Mr. Buckley may or may not be shocked, but he's certainly a vocal opponent of a competent effective government, so all of his thoughts on how he'd prefer to be governed should be ignored with extreme prejudice.
According to YOU. What a very poor all or nothing statement. And the reader should never listen to someone who claims all or nothing here or there. Nope.
Perhaps throw a bridle on your unbridled "kindly fuck off nuance" view.
Europe isn't a superpower but it's a giant entity with 450 million people and 15% of the world's gdp. It has the means to oppose the US and retaliate against its sanctions, if it doesn't it's because of the cowardice of its politicians and the weakness of its institutions.
More importantly, the bilateral relationship between the US and Europe represents 30% of global trade, and 40% of the global GDP. Both economies complement each other naturally (at least right now), and neither partners don't want it to end, so even with the relationship becoming more fragile as the US tries to close itself off from the world, I think both will still try to remain collaborative with each other, regardless of this posturing that is going on.
It will take a lot to shift that trade dynamic, but the current US administration seems quite energetic about rapidly tearing down Chesterton's Fences that it doesn't understand nor want to spend the time to understand, so I'd not bet on this remaining so even for the next 3 years.
And yes, I do understand how utterly bonkers it is to suggest something this big changing over just 3 years.
That trade dynamic isn’t going to shift unless the EU becomes a lot more insular.
The War in Ukraine is dampening trade with Russia. The EU is struggling in their trade relations with the PRC even more than with America right now, and fears them more than they fear us. A trade deal (“Mercosur”) with South America is in the process of potentially blowing up, and if it’s not passed in its current state, Brazil is looking to walk for the remainder of their President’s term in office.
The EU certainly has limited options, I agree about that.
The problem I see is the risks are not under the EU's control. We may face becoming much more insular regardless of what any of us ourselves actually want.
Trump is behaving in a manner not consistent with EU nations retaining indepdendence and sovreignty. And also betting the future of USA on economic development plans (and military plans) that do not seem realistic.
The insular part was a very small, maybe too subtle of, joke.
That’s also not a viable option for the EU, or more specifically: the constituent nations of the EU. They’re as dependent on trade as we are, maybe even more so, and so we are stuck in this relationship where we constantly piss each other off in various ways, and believe me when I say it goes both ways.
Fortunately for the UK, the photos of Boris Johnson holding a pint during covid lockdowns he'd ordered, mean that Boris Johnson is no longer a threat to the UK.
I think your main point is valid, but it would be more compelling if you'd taken a few seconds to read it before submitting, to catch this double-negative.
I hope that the USA will maintain strong relations with the EU. But the EU is structurally incapable of taking any coordinated action more significant than mandating USB-C chargers for cell phones.
Not really. We have the most money, the most guns, and world economies depend on us. Europe won't even fight Russia when they literally invaded a country in their backyard, and Russia is much weaker than the US.
Fighting Russia or the US is basically the same; you're just going to get nuked. Ukraine doesn't get nuked because Russia isn't in a real risk of losing it's own territory and doesn't want to annex irradiated lands.
But also Europe (besides Ukraine) doesn't have much to gain from fighting Russia. They're happy to assist in air raids in North Africa / Middle East for energy reasons (see Libya) but it's fighting for practical purposes.
The table can also be turned against the US. Despite the endless complaints about Mexico sending drugs & drug dealers into the US it's not like we are doing effective (or drastic).
Your most money won't buy you much resources in a decade. most of the natural resources exporting countries feel a bit cheated with 20 year contracts and two "quantitative easing" in the same period
The only resource suppliers to EU other than the United States is Norway (natural gas pipeline, crude oil 14%) and Australia (coal 36%). The US supplies a a huge minority in those as well as a majority in LNG. (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/e...)
If the EU ally’s with Australia, pics up an enemy of an enemy - China, they can withstand a US embargo.
We can’t extract our way out of this. We’ll have nothing left. We need space minerals and more rocks that aren’t home. We’re fighting over less and less sand in the sandbox.
We were never debating if Europe could survive an American embargo.
You said “most money won't buy you much resources in a decade.” This was about America surviving a European freeze-out. The simple truth is, there are more resources in America and within its military’s undisputed reach than there are in Europe.
Your UNEP report doesn’t show why America alone couldn’t extract its way out of an embargo. (While it puts its military to use.)
You must have me mistaken with someone else. I didn't say that. I said that it wouldn't matter as resource exhaustion is faster than it was previously and we will run out of resources, money or not. So if one side decides to horde or exploit the other hemisphere, it's like kids fighting over the last bit of sand in the sandbox.
> it wouldn't matter as resource exhaustion is faster than it was previously and we will run out of resources, money or not
Oh. Sure. Fair. But not relevant in our lifetimes, at least not from the position of the United States. If push came to shove, we'd take those last bits of sand. That's one of the problems with might makes right: it lets those in power put off hard choices.
France has nukes, so those aren't a plausible threat. Any kind of land invasion is doomed to fail - the US didn't even manage to beat a bunch of goat herders in one of the poorest countries of the world. A naval blockade is the most likely to succeed - except for the whole "land bridge to Asia/Africa" part. And if the blockade does succeed and the continent starts to starve, there's the whole "France has nukes" part again...
Besides, do you really think China/India won't get involved? And do you really think the US public is going to accept their friends and family dying because some power-hungry politician got the braindead idea to send them against Europe? The reception will be worse than Vietnam!
We have accepted that for a long time, and there are no plans to change it.
Why do you think there is zero movement to disentangle from any important US dependencies? Such as software. There is nothing whatsoever happening to be any less dependent on the US, part from defense, and that only after repeated urging and finally some real force-pressure to get the EU moving (even after Trump's first term little to nothing actually happened).
European countries are perfectly fine with where they are, if any less dependency on the US is to happen, it will only be after huge pressure from the US.
That is deliberate, they just don't see value in e.g. trying to recreate the Microsoft and other software ecosystems. After all, it already exists, so why compete at that point? It does not make economic sense. Also, it is not Europe's strength: Every country would, in practice, (have to) develop their own version, while in the US a company can easily scale across the entire nation. For Software, it makes no (economic) sense for Europe to compete in an area where this kind of scale is important.
And that strength argument, only some minor politicians, and some journalists, keep bringing up headlines such as "Can Germany save Europe?", or celebrating "Germany back on the world stage" when there is some minor meeting hosted by Germany (seen recently). The vast majority of people could not care less about being "number one" and "leading (anything, politically)".
Not trying to reinvent the wheel, or many wheels actually, out of some "pride" moment seems pretty foolish to me. If the US is good producing this or that, we get it from there, so what? Everybody, including the US, made even more far-reaching similar decisions with industry moved to China. Compared to that, European reliance on the US is not much, and pretty much unavoidable, unless one gives up lots of wealth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
It's probably less valuable because they're surely working, and their job is to save lives and it's time sensitive; while there are chances that you're not working and that your job is less time-critical than theirs.
However I second your idea that "if the train doesn't stop it's because they decided they didn't want it to stop"- and therefore they should be considered responsible for kidnapping their customers unless it can be proven that it was absolutely impossible to stop the train without catastrophic consequences.
I guess you need an identitarian religion that was practiced for centuries by white men and was (historically) anti-Jewish, anti-Islam.
And it's good to choose a different one from the other far-right wing nutters, the Evangelical Christians and magas, who are also far-right from my point of view.
And doesn't matter that contemporary Catholicism is an ecumenical religion that promotes equality, charity, meekness, non-violence and rejection of war.
Very interesting, pity the author chose such a poor example for the explanation (low, artificial and multicoloured light), making it really hard to understand what the "ground truth" and expected result should be.
I'm not sure I understand your complaint. The "expected result" is either of the last two images (depending on your preference), and one of the main points of the post is to challenge the notion of "ground truth" in the first place.
Not a complaint, but both the final images have poor contrast, lighting, saturation and colour balance, making them a disappointing target for an explanation of how these elements are produced from raw sensor data.
That’s because it requires much more sophisticated processing to produce pleasing results. The article is showing you the absolute basic steps in the processing pipeline and also that you don’t really want an image that is ‘unprocessed’ to that extent (because it looks gross).
No, the last image is the "camera" version of it- though it's not clear if he means the realtime processing before snapping the picture or with the postprocessing that happens right after. Anyway, we have no way to understand how far the basic-processed raw picture is from a pleasing or normal-looking result because a) the lighting is so bad and artificial that we have no idea of how "normal" should look; b) the subject is unpleasant and the quality "gross" in any case.
Not unrelated: I guess the obligation to declare bribes as income allows the IRS to investigate you for tax evasion if they suspect you're receiving (obviously undeclared) bribes.
Actually if you declare the income and classify it correctly you are clear from an income oersoective; by disclosing the crime you risk confiscation and prosecution but neither would involve the irs beyond certification of your submissions. Source: armchair cpa
But isn't that the point? If you don't declare the crime you're liable for tax evasion and can be prosecuted by the irs; if you do, you're going to be prosecuted by a different authority. And since nobody is going to self-incriminate, when they catch you you'll be prosecuted both for corruption and tax evasion.
I'm sure we'll all get replaced in a few years. But we won't be alone, the entire society is going to be upended. So we will be part of a vast social and economic experiment in which nobody (1) will be in a position much different from ours. Hopefully, solutions will be found to avoid complete social breakdown.
So I feel like I'm on the Titanic- the ship is sinking and we're going all to hit the water eventually, the trick is to try to keep dry as long as possible. If you've been in an organisation for long, and you know the business, the people, the organisation, have domain knowledge and can contribute beyond translating to code someone else's requirements... These are all valuable assets that will keep you relevant and useful for some time.
[1] except government employees in Europe. Those will never be made redundant, whatever happens.
I feel your anxiety, but let me offer a different metaphor.
Instead of the Titanic (a single point of failure sinking), consider the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan. Every 20 years, they completely rebuild the temple (Shikinen Sengu).
Why? To transfer the skill of building, not just preserve the building itself.
We are entering a "Grand Rebuilding" phase. Yes, the old structures (traditional coding jobs) are being dismantled. But the purpose is to transfer the essence of "Logic" and "Value Creation" to a new material (AI).
Don't cling to the old wood. Focus on being the carpenter who knows how to build the new shrine.
Source?
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