Diplomats say France wants to lead the mission, exclude America and bring in India and perhaps China.

Its best option, he says, would be to redouble efforts to build the European pillar of NATO. Perhaps that would convince Mr Trump that allies are willing to take up more of the burden. More probably, it would at least start to prepare them for the daunting task of taking over NATO if Mr Trump abandons it.

New bloc goes brrrr.

Also, no thanks to this guy, who’s basically been supporting the complacency this whole time:

“I have spent the past five years telling people not to worry about Trump and NATO,” says one European diplomat in Washington, DC. “Now I am genuinely quite worried about Trump and NATO.”

Also a fun fact about CPTPP: it includes the UK.

I don’t really know why, they’re the only non-Pacific nation, but there you go, a way back from Brexit.

Wouldn’t Yemen be an imperial proxy of Iran, by any reasonable definition?

And sex negative feminists. As far as you can tell from listening to them, they’re earnestly feminist, even if they go about it in a way that seems messed up.

It seems like whenever two groups from opposite sides of the spectrum have agreed on something this century, it tends to happen.

It’s starting to look like some kind of CPTPP-EU mashup with Canada in the center is where things are going, instead.

Or that we’d love how much it has to be firmed up to join the Schengen. I mean, it’s probably better done sooner than later, but if there’s a huge jump in prices and everyone’s trips become impossible that’s not how it’s going to be received.

Except Ukraine and Iran are on opposite sides.

More like, war continues to change, but the age of guerillas is still ongoing.

That’s smart, actually. Trump might not care about the Gulf being flattened, or realise that also is bad for the market, but another Strait? He understands that (now).

Yup just Americans.

[The rest of human history glancing off to the side]

Edit: And actually, it’s only true of distant, unfamiliar people’s lives. If Iran had gotten that pilot, the American public discourse would look very different right now, because it’s an American in imminent danger.

From what I’ve heard it’s like 100x markup on certain things to pay for the massive losses on whatever other crazy project the government demanded, or just on making only so many of whatever bespoke technology.

In the end, defence manufacturing is good money in wartime, but the rest of the time has a reputation as “a rat trap without the cheese”.

Without defining that a bit more, basically no.

The US has a certain tax base in a given year, and then has to fit their spending into 140% of it or whatever. Simple as. Where medicine and education might help is tax base in a decade or two, but then again a tax cut or basic research grants might work even better. (Spending on weapons now definitely doesn’t help weapons later; that’s “guns vs. butter”)

Where most would say it helps is still having a stable democracy to spend it, but then that’s not really macroeconomics anymore.

There’s written examples of sanctions being put in place literally before the West existed.

In recent history, it’s mostly the West, because other factions are too weak and isolated to attempt it. Not because they’re stupid, like you’re suggesting.

5 years is also a pretty arbitrary span to go with. You could smoothly discount future time savings instead, but then your discounting curve is arbitrary.

The most rigorous way to go would be to set some kind of future goal, and then work your way backwards to find some kind of statistical description of the shortest path there, or some kind of future metric at a specific time and the path that maximises it. This is pretty much how you design your investing portfolio, just with money instead of labour.

Yes. Plastic is actually a great material for anything you don’t want to break down.

If you want something that doesn’t break down until you want it to, and then breaks down, you might be asking too much. I’m not even sure animal leather qualifies after the chemical tanning process.

I’ve thought of that quote so many times recently.

In the sense humans are “better” or “greater” or something? Well, consider the global biomass of bacteria compared to humans - they seem to be doing okay. Or that there’s more bacterial cells in you than human cells. Single-celled yeast evolved from mushrooms, barnacles evolved from something like shrimp or crabs, and there are eukaryotes that lost eukaryotic features like mitochondria because they didn’t need them to survive.

Buuut that’s besides the point. I’m not sure how to make it more clear, but I meant subtractive as in selection is just about who dies. Random mutation is what adds features and new species.

Plants are selected to not be great to eat, basically. Cellulose in particular is almost impossible to biochemically break back down (but not completely), and is a pretty good structural material, too.

Seeds are often still palatable once you get through the shell, basically because turning into a baby plant is an already tough design constraint. Some plants still have tricks - notice that it’s the spiciest part of a hot pepper.

That random mutation didn’t happen, basically.

Evolution is a purely subtractive process. It doesn’t design things in, it just subtracts away poorly-designed creatures (and all hypothetical offspring) until only things equipped to survive are left. And obviously, there are things to eat that aren’t grass.

Edit: Herbivores can be smart, even the grazers. Look at elephants.

I can’t believe how many other replies heap that fallacy on top of teleological evolution. Apes are mostly herbivorous anyway, WTF.

Chinese leadership must be so confused about WTF America is doing. This is the worthy adversary they’ve been plotting against for decades, and now it’s just YOLOing everything on aimless bombing campaigns and insults/actual threats to it’s own sphere.

Breaking things people care about will do that.