I've been using gmail since the early beta days and was never aware of this functionality. But on closer inspection there appears to be a highly stylized (unrecognizable) camera icon there that takes me to, I guess the long lost cousin of Google Meet?? Why are these apps welded together? What a bizarre decision. I thought Meet went to The Graveyard along with Allo and Duo and Wave.
My work uses GSuite so I’m using Meet every day. I find it mildly useful to have the functionality built into the Gmail app but at the same time I see zero loss in having it be a separate app.
Meet still works on Pixel phones as a solution/parity for FaceTime. I wonder if it's bundled in the web build or they're the same build under the hood.
We don't need that to be pre-loaded on the device, do we? how often are they used? and when one is set to be used, the user is definitely online already, just grab the one then
> My hunch is that the NATO would be dissolved, and everyone would have to team up against the aggressor.
And do what exactly against the US? You can’t invade it, geographically they can easily defend Greenland from any invasion force. And speaking of an invasion force, how many countries do you know that can deploy an expeditionary force strong enough to take on the US?
US would be isolated with sanctions, EU may join to the BRICS (or a partial homologous?).
So I'm not sure if the above is his main intention, or if he is telling Greenland to join the EU (altruism? hmmm), or if we're witnessing how he sent his businesses bankrupt [1] , or if I'm missing something.
Trump specialises in sending his businesses, hotels and casinos bankrupt, to the point banks stopped lending him money, so he turned to the Russian oligarchy for funding.
We are talking about an senary were the market and energy importation from US finish, that would push EU toward the East, Are you sure we will not return to Russia to supply that energy?
Or with other words, Do you think that what happened to the unfortunate Uranians is not related to cut Russian oligarchy tentacles over the EU through energy supply?
The US did appoint a representative for Greenland a few weeks ago. It is not inconceiveable that at some point in the future they will let Denmark know that Greeland is a US territory and that’s that.
And realistically, if this happens, in the next 3 years there is nothing anyone can do anything about it.
Post January it could be yet another impeachment, this time it might stick, especially if the project 25 people think trumps causing more harm than Vance.
This is another lie - Venezuela is not mentioned at all in Project 2025. If you believe I'm wrong (and I'm not), please cite the chapter and page that the section on Venezuela is located in.
Low level officials can be eliminated through missile strikes.
If if had to guess, Maduro could have been take out with a GBU or two, but the US holds a grudge against him so they took him out to humiliate him, and send a message to others.
There's a big international diplomacy difference between assassinating a leader and forcibly extraditing one on drug charges.
Not too many countries will go to the mat to support a leader who was engaged in narcotics trafficking, if the US is able to present a viable case (which they seem to intend to, if he's being charged in US federal court).
Another potential goal of the war may have been to demonstrate that the USSR couldn't hope to win a conventional war against the US (the 1973 Easter offensive fielded 700-1200 tanks of various kinds, and the US destroyed 400-700 of them with trivial losses to US forces). The Soviets were using 15-20% of their economy to produce, among other military items, 4000 tanks a year, so a demonstration that the US could destroy so much without significant losses or any particular economic strain could have been shocking. If that was a real goal, though, it probably couldn't be openly discussed at the time, which would have contributed to the "why are we even there?" mood of the American people.
The US was barely treading water militarily, at enormous cost in both lives and cash. It was not progressing towards its military and political goals. That's why the US public pulled the plug.
The US could have continued to tread water for another 5 years, or another 10 years, or another 15 years, and would have lost even more men and spent even more money, and it would still have faced the same problem: there was no way to win the war. Every day that the war continued just meant more deaths and more money wasted.
In the event that someone is directly attacking Americans in America, I think you'll find that Americans are more united than it appears.
Americans culturally have seen ourselves as the "Good Guys" for the last century or so, and Good Guys imply Bad Guys. If there aren't any credible Bad Guys external to the US, Americans start thinking the Bad Guys are the rich, or the coastal elites, or flyover country, or liberals, or whatever. That's just 'cause there's no one else to be against, though; it'll pass.
Hence Trump's continual (and false) claims that the cities he's targeting are lawless and dangerous places.
The above applies to federal US military forces. The laws specifically exclude the US Coast Guard. Non-military federal forces (FBI, ICE, etc) are also excluded.
It also, in the more complicated quirk, excludes state military forces (i.e. "National Guard" units). These forces can be activated under a variety of different legal frameworks (see https://www.nationalguard.mil/Portals/31/Resources/Fact%20Sh... ), some of which allow their use for domestic police functions (Title 32 and SAD), because they're still under the command of the state governor (who can use military forces to perform domestic policing functions inside their state or a neighboring state).
There's also a special exclusion for Washington, DC, as technically the president is sort of its governor for many purposes.
Given that background, what actually happened...
- Trump activated National Guard units under Title 10 (aka federal active duty service), because this doesn't require the consent of a state's governor
- Trump then deployed these units to several cities, some with the support of Republican governors and some without the support of Democratic governors
- The administration's legal team realized performing policing functions with the above forces was on extremely shaky ground
- Therefore, they mostly claimed (loudly) that they were deploying "the military", but in actuality used them for extremely limited, non-policing purposes (picking up trash, talking to tourists, guarding federal buildings, guarding other federal agents performing law enforcement functions)
That's not what I said. I said that it doesn't matter.
Military might has plenty to do with bluffing. That's what politics is all about.
But when the music stops and the ball drops, US and EU aren't going to war with each other any time soon. So measuring military might doesn't really matter.
And you can't be that naive to believe is gonna make any difference. The US that had to get out of Korea, Vietnam, all the way to Afghanistan, will take on Europe? Lol...
It’s not what the US might do, it’s what they might not do.
If Putin decides Poland is propping up Ukraine he might expand the war into Poland because right now it isn’t clear that the US would honor their NATO commitments.
Ukraine was not a NATO country, never mind a EU country. I’m all for speaking truth to the weakness of the eu and its indecisive pussyfooting on the military front but let’s not start getting high on our own supply: Russia absolutely does not have the military nor industrial power to invade Poland and take on the actual EU in a hot war. NATO or no NATO it wouldn’t even be close.
Or it could just end with mutual total nuclear annihilation of course.
Edit: now if they were to attack the eu over a decades long interference campaign with its member state democracies, funding anti eu parties, stoking separatist sentiments, and covertly subverting the fundamental pillars of its liberal democracies, on the other hand…
If we're accepting as a given that somehow Putin launches nukes into Europe to invade Poland, and the EU doesn't retaliate in kind, then the USA definitely wouldn't--NATO or no NATO--so I'm not sure how it's relevant to the original comment.
Russia is has tried and failed for a couple of years now to push particularly far into Ukraine, and you think Europe would have a problem stopping a Russian attack on Poland?
Poland alone has a population comparable to Ukraine, and a significantly larger economy.
That doesn't matter. One or two atomic boms from France and say goodbye to a good GDP from the US coasts. Everyone losses, but the US it's set back to 1940.
There's no difference between suicide and an invasion from the US with total control of the neocons against a social-democratic state.
That being a puppet state a la Vichy, I mean; not something being bribed upon with corruption and money.
What the US needs is to invest right now in fusion technology and learn the damn Math right. Hint: hypercubes and physics.
They don't need a war to feed the industry, they need the balls to evolve themselves as the Chinese did. First from pure Maoism to Deng Xiaoping, and next from coal to clean energy. It's a decades bound plan, but if Beijing becames clean it would be one of the greatest things for China (and the world) ever.
This would mean acknowledging that some sectors are best stated supported, such as healthcare; while others are best company supported/evolved, such as telecos and R+D, but with proper
regulations, so net neutrality stays as is and patents get open over few decades so everyone can play the game.
And, no, you don't need to put social credit, social surveillance or any other bullshit such as Chat Control.
Labor shortages abound in the US military. It is slowly approaching paper tiger status, unless we're talking about delivering long range ordinance. The US can engage in a small handful of conflicts at the same time; it cannot take on the world. The Coast Guard didn't have enough staff to commandeer an oil tanker near Venezuela recently [1] [2]. The US Navy has mothballed seventeen supply ships due to labor shortages [3]. Total global US military headcount is ~2.6M as of this comment, ~1.14M on US soil [4] [5] [6] [7]. There are also military sourcing single points of failure, like L3 [8] and the US Air Force.
China can already detect and track stealth aircraft using a combination of ground based passive radar and StarLink signal, as well as satellite reconnaissance. Europe could have this capability whenever they're ready to spend and, in the case of a satellite, lift to orbit. Use hypersonic vehicles for anti air defense and carrier busting [9].
No, but China and Australia do if they were to, you know, alliance themselves against the tyranny of the US. Much like we did against the tyranny of the Nazi regime.
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