I want to be clear. I do not blame Ghana’s people for these laws. I do not blame Africans for the many nations that have enacted similar laws.

Christian church organizations, acting under the rubric of evangelical outreach or even more offensively charitable giving have backed religious and political leaders with LGBT-phobic agendas up to and including execution for being gay. Of course they’re going to do it - they get power and money for doing so.

The US needs to extend the Logan Act to apply to these situations and make the crime a felony that can lead to the arrest of the people involved and the legal dissolution of the organizations.

Fascism. It’s fascism.

Economic and social collapse dislocates a lot of people. It dislocates people who think they shouldn’t be dislocated, because they played by the rules. They go to church, they had a job, they’re patriotic to their best understanding of the word.

Then, in their minds, something must have changed. It might be the immigrants, or the Jews, or the gays, or weirdly drag queens for some reason this time around. Then someone comes along who validates them as victims and promises a return to their historical glory days.

The last paroxysm is the election or ascendency of a far right populist who elevates that narrative. They promise to restore national pride and return to traditional values, and to return the nation to its roots which had made it strong and put them on top.

It’s happened multiple times around the world, and there are a lot of books and articles on how and why it happens.

Also, this is literally their job. The surprising bit would be if US intel services weren’t doing a thing about a Russian invasion of an independent European nation.

I mean, sure, if a Trumpist gets offended by it because they want the fascists to win, I get how they’d get in a bind, but other than electing Trump and making sure fascism becomes the rule of the day around the world, I’m not sure what they expect to expect.

I can’t say anything about Soylent but it might be a good substitute. I thought there was some kind of issue with them (I think their target market was the “code academy” types), but I might be misremembering.

However, I can recommend Boost. It has something like 100 more calories than Ensure, and like Ensure I can down a bottle in a single go.

I’m currently going through something similar (although I did mostly stop getting sick in the morning), and I’m toggling back and forth on the solid food thing. I’d be interested in learning more about your diagnostics.

Not to minimize malnutrition - that’s an effect that we know will be carried epigenetically for at least two generations even if everything stopped now and we weren’t looking forward to a decade-plus of occupation - but the situation on the whole is physically rewriting the brains of both the adults and more especially the children.

I am an adult, and I chose, more or less, to put myself into the situations I ended up in. I still have PTSD to the point that I had a flashback and panic attack in a friend’s bathroom during lunar new year when they set off a brick of firecrackers and it sounded exactly like a half dozen automatic weapons firing from across the intersection. It took me about 15 minutes of breathing exercises and pushing everything back down before I could come back out. What I went through was absolutely zero compared to what these people, including children, are going through. You’re going to have everything from suicides to psychoses to radicalization and hair trigger political violence. And it’s baked in at this point. It’s done. It’s going to happen with all of the physical certainty of billiard balls hitting each other. All they can do is make it worse, which is what they’re doing every day.

There’s going to be decades of consequences, and Israel is going to find itself isolated far more than it has ever been.

I’m saying this as someone who has done this from both the military and three letter agency side, and as an academic researcher.

You do know that actions like this will only increase support for Hamas, right? Like, for at least the next 20 years - a full generation and probably some change. This kind of adversity - especially this over the top - drives people together in solidarity. This isn’t seen anywhere outside of Israel itself as a war on Hamas. It’s seen as the slaughter of unarmed Palestinian people - most especially by the Palestinian people. They’re going to have a generation of children growing up prepped for an ideology that will make ISIS look like the cast of Sesame Street.

Deflation is much harder to fight than inflation. I think Japan struggled with it for a decade or more.

Probably not very much.

1. Unless I’m mistaken this is a Chinese company trading on the Chinese market. Unless someone was specifically looking to be in the Chinese real estate market (which was very hot about a decade ago iirc), they wouldn’t have a lot of exposure. I think the Chinese market has been in the shitter recently, so I’m not sure who’s holding them right now
2. Retirement funds (pension funds and 401k target date funds, which is where most of the money is these days I believe) skew very conservatively. They spread their money across markets (so like 5% tech, 8% utilities, 7% municipal bonds, whatever). They might have a chunk in a bucket of “foreign” markets, but even those would be spread across multiple industries. I’d be surprised if any of those funds had more than a fraction of a percent in a single company like this.
3. Target date funds get their name from the fact that they’re investing with the expectation that you’ll retire at 65, and the closer that date gets, the more conservative the investments become. People who are retiring soon will have even less exposure to this, and people who are retiring in 20 years will never know this happened.

The real question is whether there’s going to be a ripple effect but it’s not looking like that yet.

Get it to play tic-tac-toe against itself. Problem solved.

Uh-oh. They violated the EULA.

I kind of want to learn some Middle English stock phrases to grill anyone who complains about the changing nature of English being just political correctness. Like, “You want to be a language conservative? Here’s some Chaucer-era language motherfucker.”

This is just the latest change in which an invention changes the nature of warfare. You saw it happen with crossbows, which allowed unskilled troops to shoot people far away, gunpowder weapons, which negated armor and castles, rifles, which removed much of the need for long lines of troops using volley fire, the machine gun, which made an infantry charge much less effective, air power, which changed the nature of naval warfare, and more than I care to list.

The problem is for the very impactful changes, you have two generations of military leadership who have learned tactics and strategy based around technologies that are becoming rapidly outmoded. WWI shocked people with the level of slaughter seen.

It’s easier to adapt to using a new weapons system than it is to figure out how to respond to it, because the uses were defined as the system was being developed and just need the actual applications to be refined and optimized, while the responders have a much larger search space.

I’ll always be the first to come down on the crappiness of the Russian military - I could go on for pages about what they do wrong - but to some extent this is something all armies are vulnerable to. Look how long it took for the US to adapt to IEDs, for example.

So, here’s an idea:

1. Buy a roll of rainbow/pride/trans flag stickers
2. While walking around, surreptitiously slap them on the backs/backpacks of the people you pass
3. Extra points for police/military
4. Chaos ensues

Did you leave Kahn and his followers out on purpose? They basically got transported. Maybe it’s an edge case, but I would consider being exiled to a planet and not being allowed to leave as a kind of incarnation.

If they have a six hour delay, I probably have some padding in that timeline. They’d hook me up and say “It’s just a panic attack, here’s some O2” and send me on my way. Then I’m either getting back on the plane, rescheduling with the ticket desk, or hitting up a bar and heading home until tomorrow.

What I’m wondering is what they’d do if you told the flight attendant you’re having chest pains and a shooting pain in your left arm. They’re not going to want to hold a person on board who may require emergency medical treatment. You might not make it back on board that particular flight, but with that kind of delay I’d probably just rather rebook anyway.

I’m not sure why deplaning passengers would cost more money. The flight crew and terminal operators are still working throughout the period. The one thing I can see oosssibly causing an issue is going back to the terminal and u loading the luggage, but it literally happens every day. I can’t see it taking more than about 30 minutes based on my experiences.

I can pretty much guarantee that the cost of creating an offsite backup is trivial compared to the budget used to collect and analyze those data. I can’t read Russian anymore and it’s probably not published in a discoverable way, but I’m going to offer up the possibility that the sat network, research scientist teams, sys admins, and everything else that goes into the portion of the Russian government’s budget for this work wouldn’t have even seen that as a rounding error. I’ve worked with US government budgets and I know how tight fisted committees can be, and while the USG isn’t Google in terms of writing checks for tech, and while the Russians are probably an order of magnitude or two poorer than our budgets, it’s still be a no brainer in terms of costs. Either they just didn’t think of it (which I’ve seen far more times than I can tell you about) or it got eliminated as a line item by some bureaucrats who don’t understand cost/benefit analysis (which we’ve all also seen), it wasn’t truly a cost thing. Compared to the price associated with sat launches and data analysis, $10-$20k/ month for data retention is nothing.

Also, I sort of suspect that these were dual use systems. When you’re talking about the sensing tech they’re using, there are the very obvious and direct intel applications.

There was a quote that I’m remembering coming from Nixon about Vietnam that observed that when he lost Cronkite, he lost the war. I’m seeing a shift in the mainstream American press that’s increasingly highlighting what in all honesty are war crimes using the kinds of bleak language normally reserved for things like civil wars in Africa.

I can only see Israel, particularly while still under the Netanyahu government, becoming more and more isolated from the rest of the world.

It feels like eating a toothpick and getting a bit stuck in your teeth leads to one of those infinite loop scenarios.