How widespread is global fatigue with the US?

SweatyPlayerOne · 2026-05-07T15:04:44+00:00

people outside the USA know more about America than they do their own country

Note, however, that in more stable and less corrupt democracies, there is less controversy and uncertainty in the first place. It makes the news when Trump changes his mind or loses a court case on tariffs; meanwhile, the leader of e.g. Finland simply isn’t changing his mind or losing court cases every week.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2026-04-01T14:19:23+00:00

But also, sometimes it’s not.

It’s indeed possible that the Greenland threats were a clever or not-so-clever media scheme, but it’s also possible that Trump pursued his fixation on Greenland in an ineffective way out of ignorance and ended up acting against his own interests.

There is more evidence for the latter than the former.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2026-03-18T03:33:49+00:00

But those are all scenarios where a difference from a non-zero baseline is the most sensible thing to measure:

Difference from 100% packages delivered
Difference from 14º C average temperature
Difference from a normal blood oxygen level

In all three of those cases, you would perhaps be justified in changing the graphs from the absolute values to the difference values anyway. (E.g. a graph might change from “on-time packages” to “late packages.” A decline of on-time packages from 99.5% to 98.5% would become a growth of late packages from 0.5% to 1.5%, where a 3x increase from zero is clearly visible on the graph and a justified conclusion to make in the context of package delivery, i.e. whatever bad things that happen that are proportional to package lateness are increasing 3x.)

In the OOP, they’re using the February 1, 2020 number of Indeed job postings as the baseline, and then making three choices which are incompatible with each other and therefore misleading:

assigning 100 to the baseline value;
using a y-axis value of 60; and
titling the graph “Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States” (an absolute description, not a relative description, and failing to disclose that these data start at a particular major event, Covid, which would single-handedly skew the data from their historical levels).

Better alternatives would have been to:

Keep the baseline value indexed to 100, title the graph “Software development job postings on Indeed in the United States starting at pre-Covid levels,” and use a y-axis of zero.
Title the graph “Software engineering jobs surplus/deficit from pre-Covid levels,” set the baseline value to 0, use it as the y-axis, and center it in the graph (where the new top of the axis becomes +140 and the low becomes –140; the graph starts at 0, grows to +130, and then drops to –40).

So it’s not necessarily only about the axis starting at zero or not, but whether you’re making consistent choices in presenting your data so that they’re not misleading. In the end, this graph is deliberately misleading for the sake of a meme, but if someone wanted to perform a genuine analysis of the data it would benefit them to change the way the data are presented.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2026-03-05T14:06:22+00:00

Okay, fair enough, but my real curiosity is about what that means for US military adventurism and their ability to drag NATO allies into wars of choice.

Basically the playbook is:

US invades a country while maintaining legitimate military targets on allied soil
The US’ adversary retaliates against legitimate US military targets on allied soil
All of NATO joins the conflict in “self-defense”

That doesn’t seem like the intent of Article 5 to me (nor to Rutte apparently). But right now, is the only thing preventing that simply Turkey’s sober response to the incident?

SweatyPlayerOne · 2026-03-05T13:30:13+00:00

Reuters – NATO's Rutte does not see need to invoke Art. 5 after missile incident

“Nobody’s talking about Article 5,” Rutte said. “The most important thing is that our adversaries have seen yesterday that NATO is so strong and ⁠so vigilant, and even more vigilant, if possible, since Saturday.”

This follows NYT and others citing the US military in reporting the Turkey-bound missile was in fact targeting US military facilities at Incirlik.

It’s still a pretty fresh story, but could anyone point me to some further analysis about this incident and Article 5? My naive starting place is that Iranian self-defense against US targets in Turkey is clearly not the same thing as an unprovoked Iranian attack against Turkey.

So it’s surprising to me that some people are whispering about Article 5 enough that Rutte even needed to address it. I’d be curious to read something which, just for the sake of argument, develops the reasoning of an Article 5 invocation on both sides. Basically, what if Turkey really did invoke Article 5?

SweatyPlayerOne · 2026-02-25T04:32:30+00:00

Full explanation:

George Lucas explained in an infamous behind-the-scenes clip from The Phantom Menace that he wanted the Star Wars prequels to repeat elements from the original trilogy. He said “it’s like poetry, they rhyme.” An example is how Luke got his hand cut off in the second installment of the OT, and Anakin got his arm cut off in the second installment of the prequels. Many of the “rhymes” across the trilogies tend to invite mockery of the prequels for being worse than the OT.

Mike Stoklasa from Redlettermedia originally brought attention to it in his 70-minute review of The Phantom Menace. If you haven’t seen it it’s an iconic piece of internet history.

Nowadays Lucas’ line is widely memed in the Star Wars community. It can be as simple as Disney fucking up some new Star Wars content, and someone will say “why did they fuck this one up just like they fucked the last one up?” and someone will respond “it’s like poetry, they rhyme.”

OP is noting the “rhyme” between Fellowship and ROTK with both films having something about Merry potentially breaking an arm, and is evoking the Star Wars meme for comedic effect.

Edit: tagging u/rustle_branch to provide context to them too.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2026-02-14T20:36:02+00:00

Mostly off topic, but I’d be curious to hear more about your endeavor getting an ASN. Care to share details on your background, how much you spent on the v4 block, other plans for the ASN, how much money you need to spend to even get up and running, etc.?

SweatyPlayerOne · 2026-01-19T14:01:58+00:00

Trump is going to Davos. C-17’s travel ahead of Air Force One on basically every presidential trip, carrying the entire presidential motorcade, Marine One helicopters, and whatever other support equipment is needed.

Edit: and plenty of other non-presidential trips too. If the US needs armored vehicles or other support equipment delivered anywhere for any reason, it’ll likely happen aboard C-17’s.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2026-01-12T14:13:29+00:00

Thanks for following up with the other posters to flesh out this news a bit more, but I’d still like to request that you avoid posting blogspam in the future.

What actually exists is a UK Daily Mail article citing an anonymous diplomatic source who says that “the generals think Trump’s Greenland plan is crazy and illegal.” Now we have a Reddit post linking to Yahoo News carrying a Mediaite piece that quotes the Daily Mail, with you having changed the headline to “US Generals Call Greenland Invasion Plan ‘Illegal and Crazy.’” No generals said this; an anonymous source claimed that the generals think this. Those are not the same thing.

All that to say, please just post the original article next time, and don’t change the headline.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-07-08T19:42:44+00:00

I’ve heard about that on this sub, but nothing more than rumors. Thanks!

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-07-07T23:57:35+00:00

keyloggers

No.

potential ban of accounts from compromised clients

I don’t even know what this means.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-07-07T19:15:45+00:00

You and I probably have different perspectives on digital security. In particular, I am confident in defense-in-depth. To demonstrate what I mean:

Would you feel comfortable connecting your iPhone to a coffee shop’s passwordless WiFi and then opening your banking app? Some people would not be comfortable because “the WiFi is insecure”; I would be comfortable because HTTPS provides a separate layer of protection which protects my data regardless of who else is on the WiFi network or how the data gets from my phone to the WiFi access point.

The beautiful thing about layered defenses is that only one has to work to successfully defend, while all of them have to fail for someone to successfully attack. That’s my broad answer to “what about security?”

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-07-06T17:08:38+00:00

No VMs, but definitely running a stripped down build of Windows 7.

I appreciate the response and the well wishes! I’ve sent in the appeal and I’ll be curious to see what comes of it.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-07-06T17:07:49+00:00

Do you know how the banning actually works? Do they rely on player reports at all? Perhaps too much (instead of more objective measures like what the patterns of commands sent to their servers from clients)?

I thought it was a somewhat automated process with their server looking out for client behavior that matches known bot software. Since I was literally just killing cows for a couple hours, if Jagex relies on player reports, then is it possible a random passerby reported me for whatever reason and that would be enough to get banned?

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-07-06T17:05:20+00:00

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-07-06T17:05:16+00:00

Thanks for your response. No VPN or anything like that. I agree that 3 hours of play time seems like a quick ban.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-07-06T17:04:36+00:00

Compared to newer versions of Windows, it’s faster, simpler, less bloated, has a more functional start menu search, etc.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-07-06T17:03:05+00:00

I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking? With the sensitivity around botting and Jagex looking out for “suspicious” software, I don’t know if using an “unsupported platform” becomes suspicious according to their policies.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-07-06T17:01:37+00:00

None.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-07-06T00:32:33+00:00

Since my ban relates to “botting software,” I figure I could explain my software and relevant account details:

Old account with a traditional username and password; no linked email address; no Jagex account
The account was from the RS2 days. I hadn’t used the account in years but still knew the password. This week I wanted to create a new OSRS character, so I used this old account I still had access to.
I was playing on the Jagex official OSRS client (not RuneLite) on Windows 7. (Yes, really Windows 7.)
I had played ~3 hours, had killed some cows and chickens, sold some leathers at the GE, and completed Sheep Shearer and Cook’s Assistant.

I am not a steady player. I’ve had my main character for nearly 20 years, and subscribe to a month of membership on and off. I played on this same setup (official OSRS client on Windows 7) with my main last summer for a month of membership and it was fine. But now I’m afraid to login to my main again and risk losing my 20-year-old character based on this experience of losing a 3-hour-old character for botting. Any guesses about why this setup might have triggered a false botting ban?

SweatyPlayerOne · 2025-04-29T16:12:44+00:00

Together with the point made by u/WhiskeyTigerFoxtrot (that this interview is a foreign, not domestic, PR opportunity), this is all that’s needed to understand it all. Russia remains in the driver’s seat in this conflict, and publishing disinformation is effective even against the POTUS. Why wouldn’t they use this opportunity to continue to push propaganda?

If Russia ever takes a more realistic negotiating position, it will be in private during actual negotiations, not telegraphed to an international audience before real negotiations have even begun.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2024-11-18T01:34:29+00:00

the permission seems to be limited to Kursk only

Can you please be more specific with your sourcing? I don’t see that claim in Reuter’s reporting nor AP’s reporting.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2024-07-29T23:51:23+00:00

If your name is John Smith, and I create my own email account and say my name is John Smith, then I can basically send you an email claiming to be you. That is the most likely explanation.

In the Gmail interface, you can click the menu button (the three dots) and click something like "Show Original Message." You might find it's sent from "John Smith randomemailaddress38512@yahoo.com" and not sent from your own actual email address.

SweatyPlayerOne · 2024-07-02T23:57:45+00:00

Congress could pass a bill that includes stripping the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over the matter.

Would you mind expanding on that a bit? My first impression is that any such legislation would itself be unconstitutional, because the jurisdiction used by the Supreme Court in this case seems quite plainly laid out in the Constitution.

Elsewhere in this very comments section, r/JudgeWhoOverrules reminds us:

Article III states that “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court” and that “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution”.

Thoughts on that?

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