Let's see:

• Serbia: Stopping mass genocide (on my list of reasons above).
• Kosovo: Stopping mass genocide (on my list of reasons above).
• Libya: Enforcing UN no-fly zone mandate (peacekeeping, on my list of reasons above).
• Afghanistan: Defensive/retaliation for a direct attack on the United States (on my list of reasons above).
• Iraq: Not a NATO mission. The only actual NATO-authorized action in Iraq was providing training for Iraq's security forces *after* the 2003 mission.

Care to try again?

In comparison with Russia, yes, it's tiny. Russia's military was somewhere around 3 million including reservists, versus 980k for Ukraine. And Russia has almost five times the population, which means almost five times as many people who could potentially be conscripted.

The part you're conveniently omitting is that the number is that low only because so many of them died. Russia has *lost* over a million troops since the war began three years ago. The fact that only 150k were in the battlefield at any given time only makes that number more shocking, because it means they sent wave after wave of people to be slaughtered.

Put another way, Russia has already *lost* more troops than Ukraine ever had.

I maintain my original statement.

Ah, but here's the thing. NATO is a defensive organization. In approximately every NATO military action, either the legitimate ousted leadership of a country asked for NATO's help, NATO was acting defensively, NATO was acting to stop mass genocide, or NATO was providing peacekeeping forces to stabilize a region. NATO is not a military force that goes out and attacks other countries unprovoked, and it never has been.

So the only reason Russia should consider NATO expansion to be a threat is if they intend to attack their neighbors and subjugate them.

So are you saying that Russia is dangerous to all the countries around it and can't be trusted to follow international law and stay the f**k out of neighboring countries' sovereign territory?

No, Russia funded paramilitary terror groups and had them take over Donetsk and Luhansk by force. And after eight years of fighting, Moscow invaded to make it easier to provide weapons for their proxy army.

That's some pretty seriously messed up propaganda you're spewing there. In the entire history of NATO, it has engaged in non-defensive, non-peacekeeping wars how many times again? And you think it is going to suddenly start now because...

Horseshit. Russia sent people into the Donbas to rile them up and stoke anti-government sentiment after Ukraine's previous Russian puppet leader got ousted. Russia provided money and weapons for paramilitary groups (otherwise known as "state-sponsored terrorists") to rise up against the government of Ukraine and divide the country.

The Donbas region had not done anything to separate from Ukraine even one day before they requested assistance from Moscow. Russia funded and supported the DPR and LPR secession attempt from the very beginning.

What invasion? It was their country. The closest thing that region had to invaders were the Russia-backed terrorists who took over part of the country. They were a fringe group that took control of the territory at gunpoint and caused most of the population to flee. Were some of the people fighting for a right of return for those refugees bad people? Maybe. Do I care? No.

There's a right way to secede in the modern era, and it isn't with a violent overthrow of the government. See Brexit for an example. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who took money and/or weapons from a foreign government and used them to overthrow their own government gave up any claim to moral high ground long ago.

You said it, not me.

Only because Ukraine wiped out all of Russia's tanks right off the bat, shot down a large percentage of their missiles and drones, etc. Russia had more soldiers, but their technology is so far behind that Ukraine has basically been holding them back with a relatively tiny force, and at this point, Russia has lost so many troops that they're having to borrow some from other countries in bulk just to keep the war going.

Russia hasn't killed many civilians because they have basically lost rather badly, despite dogged determination to turn it into a win, no matter how pyrrhic.

The U.S. should have done that a long time ago, IMO. There should have been a U.N. peacekeeping force in Gaza and the West Bank for the last thirty years, and then we wouldn't be dealing with any of this s**t over there.

But although the best time to do that would have been decades ago, the second best time is now. It's not too late to fix that mistake.

Not true. We could easily sustain far more people. But most countries don't want people from other countries these days because of a combination of xenophobia and a nationalistic desire for their resources to be used for their own people instead of supporting random refugees. So instead, we allow 1% of our population to hold a third of our nation's wealth and basically squander all of those resources, most of which will likely never be spent or used for anything worthwhile.

We live in a screwed up world.

The EU was pushing for micro-USB. Apple ignored them almost completely, doing the absolute minimum required to technically comply with the law. Apple is fond of malicious compliance, and has been for a long time.

For commercial buildings of any significant size, I think it's a much easier sell, because those go out of lease, and you might spend months searching for someone, and if you do it at the end of the lease, you can increase the lease price and make your money back pretty quickly, because you can be almost guaranteed that anyone who leases it will have some employees with EVs.

For apartments, it's potentially a harder sell, because you're dealing with a small number of units coming on the market at a time, and for each unit, you have a one in three chance that the next person will have an EV and will pay a premium for an EV space. So if it takes two or three years to pay for it and there's only a one in three chance that each of those years will have a tenant who wants it, it might statistically take almost a decade to pay for itself. And that's before factoring in the interest on the loan, which is to say it could actually take two or three decades, or almost the lifetime of the building, to pay for itself.

It's way easier to deal with when you're allocating a bunch of units at once (e.g. new construction), because you're not having to try to force people to change parking spaces mid-lease to get the benefit or figure out how to do just-in-time wiring if and only if the person pays an upcharge for an EV space. Possible, maybe, but not necessarily easy to justify the hassle.

Not very well. The requirement is that new construction have 10% of spots with EV charging, and 25% that could have charging if someone installed a charger. This is in a state where 29.1% of new car registrations are EVs. That means even if everyone rented only new apartments, the requirements would still barely meet *current* demand.

With apartment complexes not getting torn down until they are 50 years old or more, anything less than 100% EV ready is unconscionable, because within 20 to 30 years, every car still being driven in California will likely be an EV, to within the margin of error, and the cost of retrofitting is way higher than the cost to do it right to begin with.

Except it won't, for three reasons

• Using PHEVs on workplace charging is really wasteful, because they charge up in three hours, but you're there all day, and swapping cars around really doesn't work very well, so you typically end up with low charger utilization.
• If people don't install a charger at home when they get a car, they usually won't ever install one.
• Chargers in random locations can actually be more expensive than gasoline.

It's not an infrastructure problem. Hybrids are intrinsically a mistake. It's just too much easier to keep using them as ICE cars and not put in home chargers, and without home chargers, you're going to end up doing most of your miles on gasoline.

Apple made that change in March of 2015. The EU didn't even *start* talking about standardizing on USB-C until roughly January of 2020. So I can't say for sure what made them start using separate cables, but I can say with near absolute certainty that the reason was *not* regulatory pressure from the EU.

There's a chance I might have accidentally caused that. Way back, when the original MagSafe chargers were around — probably about 2008 or 2009 — I filed a Radar asking for removable MagSafe cables, pointing out that I kept having to throw away $80 chargers over a $10 cable, and that this had been a problem with every Mac charger I had ever owned from the PowerBook 145 all the way up to the MagSafe stuff. And I pointed out that having removable MagSafe cables would also provide a permanent solution to the problem of external battery makers not being able to provide cables that hook up to the MacBook. I think I laid out a pretty solid case for why the charger cables should be detachable.

To be fair, the transition to USB-C might have been the only factor, and my bug might have just sat in some hardware team's queue and never gotten looked at, but other companies do build USB-C supplies with non-detachable cables, so I like to think that maybe at the very least seeing my bug might have gotten someone thinking about the possibility.

I wonder if somebody got to close that Radar as "Hardware Changed" a decade after I filed it. I wonder if somebody is looking for that bug now, trying to get credit for closing it. :-D

No question about that. On the flip side, I'd argue that those power projects are corporate welfare, making the entire country pay for power generation that is used by only a small percentage of the country, for the primary benefit of a few power companies that happen to get the grants. I'm not sure that's really a good use of government resources. Power companies should pay for their own construction, or else they should have to pay back the money to the people with interest.

One of the biggest fiscal mistakes in our country's history was spending so much money to build private power and communication infrastructure with public funds. If the government pays for it, the government should own it and lease it out for public benefit without taking a profit. When our government has done it this way — various municipal fiber projects, TVA, etc. — the results have been high levels of efficiency at a low cost. When our government has done it the other way, the results have been monopolies that have to be broken up.

Cancelling projects is frequently stupid because of sunk costs, and I would bet good money that the current administration did not do adequate analysis to determine whether this is the case, because they have a long history of failing to do so, but that doesn't mean that they aren't right to question that spending.

What we need is a few dozen clones of TVA in various regions of the country, operating in a not-for-profit fashion as a government-owned corporation to build and maintain power infrastructure. Federalize as much of the infrastructure as possible, make all future construction paid for by the government be done through one of those companies so that private companies don't solely reap the benefits, etc.

The real problem is that Republicans scream "Socialism", so Democrats try to work around it, and the result is corporate welfare, where everything is as inefficient as possible.

I'm laughing at the failure to recognize that COVID was the driver of those deaths, not the vaccine. That's why the overall death rate in the U.S. actually dropped by about 5% in 2022, making the increase predicted by that website rather laughably wrong.