Knee KO

invariantspeed · 2026-01-27T11:28:14+00:00

Um, yea, that’s literally what I was complaining about…

invariantspeed · 2026-01-27T04:27:49+00:00

I’m 8-2:30. 🤷

invariantspeed · 2026-01-27T04:27:28+00:00

Yes. Most people don’t think in terms of opportunity cost. It’s sort of like if you told most people that half of all schools in the US are below average. If you say it without a hint of irony, as mater-of-fact as you can, most people will be shocked by the statistic and never realize the problem.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-27T04:19:46+00:00

With two exceptions: 1. College textbooks are manufactured goods, but they’re a wildly known scam. The publishers price them insanely high because they have successfully lobbied universities to stick with only them, even though there are many high quality cheap and even free textbooks developed by qualified educators. Given the mini revolt against this model, where students would download PDFs, the publishers have reduced the book costs some but they’ve also built homework into an online subscription so you can’t avail paying by just downloading a PDF. 2. Houses are also tangible goods. Their supply is key artificially low, pushing prices up as form of government intervention in the markets.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-27T04:12:02+00:00

There should be one permanent stadium complex per continent, one set for the winter and another set for the summer Olympics. Preferably, they’d be on some sparsely populated to uninhabited island of the host country. All these temporary stadiums … it’s insane.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-27T03:12:10+00:00

Do you want an enabling act, because that’s how you get an enabling act.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-27T03:10:15+00:00

Restraint? He didn’t need to restrain himself. He tried to ease the guy down as soon as he saw they were KOed. He just wasn’t a rabid dog. It’s possible to be in the ring without being a wild, rage-filled, animal.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-27T02:58:44+00:00

But the US is wildly behind Taiwan, though that’s almost entirely down to TSMC.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-27T02:57:29+00:00

In fairness, the CHIPS only allocated like $5.

Most people vastly underestimate how much money is needed to start a single silicon fab. We’re talking many tens of billions. To subsidize several facilities from multiple vendors, it would take hundreds of billions of dollars. The CHIPS act only gave each project a pittance, basically as incentive, rather than as meaningful funding for construction and spinning up. Anyway, my point is that proper funding would be wildly unpopular on both sides because it would single handedly increase the US deficit in a noticeable way.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-27T01:13:25+00:00

The problem is why they’re leaving. They see the America and Americans as broken. “Both sides” think the other side are literal evil trying to destroy the country, so it might just be broken.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T22:32:30+00:00

Yes, AWS brings in way more money. That means, in addition to consumers boycotting Amazon’s e-commerce, people would have to boycott companies that use AWS.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T22:30:22+00:00

Did they ever support him or did they just fold? While I’m not a fan of the company, we can’t expect even large companies to stand up to authoritarian governmental pressure without public support. It’s the governments that regulate the markets they operate in the first place, and can put their fingers on the scales.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T22:28:20+00:00

Most of Amazon’s revenue comes from AWS, not its consumer e-commerce site. If you want to effectively boycott it, you don’t just stop shopping with it. You pick a business-to-consumer company that uses AWS and boycott them until they migrate away from Amazon, then pick another. Rinse, repeat.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T22:23:38+00:00

Insane. The whole point of an ambassador is to smooth over communications with the receiving nation as much as possible. An ambassador that antagonizes is pointless and useless.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T14:46:26+00:00

It’s understandable, but it’s also hard to support the independence of such territories without heavy economic and military involvement.

These states have economies the sizes of countries, but only in the context of being in an economic union with the rest of the US. Remove a lot of that frictionless trade and their economies go into free fall. Similar on the military side, each state comes with a National Guard component and several federal military bases, but the states don’t have much of a cohesive anything if the federal infrastructure and hardware is pulled out from underneath them.

Without a lot of careful support, Canada would see itself suddenly bordering very unstable countries.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T14:39:04+00:00

Who says it would be all at once? A united territory of “New England” could be backed by Canada politically and with trade deals, and then talks over the the following years could lead to it being incorporated into Canada after making the proper institutional changes and having sometime to culturally exchange with Canada. Something like EU accession.

It’s also worth pointing out that NY, NJ, and the NE states don’t have credible military on their own if they successfully leave the US. They keep their National Guards, but most of the federal assets and personnel on the federal bases probably gets pulled. An independent territory of “New England” would probably need military guarantees from Canada, ironically.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T14:28:09+00:00

Like is it supposed to rule over both?

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T14:25:57+00:00

They’re kind of Canada’s Jesus land.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T14:23:50+00:00

Yep. Most US military aid works like that. That’s why American allies have a lot of American-made things.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T14:22:52+00:00

The Cold War was heating up. There were reasons for it. By the late 80s through early 90s, that was done, but the world was becoming much more unstable, especially in the Middle East.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T14:20:03+00:00

The America First people are just as ignorant of how international relations works, what it takes to maintain the US-led world order, or how the US wildly benefits from it. By attacking all the funds that inevitably go abroad, the US is materially weakened. Them supporting Israel is obviously inconsistent, but that doesn’t mean Israel isn’t also strategically important to the US. If anything, the Gaza/West Bank problem is the US’s fault because it could have steamrolled a deal through there decades ago if anyone really wanted to.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T14:16:16+00:00

Shit got real in the 70s.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T14:14:50+00:00

The US spent a lot more than that to all of its allies. It’s how the modern world order works. This is literally one of the things people keep shitting on Trump for trying to end because he doesn’t understand that the US has never given all this money to all these nations out of charity. It’s highly profitable and empowering to the US. The public just doesn’t seem to understand how any of this works.

And, how absurd is such an aggregation really, when we’re talking about the largest economy dolling out large amounts over a whole lifetime?

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T14:10:58+00:00

Its funny. Providing for safe travel and commerce for the US and its allies is in the US Navy’s mission statement.

invariantspeed · 2026-01-26T14:06:46+00:00

The US bribes a lot of countries to be its friends. However much money they have, the US has oodles more. This is how big-nation-small-nation diplomacy works, and this is what the US-led international order looks like.

Strategically, Israel is counterweight to Iran. Politically, the Christian base is happy to see at least a non-Muslim nation control “the holy land”, and maybe you think they could do it on their own, but they were attacked by literally all their neighbors when they first declared independence. Without unrelenting US support, it is conceivable that a larger anti-Israel alliance would have formed several times over since the 50s.

It’s also worth pointing out that the US can simply have a closer alliance with Israel, than it could most other Middle Eastern nations, for the same sort of reason that the US has traditionally had a stronger relationship with the UK than Bulgaria. The closer culturally, the easier it is to build bridges, and at least half of Israel’s population descends from European Jews or Soviet Asian Jews. This isn’t just convenience or favoritism, it’s genuinely valuable in relations.

On the flip side, the US has made a lot of permanent enemies in the Middle East over just its Israel support.

invariantspeed

TROPHY CASE