See my other response to peregrin5 but in addition you’re assuming rational actors all around. Actual reality is far more messy with many of those involved making decisions based more on feelings than any in depth reasoning. States stay together because there’s no obvious alternative. There’s no mechanism for a state to leave the union and doing so requires solving many problems that have no obvious answers.
That’s great in theory but just as unrealistic in practice for California as it always has been for Texas. The single biggest stumbling block for any state to leave the union for any reason is the military. Most of the other problems can be resolved within the borders of the state, but the disposition of existing and theoretical new military hardware, personnel, and bases will always be a sticking point even assuming the federal government and the other states are willing to let them leave.
Any attempt to leave the US that has any hope of succeeding would be a very long and protracted process that would make Brexit look breakneck in comparison. We’re talking at least a couple decades at a minimum.
It’s either that or another civil war and that has so many variables I’m not sure anyone has any hope of predicting how that would turn out.
Unfortunately this runs into constitutional problems. While the spineless subhuman creatures in congress and the supreme court seem to have no problem with Trump and his administration ignoring the constitution I fully expect them to come down hard on any state that does so (at least in cases that go against Trump and his policies).
Yeah, the article is right, but for all the wrong reasons. China is taking the lead globally less because of anything it’s doing but more because of what everyone else is. In many ways the US was doomed from the moment one of our two political parties decided its future was best served by appealing to the ignorant and uneducated.
The GOP has spent decades attacking our education system and painting experts and the educated as the enemy all because they had the temerity to say the emperor had no clothes and point out the many ways in which conservative dogma fails. China got incredibly lucky to have just the right economy and connections in the 80s to become everybody’s outsourced manufacturing hub and has further benefited by the US attacking its own educational and research institutions.
China hasn’t so much sprinted past the US as they have maintained their steady pace while the US shot itself in the head because the right hand wanted to be the one in charge of everything.
Trump and the MAGA idiots are just the natural progression of the policies the GOP embraced starting all the way back with Nixon and his southern strategy and accelerated by Reagan and his economic policies.
It turns out it’s hard to be a leader in a technological society when you put the dumbest people you can find in charge of things.
You’re right, essentially all so called Christian holidays and traditions are just rebranded older traditions from other religions. People were far more amenable to converting to or at least tolerating Christianity if they could continue their existing holidays and traditions largely unchanged, so Christian churches came up with various explanations for why those holidays were now Christian. It’s why for instance Christmas is in December suspiciously close to the winter solstice despite all evidence pointing to Jesus being born at a different time of the year. Sometimes they don’t even bother with trying to pretend like with Christmas trees and the Easter bunny (also the name Easter).
Trump doesn’t have enough pull yet to make that happen, and it’s unlikely he will anytime soon. He could manage to get the US to sit out the fight, but actively committing US forces to help Russia isn’t going to happen.
Considering that Putin got his ass absolutely beat by a small country using second hand and surplus military hardware he’d have to be an absolute moron to pick a fight with NATO. Literally the only card he has to play is nukes and that’s kind of an all or nothing sort of move. If nukes are off the table any concerted push by NATO is going to be mopping up in moscow within a few months.
That’s also assuming the US doesn’t get serious about it, but considering Putin’s puppet in the Whitehouse there’s a pretty good chance the US would quit NATO and so wouldn’t factor in. Even without the US though Russia has demonstrated the rest of NATO is far more than sufficient to handle Russia.
Fluoride in toothpaste does help as well but it only does so much, and yes some toothpaste brands also don’t include fluoride. To get the most out of fluoridated toothpaste you need to pair it with a better diet. Most Americans eat a diet that’s incredibly heavy in sugars and carbs as compared to Europe. That’s part of the reason why many European countries found little benefit to adding fluoride to their drinking water, their rates of tooth decay were already significantly less than in the US due mostly to dietary differences.
There are two ways to prevent tooth decay. First is the easy way which is to put fluoride in the drinking water. It’s easy and protects everyone, but particularly the poorer segments of the population that might struggle with things like preventative dentist appointments.
The second way is the hard way which is to modify your diet to avoid foods high in sugars and carbs and to prefer more proteins and fiber. This is the approach some European countries take.
If you do neither you will get significantly increased rates of tooth decay.
Save time and just classify them all as Trumpgate. Basically spans the entirety of 2016 to 2028 (and if we’re in the worst possible timeline long after that as well). Trump was already one of the worst presidents in recent memory, but now he’s shooting for the worst of all time. He’s going to go down as the president that either destroyed the US or nearly did. At minimum I’m expecting him to be remembered as the cause of the second great depression as well as a significant contributor to instability and war in Europe and Asia (I would include the middle east as well, but that’s pretty much business as usual there).
Teams meetings aren’t really that much worse than Zoom, it’s mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that’s significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.
An organization , “team”, channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can’t I completely silence or ignore a “team”, channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren’t there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow “reply to” option? Why can’t anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic “teams” that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.
Can’t stop the signal.
Every democracy in the world should be issuing travel warnings for the US.
You’re assuming a single rational actor. The current US government is neither rational nor unified in policy. Whether someone gets in or not is down to the whims of individual ICE agents and whether they’re detained or not is down to the whims of individual ICE agents, so you get one reasonable guy who says “sure, come on in”, and then you get one xenophobe who says “need to get all these damn foreigners out of our country” and then you have this situation.
Normally you have a sane leadership setting and enforcing uniform policies. The current leadership is entirely focused on generating sound bites and demolishing everything within reach. Thus individual agents have been handed almost complete authority with almost no oversight.
Maybe, possibly, some day. Shit or get off the pot. Stop threatening consequences and actually do something for once.
Nope! We’re in late stage capitalism now where the game is a race to see which mega-corp can merger and acquisition itself into being the only company in existence where they’ll be free to squeeze every last cent out of their customers slaves.
Now that they’ve got their puppets into place in all the government offices that could actually prevent us descending into the plot of every cyberpunk dystopian story ever written, they’re going to milk it for everything it’s worth, and the room temperature IQ morons that voted them into power will cheer their enslavement every step of the way because Reagan convinced them all that government regulations are the real problem.
Microsoft’s requirements for Windows 11 include a 1GHz or faster CPU with at least two cores, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage,
All of this is no problem and essentially any computer manufactured in the last couple decades can meet these requirements. They’re effectively irrelevant for this discussion.
Secure Boot capability, and TPM 2.0 compatibility.
This is the problem right here. Pretty much every last computer you hear about that isn’t compatible it’s one or both of these, almost always the TPM 2.0 module.
That of course is if the reason you aren’t “upgrading” is because the hardware isn’t supported. For a great many of us our hardware is supported, we just don’t want all the bullshit anti-features Microsoft has crammed into Windows 11. Windows 10 was already bad enough with it’s constant telemetry spyware, that annoying Cortana garbage shoehorned in anywhere they could manage, the absolute atrocity that they turned the start menu search function into, and the annoying Teams and OneDrive integrations that randomly reinstalled and re-enabled themselves after updates.
Then MS went and had to cram in even more spyware by way of their horrible copilot garbage. All for what? What are we getting with 11 that’s better than 10? What feature justifies that upgrade? Nothing, that’s the answer. There’s no reason at all that 11 needed to be made.
In other words it was the sales department doing what they always do, pulling complete bullshit out of their ass and then expecting the engineering team to deliver it.
Whether college prices have risen in the last five to ten years is irrelevant because they rose precipitously over the last fifty years. There was a time when you could pay for college with the money earned in a minimum wage job without needing to take out a student loan. The fact that it now takes multiple years worth of wages (for any job someone without a college degree is likely able to get) is an issue.
Economics in general. California is responsible for a significant chunk of the entire US GDP as well as being one of the primary shipping hubs. My point was more along the lines that these other problems are tractable, you could for instance negotiate trade deals between the rest of the US and California. The military on the other hand is a much tougher problem akin to unscrambling an egg. There’s no obvious way to disentangle California from the greater US military.