The US hasn’t technically been at war since WW2 by US definition technicalities, a system that many Americans seem to enjoy stating when talking about the millions of people killed by the US military and allies since in various invasions and occupations
If elected, she’d be 79 years old when she’d be sworn in as a freshman congressperson. Senate terms are 6 years. Solid shot at another democrat dying in office again with this one
Platner polls well and is much younger and has run very well with young people and progressives. He polls well against the incumbent republican. The talk for months before Mills entered the race was that Schumer was trying to get her to run
Now there’s stuff coming out about Platner and the Maine race may be screwed regardless. Mills is a bad pick anyways. Biden 2020 level pick for the same reason of too old and not setting up younger generations. Even 60 years old is solid for 2-3 terms before you really get scared that they’re going to Dianne Feinstein themselves in office
One of those things where it’s difficult to talk about because conservatives go wild with anything bad about a city in a blue state. A blue city in a red state and they’d have to look up the party association of the city council members and mayor so until they’re widely known as a blue city, they don’t get attention.
Portland is nice. It’s quiet. Things close early. COVID hit Portland and Seattle like a freight train. So there was about a 2 year period where the homeless were a major issue, still a nicer place to live than most red communicaties you drive through. For how bad downtown Seattle and near the water Portland got, drive like 10 minutes away from the dense part of the city and it’s quiet suburbs.
The thing about poor communities along the west coast is that these days, yes people are poor and desperate but go to poor communities in like Arkansas, Indiana, Tenessee, Louisiana. It’s a world of difference. Like east Portland scares suburbanites and then I drive through to grab something I wanted to eat and it just looks like an average suburb where people aren’t paying landscapers to keep everything aesthetic.
It’s an example to me where people visit the US from almost anywhere in the world and be like, “even the poor people are rich.” And it’s about how people manage to have these comparative to their countries: big houses, expensive phones, multiple cars that are pretty big too, a substantial front and backyard
Ya there were problems with homeless people setting up barrel fires for warmth/etc and those getting out of control. Homeless people occasionally posting up dumping all sorts of whatever in residential streets. Occasional hyper aggressive homeless that’s a danger to others surrounding them. But peak COVID was 4-5 years ago. Portland is back to having the common large enough city homeless problem every large enough city has and it’s back to being a relatively quiet sleepy city.
The main knock on Portland is the passive agressive racism that comes with being very close to a mono-color city and the denial from people that racism could be a problem in Portland especially not from themselves a vocal leftist. Better than cities that don’t try. Also I’d say there’s an odd classism in Portland similar to like Paris, France. Intersection of leftist rhetoric but you got to play up your rhetoric and have the correct occupation (and color though people try not to be racist but people in Portland don’t live around very many non-whites. They see them at restaurants) or else get weird treatment.
Portland’ers treat non-white people with the concern of a terminally online social leftist who tries to be culturally sensitive by watching tourism videos of other countries and trying to connect very awkwardly like - I love rice. I know how to use chopsticks. I really enjoy the Djembe. I have a mortar and pestle (big smile and knudge on their shoulder), a molcajete. You’re native, I did my genology a year ago and I’m 1/16th Cherokee - I’m on the rolls - Thanksgiving is so awkward isn’t it? Look at all my Buddhist prayer beads and urns and drums and rugs and paintings and incense and …
Reading how and why to teach reading like that, sounds like a lot of the feel good artsy-infused politicking I felt has been a major fail of the last like 30 years. Like people that grew up on early movies and television grew up and decided family sitcoms and YA novel adaptations would translate to real life
You hear a lot of racist shit in Europe. It’s not as bad in the big cities with large non-white populations but during times of xenophobia/super anti-immigration, the racism goes wild. Outside the big cities, it’s as bad or worse than country USA racism just without the global public microscope
That’s hilarious. This guys got to be stupid or someone in a troll farm trying stir up racial tension in other countries
If you drink, when a store is shutting down and puts everything on sale, the first things to sell out are the alcohol. Act fast
Yup. Unreliable hardware. More expensive hardware than other countries. And what I enjoy hearing as my, I told you so, shitty software. I take a mild amount of joy hearing how much of a struggle all these orgs military or not struggle with complex software projects. Pay some of the worst wages, understaffed, impossible deadlines for the conditions, minimum effort as required by contract, leadership that wants a yes we can rather than this what we can. Every article about government procurement in the last decade has been displays of entertainingly incompete leadership and lack of understanding of what they’re even asking for
What I say about those sideburns!?
In the US it was a wave of Vietnam war movies for a while that ranged from feeling bad about themselves for getting PTSD and ones trying to make it seem heroic. Also stuff like Henry Kissinger gets all the blame and practically no one else in people’s discourse. Iraq/Afghanistan haven’t resulted in the same level of woe is me the invader cinema as Vietnam did. Revisionist westerns had a good amount of the terrible toll on the mind of a colonizer as the great tragedy of the western US genocidal expansion
Sacramento is hijacking local planning, stripping away neighborhood voices, ignoring safety and infrastructure, and handing the keys to corporate developers,” said Councilmember Traci Park, whose district includes the Pacific Palisades and who introduced the resolution to oppose SB 79 alongside Councilmember John Lee of the San Fernando Valley.
Stuff like this is why that high speed rail project is so behind and over budget. In the past local control was fought for because in the past highways were rammed straight through poor neighborhoods but then that local control decentralized it all so much that there became a huge amount of points for NIMBYs to prevent new construction
That plan left areas zoned for single-family homes — representing 72% of the city’s residential land — untouched. An analysisfrom the advocacy group Streets for All, which supports SB 79, found that 45% of the land surrounding L.A.’s “high-quality transit stops” is zoned for single-family homes, duplexes, or parking lots
Though this too is interesting. I’d guess also because of the decentralization of housing and transit authority throughout the state, it’s not very feasible to tie together public transit expansion and upzoning of housing so upzoning near major transit stops probably also primarily effects poorer neighborhoods rather than the public transit light wealthy suburbs. Somehow public transit has to expand into the wealthier suburbs and those wealthier suburbs be upzoned too
Embarrassing. The whole collection of post-FDR congressional and presidential elected democrats are going to be remembered for being a slow burn of out of touch bumbling idiots. 9 years since 2016 and seems like the party has barely shifted since. Embarrassing
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The US wants cutting edge autonomous boats from numerous vendors that are all supposed to play nice in squadrons. No doubt in my mind the, I’m guessing like a dozen, companies out there all making boats intended to be operated autonomously by the US military are being developed with skeleton sized software teams where team members work multiple projects and there’s no time and resources given to them to develop with good practices for long term development and version/configuration management. Without a doubt this whole program umbrella of autonomous naval vessels is a clusterfuck of numerous contractors doing the bare minimum required in their contracts for working together. I bet the teams have bad turnover so the idea of building out and continuously enforcing best practices is a non starter anyways.
I bet the ones overseeing these, politicians/pentagon pencil pushers/captains/admirals can’t even identify whether these companies are doing software development long term sustainably and efficiently. They hire companies rather than people so they wouldn’t even know if they lost their most important developer and the program was obviously doomed to anyone else left on the software teams. Just hacking away for contract renewals until it finally becomes so much of a mess that it finally gets cancelled as too costly and increasingly obsolete because of how slow development had/will become
Dictatorships fall when they can’t keep promises to pay and feed their military anything of worth. Any attack on Mexico would be another major hit to US financing ability like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were. The US has had to deprioritize development of a distinct navy 6th gen fighter jet to financially support the air force program. They scrapped plans for Zumwault destroyers for a new cheaper design. E7 AEW&C is on the chopping block which anything AEW&C is important for drones
Russia and Ukraine right now display the problems in difference in personnel numbers. For the amount of drones being manufacturered for Russia and Ukraine, on the front lines Ukraines lack of soldiers on the ground leaves gaps for Russian forces to push forward and create opportunities for encirclement. Mass production drones are not yet a replacement for human soldiers. Mass production drones don’t go very fast and far and they can’t Cary that heavy of munitions. Ground drones are far behind air based in terrain traversal. Large drones are expensive, use expensive munitions, and the US is slow to build things. The US unmanned systems are not good enough yet to replace a ground army and because of the Ukraine Russia war, drone counter technologies and strategies are being learned across the world like how the first Gulf War taught the world the importance of AEW&C
What swarm of AI killlbots does the US have that can take out the military of a country of 130 million people and successfully occupy and control this populace? With what money? How do they finance that with a worsening debt to GDP ratio? How well will US bonds sell to international buyers after going nuclear on Mexico? Go nuclear on Mexico and the wind. Managing the fallout drifting towards the US. There is no avoiding conscription. There is a reason the military is currently trying very hard with recruitment advertising in gaming tournaments and what not. War has not progressed in any country where machines can replace people
For the technological advantage of the US and Israel over Iran and Yemen, the US had to expend a large percentage of their THAAD stockpile to fend off missiles. Southern Mexico is the heart of the Mexican population. The US would need to defend its air assets across distances pushing well past a thousand of miles. It would have to expend a substantial amount of missiles to destroy other missiles that target US missiles and US infrastructure and sea vessels. A lot of expensive equipment. A lot of money. It would not be a quick war.
People thought Ukriane would fall within a month. Then people thought the Russian economy would collapse within a year and Putin deposed. It became a lot more murky. Current US (not previous US and not even Trump 1st era advisors thought Iran was quick work) and Israel thought it would be quick work to disable Iran and Iranian missiles wouldn’t be an issue for Israeli and American missile defenses. Pretty high percentage but enough makes it through to be an issue. So Iran and Israel, unsettled and the Houthis are back to shooting ships in the red sea and Israel beven after years of US, Israeli, and Saudi technological superiority. Probably a restart of the war in the near future as Iran replenishes it’s missile stockpile and defense systems through regional suppliers and domestic.
War with Mexico would not be quick. It would not be cheap. It would not be without major human ground forces. It would be the perfect opportunity for war in the pacific and middle east as the US just had to commit major resources to dealing with Mexico and suppress domestic unrest. All incredibly expensive for a country whose finances are built on the expectations and faith of international treasury buyers for American debt. The major international credit agencies would undoubtedly downgrade the US credit rating again complicating feeding the active American military and benefits for the retired
People concerned about the billions in recent years to Ukraine and Israel. Mexico and the international complications from opportunities made by the huge American blunder would mean trillions from the US to try to manage major wars at the southern border war, the war in Europe, the war in the middle east, and likely war in the pacific
A war with Mexico would be disastrous. Yes the US military and military industrial complex is much larger but Mexico is a huge country in land and population that has a much larger and diverse economy than Iraq and Afghanistan. They have a large population of people with engineering education and a large population of those employed in manufacturing. Mexico doesn’t have an incredibly huge domestic arms industry but it exists and what they do have is a huge manufacturing industry that I’m certain they would be able to take advantage of to churn out anything that can be used for war.
The loss of the US to Mexican manufacturing would mean significantly higher inflation and a huge increase to national debt that would also contribute to an eventual increase in inflation. Long term it would also mean Mexico joins the arms race for at least ground armies and missiles. Mexico does have a strong and growing tech sector. Mexico does not have a large military because they have not needed one. The only theoretical threat would be the US but that hasn’t been threatened in a very long time. A US invasion would motivate Mexico to being the regions South Korea but possibly much larger long term. Domestic resources and highly educated people and amount of people for active and reserve forces
The north is a lot more sparsely populated but I’d expect that to be where things trap out at with constant insurgency across the southwestern united states and northern mexico. War with either Mexico or Canada would destabilize the US domestically but Mexico probably far worse. By the time a sufficiently sized invasion force for the US military made it to southern mexico, bridges and cities would be boobytrapped and fortified to hell.
I’d question what every other country south of the US would do. Not active participant but proxy to ship arms from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran to Mexico now that international sanctions would not matter to Mexico. I doubt Brazil would be happy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the opportunity to grow their domestic arms industry and see their missiles in action and gain data. See a huge return of Brazil to the international arms market. Progressively send out their old stockpile to make way for their ongoing modernization efforts.
US economic and stockpile disaster in a time when one of the largest concerns is how bad the acquisition and production levels are for militaries in the US and western europe. How old and regularly in maintenance and need for replacement large naval ships. How expensive the missiles shot out of missile defense systems are. The maintenance needs that will be needed from the stress placed on actively fought against naval vessels and aircraft
Just as problematic is what this would mean for US military acquisition and development. It would shift back to ground forces when the US wants to focus on Navy and air. Disaster for the US and allies in the Pacific. Attacking Mexico would long term make the cost of maintaining the ground and air army just domestically much more expensive. It’d have to be larger now with a strong enemy with a huge shared land and maritime border. Plus how Brazil can benefit from a US-Mexico war. Alliances that can form in defense against a crazy US that’s gone back to cold war and earlier meddling in Latin America.
What would happen is early US war effort makes huge gains. Stockpile of missiles drop to levels where legal mandates of required stockpile levels near or are breached. Military ends up in a legal and logistical back and forth of can they fire more and why can’t we build missiles as fast as Russia and China. US populace unrest would make anti-Vietnam war protest look small. Riots would make post-MLK assassination look small. Mexico rapidly develops production for small cheap explosives and drones and develops international strategies to have international arms make it to Mexico. Brazil quickly ascends back to being a major international arms dealer. The US eventually has to withdraw from Mexico because of the cost of war and occupation of Mexico and domestic unrest
US military now has to primarily focus on the Americas rather than the Pacific, eastern Europe, and the Middle East because Mexico and Brazil are now hypercharged more than anytime in history to compete with the US. Their populations motivated. Mexico eventually joins BRICS. Major implications all over the world as the US just post-WW2 France and UK’ed themselves where those two trying to reassert their international empires without the US and failed by the 60s and took positions as US vassals. US wouldn’t become a vassal of any, but it’d have to pull back internationally majorly
Even a short attack and retreat like Iran would force a shift to domestic army instead of overseas. Mexico would instantly bump up their military expenses up to higher single digit percentages of the countries GDP and go on an acquisition spree while building up domestic arms industry
Americans would face high inflation, austerity, possibly high unemployment as hostility to American products and services increases. Another major decline in tourism. Huge cost of military benefits pay for anyone that was deployed to the active war zone, injured, survivor benefits, or just recruited to shore up needs domestically while maintaining overseas personnel. The US conservatives would have a marketing win but the whole of the US an international strength and influence loss. American people lose.
Nobel peace prize has been a joke for a very long time now like damn near all the lights camera flash red carpet awards of the past century
Ghettos to me are just the natural destination. People these days try to conflate immigrants all as wealthy immigrants to downplay immigrant successes in upward mobility but pretty sure most non-white people across Europe and the US came over as refugees/asylum seekers usually from wars from invading Americans and Europeans. My impression of what immigrants across Europe are mad about and it’s all former colonial holdings that were Muslim countries and have been proxy war central since after the Ottoman empire fell.
They’re broke. They’re traumatized from a warzone and/or poverty (level of poverty unfamiliar to Americans and Europeans) and then traumatized again from the uprooting their life from tgeir community to another country where they will undoubtedly face some level of racism and language barrier
They’re broke so of course they’ll end up in poor communities and communities of similar background where they can function day to day with less language barrier issues. Language barrier assimilation. Classic and ongoing solution for people is their children learn the language in elementary/middle school and as elementary/middle school children, they’re helping their parents fill out paperwork and talk to doctors/school admins/whoever. Why are children of immigrants so resilient and resourceful but oftenly not so whimsical as kids with long lineages in a country, those children often are doing adult stuff from a very early age to support old people in the community that have trouble learning the countries language. Early age responsibilities mentally age kids quick
Then as the children grow up make money and the neighborhood economically stabilizes from a large community of hard working immigrants, now the white people want to move in for all the high quality food and grocery stores. Not the best landscaping and fresh paint buildings, but possibly the most convienent neighborhoods to live in now that the neighborhoods economically grown and stabilized.
So convienent and ethnic while still mostly anyone under the age of like 50 can speak the countries primary language. There’s very little active efforts to force assimilation. It’s just children that grow up watching the same media as all the other children wanting to fit in growing up. I don’t know what assimilation program even means when Europeans keep talking about it’s necessity and using the US as a measuring stick of assimilation program success. The US barely does anything in that regard. Just let’s it play out over a couple generations
I don’t care how you feel about these countries, economic interdependence and globalism has been advertised as the path to preventing wars. The idea of pitting India against China was always messed up. It’s pretty much just trying to get former colonial/genocide targets of the western world to try to kill each other for us to take advantage of the remnants.
Better relations between China and India means far less likely chance of war which would be devastating even if though such a war wouldn’t make most of us here all that in our feelings. Like how you don’t see people all in their feelings about war in the border regions of Congo and Rwanda. Or the Sudan civil war. The multidecade meddling in Somalia to the current state of Somalian civil war. The civil war in Ethiopia/Tigray was practical non-news for being so deadly.
We should want good international relations between these countries. And it’s not like India doesn’t have good reason to be wary of closer American and European relations
T&T not giving this energy about verifying whether all the people killed by the US on small boats are drug traffickers. Maybe they want to be the next Israel or Rwanda as the regional hammer for the the US