Because it wasn't at all obvious that it was degraded. They didn't have anywhere near this much difficulty rolling over Georgia, and that was in 2008, just a handful of years ago.

No one was going to bed worried that Russia would invade Western European. A whole lot of people went to bed at night worried that Russia would invade Eastern Europe. Most of those people live in.... Eastern Europe.

Is he? He's been pursuing a losing war for a year longer than he should have, with years yet to go. His decision-making is manifestly not the greatest.

Yes, we know that now. Before the current debacle, no one knew that. Russia had armored battalions. Russia had an air force. Russia had at least some of a fleet. They looked like a world class military. They allegedly had all the elements. No one knew that had been systematically looted and destroyed from the inside for the last 15 years.

Foreign policy. That poker game where everybody is cheating. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has disrupted the global wheat market to a much greater degree than you'd expect. Economic retaliation for it has disrupted the global natural gas market. The US is sending the message to everyone watching that you don't get to do that. And incidentally securing their own military ascendancy by seeing to it that the Russian military is humiliated and obliterated for all the world to see, which will affect the foreign policy of dozens of countries.

In that poker game where everybody is cheating, Russia had bluffed the world into thinking they held a straight flush. Now their busted flush is on the table for everyone watching. It changes the game, everywhere. And no, stopping the push to Kiev at the beginning of the war wasn't enough. That was a good start, but it was a signal to seize the opportunity, not only to expose the real state of the Russian military, but to expose the state of the Russian economy. The US invaded Afghanistan and came out at the end of it richer than it went in. Russia... isn't. And the world is noticing.

We're one of the species that survived the last period of glaciation. Many others did not. And that was far far worse than what we're facing now. You can't grow crops on top of a mile high sheet of ice that extends for longer than you can walk in a month. You can grow crops on land that saw an average air temperature 1.5 degrees higher than it was two centuries ago. How do I know this? Because it's already happening.

Are they species we eat? No? Then nobody cares.

And let's be precise here. Of the 99.99999% of species which have gone extinct in Earth's history, we had something to do with 0.00001% of them. At most. We didn't exist as a species for the vast majority of those extinctions and we were scattered tribes of hunter/gatherers for nearly all of the rest of those extinctions. In the last century, we have artificially preserved species that should have gone extinct. Much more of that and our affect on species diversity will be a net gain. We really haven't had much to do with extinctions, all environmentalist propaganda to the contrary.

Sure it does. Refurbishing desert into ranch land and further into farmland is an entire genre on YouTube. Not to mention we have the historical example of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, which turned 100 million acres into dust. It was caused by 11 consecutive years of drought brought on by Pacific Ocean surface temperature anomalies which dissipated as mysteriously as they arose. I've been to that region this century and it's full of mature trees and extensive agriculture. If you didn't know the history, you'd never guess what it looked like 80 years ago when the drought finally broke after record rains in 1941.

Water recovers faster than anything else. It flows. It evaporates. It migrates and moves by the trillions of tons in a solar-powered process we couldn't stop if we tried.

There is no "the ecosystem". Let me repeat that with emphasis: there is no the ecosystem. The Earth is home to hundreds of ecosystems with no overlap whatsoever, and tens of thousands of microclimates so starkly different from their surroundings they look artificial, but they're not.

I do understand. You are the victim of a concerted propaganda campaign which has been warping and distorting your view of reality since you were a child. You have been not only consistently lied to but significantly conditioned to respond in prescribed ways to certain key phrases. You have been intentionally kept ignorant of history, both ancient and modern, and what did leak through was carefully selected to persuade you of the self-loathing you were meant to internalize. You have been manipulated by immoral and unethical means for decades. Everything you know is wrong.

But cheer up. Now that you know what has been done to you, you can actively seek to correct it. You do that by reading. Do not read "popular media" articles. Do read journal articles. If you don't have academic credentials, use sci-hub to download them. You will discover a whole different tone, helped by a whole lot less artificial certainty that the popular media uses in all its language. You will discover the subtleties and context that are always stripped out by the propaganda machine. Most importantly, you will gain access to real numbers, in real units (no more Libraries of Congress and Olympic swimming pools), with both error bars and ranges for numerical context. (And if the journal article you're reading has no error bars, it's probably shit. Not all journals are created equal.) Pay attention to the numbers. Study the error bars. Take careful note of the context you weren't allowed to see before. I think you'll discover the world is a very different place from what you've been led to believe.

Rehabilitation is out of reach for literal psychopaths, but I'm anti-death penalty simply because I know the "justice" system is fallible and death is inconveniently irreversible. Our society is rich enough to warehouse a few psychopaths for their lifetimes to avoid permanent mistakes. Gandalf spoke true, as usual.

There's a theory that we don't get more conservative as we age. Instead we stay in one place while society trends more and more liberal around us.

As with all rules about human social behavior, both assertions are simple, facile, and wrong. Even the generalizations under which the political parties operate may be purely an accident of history and not valid under different historical pressures. Right now, old people are really easy to terrorize into voting against their own interests if you know what buttons to push, but is that necessarily always the case? I have my doubts.

They had help. They didn't invent their particular imaginary monsters in a vacuum. The generation raised on television isn't imaginative enough for that. TV stunts imagination in ways other types of media do not. They were prompted at every turn by a media machine designed to manipulate them, dialed in over the course of the past 70 years to appalling levels of effectiveness.

The appalling effectiveness of TV to manipulate Boomers is exceeded only by the even more appalling effectiveness of the social media machine to manipulate Millennials (and GenX, when it can be bothered to acknowledge that generation exists). Avoiding succumbing to the hate-festivals requires limiting exposure to both types of media, and carefully curating what exposure you do accept. Most people don't know that's necessary, and here we are.

It remains to be seen how GenZ handles it all. I don't know how smart they are but I do know they are more media-savvy than any prior generation and it shows in their poll results on social matters. I'm especially amused by the researchers loudly lamenting how "far right" teenagers are because they got so many "attack helicopter" answers to a poll asking the gender of 15-year-olds. No they're not. They're trolling. Polls by sociologists were always questionable. It just wasn't as obvious as it is now. Making the broad generalizations that the social "sciences" are so fond of is going to get ever more difficult, and that's probably a positive outcome. Unfortunately the alternative of algorithmic data-driven precision targeting may be worse. Fortunately Google has disabled most of that, in pursuit of profit. Are we doomed because Facebook hasn't? Maybe. But GenZ avoids Facebook, so maybe not. Be comforted. One thing the poll results prove is it's all more complicated than any convenient soundbite can contain.

Which should demonstrate to everyone watching that "free trade" was never anything but a fig leaf in US trade policy in the first place. It was a big fat lie and it still is a big fat lie. US import/export law is Byzantine to the extreme thanks to the tireless efforts of trade unions on the one hand and crony capitalists on the other.

Yes, that's definitely the reason.

Stop trolling. It's not clever.

The US and EU have spent over $100 billion to help Ukraine degrade Russia's military without spending a drop of their own blood. Russia used to be considered a near peer of the United States, militarily. A world power in their own right. When Russia fumbled the invasion in the opening days of the war, the Western world jumped at the chance to help Ukraine damage Russia's military to the point of ruin.

It's working better than any military strategist could have hoped.

Given the prevalence of states with a death penalty, it's debatable whether or not America ever left barbarism.

That isn't it at all.

People forget that Toyota was at the very forefront of electric vehicles. They brought a fully electric RAV4 to market to meet California fleet emission standards—twenty years ago. They got sued for patent infringement over battery patents by an oil company and lost and they've been gunshy ever since.

Two of the self-driving car developers have already added human-style interpretation of the rules of the road to their self-driving specifically to make the vehicle behave more like a human, and in the process disobey traffic laws. To include beginning to pull out before traffic has cleared, especially at stop signs, where this behavior is absolutely necessary for the intersection to function with human drivers.

Old World cities are uniquely terrible for driving any vehicle at all. The structures were placed in an era when the fastest thing going was a man on a horse and almost no one owned a horse and the ones who did own a horse were allowed to stab people who interfered with their right-of-way. The only reason German cities suffer less from that problem is WWII carpet bombing. The rest of the Old World has roads that were "designed" by cows going down to the river to drink. It isn't a wonder that mass transit is more favored in such places.

I call bullshit.

Reporting says they were submarine drones. Starlink signals do not work under water. The frequency is totally blocked by water at the surface. No submarine can receive Starlink signals. So no, Ukrainian submarine drones were not disabled by losing connectivity they never had with Starlink.

Former CNN guy is making shit up. What a surprise.

The big phased arrays on Starlink satellites are aimed at the ground, not deep space. I'm sure SpaceX would be delighted to build an outer shell of specially modified Starlink-compatible satellites for deep space activities. NASA hasn't decided to do that yet.

I have one. My bank doesn't support them. My broker doesn't support them. My other broker doesn't support them. My other bank doesn't support them. The institutions which should care the most about them are the very worst at supporting them, as a sector.

I used to carry it on my keyring until its own lanyard severed the loop through which it passed. I checked and some time recently Yubikey finally created a device they say can survive being carried on a keyring, but that's a recent development.

Now they just need to be supported. Everywhere.

I'm fairly certain there isn't. Asus has two current models, one of which is focused on gaming, Dell has one, Lenovo has a couple which happen to be Chromebooks, and of course there's Microsoft's Surface. The Surface Pro series is now a decade old and it's not exactly burning up the sales charts. These things have existed for long enough that it's pretty clear that the design results in an inferior tablet and an even more inferior laptop, not least because of the horrible infestation of tablet user interfaces into what are nominally laptop operating systems. Both Microsoft and GNOME have pushed this idea and anybody who has had to suffer with using them can tell you that convergence does not work.

They have their uses, but detachable laptops are firmly a niche product.

Just like the last two tries.

Money can't buy happiness... and isn't guaranteed to buy competent engineers. Or China would have a state of the art chip industry and Blue Origin would have an orbital-class rocket.

It most definitely is not being used for concrete. Ocean sand is so rounded off that it makes exceedingly weak concrete. There was a scandal about it in China, and some collapsed buildings. River and ocean sand is wholly unsuitable for structural cement.

The vast majority of dredging is to keep shipping lanes open. Barge traffic on the Mississippi river accounts for half a billion tons of freight every single year and it's neither the largest nor the busiest river in the world. The streams and smaller rivers that make up the Mississippi river basin carry tons and tons of silt and sand into the river every year. The Army Corps of Engineers is in a constant battle with the silt accumulation. More beavers on small streams would help with that, to slow down the water farther upstream and allow the silt to fall out on the bottom of tributaries, but the North American beaver is an indiscriminate, if persistent, engineer, who will flood roads if not supervised.

I work for a tech company with very few young people. Our hourly bill rates are eye-wateringly high. And people pay them, because we deliver.

Youth is not required to run a tech company. It just makes it cheaper.