Allow me to posit the following: we could very well be minding our own business but still strongly influence the rest of the world. For example, if a company wishes to do business in America -- the world's largest and most lucrative commercial market -- they must comply with US laws. This is no different than any other country. You may not like it, but that's how commercial business works, and it'd be no different if someone like North Korea had the market everyone wanted. You'd just be complaining about a different country.

Don't like it? Don't do business in the US and you're free to do whatever you want. You'll be excluding yourself from probably 70% of the available market, but you're free to make that choice.

Don't forget, your argument can be turned around quite easily: you could mind your own business and stop trying to tell the US how to do business according to your wants/needs. Funny how that works.

You're blissfully unaware of how national sovereignty works.

Good luck getting the US to accommodate an Interpol extradition request for 4chan and its personnel. There's no reason the US would agree to it since 4chan has violated no US law. So long as 4chan operates in the US exclusively and violates no US laws, they are effectively beyond the reach of the UK government. They could presumably nab some 4chan executive if they ever visited the UK, but all one has to do to avoid that is just not visit the UK.

This is how international legal disputes have been handled since the dawn of international legal disputes. Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

It's about time they admitted to something that was obvious to almost everyone: nuclear power is the only effective path to carbon-free base load power generation. Wind and solar make good intermittent sources, but base load has to be utterly reliable regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. That's nuclear.

Getting rid of the nukes was a knee-jerk reaction, not a smart technological decision. The pivot to depending on oil and gas from a potential hostile neighbor just added to the madness.

He financed, produced, starred in, and distributed the film completely independent from the "Hollywood System". For God's sake, how much less "sucked in" can a person be and still have the means to do it at all???

Give the man some credit.

I presume you're referring to the 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal? I'll point out this was something perpetrated by the Chinese industry, not American. It was knowingly covered up with the complicity of the Chinese government to prevent it from embarrassing the ongoing Olympics. Only when the scandal became impossible to cover up did the CCP take any action.

As of December 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former Mayor London Breed have both expressed praise for China and the relationship between San Francisco and Chinese cities.

You're not missing something. Much like Disney's "Snow White" was called a "success" despite bombing both at the box office and on streaming, the corporate media stooges will blithely state the complete opposite in an attempt to hide abject failure. Ubisoft is no different.

AC fans waited years to get a game with samurai's based in feudal Japan. What they got is a "samurai" game with no actual Japanese samurai protagonist. Ubisoft's reason for this is painfully obvious to everyone. This is why Japanese consumers have largely rejected it and has a lot to do with why sales have tanked overall.

There's a saying for this that ends with "go broke." It's slipping my mind at the moment, but I'm sure it'll come to me eventually.

If more companies would not only put a monetary bounty on these crooks but also specify "dead or alive," perhaps it would start to put a dent in their activities. They're already operating from countries that either look the other way or actively assist them in their activities. Putting a death mark on them ups the stakes considerably and allows the use of...ahem...alternate actors...ahem...that can operate beyond the law to get actual results.

However, if you're a user in certain countries, like France or Canada, opening the app shows a collection of pirated movies, such as Venom: The Last Dance, Joker: Folie a Deux, and Terrifier 3.

So...nothing anyone wants to actually see then.

"Most" is pretty vague. Which ones don't overlap? Do you even know? Have you read both? In full? Project 2025 is 922 pages long. Somehow I doubt you've read it, instead relying on the media to tell you what to think and say and do.

What if "most" of the overlap are things that are relatively mainstream, non-controversial things? What if the only places they don't overlap just happen to be the Big Boogeyman Ideas you're so terrified of? Did you ever consider that enough to bother reviewing both proposals? Or did you simply hear "Trump = Project 2025 and Project 2025 = bad, therefore Trump = bad"?

The sheer lack of curiosity about the stances some people are willing to take is stunning sometimes. Presumably you have a prefrontal cortex. You may wish to use it from time to time to think on your own and come up with your own opinions.

And yet who will build, program, and maintain this AI-controlled fleet? Another AI-controlled facility? Who will build, program, and maintain that? Or is it turtles all the way down?

At some point humans have to be involved, and those humans will be gainfully employed and benefit from their labor. Those who adapt to this new economic reality will prosper. Those who do not, will not.

This is nothing new. When mass production put artisans out of work, the same hue and cry was raised. The human race as a whole is incalculably better off today than it was when that happened. Those who try to stand against the march of technology to maintain the status quo will always get steamrollered. And we should not weep for them, for we all benefit from the march of progress. If you truly believe in the betterment of humanity, you cannot allow the creation of a society where stagnation is rewarded.

So the moral of the story is early buyers will pay full price while getting a buggy, unbalanced, unfinished product. Meanwhile, those who wait will generally get discounts, see fewer bugs, and more polished content.

This is why I almost never buy anything as soon as it's released.

Also not (necessarily) true. Dissolved CO2 can be consumed by algae and seagrasses in the ocean, converting it to biomass -- where carbon remains largely sequestered when the organism dies -- and oxygen.

Almost but not quite. You left out a few relevant factors.

Personal bias - despite attempts to eradicate it, it still exists. A scientist who has their reputation staked on a particular theory or outcome will tend to favor that outcome, disregard outcomes that don't agree with their position, or both. The recent LK-99 "room temp superconductor" is an example of this.

Funding bias - Scientists don't work for free, and even if they did, research itself is an expensive endeavor. This requires funding from external sources, usually government but sometimes major industries contribute as well. Both these patrons tend to fund research that confirms whatever policy or product they wish to push. Likewise, funding for other things either doesn't get funded or could disqualify you for future funding.

Community peer pressure - Despite the stereotype, contemporary science is largely that of conformity. Mavericks are generally frowned upon, laughed at, or ostracized. This has historical precedence. Major luminaries like Einstein, Bohr, etc. were regarded as crackpots when they first challenged the establishment before they were recognized as prophets of truth. Very few people have the courage to stand against such as this, hence conformity and groupthink are more normal than most people suspect or are willing to admit.

Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?

Go ahead and try such a mandate. It will accelerate the trend of businesses moving out of states requiring them.

So over the last decade our total generation has remained somewhat stagnant while demand is steadily increasing. That is the point I was making. Your figures back this up.

You gloss over why natural gas is the more economical option. Coal plants are burdened by expensive emissions controls and regulatory requirements that make them too expensive to operate. Minus these, they would still be competitive economically. I'm not arguing against such controls, merely saying emissions are the drivers of the economics.

I worked at TVA during the time frame in question. CCGT's are peak load assets but were being run constantly to make up for lost capacity when coal plants were shuttered. Maintenance cycles were being deferred. The net result was more unplanned shutdowns.

I did see the table. Did you? From 2011 to 2021, total coal generation dropped from 1,733,430KMWh to 897,885KMWh, a difference of 835,545KMWh. During that same time solar added 164,422KMWh, wind (aka "Renewable Sources Excluding Hydroelectric and Solar") added 256,261KMWh. That's a deficit of 414,862KMWh, not even factoring in the ~12KMWh loss in nuclear. Solar and wind are not making up the difference lost to coal shutdown. Natural gas.is making up the difference, and, as stated, these are not designed to be base load generation and hence unsustainable.

Government researchers have been tracking heat waves for more than 100 years. According to data from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the annual heat wave index for the contiguous 48 states was substantially higher in the 1930s than at any point in recent years. In some years in the 1930s, it was four times greater or even more. Additionally, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a large database of daily temperatures that goes back to 1948. NOAA used 1,066 weather stations located across the U.S. to collect this data.

According to NOAA, huge swaths of the U.S. have experienced a significant decrease in abnormally hot days recorded since 1948, especially in the Midwest and northern and eastern Texas. Although it’s true that some parts of the U.S. have seen the number of hotter-than-usual days increase over the past 70 years, most weather stations have shown no meaningful changes or even declines.

This maxim equally applies to your comments. My points stand and your own data does not refute it.