We passed Idiocracy some time back. We're now in a region where satirists and humourists are simply no longer able to function without sounding saner.

True, but to be fair, the scientists, engineers, and scholars are largely fleeing the country, the tech industry is in a massive slump (agriculture is the only sector growing jobs according to the last reliable official figures), and there's a political need to create the impression that the country isn't in a bad way.

Vietnam required a draft. If the US tries to actually conquer and occuply Venezuela it would too. Canada or Mexico as well.

The US has gotten by with decapitation strikes, the same thing Russia tried to do to Ukraine, and only a couple of actual occupations supported by international allies and a lot of contractors. An actual war against an actual determined opponent, especially without allied support, would absolutely require conscription and even then would probably grind down into another Vietnam or Ukraine.

Of course they're going to do things of consequence. Most of the US's allies are trying to de-Americanize their military and other supply chains as quickly as they can. This will encourage that even more. The US's non-allies can now point to renewed American aggression and sphere of influence foreign relations to justify their own actions. Unaligned countries will likely start cozying up to China for protection. Several countries are likely to be pushed in the direction of developing nuclear weapons of their own.

Nobody is going to invade Texas over Venezuela. That doesn't mean there won't be consequences.

Precisely zero of those other buildings host the security council or has the facilities for that.

Seems like feature.

... detailed in a book with many citations written "by liberals, for liberals": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Abundance is a nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025. The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. It became a New York Times Bestseller.
        Klein and Thompson argue that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development. They write that American liberals have been more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development since the 1970s. They say that Democrats have focused on the process rather than results and favored stasis over growth by backing zoning regulations, developing strict environmental laws, and tying expensive requirements to public infrastructure spending.
        Klein and Thompson propose an "abundance agenda" that they say better manages the tradeoffs between regulations and social advancement and lament that America is stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention. They present the abundance agenda as a way to initiate new economic conditions that will diminish the appeal of the "socialist left" and the "populist-authoritarian right". ..."

https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...
"The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix).
        We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository.
        You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web. ...
        In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on earth is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space.
        The heart of any community is its library, which stores a wide variety of technological processes, only some of which are used at any one time in any specific environment. If an independent community is like a cell, its library is like its DNA. A library has many functions: the education of new community members; the support of important activities such as farming and material extraction; historical recording of events; support for planning and design. And the library grows and evolves with the community.
        The earth's library of technological knowledge is fragmented and obscure, and some important knowledge has been lost already. How can we create a library strong enough to foster the growth of new communities in space? How can we today use what we know to improve human life? ..."

Instead the USA ceded most of its technological know-how to China over the past quarter century. Given that, perhaps I should hope China at least will eventually work on such a library and someday make it available to the rest of the world under a free and open licence?

A recent related comment by me on "On DOGS (Design of Great Settlements)" as an answer to "What's the Best Ways for Humans to Explore Space?": https://slashdot.org/comments....

Of course, Bucky Fuller was there first with his "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science" idea.
https://www.bfi.org/about-full...
"In 1950, Buckminster Fuller set up an outline for a course in Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science. Taught at MIT in 1956 as part of the Creative Engineering Laboratory, this course by Fuller probably served as one of their more unusual offerings. The students who took the course, all engineers, industrial designers, materials scientists and chemists, represented research and development corporations across America."

The first paragraph is sort of reasonable, but fraught with confounders. The second is just making the original error but substituting the author's pet cause and adding some religious weirdness. Fortunately the exact same argument deals with it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The highest per capita meat consuming countries are non-muslim. The muslim countries are all mid tier except for a couple gulf states, including Qatar.

Sacrificing animals is big part of Islamic religious ritual.

Lol. It's a big part of Christian religious ritual too. That doesn't mean people do it very often.

Oxygen also causes cancer.

No, they're part of normal society that pushes their wishes and ideals as truths. Science is a weird niche branch of philosophy that says that's a bad way to generate knowledge.

That's hard enough for trained scientists to do never mind the masses. So the masses politicize papers with conclusions they don't like. Notice most of the arguments aren't about the data, they're something along the lines of "idiots won't understand this so it's dangerous to publish."

We were talking about why you can't send information faster than the speed of light. Nobody said communication via entangled particles was the same as classical communication. It requires classical communication. In the case you're talking about, that classical communication even has to come first.

I currently have six travel eSIMs in my phone

The article author transfers eSIMS between phones frequently, several times a month. Swapping eSIMS in one phone is easy, quick and much superior to the physical kind. Swapping between phones apparently runs into some problems if your carrier is braindead. That's what the article is complaining about.

You can buy a pay as you go eSIM for cash in many places too. It's the same thing. You can also buy a pay as you go eSIM without going to the store and showing your face to the employees and their security cameras.

This is horrifying, terrifying, and sadly well-known even to those who superficially monitor such things.

Popular media: More than one US film/tv studio has "lost" or "suffered a mysterious fire" in un-digitised archives, destroying the lot, during battles to preserve. The BBC sued Bob Monkhhouse for preserving material it destroyed. In Britain, it has been no better. Fans of the British TV series "The Avengers" can only see old episodes because armies of previous fans descended on rubbish tips and, at great risk to themselves, collected as much film as possible.

General history: Places like the John Ryland's Library and the British Library have suffered with rescuing archives at risk of becoming submerged or destroyed by mould. The Archimedes Palimpsest was partially destroyed by one collector filling in the pictures with coloured pens and by another collector allowing the book to be severely damaged by mould.

The National Archives have mysteriously "lost" a great many files over the years and are only digitising those they've retained at an incredibly slow rate. I know because I've personally forked out several hundred to get just two scanned, all because politicians far prefer frippery to archiving. We've absolutely no idea how many of the manuscripts held in other archives are still in usable condition because nobody bothers to check.

It's not just limited to archives, of course. The US has, over the last couple of decades, demolished numerous buildings within the US that are over 300 years old because malls produce profit and ancient structures don't. (They also then complain they have no history...) The Space Shuttle is to be taken to Texas for a PR stunt, which will require it being dismantled and those things aren't designed for that. There is no guarantee any of it will survive the journey. All because PR matters and preservation does not. Other countries? The Louvre... well... probably best not to talk about that utter disgrace. In Egypt, 3000 year old gold artefacts are routinely melted down so the conservators can pocket some extra cash.

It's at times like this that Kenny Everett's general comes to mind.

Is it stupid? How do you tell the goons running the metal detectors to check for "behaviours or capabilities?" You CAN show them a picture of a raspberry pi and a flipper and tell them those aren't allowed. I expect if you show up with an orange pi or a flopper ziro you're also not going to be let in.