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Comment Re:Those who cannot remember history (Score 1) 225

For the US, Europe has always been the buffer zone between them and the Soviet Union, that theater on which that war that luckily didn't grow hot would happen.

The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are indeed our buffer zones. NATO was formed to keep Russia from further implementation of Buffer states that are populated and subservient to Russia. There is a certain advantage to have thousands of miles of water around your country There is no real practical way for a buffer state scenario here. And the US doesn't rule the Atlantic and Pacific.

You might want to claim that the US was protecting itself. Yes, in some form it was. It was also protecting allies. Not many western countries wanted to be living under Stalinist/Russian rule. Stalin and his replacements have rather different methods of handling disagreement. Command Economies are not popular among people who prefer to set their own goals. Seeing the difference between East and West Germany, and the Stalinist attempts to starve West Berlin - a Kind of mini holodomor if you will, and the resulting Berlin Airlift, told us what we needed to know about Stalin's plans.

Claiming that you're protecting your shield and getting angry that your hands have gone too little and weak to carry it is funny, but pathetic.

Don't mistake trolling for anger. and your little hands comment is kinda weird. I thoroughly enjoy pissing you and your ilk off, it feeds me.

Now to weakness - probably not our time to fall yet. Countries do not stay at or near the top forever, and that's a fact. Too much competition, and the so called "Grand Experiment" here in the US will eventually fail. There is no Roman Empire today. There is no British Empire today. No Soviet Union. The question is what will replace the US when that eventually happens?

Of today's players - who do you want to replace the US, and hold the power against the other countries that want the position. Name it. A question of utmost simplicity, no trolling, no humor, no little hands, no patheticness. No name calling. Name the country.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 0) 87

It's easy to have unique keys in your spreadsheet so that you can easily relate information on different sheets to one another. The problem is, actually doing the processing that a SQL server would do trivially is irritating, and then it will be processed slowly every time. Whatever Excel does or doesn't cache, it isn't enough. You can do big complicated things, but they work slowly, and maintaining it is irritating at best. When you do complicated things either your formulas get long, or you wind up having to write code, or in fact often it's both. At that point you're way better off IMO doing it in something else so that at least performance is good when you're done, and you never have to screw with editing a long formula.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 1) 87

But, is 2e7 cells really that many? If I spent 5 minutes brainstorming I could probably think of 20 pieces of metadata you'd want in columns of a spreadsheet tracking financial transactions

That's exactly why it should be in a database and not a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are best when you have a reasonably limited number of columns. It's also a horrible PITA to use them as a relational database (it's more or less possible, but you don't want to do it) so hiding pieces of that complexity in other sheets in order to limit the data the user interfaces with on the main sheet is just a lot of extra work you wouldn't have to do if you used another solution.

I'm mostly surprised that Google Sheets chokes on what feels like a fairly small amount of data. My best guess is that it's some insane formulas that it struggles with more than the number of cells.

It doesn't really matter where it fails, if Excel can do it and Sheets can't then Google has to admit inferiority to Microsoft which is never a good look.

Comment Re:Those who cannot remember history (Score 1) 225

Sorry, but you sound incredibly butt hurt and whiny.

Lets base our foreign policy on who was mean to me online ...

Yeah, that's the ticket!

Perhaps I'm just pointing out who is propping you up. One h8er at a time.

Not expecting individuals to grok that necessarily, but no butt-hurt here, just Enjoying watching where y'all are heading.

Comment Re:Europe has itself to blame for this (Score 1) 225

You're attributing to me, that which I'm attributing to political leaders after the fall of the Soviet Union.

I re-read your post. You are correct, and I was way off. I dunno if I posted before my first cup of coffee, but my reading comprehension was really bad. Mea Maxima Culpa!

I thought Russia might be able to change its spots, but their actions starting in the late 200x showed otherwise.

When Putin came to the helm, it was over. He was KGB.One does not leave KGB or the ideology except by death, or alphabet soup name change.

And while not quite communist, it isn't all that different in practice from before the fall of the USSR, A small class of extreme privilege, and the rest of the country.

Let me repeat Pug Ismay's characterization of NATO: "US in, Germany down, Russia out" NATO succeeded for a long time, but it's not clear to me now NATO is working. Hungary & Turkey have at various times been the primary impediment to NATO consensus on various missions.

Turkey always seemed like an odd fit into NATO. Hungary could be playing with fire. In my assessment of the situation today, the Russian Federation today is not the Soviet Union. Can they come to dominate Europe, or at least create a Stalinesque vision of buffer states? Probably not. I do not think they have enough power. Their difficulties in Ukraine show some serious weaknesses. A country that teaches about the Holodomor in their history classes might just fight back. I would expect most EU countries would also fight back.

Replying after finishing that first cup today. 8^)

Comment It could be worth it (Score 4, Interesting) 57

If they end up somehow building strong AI, then the investment will pay off in huge multiples and will absolutely be worth it.

If they don't manage to create strong AI, but manage to create a better search engine that somehow replaces Google, then it will be worth the investment (for comparison, Google profit is on the order of $100 billion per year).

There are a lot of other potential products that could bring heavy revenue, even without strong AI. AirBnB has $2billion a year in net profit, which isn't great but it's conceivable that even with the current crappy AI product, OpenAI could make a reasonable amount of revenue. With billions of potential customers, they don't need to make a lot of money off each person.

Comment Re:Blaming a single cause (Score 2) 70

Here is how the researchers themselves say it:

We contend that reduced water availability, accompanied by substantially drier conditions, may have led to population dispersal from major Harappan centers, while acknowledging that societal transformation was shaped by a complex interplay of climatic, social, and economic pressures.

Don't conflate the arrogant headline with knowledgeable researchers.

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