Nothing wrong with it as a method, so long as it makes some predictions we can then test for.

GDP is basically a measure of how much work is getting done. So, if you save your money, you’re not contributing to it. The moment you spend some, that spent money goes into the calculation.

Whether this constitutes any kind of real “growth” or not in your economy is a different topic. There are already debates on how useful GDP is as a useable measurement.

Spending lots of the money you have saved up in your sovereign wealth fund is a good way to keep your economy afloat. Can also just do what the WW1-2 powers did and just borrow a lot if necessary, assuming there are people you can borrow from.

Despite all the fearmongering, it’s so far proved unnecessary. Ji is going to look at it in terms of cost/benefit, and as things sit, the costs are high and the benefit of getting a leveled Taiwan is minimal. The diplomatic costs in particular are fairly prohibitive, with China investing so much recently in trying to be a predictable, stable and peaceful world power that other countries can feel good partnering with.

It would be vastly preferable for all parties involved to maintain the status quo and continue to work towards peaceful reunification in the future. Assuming Taiwan doesn’t do anything stupid, this patient approach has no real drawbacks. It did work several times in the past, after all.

You might be interested in trying a polyphasic sleep cycle. Instead of one big 8 hour sleep each day, you could try two 4 hour sleeps. So, you can have your middle of the night sleep, and maybe another one after you get home from work or eat dinner or something.

Supposedly polyphasic was pretty common prior to the industrial revolution. Nothing really wrong with it if your schedule can accommodate it.

Not off the top of my head. Cooking is frequently a recreational hobby though, it’s essentially an art form. So I think it’s about equally likely that dancing, painting or making music fade away.

You’re missing an English dude with a huge bow.

Most generally useful single ability? Probably the Flash’s speedforce. Being able to get whatever you want done in a fraction of the time has broad utility. Plus you’re well equipped for any supervillain attacks.

There’s a difference between “we won’t trade with you” and “we will intercept all the goods other people try to trade with you”. It’s the difference between embargo and blockade. Blockade is generally considered an act of war, embargo is not.

That said, I do agree that double standards are common and a problem.

Worth noting that it is illegal in Russia to criticize the war, so saying you don’t support it is probably a good way to get yourself sent to the front lines in an infantry uniform. So, it’s difficult to gauge how many people actually genuinely support it or not.

Yeah, made the hair on the back of my neck stand up a little bit. The fridge door would function here as a large lever, and a cat’s arm is not particularly sturdy.

Blocking resources from entering a country is a form of attack. We criticize Israel over blocking the transport of goods into Gaza, we also need to criticize Egypt for halting the goods into Israel in the run-up to the Six Day War. It’s unacceptable to block the goods going towards an entire region, regardless of which side is doing it.

Just need to edit the main body. The coalition did not actually declare war first, they just closed the Strait of Tiran first, when it had been made clear that would be an act of war. Details matter though.

There’s a reason so many poker players wear sunglasses.

Anyway, try to preempt your emotional reaction. There’s always many different flavors of reactions we can have to something really negative, which normally depends heavily on mood. By default, this all just runs unconsciously, but it doesn’t have to. Of the many potential options, like anger, sadness, condescending disdain, arrogant bemusement or surprise, you can try to consciously pick one and channel your feelings towards it instead of just letting your feelings run wild.

Or you can just practice a proper poker face, but that can be really hard. Doable though, just takes a lot of practice. Playing poker would be an effective way to get that practice.

Is there thinking among the locals that a big war might break out? Or do more people think it will just be small border skirmishes?

You know getting a progressive President wouldn’t have gotten us any closer to abortion rights? Unlike Trump, we actually follow our separation of powers principles, which means the Pres has limited authority. You expect us to just ignore court orders and the legislature like Trump does or something?

A law enshrining abortion rights would require a filibuster-proof Senate majority and control of the House.

I’m all for being critical of the DNC, but we should be clear-eyed on how governing actually works. Also, pretty hard to say Harris was less progressive than Obama, her Senate voting record was pretty damn progressive.

There’s degrees of difference. Wheat goes through a new generation every year. Faster if you have a greenhouse. People go through a new generation every few decades. Wheat can thus change 20-30 times faster than people.

A century is, at minimum, 100 different “iterations” of the wheat genome. A century is ~3 “iterations” of humans.

Agreed. I understand people’s desire to look at the fact that both women lost, but we should also remember the fact that they both failed to unify their own coalition. This is a pretty big deal, if you can’t even unify your own coalition, your prospects are pretty damn challenging.

That charisma element is very valuable for that, as is tossing your own faction members enough policy bones to satisfy them even if you’re not fully pleasing them. Clinton and Harris both failed to do this, and took their coalitions a little bit too much for granted. Harris came close with the Walz pick, but Gaza weighed very heavily on her with progressives. She needed to do more to distance herself from Biden to thoroughly win them over.

Ultimately, I think our problem stemmed from them not understanding the appeal of the far right. This caused them to underestimate the strength of their opponent and fail to run as dynamically and aggressively as necessary. They played it too safe. With Harris in particular, I wanted to see the prosecutor prosecute the case against Trump, with the voters as the jury. Instead her stump speeches and interviews remained frustratingly soft. Hilary did this too.

We the people can look at Trump as some big joke, and make fun of him and his supporters as much as we want. But the opposition candidate has to take him deathly seriously, and give him the gravity he is due as a potentially fascist leader of the worlds most powerful military. That is no laughing matter.

This sort of speech by AOC is what we needed more of, and even it is a little bit soft: https://youtu.be/OO7SE4Zpd9s

Bernie could have done it too, I think. He did come fairly close in the primary, even though he was fighting upstream against lingering negative sentiment about “socialists” in middle America. I think the country has changed enough in the past 10 years, partly due to his trailblazing, that that’s no longer as much as an albatross as it once was though.

Once an authoritarian state reaches a certain degree of power, they’re no longer vulnerable to their own populations. They just have too much control over the information, domestic security, economy, etc. Hypothetically you can imagine: if everyone who stands up gets their head cut off, and that goes on for 500 years, this will create a very different sort of population than we are accustomed to.

At that point they can only really be toppled by a foreign power or an uprising from their own elites. The peasants are simply no longer a factor.

A peace plan was always a foolish promise, the two sides remain too far apart in what they are willing to accept. There is no amount of pressure that Trump is willing to exert on the two parties combined that will overcome all the hurdles to some sort of compromise, unless we want to get directly involved with our own troops.

Ukraine requires a hard security guarantee, something with more teeth than the Budapest Memorandum. (which specified no actual actions from the signatories, just a vague promise) That is non-negotiable for them, not getting one leaves them in pretty much the same position they were in when the war started, except with less land–not good prospects for future survival. Trump has been unwilling to promise this, though, because it could pull the US actively into a war in the future with no benefit for him. This, of course, is exactly what would be so appealing about one to the Ukrainians, it would be a formidable security arrangement.

Putin requires a significant victory he can bring home, not something half-assed. His support among his fellow elites, who have made sacrifices for this war, hinges on making that worth something. He needs more of the land, at very least the 4 Oblasts he has formally annexed into the Russian Federation. Otherwise he is literally leaving what they now see as formal parts of Russia in enemy hands and saying “ok I guess we’re done now”. If he can’t secure them (he has around half currently), it means all these losses were basically for nothing, and that is a dire threat to an authoritarian leader. This would put him in an absolutely horrible, nigh-suicidal position where he would have to stay away from windows for the rest of his life.

So, it’s basically existential for both sides. They also both retain possible routes to victory, it’s not out of the question for either of them. Ukraine could try to outlast the Russian war economy, war economies are not sustainable forever. Russia could try to continue their slow progress on the ground, they still have more troops. It’s not easy to bridge these two sides, no amount of money or resources or soft pressure could bribe them away from their primary objectives.