Your attitude is precisely why Trump is going to declare himself God-Emperor Of America and send the left to Happy Camps.

Less coal burned in America means more coal for China to burn.

Most of the areas where Russia is fighting are full of ethnic Russians and they literally asked for Russian peacekeepers in 2022 because Kiev kept attacking them.

And it's quite likely that Trump will soon be invading Canada to protect the Western provinces from Ottawa. I suspect he's already set that up with Carney, since it will give him the most valuable parts of the country at very little cost.

Why would you send new tanks to Ukraine when they'll be destroyed in a few hours on the front lines? Might as well get a few hours of use out of the old ones that would otherwise be scrapped.

That's not even vaguely what I said, so it's unclear if this is some kind of language issue or the result of a disability, but I'm just feeling worse and worse for you. You somehow believe the cold war was about communism?

I'd say Microsoft won that war, and everyone else lost.

Imagine if instead of the left spending the last ten years campaigning to ban Christmas and force women to allow men into their bathrooms, they'd been campaigning against the power of billionaires.

If the Woke left didn't exist, billionaires would have had to invent it.

Oh, hang on, in many cases they did.

Well, I'll have to admit, I didn't have "learning that someone on Slashdot believes that the Cold War was a myth" on my bingo card for today.

Wow, I had no idea you were dumb enough to fall for the Red Scare.

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

US Solicitor General John Sauer disagrees.

In the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter, on Monday, Sauer said this isn't true when Justice Kagan pushed him on it. She said that the Founders clearly intended to have a separation of powers, to which he basically said "Yeah, but with the caveat that they created the 'unitary executive'", by which he seemed to mean that they intended the president to be able to do pretty much anything.

Kagan responded with a nuanced argument about how we have long allowed Congress to delegate limited legislative and judicial functions to the executive branch in the way we allow Congress to delegate the power to create and evaluate federal rules to executive-branch agencies, but that that strategy rests on a "deal" that both limits the scope of said rulemaking and evaluative functions and isolates them to the designated agency. She said that breaking that isolation by allowing the president detailed control over those functions abrogated and invalidated the deal, unconstitutionally concentrating power in ways that were clearly not intended by the Founders.

Sauer disagreed. I'll stop describing the discussion here and invite you to listen to it. The discussion is both fascinating and very accessible, and the linked clip is less than seven minutes long.

The court seems poised to take Sauer's view, which I think is clearly wrong. If they do, it's going to come back and bite conservatives hard when we get an active liberal president, as we inevitably will someday if the Trump administration fails to end democracy in the US.

What's very sad is that we already went through all of this and learned these lessons 150 years ago. After 100 years of experience with a thoroughly-politicized executive branch, we passed the Pentleton Civil Service Reform act in 1883 specifically to insulate most civil servants from presidential interference. Various other laws have subsequently been passed to create protections for federal workers and to establish high-level positions that are explicitly protected from the president. SCOTUS seems bent on overturning all of that and returning us to the pre-Pendleton era.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it's looking we're gonna repeat a lot of bad history before we re-learn those 19th-century lessons.

If it was reasonable I presume companies wouldn't be complaining because it would be as cheap as or cheaper than setting up their own payment system.

Not necessarily even that. Some friends tried to break into the movie business in London but pretty much everywhere required them to work for months as unpaid interns to have a chance of a paid job. Middle-class kids living with their parents could afford to do that, but poor kids couldn't afford to live in London that long without an income, and probably not even on the income they'd get from their first paid job if they held out that long.

It's another way that poor kids are kept out of certain lines of work.

China is a serious country. The West is (mostly) not.

The economics is largely irrelevant. China could be in just as bad a state as the West if they put people in universities based on sex or skin colour rather than merit, taught them that people can change sex just by saying so, and continually told them that China was evil and Chinese people should just disappear and be replaced by Indians and Africans.

> in many parts of the country schools are literally falling apart while good teachers leave the profession because they cannot afford to live on a teaching salary

Meanwhile, if you look at education outcomes against spending over the last few decades, outcomes in the US have become worse and worse as spending has risen.