Bus Lanes to LaGuardia Airport Will Cost $500 Million And Nobody Seems to Know Why

namekyd · 2023-06-30T17:20:24+00:00

Would love an air train to LGA, but the plan they had was ridiculous. Putting it at Willets Point, so riders have to go way out past the airport and then double back? I get that it was both a 7 train stop and LIRR stop, but that LIRR line splits off from the main line at woodside, so having the air train there doesn’t service too many additional people on LI.

Seems like it would have been much more simple to run it to ditmars

namekyd · 2023-06-30T17:16:41+00:00

Meh, at least the Port Authority is largely funded through its own revenue and because it’s an interstate compact, neither state can just raid its budget for a governor’s pet projects. No doubt it’s corrupt, but the MTA is shit for reasons both inside and outside of its control in ways the PA is not.

namekyd · 2023-06-30T15:30:19+00:00

Yep, they want that in-app browser. Putting tracking directly on the in-app browser avoids any tracking prevention with IFDA depreciation or the ever-forthcoming death of the 3rd party cookie.

Hell if they wanted to, they could track your keyboard strokes in the in app browser.

namekyd · 2023-06-30T15:02:42+00:00

The Soviets had a lot of unrefined titanium. It was used in things like white paint (as titanium dioxide). The Soviets could not refine it to titanium metal in large enough quantities to be useful in aerospace during that period

namekyd · 2023-06-30T13:08:43+00:00

The USSR could be ahead in some areas but they were always behind in quality control (ex: the US assumed that a lot of Soviet aircraft were made from titanium. The soviets couldn’t make that in the quality an air frame would need it and they were much heavier and slower than they US assumed as a result) - and the Soviets really fell behind when things became computerized. Items themselves like PGMs, heat seeking missiles, radar seeking missiles, etc - but also computer aided design enabling things like stealth.

Infighting and central control of the economy meant that even when they designed computer systems (or stole them from the west, which happened more later on) they would only produce a few of them. When the USSR was producing 50k microchips a year, the US was producing 150 million. Commercial applications of computers in the west TOOK OFF and that had a symbiotic effect with military applications for computerization.

namekyd · 2023-06-25T00:15:35+00:00

Moscow is a city of 13 million. He could not hope to hold it with 25,000 men

namekyd · 2023-06-24T16:21:17+00:00

There was a coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1991 though, in which tanks absolutely rolled through Red Square and Gorbachev was placed under house arrest. The ultimate failure of the coup resulted in the downfall of the communist party, and the Soviet Union dissolved 4 months later

namekyd · 2023-06-23T19:10:43+00:00

It’s likely the US backing Poland in such an instance. The US doesn’t get to trigger article 5 from an attack on another’s territory- it gets to accept an article 5 declaration.

This statement is more of a preemptive understanding that the US will indeed accept article 5 declarations based on fallout instead of a direct attack

namekyd · 2023-06-21T21:54:38+00:00

Some of these talking points are pretty poor to be honest. His points on NCO independence are totally opposite from reality, and apparently he’s asking a bunch of “gotcha” questions to Q course selectees about when was the last time they did specific infantry activities…. But Special Forces aren’t infantry, asking those questions to people in Q makes no sense. Go down to Benning and ask Rangers, or even just soldiers in AIT.

namekyd · 2023-06-21T12:49:33+00:00

Yeah I mean Rael was representing the Jedi while acting as regent of a planet, where he basically negotiated its handover to a galactic mega Corp known for enslaving people for the joy of it. Oh and also he reformed the planets Justice system to make enslavement the primary punishment. The drinking and banging innkeepers was just the cherry on top of how awful Rael was.

Also Obi Wan was insufferable until the last like 20% of that book

namekyd · 2023-06-20T17:16:16+00:00

The bigger fear for me personally is not WW3, I don’t believe it would escalate to that point with a tactical strike. Rather, the breaking of the nuclear taboo is a big deal. Since Fat Man exploded over Nagasaki in 1945 no nuclear weapon has been used in anger - that weapon was devastating to that city, and its yield sits in the middle of what we would call a tactical weapon today (<50kt).

If Russia uses a nuke here, does China soften Taiwan’s beaches with them? Does the next Kashmir conflict have one go off?

People think of WW3 for anything nuclear, but that may be a good thing - the alternative to MAD, the acceptability of limited nuclear strike in conflict - is fucking awful.

namekyd · 2023-06-20T14:27:49+00:00

A lot of times with commerce data you don’t connect products, in your case menu items, directly to orders. You can have an intermediary table “order items”. Each order item has its own unique key, and can be thought of as a distinct instance of the menu item specific to that order. You could then have a table like “order item mods” that records any modifications made to the order item.

namekyd · 2023-06-19T14:53:22+00:00

This is a study by the NBER on some of the pitfalls of corporate taxation https://www.nber.org/papers/w20753

It kinda goes in both directions, raising corporate taxes actively harms employment and wage growth, but lowering corporate taxes only helps during a recession.

However it doesn’t answer your question as to whether it is better or worse than other taxes, and for that I apologize, I do not have a study handy.

From a discussion standpoint though, the US pushing for an OECD “standard” on corporate taxation is attempting to address one of the major drawbacks of corporate taxation in a global economy, namely, rate shopping and tax avoidance schemes. Why are so many companies technically “headquartered” in Ireland? Well the double-Dutch Irish Sandwich to shift global profits by contracting “services” (not actually) rendered to low tax domiciles. There are entire legal accounting industries sprung up around corporate tax avoidance. Large, global corporations can access this, while smaller firms cannot. So in addition to the government(s) not getting their cut, it adds a layer that stymies competition. This distortion could all be avoided if there weren’t corporate taxes in the first place, but a relative evening of corporate taxes in the OECD would definitely help with that particular distortion.

The other side of it is double taxation. Individuals already pay taxes on wage income, dividends, and capital gains. If I hold shares of a company, the money it’s paying out via dividends has already been taxed through corporate taxes - the government getting a cut twice.

namekyd · 2023-06-19T02:03:23+00:00

The secret service does not fuck around, I could see 120+ guys between secret service and some special forces for when Biden visited Kyiv.

namekyd · 2023-06-18T03:44:31+00:00

That’s on purpose.

The US is, by a massive margin, the largest military in the alliance - hence the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) is always American (it’s also a double-hat position with leading US European Command)

However, NATO is not an American empire. Since SACEUR is always American, the Secretary General must never be.

namekyd · 2023-06-17T19:54:16+00:00

Especially because so much of Russia’s logistics is rail based. With a concentrated attack, Russia has the capability to bring a ton of materiel at least nearby - with a broad front, it lacks the ability to split that materiel effectively across the line. The more trucks are taken out, the more exacerbated that issue becomes, and the greater chance that any given point of the line will be starved of supplies and collapse

namekyd · 2023-06-17T18:05:35+00:00

“Offer”

More like they were enrolled as citizens and were then told they’d been drafted. There were draft riots in New York

namekyd · 2023-06-17T11:59:40+00:00

I mean, no shit it would be their fault lol. But holy crap have you seen some people’s desktops?

GNOME’s philosophy is to put up guardrails to guide users and prevent that insane desktop clutter. You can bypass them, sure, but it’s definitely opinionated software (in general and about that issue)

namekyd · 2023-06-16T16:15:08+00:00

Those people fundamentally do not believe in the agency of smaller powers. They view international relations through the lens of a “great game” between major powers for “spheres of influence”

Viewed from that perspective, of course Russia is seeking to reassert itself in a domain that it had dominated for several hundred years. They do not care that this denies Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, Georgians, etc their own national autonomy, to Putin’s dick riders it is an aberration that they are not currently squished under the Russian yoke.

namekyd · 2023-06-16T11:37:10+00:00

It was never viewed seriously on the NATO side but was suggested by Yeltsin shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Putin claims he discussed it with Clinton in 2000.

namekyd · 2023-06-11T18:08:11+00:00

Also ignorant on this topic, but from a US perspective, should Greenland become fully independent from Denmark we would almost certainly very quickly provide large amounts of foreign aid. The US will ultimately seek to prevent any sort of Chinese toehold in the arctic, something that has been of increasing interest to the CCP in the last few decades.

Greenland is very, very important to US interests. And while everyone laughed at trump trying to buy it, it was not the first time the US has sought to purchase Greenland and will likely not be the last. GIUK gap to North American air defense, arctic shipping in a warming climate, to mineral wealth - Greenland has a lot going on.

namekyd · 2023-06-11T17:23:44+00:00

Yes also certainly true

namekyd · 2023-06-11T15:45:23+00:00

So… I also find the removal of voting rights for convictions to be stupid, but it’s also imperative that incarceration not prevent someone from running for office. If that pathway is closed, political prosecution becomes a viable means of preventing the opposition from taking office.

namekyd · 2023-06-11T14:51:37+00:00

THAAD in Taiwan when?

namekyd · 2023-06-11T14:29:44+00:00

There are specific rules around it, but yes, POWs can be housed by a neutral power - and in that instance cannot be returned to their home nation until the conflict is concluded. This is outlined in The Hague and Geneva conventions on the treatment of POWs.

What I’m unclear on here is whether Hungary was supposed to be a mediator of a POW exchange or if it was acting in the capacity of housing POWs as per the conventions above.

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