I like to set my tent up in the lowest elevation spot I can find too.

tbf, a play would be the ideal format for it. Can’t do screwey camera angles for no reason 24/7 with a proper stage and actors.

Nothing wrong with it as a method, so long as it makes some predictions we can then test for.

No, it cannot. I was talking about the strategic importance of the Suwalki Gap though. Russian aggression is not overblown whatsoever.

Never really understood the point of a single edged straight sword. If it’s going to be straight, isn’t it just pure benefit to sharpen both sides? Just gives you more options.

Catching corruption in your investigations is a good thing. When you don’t seem to regularly catch anyone, that’s the bad sign.

This is the Suwałki Gap, described as “most dangerous place in the world”.

This narrow strip of land, just 65 kilometres long, connects the Baltic states with Poland and thus also with the other NATO countries. To the west of it lies the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, to the east, Moscow-loyal Belarus. If Putin were to strike here, it would be relatively easy for him to cut the Baltic states off from their allies.

This is a little overblown.

The plan was never to try to dig in and hold the borders of the Baltics, that’s not feasible. They’re just too small, there isn’t enough depth. In any kind of large war, they would almost certainly be occupied, at least mostly. The question is, for how long, and how painful and resource-intensive would the process be for Russia? Once NATO mobilized, there would be a significant counterattack coming from the west. The Baltics wouldn’t be that much easier to hold for Russia, being in range of naval power and such a ridiculous number of NATO airbases.

That said, this is why a full scale attack is unlikely, at least at first. Putin knows a massive invasion, like what Ukraine faced, would bring almost all of Europe into a war with him in a completely unwinnable situation. Instead, it’s much more likely for him to try incremental escalations, testing Article 5 with small scale incursions and attacks, hoping he can drive wedges between the alliance members while leaning on nuclear saber rattling to deter a large retaliation. Ideally, NATO retains the ability to retaliate in kind to avoid escalation. While they don’t have as many undersea cables as we have, there are multiple other avenues for delivering smaller-scale retributions. Cyber, sabotage, diplomatic/legal, economic, etc.

an audience including JD Vance

Really shouldn’t be taking such dangerous risks like that so early in your tenure, the fatality rate for Popes meeting Vance was estimated to be 100%.

GDP is basically a measure of how much work is getting done. So, if you save your money, you’re not contributing to it. The moment you spend some, that spent money goes into the calculation.

Whether this constitutes any kind of real “growth” or not in your economy is a different topic. There are already debates on how useful GDP is as a useable measurement.

Spending lots of the money you have saved up in your sovereign wealth fund is a good way to keep your economy afloat. Can also just do what the WW1-2 powers did and just borrow a lot if necessary, assuming there are people you can borrow from.

Despite all the fearmongering, it’s so far proved unnecessary. Ji is going to look at it in terms of cost/benefit, and as things sit, the costs are high and the benefit of getting a leveled Taiwan is minimal. The diplomatic costs in particular are fairly prohibitive, with China investing so much recently in trying to be a predictable, stable and peaceful world power that other countries can feel good partnering with.

It would be vastly preferable for all parties involved to maintain the status quo and continue to work towards peaceful reunification in the future. Assuming Taiwan doesn’t do anything stupid, this patient approach has no real drawbacks. It did work several times in the past, after all.

Only place I’ve occasionally run into metric prefixes above km is in astronomy within proximity to our planet. You just don’t need them for most terrestrial applications, and as soon as you get out of the solar system people switch to parsecs and light years.

I suppose people also have a basic sense of how long a km is, where that goes out the window with anything bigger. Especially anyone who has gone through the military, has an intuitive feel for how distant a “klick” is.

You might be interested in trying a polyphasic sleep cycle. Instead of one big 8 hour sleep each day, you could try two 4 hour sleeps. So, you can have your middle of the night sleep, and maybe another one after you get home from work or eat dinner or something.

Supposedly polyphasic was pretty common prior to the industrial revolution. Nothing really wrong with it if your schedule can accommodate it.

Not off the top of my head. Cooking is frequently a recreational hobby though, it’s essentially an art form. So I think it’s about equally likely that dancing, painting or making music fade away.

You’re missing an English dude with a huge bow.

But, y’know, in case anyone wants to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax

It’s theoretically possible, sure, but the nice, pretty spiral arms that our Milky Way has indicates it probably hasn’t crashed into any other big galaxies recently. So we probably don’t have any rogue supermassives, just rogue normal ones which are much harder to detect.

Most generally useful single ability? Probably the Flash’s speedforce. Being able to get whatever you want done in a fraction of the time has broad utility. Plus you’re well equipped for any supervillain attacks.

There’s a difference between “we won’t trade with you” and “we will intercept all the goods other people try to trade with you”. It’s the difference between embargo and blockade. Blockade is generally considered an act of war, embargo is not.

That said, I do agree that double standards are common and a problem.

Worth noting that it is illegal in Russia to criticize the war, so saying you don’t support it is probably a good way to get yourself sent to the front lines in an infantry uniform. So, it’s difficult to gauge how many people actually genuinely support it or not.