They have tons of competitors. They all just choose to suck.

It’s pretty wild just how much dependence the Soviet space program had on Korolev personally that once he died the whole thing just fell apart. Having one guy driving the technical side and securing the political side is possible if you have a sufficiently talented person (like Korolev) but it’s inherently unstable.

That said the Soviets did do a lot of really cool space stuff, including getting probes to land and photograph the surface of Venus (which is an extremely hostile environment).

Minivan full of usb keys. Probably still the fastest data transfer method too.

This is the kind of culinary aggression I can get behind .

This is pretty cool. They didn’t adopt solar to this extent under good circumstances - the background is that years of warfare degraded their power grid to the point where anything but extremely local generation is hopelessly unreliable. Well, there’s nothing more local than a solar panel and the external input required for it to run (sunlight) can’t be blocked.

They want to prosecute peope in open court so using the NSA to id people would be inconvenient (but not impossible).

That would actually be massive escalation in more than the obvious ways. Gulf states are the ones buying up most US debt (which is piling up extremely quickly). This is a large part of their leverage to secure continues US military protection. Should the US Navy be used to block the straight to enforce some kind of all-or-nothing approach, it’s going to be cause a lot of knock on effects in the bond market. We do be living in interesting times!

Neither of those things has anything to do with this. You can eliminate the NASA budget and you still won’t have healthcare lol. You have to actually fight for that.

The moment anyone else moves to assist he will simply bail out and walk away. He was actually dumb enough to say that out loud too. It would be strategically stupid and politically suicidal for anyone else to get involved.

Centralized problems are generally easier to solve than distributed problems. Depending on their architecture moving to an EU cloud provider could range from tricky but manageable to very painful , but it’s a centralized IT problem that can be attacked and solved. Getting every retail vendor to support Wero is much harder, and is being solved apparently.

China is getting Iranian oil right now and the US isn’t going to control Iran. Why would either of them commit to this? Pretending like you solved the problem when none of the incentives line up is ridiculous. Either of them could militarily defend Iran if they want to without commiting to a security guarantees for Iran. So why would they bind themselves unnecessarily?

Yes they could do that. But why would they commit to that?

Lol so now Russia China and Europe have to jump into militarily attack the US ? This is your plan? Well sounds solved to me.

The 1/3rd of eligible voters who didn’t vote in 2024 aren’t MAGA . They’re just some combination of dissolutioned and ignorant. They’re also not up to the task of navigating the pathetic state of the modern information environment.

Is that really what he said? Lol

This is basically just the Obama Iran deal. It was working pretty much exactly like this until Trump tore it up and began in multiple rounds attacking Iran.

After this war, Iran has no reason to sign such a deal especially since Trump and Israel will just tear it up whenever they want. Iran needs security guarantees which your deal doesn’t provide.

His field isn’t that big in total.

In a same world after a hack like this the mere possibility that he was now compromised would be enough to get him removed as FBI director.

Best I could ever be is a semi-renowned derptologist.

He says other nations will have to guard and police the Strait of Hormuz as necessary, after his attacks on the country prompted Iran to target vessels in the crucial world shipping lane.

Yeah that’s why nobody wanted to touch this mess with a 10 ft pole.