On the changes to US military organization and thinking post-WW2 (and the name change):
> […] The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”
> These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.
Ah yes, the administration’s love of Axis of Allies, or is it allies of axis? They don’t know, they got distracted by the mustaches and the desire to conquer the world.
You do realize that the Axis (Nazi Germany, Japan) were attacking everyone with the explicitly stated goal of conquering the world (and subjecting it to the holocaust, we might add), and US stopped them, conquered Europe, North Africa, half the Pacific, and nothing has been able to stop the US military since.
And the US ... retreated.
We might add, the Soviets, the other axis, did not retreat. China did not retreat. Both of them started killing people to keep their conquests.
I mean, there's no shortage of stuff that the US did wrong and US made mistakes. This was not one of them.
The US did not retreat. We fought multiple wars to maintain our power and influence. We toppled multiple regimes to maintain puppet governments. Very much the same as the USSR and China have done.
Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, etc.
US conquest was quiet similar to British conquest. They didn't make their conquered people citizens (that'd make things tricky for exploitation) so instead they make sure the "democracies" they spread elected the right leaders who just so happen to align with US interests.
There's a reason the US has military bases across the globe. It's not because they've retreated from their subservient states.
> The US did not retreat. We fought multiple wars to maintain our power and influence. We toppled multiple regimes to maintain puppet governments. Very much the same as the USSR and China have done.
As much as I am critical of the US, until now the US did behave very differently from other superpowers. Consider the end of WWII. The US did not inflict reparations on the vanquished nations but rather, invested huge sums in their rebuilding, in the process making stalwart allies of them. These were not puppet governments, they became thriving democracies.
This is not to excuse the many bad things the US has done in Latin America, Vietnam, etc. But there is really no comparison between US behaviour and that of the USSR (or of colonial European countries, for that matter). People in Soviet-controlled East Germany were quite keen to go to the west and did not perceive the presence of US military bases there as evidence of American totalitarianism.
That, of course, has changed and now America is seen as a predatory hegemon. But that has not always been true.
The US did not keep bases in all of West Germany though.
There were different sectors. The US had essentially the South. There were also the British sector and French. The Soviets were the fourth sector but we all know how that one was quite different from the other three.
While the French and British have mostly left, the US stayed. Though to be fair even the British still do have some bases it seems as NATO troups. But no more large garrison in many larger cities.
The US on the other hand is still there with much larger force. Like think back to "Air Force One" (the movie with Harrison Ford) which used Ramstein Airbase in the movie (though they didn't actually film there) and that airbase has come up in the Iran conflict as a conflict of its own. Meaning Germany didn't want the US to use it as a hub for US operations (supply logistics) for the Iran war.
> The US on the other hand is still there with much larger force.
To provide for European security! That’s the deal in terms of Europe and NATO and also specifically to handle Germany. The idea was that America would provide security to Europe including the nuclear umbrella, and one benefit - among many others - was that Germany would not need to have a powerful military.
Can you perhaps guess why people might be concerned about a heavily armed Germany in the postwar period? Those same concerns are bubbling up in European capitals right now, as Germany rearms due to the loss of the US as a reliable partner.
And yes I definitely remember Colbert quite some time ago quipping about exactly that (paraphrased from memory): US no longer reliable NATO partner and nuclear deterrent. So Europe needs to step up. Let's have Germany have nukes. What could possibly go wrong!
The obviously funny thing being, that the US has, for a long time and Trump doubled down, asked Europe including Germany to spend more on military. And the "moderate forces" in Germany are not an issue in that regard. Those are the ones not wanting Trump to use Ramstein airbase in a war he started.
But would you want the AfD to come to power and wield those ramped up, potentially now nuclear, forces? The party that was ruled as "definitely extremist right wing aka neo nazi" in some federal states by Germany's own "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution". Oh and also was that not the party a certain Elon Musk and Trump were trying to prop up? Which is doubly funny because of the AfD's alleged ties to Putin (sometimes more than alleged).
> But would you want the AfD to come to power and wield those ramped up, potentially now nuclear, forces?
Totally! That’s what makes the situation doubly maddening. It would be one thing if these actions were bad for the world and good for the US. But they’re bad for the US too!
I forget who it was that said this, and I’m sure my paraphrasing is bad, but I listened or read something I found chilling. It was something like, ordinary Americans are totally unprepared for the level of danger they will experience over the coming decades.
The only reason Trump is able to destroy global institutions so easily is because Americans take their security for granted. But that security is the result of institutions developed in the aftermath of an utterly devastating war. Now those institutions are damaged and America’s friends are alienated, right when they are most needed to deal with China, Russia, AI, drones, cyber, nuclear, climate…talk about bad timing.
> As much as I am critical of the US, until now the US did behave very differently from other superpowers. Consider the end of WWII. The US did not inflict reparations on the vanquished nations but rather, invested huge sums in their rebuilding, in the process making stalwart allies of them.
That is also how Rome routinely dealt with the border tribes that it defeated. It's not a new idea. That's just what superpowers do.
Spain, France, the entire iron curtain following 1992 dissolution of USSR, Taiwan, Phillipines, Costa Rica, Panama ... and speaking of central America, Venezuela isn't doing so bad either. Perhaps more expansive lists could be produced once the definitions of "meddled with" and "treated well" are more refined.
I generally take the word "conquest" to mean some outside force coming in and taking over. That didn't happen in either Vietnam or Korea. You could argue that the USSR used conquest to take over territories for the soviet union. However, that's not something really arguable about Vietnam or Korea. Vietnam, in particular, was the native population overthrowing their conquerors, the french, and then deciding they wanted to be communists. They got support from both the USSR and China, but they weren't ultimately under the umbrella of either regime.
Now, I'd agree that Vietnam and Korea both had civil wars supercharged by the US, China, and Russia. But I disagree that these were wars where the US was stopping conquest. We see that in the modern state of Vietnam and North Korea. Vietnam, funnily, became a closer ally to the US than China after the war.
Cuba is very much the same way. It wasn't conquered by an outside force. Yet they did ally with the USSR once the dust settled. They were still an independent nation from the USSR.
The Communists. Would you rather live in North or South Korea?
Vietnam is interesting in that they're still politically authoritarian but willing to be more economically open; see also China. (Just don't say the wrong thing about the wrong people.)
Today obviously the South. In 1950, probably the North. Throughout the Korean war, it's a wash. The US obliterated the north, but the south was completely insane towards their own civilian population. The ROK was not a "nice" government to live under during the korean war.
If you lived in the north there was a good possibility that you were getting bombed. It was best to live near china.
If you live in the south, there was a good chance you would be conscripted and sent to the meat grinder as a man.
The subsequent cease fire, the south has rebuilt and become the better place to live. The north has mostly struggled due to international sanctions. They have never fully recovered.
"The Communist" were a faction in a civil war, that's not an invasion. And the split in both cases (Vietnam and Korea) was recent and artificial, in the sense of no tradition of there being two countries. It wasn't one country invading another country, but two halves engaged in a civil war.
Where one wants to live is irrelevant. It wasn't about stopping an invasion, which was the initial claim. The US was meddling.
> Vietnam and Korea were technically wars to stop conquest, no?
No.
For example, the US got involved in Vietnam to help the colonizer (France) stop an independence movement. Yes, because they feared the resulting Vietnam may become communist and USSR aligned (something they helped happen, since Ho Chi Minh quite admired the US and expected them to help him at first), but even if this was the case, it's still not about stopping an invasion, because commie Vietnamese are still Vietnamese.
> Very much the same as the USSR and China have done.
The expressed goal of Communism (USSR, later China) was to spread its ideology to the entire world. The US chose at its goal the containment of Communism:
This is what drove Korea, Vietnam, Cuba/Castro, and many other countries with left-leaning governments. In many cases this ended up with the US supporting the right-wing people, e.g.:
> There's a reason the US has military bases across the globe. It's not because they've retreated from their subservient states.
Yes, containment and power projection to keep the sea lanes open for trade (which benefits the US financially and life-style-wise, but also benefits countries who export things, to the US and other places):
If you don't think having peaceful sea lanes is useful, see Houthis/Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz. What we're seeing with Trump's worldview is a return to how things tended to be earlier in history:
> Russia has 12, mostly in former Soviet countries. China has 3
To be fair, you're comparing land powers–that tend to annex their holdings–with a maritime power, who tend to trade with and maintain favourable ports at their conquests/allies. So yeah, China doesn't have any foreign bases in Tibet. But that's because it annexed it in the 1950s.
Put together, America obviously has a larger military than China or Russia. But before Russia became a rump, the Soviet Union could marshall military resources comparable to–and for one decade, in excess of–those of the United States for much of the post-War era.
To be fair, if you stand in the middle of The Netherlands, 260km in any direction and you end up outside of the country. Which base are you talking about?
Was that on a country that went on a genocidal rampage just before and lost the war after killing millions all around Europe, which was decided to be divided in several parts, of which USSR got to control one, and which still developed into an independent country less than a decade later?
Yes, but you're leaving out the other 9 countries the Soviet Union occupied, and immediately started killing the population to keep their conquests: Poland, Austria’s Soviet zone, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
By contrast, the US retreated. And also didn't start killing any population.
"Killing their population" as in executing some Nazi collaborators, of which there was no shortage in all, down to full cooperation? Like the ones involved in the Axis alliance and in the eastern front offensives that caused the deaths of millions of their own people?
>And also didn't start killing any population.
Yes, just Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and anybody who leaned national sovereignity/left in the Latin America and later the middle east.
US did not stopped Axis alone, Allies did. Even in Pacific Soviet participation was very important in defeating Japan.
And the US did not retreat, it kept its military all across Europe (and the world), brought its nuclear weapons to Europe (not for the Europe, but for the US to be used with Europe as a launching pad).
Japan did not take part in the Holocaust. Not the goal of Germany nor Italy was the holocaust. Their objective was not to conquer the world. They were empire builders, plain and simple, and they were trying to expand their trade networks, like Britain had done and monopolized. They took over each European state and replaced its leadership with one that benefitted themselves. Their objective was policy frameworks for the purpose of trading. The holocaust was a later addon (1940).
No one calls the japanese persecution of the Chinese a holocaust.
For generalplan ost, “The plan, prepared in the years 1939–1942, was part of Adolf Hitler's and the Nazi movement's Lebensraum policy and a fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten” which still makes it a later development.
Most simplistic would be _Divide and Conquer_ (Axis) vs _United we stand, divided we fall_ (Allie). This administration is going down the divide and conquer path.
I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H Kater. [0] The current US administration has numerous similarities to 1930s Germany. The way they support banning books and the treatment of the LGBT+ community. Working to take over media organizations with proponent operatives, financial corruption, and _please the leader_ are also present in both. There are more ... read the book for them.
And a lot of dissimilarities, like the lack of mass executions of the disabled for example or a missing mass extermination plan of millions, maybe also kidnapping teenagers from the street and shipping them to brothels for soldiers, shooting babies? but apart from that exactly the same
Are you looking for and only accepting isomorphism between the two?
There are no governing bodies in history that have ever been isomorphic. Only similarities exist between them. Japan never assisted with extermination of Jews and they are in the Venn diagram of Axis and authoritarianism.
I have high confidence that Adolf Hilter, Bentio Mussolini, and Emperor Shōwa never were part of a child trafficking ring that catered to the wealthy and assisted them with raping and torturing of youths on a privately owned island. There are simulates though with _human trafficking_ between all parties.
Didn't Donald Trump state that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country? Didn't Adolf Hitler say Jews are poisoning the blood of the country? Aren't both simulates?
There never can be two states that are exactly the same; from policies to events. Iceland and Germany are classified as democratic countries and they have dissimilarities.
The Allies stopped them. The US was one of the major contributors, but they were far from alone. The Soviets, Britain, Canada, India, Poland, France, Netherlands, Kenya, etc etc all contributed to various extents. The Indian army was one of the biggest by number of men. The Poles and French were crucial in setting the ground work for the British decrypting Enigma, alongside their purely military contributions.
My point was that this administration seems to like the axis plan more than the original US/Allied plan. I'm fully aware of which side was which. Tell that to Hegseth and Miller.
They didn’t even retreat from places like Italy because... the communists might be successful. So the CIA backed fascists to sabotage them.
And the US ... retreated. harumph And interferred, and supported right-wing militias, and invaded countries by themselves, and supported coups, and so on.
You can get a lot of mileage out of making the indica/sativa distinction. Regardless of strain, inidca heavy tends to chill people out, while sativa heavy strands give energy and more anxiety. Everyone is different and ymmv.
It's a bit of a mix. Some strains affect most people the same way, while others don't - in particular, neurodivergent people often seem to have a different experience.
And some strains are better at different times of the day too - some can be stimulating, for example.
I'd say it's best for individuals to experiment and find what works best for them, to treat their specific symptoms.
There's a general vibe to the strains that's the same between people but you won't know which one you like or which improves your life until you try. It's more some-sizes-fits-most but not one-size-fits-all
I am suspicious that strains are much beyond marketing terms. Both in the literal sense that people will sell the exact same crop under different brand names. Or sell different crops under the same brand.
I'm also generally dubious that you can maintain consistency in a crop across seasons and growing cycles.
It's theoretically possible that there are growers using clones and exacting greenhouse conditions to replicate the same product over and over. But it's way easier to slap a brand on something so that's what people will end up doing.
Strains are very real and the general concept exists in not only many other farmed plants as well, but domesticated animals, like dogs. All members of the same species, specifically bred for a certain phenotype through manual selection.
Now some people might say that X strain is good for sleep, Y strain is good for anxiety, Z strain is good for creativity, etc… That type of “phenotype” is much harder to quantify and I agree a lot of that type of stuff could be mumbo jumbo, though there could be something to it. But overall high THC strains (more stimulating) vs high CBD strains (more relaxing) have a clear difference.
However flavor is also a big differentiator among strains and that is much more easily quantifiable through the terpene/flavonoid profile, and plain old smelling and tasting. And people have been breeding plants for specific smells and tastes for thousands of years, so it’s not like this is some new concept specific to cannabis.
Strains are a marketing term, and also a set of "expectations". Same with indica/sativa distinction. They aren't true, but they set an expectation. What actually drives the high, is a mix of the terpenes and other cannabanoids in the flower.
Terpenes (the smell and flavor compounds in the trichomes) will guide you toward a feeling. Limonene (citrus smell) is uplifting, just like kitchen cleaner. Pinene (pine needles) is another uplifting scent/flavor. Myrcene (musky smell) is a sedating terpene. And many others.
Then there are the other cannabinoids: CBD, CBG, CBN, CBC. CBD will modulate THC effects. CBG is almost non-existent in most commercial crops, but new strains are being bred to increase this as it gives a focused high. CBN comes from the degradation of THC, and it potentially causes couching and sedation (though might be myrcene).
Now as for harvest-to-harvest differences, this is true, which is why every harvest is tested and you can get the CoA of any harvest that will give you the full breakdown of the cannabinoids in the flower.
Cannabis is not typically grown from seed, it is grown from propagation off trimmings from mother plants. They are all the exact same plant genetically. So the harvest will be VERY consistent from harvest to harvest at an industrial scale since almost all of the environmental variables are accounted for and controlled.
Same as with everything else in life, the people doing that are going to run the gamut, from the lazy basically con artists to the OCD mfer that's a pain in the ass to work with because they're so meticulous about everything. One trip at the store isn't going to tell you if which of the two extremes (or somewhere in between) the grower of a particular strain is, but repeated use of a particular strain will either be consistent, or not.
> I have "load remote content" disabled on my e-mail client so that tracking graphics/pixels do not leak such information to the sender.
Often times that's meaningless as email scanner software will load and inspect all links and images regardless of the human's email client preferences. It basically comes down to can Constant Contact, or similar, detect if a link was clicked by security software or an actual human. And security software wants to look like an actual human because if security software looks like security software it's very easy for bad actors to serve safe payloads to security software and malware payloads to human actors.
Meta: giving oranges as gifts at Christmas was a bit of a thing in the past when they used to be much more rare during winter: from Valencia/Ivrea for Europeans, and California/Florida in the US.
In the US the Interstate system helped reduce shipping and logistic costs across state lines, and so oranges became more prevalent and less 'special' post-WW2.
I've seen Youtube videos of people growing citrus, among other things, in colder climates in "greenhouses" made of plastic sheeting heated by a thick layer of woodchips which slowly decompose and give off heat.
> It's also important to remember that any blocker between a potential suicide victim and the weapon of choice reduces rates greatly. A gun locked in a safe where the potential suicide knows the code - reduces rates.
RAND found that minimum age requirements and child-access prevention laws reduced suicides and unintentional injuries/deaths and violent crime:
> Until now Apple hasn't addressed the mass market in nearly two decades.
Going back to 2008:
> But the most fun on the conference call came when he parried analysts’ questions about new product areas that Apple might or might not enter. A recurring question among Apple watchers for decades has been, “When is Apple going to introduce a low-cost computer?
> Mr. Jobs answered that decades-old complaint by stating, “We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk.” He argued instead that the company’s mission was to add more value for customers at current price points.
There is more to it than just accounting for inflation. Apple has done a number of other things in the meantime, including designing and manufacturing their own chips, that have changed the economies of this. Until the very recent RAM price explosion, a sub $500 computer in 2008 was probably more like a sub $350 computer today.
Inflation goes up - someone who could buy a $500 computer in 2008 should be able to buy a $766 or so computer today (cite: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com)
But today, if you can finagle the EDU discount, you can get a MacBook Neo for $499 ($600 without) which apparently isn't really compromised in any major way.
> Inflation goes up - someone who could buy a $500 computer in 2008 should be able to buy a $766 or so computer today
It should also be noted that technological advances tend to be deflationary in general: regardless of real or nominal dollars, the chips/storage/etc you can buy today were sometimes not even available in the past at any price.
True, a high-end 386 would have cost upwards of $10k when it first came out, but a MacBook Neo probably beats the pants off a supercomputer from the same era.
Yes, I'm aware how inflation works, you missed my point.
Many technology things have effectively gotten cheaper over time, when you account for overall performance/specs/capabilities/etc.
The "we don't know how to make a $500 computer that doesn't suck" statement of today would be more like "we don't know how to make a $350 computer that doesn't suck".
> In my native Netherlands I'd guess to see that peaking at ~south at say 15-30 degrees, with some lower peaks at east/west combos.
Folks are doing some interesting exploration of the pros and cons of different alignments, e.g.:
> When roof area is limited, the question becomes: What layout lets you install the most space-efficient solar capacity within budget on the available area? In those scenarios, an east–west (E–W) layout can outperform a south-facing layout. The South layout may be “better positioned”, but the E-W allows the installation of more panels in the same area.
I installed a east/west facing set myself on our flat roof. Looking at dynamic power prices of the preceding year, multiplied by expected power output.
Even wrote a simple space optimizer for this one time. But messed up some measurements so had to change on the fly anyways. The old adagium still holds: measure once and curse twice.
> It doesn't even have to be hardware. Maybe the guy from hardware who created and maintained excellence under his org can bring that level to where Apple has fallen - software.
There was already a change in software with Alan Dye's departure and Stephen Lemay taking over:
AIUI, lots of folks internal to Apple were not happy with Dye, and are happy with Lemay. Some consider it a failing of the executive that Dye wasn't pushed out sooner (rather than choosing to jump himself).
> […] The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”
> These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
The author is a retired professor from the US Naval War College:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Nichols_(academic)
reply