_acquisitions_table

Notable examples would be places like “Tibet”, several Baltic states, and an attempt on Finland. Hell, Russia is currently trying to annex Ukraine.

They specifically said 20th century, and were obviously referring to the post world war period.

After the wars, the US sought soft power, not territory.
Aligning with them was often a more safe move.

I mean, who doesn’t like a nice cache?

If not having it doesn’t lose you anything can I have yours?

You’re focusing on loss of money while ignoring loss of value. It doesn’t have to be currency to have value, and the value of something falling has an impact on your expectation of realizing that value later.

Your position works better with people treating the expectation of profit as value, and decrying unmet profit goals as a loss.

I lack your confidence in the racism of the US military. I think it just changes what terms they use to dehuminize anyone they shoot.
It’s not like the US has never invaded anyplace with white people.

I have zero belief that any units will ignore or slow walk any orders. There’s just no history of that happening in recent US military existence to expect it to happen now. Vietnam saw a handful of cases where people likely killed their commanders, but it very plainly didn’t impact the course of the war.

The UN will never determine that the US is engaged in an illegal war. The security council needs to vote on that, and the US gets to veto. The ICC doesn’t apply to the US because we never ratified the agreement. It’s just someone elses laws.

Direct action against the military is more likely to have an effect, but linking arms is not going to be effective. Impeding military production is just going to get you beaten and arrested, at best.
Specifically interfering with military operations is particularly illegal and carries penalties way worse than the usual you get for messing with other businesses.
If you’re going that far, at least do something effective rather than slowing down a truck for a few hours.
Look to the WW1 protests, and what was effective there and what happened.

But that also assumes the US military is unified to follow orders into an illegal war, and that may not be the case.

Curious about why it would be an illegal war. Unjust, immoral, unprovoked, and unnecessary are not actually what makes a war illegal.

The invasion of Iraq was entirely based on false pretenses and the military was perfectly unified. Compared to that, an open war of conquest is pretty reasonable.

So buy a car without those things, or don’t use them. It’s not like you can’t drive my car without those things, and every one of them, barring the camera for obvious reasons, is controlled by a physical button. Better yet just don’t drive. If more people took public transportation we’d be better off.

I don’t particularly want to drive. When I do, I’d prefer to have climate control, not need to crank a window, and for the car to be able to tell me someone is going to clip me when I’m backing up. No matter how small the support bars are, the driver will never have as good a view as the radar sensor mounted on the side of the rear bumper.

Backup cams aren’t a solution to a design that limits visibility, they’re a solution to “most people won’t turn their heads when backing up”. People like their necks more than they like their neighbors kids.

It’s one thing to say that you want a no-frills car, and another entirely to say that car design peaked 30 years ago, and even further than that if you want a car that isn’t impacted by electronic component failure.

Not every car is a piece of shit. Mine has a touch screen for configuring parameters I honestly don’t think you need a dedicated button for, like “lane drift alert volume” and those can only be done when the car is parked.
Everything else either has a button as well even if they had to dig deep into the plausible locations to get there, like “press the button on the end of the turn signal to disable lane centering while adaptive cruise enabled”, or it only allows voice communication while in motion, like the typing based commands for navigation.

I think the only time I’ve wanted to use a setting that didn’t have a button was when I was on a stretch of freeway in traffic where I didn’t feel keen on pulling over if I could avoid it, and I got gunk on one of the radar sensors. Since it couldn’t get a coherent reading it refused to turn on cruise control since it was set to adaptive. I had to drive without cruise control for a while until I pulled into a gas station and was able to clean the gunk. The setting to disable adaptive cruise control was touchscreen only, and locked out when the vehicle was moving.

Thank you for being uncertain. :) I mean that sincerely. Some people are too quick to dismiss doctors expertise, and some people are too eager to try to use medication to solve “boredom”. Trying to make sure you’re actually doing the right thing is great.

Just remember: one of the effected things is executive function , or the ability to act deliberately and stay on task. You unfortunately see a trend of people who think “they don’t need medication, we just need to teach the better study skills/to focus/etc”, which is the one bit you can’t teach.
And get them a bowl to put whatever that thing they keep misplacing in. They might not be able to remember where they put it, but they can learn to always put it in the bowl.

I got medicated as an adult, so I can’t directly share my experiences relating to your question.

I wish I had been medicated at a younger age, since I can see so many problems I had in my life that were ultimately related to entirely unmanaged ADHD.
I also turned out fine without it, things were just more difficult.

Make sure you trust your pediatrician and that you’re on the same page as them. That’ll make it easier to feel confident that their advice is in line with your goals. They all have your kids best interest at heart, but there are different emphasis they can focus on which might not mesh with yours.

Talk with your kid and see how they feel. They might not be old enough to fully articulate things, but you can try to get a feel for if they’re feeling volatile, struggling or things like that. Look at how they play alone and with others, and at how they engage with homework.

Start slow, and work your way up.

It’s most likely gasoline. It’s very difficult to engineer upholstery and rubber to be resistant to prolonged exposure to an open gas fire. Usually the best you can do is get to a minimum safe time for certain temperatures.

The highest standards you’ll run into day to day are baby clothing, bedding, and residential wall insulation.
The reasons for those being specifically regulated should be relatively obvious, and are respectively heartbreaking, scary, and sensible.

Cars tend to be going fast when they encounter issues, and there’s a lot less ability to make a lot of assurances. As a result, cars tend to be designed for controlled failure rather than resilience. This allows to car to fail around the passengers, hopefully resulting in the car, which is totaled anyway, absorbing the damage the passengers would have otherwise gotten.
We can make a car that can take a 45mph collision with an oak tree. We just don’t know upfront that that’s how it’s going to crash, and the squishy people inside can’t be made to tolerate a 45mph collision with the dashboard. So instead of making a perfect fuel tank, we just make sure that if it breaks it tries to rupture the fuel away from the passenger compartment. Instead of making the upholstery incapable of burning (which comes with downsides like “expensive”, “uncomfortable”, “ugly”, “smelly”, or “even more toxic than current flame retardants”) we make it able to resist burning for as long as it would take for the air inside the vehicle to become deadly hot. It doesn’t matter if the seat fabric is unscathed if the fire is hot enough to warp the metal.

Beyond all that, Tesla’s are notoriously poorly engineered, and in that category the cyber truck is best in class. I do not know, but would not be surprised, if accelerant was simply able to seep into the more flammable parts of the car from the outside.

As for surveillance catching the people, covering your face, obscuring identifying marks, and simply being far away by the time anyone notices the fire is a good bet. The police might try a bit harder because it’s an expensive property crime, but it’s ultimately a property crime where no one is going to be building their career on it, so there won’t be real incentive to go above and beyond.

It’s also worth noting that, economically, it’s not surprising that the country with the most people would have the largest economy.

There’s nothing fundamentally different between the people of the US and China beyond the conditions they’re born in. Insofar as innovation is a product of economics, educational investment, opportunity for innovation and a random chance it happens, and economic strength is a product of innovation and raw work output, it follows that more people leads to more work output, and eventually to a larger, more innovative economy.

A disorganized China and some key innovation breakthroughs by the west last century gave a significant headstart, and some of Maos more unwise choices slowed their catch-up, but it’s not surprising that an organized country with five times the US population would surpass us in economics and innovation, to say nothing of being competitive.

Please let’s try to keep generative AI from claiming the entire word “AI”.
Current generative AI is good at and built for mimicking patterns with boundary conditions.
This means it does a decent job of imitating authoritative knowledge, but it’s just mimicking it.
People are hyped for it because it looks knowledgeable, it’s relatively simple to make, and a lot of what we do is text based so it’s easy to apply.

There are a lot of other types of AI, the majority even, that work significantly better, take a small fraction of the computing power and provide helpful and meaningful results. They just don’t look like anything other than complex math, which is all any of them are in the end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pancakes

Seems very relevant. Found it while trying to find the etymology of “flapjack”, since I thought about it and that’s not a normal word.

I also found out that some countries have a pancake day, where they eat pancakes. Seems to be a different method of celebrating what we call Mardi gras or Fat Tuesday, depending on your proximity to France/Louisiana. We often have something like a donut.
Seems the intent is the same: eat all your animal fat before lent so it doesn’t go to waste.

Your cooking looks delicious! I would call it a crepe, but whatever it’s called I would eat it. :)

How is it even legal to have explicitly preferential pay for people not in a union? Is there a limit to that, or can companies just say, “Anyone who joins a union will be paid minimum wage.”

What I’m saying is that if they can set “$0.50 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone, they can also set “$5 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5.

That’s you. That’s what we’re talking about: why they can’t “set “$5 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5”.

You were told it’s because of the unions contract that they can’t cut union rates, and paying people not to join is a violation of labor law.
You then replied about how that wouldn’t work because everyone left the union so they don’t have bargaining power.
And yeah, if the union has no power they probably don’t have a good contract, but that’s aside from the point of “a unions contract prevents their pay from being cut on a whim”.

I’m treating it like a weird add-on to the discussion because it is. They can’t cut pay because of their contract, unless their contract doesn’t stop that, in which case they can.

There’s a limit to how much they can pay the ununionized workers before it becomes clear they’re trying to interfere with the workers rights to free organization. In the image, it’s quite likely that the extra 50¢ is union dues, or could be explained as related to costs.

Literally the first reply I sent you.

If you don’t know the basics of labor law and how companies are ostensibly prohibited from preventing organization, you really don’t have a lot of room to get upset when people think you don’t know stuff.

That… is literally the thing being discussed here.

No, it’s a nonsequitur you brought up out of nowhere. You asked why the company doesn’t just pay the union less, and when people told you replied assuming that everyone knew that all the workers left the union.

And you won’t, or can’t, respond to my point. It doesn’t matter that it’s a nonsequitur, you’re still obligated to respond to it premptively, you fool.

Yes, if everyone leaves the union it doesn’t have power. Fucking duh. It doesn’t work that way because it’s illegal to pay people to not be in the union, since it infringes on people’s rights to collective bargaining. Which I politely said in my first reply to you when I just thought you were ignorant, rather than obstinate and rude as well.

You just started randomly attacking me for no reason

Crystal more. You’re the one who kicked off being angry when you found out I thought you were just genuinely ignorant, as opposed to properly stupid.