Seriously. We are talking about tire tread compared to weight. Both use multiple sizes of tire depending on the year/model. There are a few that overlap in diameter to get the closest to comparison but they still have a very different width. We are talking about a 235/35R18 vs a 235/75R18. That is a huge difference in wall height/aspect ratio and changes how the tire gives under power. Those numbers massively change depending on model as well. Something like an f150 raptor could have a 315/70R17, almost a foot wide. So comparing just the weight and saying they are close enough is far from a fair comparison.

While any aircraft sent to ukrane is nice, I sure hope they aren’t paying much for them. That airframe is about 60 years old with the last major design overhaul in 1990 and its last electronics upgrade in 2000. They would be better off buying F15e’s or even the new f15ex. He’ll, even getting some last Gen f16’s or f18’s over there would be as good or better, but cost probably more. The f15 though is probably the best multiroll jet for the cost.

Now, if we are talking about sending some OG Mirage 2000 fighters over there, then that sounds like the ultimate white elephant gift France could give. The US could sent some F4 phantoms over while we are at it.

The big news I the training of 4500 pilots. That is huge. If they could do that, then the mirage 2000 could basically turn into their base fighter trainer and use it as the training wheels to get the new pilots experience and into bigger and better things.

To counter Metallica, Nine Inch Nails at about the same time then went on and very publicly said to steal his music because the label was overcharging his fans and he would rather they listen to it than he get paid. He then started releasing his albums for free where you pay what you want on his website. And this is just one reason I am a life long NIN fan and stopped listening to Metallica after middle school.

I have an honors minor in medical humanities and took several medical policy courses. We looked at this exact graph from previous years as well as several other huge sets of data/graphs/studies and anything else related to insurance you can imagine. Insurance is not a standard market commodity and does not follow the same trend or logic. The only way you can lower premiums in insurance is by reducing the risk in the pool, or increasing the pool size to dilute the risk. This is either increasing the total pool size by increasing premiums, getting more people, or being selective about who joins the risk pool. The third one was what was called “preexisting conditions” and kept high cost people from entering the risk pool and draining the funds. This got banned and increased premiums. By increasing competition you end up splitting up the pools, making everyone’s premiums go up. This happened multiple times post ACA after the GOP started stripping out the funding and safeguards to prevent this. More and more competition opened up with artificially low premiums being subsidized by federal dollars, but then when the subsidies ended the premiums started jumping. Then when the premiums were jumping, new companies opened up to make more competition advertising lower rates, but then further fractured to pool sizes, leading to premiums skyrocketing. If you look back just 10 years ago there was a 3-5 year stretch of premiums increasing almost 30% year after year. It was due to all the competition opening up every year. This is why single payer systems have the lowest rates. If you have even one private company monopoly with a regulated cap on profits you would still end up with lower premiums. Then, if this single paying company was nationalized to take out the profit making middle man, the premiums are that much lower because your risk is spread across a massive pool. More competition in insurance makes the problem worse. I would agree with your stronger regulation though. There is a lot that can be done there.

One man’s terrorist group is another man’s freedom fighter. This is why many new organizations that are big on neutrality normally shy away from calling anyone terrorist groups. You could just as easily frame Israel as a terrorist group with the same justifications listed above.

That is at a ‘state’ level, there are still smaller level communist places to live. Like where the word ‘Commune’ comes from and what communism was derived from and attempted to expand into. There are communes all over the world. US included. There is a famous one in London, lots of large ones in Spain. They are communities that exist in their own bubble of micro economics within their larger communities of normal living. You should look it up. They are interesting and normally very appealing.

I always know someone doesn’t know anything about Afghanistan and its people when they refer to them as Afghani’s.

An Afghan is a person. Afghani is a currency. Anyone who calls them Afghani doesn’t even know the right term to call the people. It is a giveaway to how little you know about them when you don’t even know what to call them.

Meanwhile all the Chineses and Viet Congs are turning in their graves right next to the Afgani.

Did we watch the same movie? Or read the same comic? From its wiki:

“V for Vendetta is a British graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd (with additional art by Tony Weare). Initially published between 1982 and 1985 in black and white as an ongoing serial in the British anthology Warrior, its serialization was completed in 1988–89 in a ten-issue colour limited series published by DC Comics in the United States.”

It was british in the comic…

Plot summary of movie?

“Following world war, London is a police state occupied by a fascist government, and a vigilante known only as V (Hugo Weaving) uses terrorist tactics to fight the oppressors of the world in which he now lives. …”

British in the movie.

Now, to be fair, the screenplay was written by 2 Americans who loved the comic and it was directed by an Australian. Your downvotes are coming from you jumping onto the “amerikkka bad” train without any real connection here.

It isn’t just about the pumping. You can pump crude all day and still be broke. Look at several of the middle east smaller countries or even most south America pumpers. The refining is where the industry and money is really at. Cars don’t burn crude oil, it has to get refined. Plastics don’t come out of the ground, they have to get refined. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest crude oil exporter and they still have to rely on others to refine.

In fact, here is a direct quote from OEC-

“In 2021, Saudi Arabia imported $7.43B in Refined Petroleum, becoming the 27th largest importer of Refined Petroleum in the world. At the same year, Refined Petroleum was the 2nd most imported product in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia imports Refined Petroleum primarily from: India ($2.17B), Greece ($1.09B), Russia ($892M), United Arab Emirates ($835M), and Egypt ($689M).”

This is a huge deal for India. They are the world’s second largest exporter of refined oil, and the largest in asia. This means a lot of buisness is about to shift to them. This is also after India has been negotiating cheap raw oil off Russia due to a combination of sanctions and the occasional case of exploding refineries leading to excess raw oil in Russia

Death from “old age” (talking about those 85+)is actually death from heart disease (number 1), cancer (2), alzheimers (3), or stroke (4).

Heart disease at end of life can be a drawn out pain with the heart not strong enough and it causes fluid to back into the lungs, the lead to death from pneumonia or some other breathing issue like COPD or some shit. It is pain for a few years with diminished quality of life and most days are spent just fighting to hang on. Those that die of a heart attack are the lucky ones if it is quick enough, but still pain and terror for several minutes at least.

Those that die from cancers at this age, well… it’s cancer. Try and find anyone’s story of having a peaceful time dieing from cancer when they are old.

The alzheimers deaths can take many forms. Anything from alzheimers dimentia and your brain deteriorating until it literally forgets how to function basic bodily functions like breathing; or it could be something like lewd body, where you are hallucinating most of the time trying to cope with a world that is literally changing in front of you by the minute with memories of your past blurred with imagination and nightmares that you can no longer suppress.

Then you have stroke patients. Most of these people have had multiple strokes by this age if this is how they are going out. This is where from the first strokes they have lost entire sections of their brain and lost major functions of things. For some it is as simple as loosing their speech and no longer able to physically talk. Others have a quite opposite loss, and lose their language. They talk all day and it is nothing but nonsense. Both groups are locked from communicating in meaningful ways and frustrated eternally. Therapy may restore some levels of communication but it all depends on several factors. Then there are the strokes that take out your hearing, vision, sections of memory, perceptions, you name it. Some of these people even suffer from a basilar stroke and are stuck with the ever terrifying “locked in” syndrome.

Of all of these, sure, you might want to hang of for a bit. But after your one person you have spent your life with, the one person who understands you, and the one person you have been fighting through all your daily pain for- they are going to die. Then why fight for more pain? Just go out with dignity and do it together. You can make an event out of it and let those around you know how good it has been and give people some closure.

Me and my brother both joined the army at slightly different times. We both did a tour in Afghanistan that overlapped and were just one province away from each other. I did a second tour over there and he got out.

We both came from a VERY conservative family. It was after serving that we both became suuuuper liberal. It was like the wool being pulled out from out eyes when we joined the army and saw how much of a lie it all was. Oddly enough, this is a semi common story for conservative people joining the military.

We grew up with our dad working in the military-industrial-complex and he would make fun of the liberals who called out the military for serving the MIC companies, and how it Iraq was a war for profit. Then we serve and see it first had with all the contractors, the needless equipment, the contracts for new tech that wasn’t needed, and all the other money sinks going into it. It was all a lie.

We grew up being told how bad universal healthcare would be, but then had it in the military and saw how amazing it was.

We were told that if people didn’t have a personal motivation through debt and loans to make them work harder, then people going through college would have no motivation to improve their lives. And yet here I am with the GI bill. (Granted, I still have 70k in student loans. The GI bill is kind of a lie in its self).

Everything that was a conservative talking point was exposed as a lie after joining army.

Woosh

Ethiopia DID have a coast. It was what is now known as the country of Eritrea. They were forced to be part of the country after WW2 in 1950, and ignored the wishes of the people to remain independent. Then by 1961 a war for independence started and lasted for 30 years. It ended with the Eritrean forces taking the Ethiopian capital and winning the war capture the flag style, but with guns.

As far as Djibouti, they are probably the best example of American modern imperialism. The country enjoys a stable currency by using an American backed currency. In exchange the US has their Horn of Africa base there. Because the country is so small but the base has so many troops and the US pays to lease the land, the US military ends up making up a little bit over 10% of their entire GDP. This is the base that launches the anti-pirate operations for the region, not only providing security for Djibouti, but security for the entire HoA. Say what you want about the USA and their modern imperialism, but the only thing anyone in that region agrees with is that they love the US troops there and the mission they do.

If Ethiopia wanted to take Djibouti, not only would that piss off literally every other country in the region, they would also have to go through the USA to take it. Good luck with that.

For those who are not familiar with operation praying mantis, here is my favorite video the breaks it down in about 15 minutes.

https://youtu.be/d5v6hlRyeHE?si=qjuaWUv61xe0Y4Xe

In 2000 the Afghani was worth 75,000 to 1 USD. During ISAF occupation it was fixed at 50 to 1. It is now at 70 to 1 and dropping. Let’s stick to one argument at a time rather than playing the whataboutism game. You said the USA destroyed their economy, yet the evidence strongly says otherwise. Before 2001, Afghanistan was the second poorest country in the world. When ISAF pulled out it was ranked at about 40 (I say ‘about’ because it was still growing and changing faster and the rankings were uptated). In the short time of Taliban rule they have dropped back down to sub 33 with exact number still to be determined. (The sub 33 ranking is important because there are only 33 countries on the UN “least developed countries” list).

I would spend time debating topics like this with educated people and those that are open minded, but you do not seem like you fit either group. Do not expect a reply.

Over the course of 20 years, the US and its coalition allies in Afganistan killed approximately 50,000 civilians and there we calls for war crimes investigations. In the course of one month Israel has killed over 10,000 civilians.

I did two tours in Afghanistan and can tell you now, they are not bending over backwards to minimize it. They are using this as an excuse to indemnify themselves from war crimes prosecution.

Death toll as of yesterday was reported around 8,000. The US/coalition 20-year war in Afghanistan was (rounding UP) 50,000. That puts it at an average of 2,500 civilian deaths per year. Even THAT number was high enough for people to call for war crimes investigations. Now Israel has reached over 3x the yearly average in only 3 weeks. On track to pass 10,000 by the one month mark, too. I’m not saying that Isreal doesn’t have the right to defend its self, or even defense through offense, but there is a point that we need to agree is too far; and I think we are a bit past it.