Go to Moscow, hang a left. When you hit the North Pole, head south…not, not that south, the other one! The other other one. After a bit, take another left for a couple hours, and you’ll arrive at your destination on the right.

Lol, really? One can’t control the fact that bad things happen. The west isn’t forcing either China or Russia to claim territory that doesn’t belong to them.

However, one can control how one reacts to said events. Help out where we can, and strengthen ourselves for the future.

There’s that whole proverb about crisis=danger+opportunity. The danger is there regardless…if you fail to seize the opportunity presented, well, you are pretty much guaranteed to come out the other side worse off.

Very few people WANT a war in Ukraine. But as China keeps adding dashes to their map, it’s pretty clear there’s a reasonable chance to be an even bigger war around the corner, whether we want it or not.

The Ukraine war woke the west up from its slumber, and it has allowed us to put the old stuff stuff cluttering our closets to good use, as well as test some new weapons concepts, and to get ourselves ready for the bigger conflict on the horizon.

If we are really lucky, China is looking at Ukraine and having second thoughts about kicking the hornets nest at all, saving a lot of lives on both sides.

If we are not that lucky, then Ukraine has allowed us to be much better prepared for the coming conflict.

So am I glad Ukraine happened? Not a bit. Can I see the silver lining thru the clouds? For sure.

Pretty much. China is pretty good at buying friends…when they aren’t busy stealing their stuff..

I don’t get why China allows their fishing fleets to keep shitting on their international reputation. It’s so counterproductive.

Credit/debit systems appear to have existed for at least 5000 years. Money is just an abstraction technology to make the credit/debit economy work more smoothly and scale up.

As money is a foundational tech for civilization, you’d need to find a replacement tech that serves much the same purpose, but avoids whatever downsides you feel outweigh it’s benefits. That’s a hard problem.

Then implement it in such a way that civilization doesn’t implode during the transition. This is a very hard problem.

And then prevent humanity from finding a way to exploit that tech for the benefit of the few, bringing you right back where you started. This is a nearly impossible problem.

Well, that’s not at all what I said. Japanese compact cars were generally pretty cool and affordable in a way most similar small American cars were not, so of course they get customized a ton more that their American equivilents.

The people who actually made their cars perform were the racers, those who did the truly terrible mods were the ricers.

Yes, racist due to stereotyping. But it was more wordplay for insulting the taste of the person in question in comparison to the racers, not their ethnicity or the origin of their car. Bad taste is pretty universal. And as with pretty much anything in language, people can and clearly have used it as a racial insult. I just don’t think that was it’s origin.

I am really amused it has morphed into a more positive connotation with the *nix crowd, while still meaning essentially the same thing. Language truly is a living thing.

I mean it has clearly racist origins, but I’ve never actually heard it used in a racist manner in real life.

At least where I was, there were basically zero Asians, “ricers” were (typically but not exclusively) Japanese cars that were customized terribly, as someone else mentioned, all show and no go. You could have American ricers too.

The owners, the “rice boys”, were pretty much all white guys.

I get that Ukraine won’t consider the possibility of ceding any territory, nor should they. They probably don’t like their allies even mentioning it.

But, there’s the separate issue of not being able to join NATO with ongoing territorial disputes. Without much context to go on, I would almost interpret this as something more along the lines of “Ukraine could join NATO tomorrow if the dispute went away (by whatever method)”.

Its amusing how this thread went from the legitimacy of various naval exercises and then shifted to trade policy when that didn’t pan out, which is an entirely different animal, its more of an elephant than a zebra. (It ain’t black and white, definitely grey.)

Trying to get me to defend the Cuba trade embargo ain’t gonna happen, because it really is pointless and harmful. But I like how its conveniently ignored that the rest of the world could easily more than cover what the US refuses to send to Cuba. The US Navy wouldn’t stop them from doing so, because the blockade ended decades ago.

But oddly enough, that doesn’t happen. I wonder why not? Because, oh no, what would the world do without more of those sweet, sweet dollars??? Yeah, never mind the ethics, one can’t forgo profits from trade with the US, so let’s go fuck the Cubans right along with the Americans, and keep our citizens fat and happy with a steady supply of Levis, Big Macs, and movies. But, you know, lets continue paying lip service to how bad it is while making money hand over fist in complicity.

A truly astounding amount of hypocrisy. The US has plenty of hypocrisy to go around too, but at least I am not going to try to defend it.

I am mostly sure the naval blockade of Cuba ended well before I was born, so there is zero freedom of navigation issue happening currently.

The embargo only applies to US companies, we aren’t stopping other countries from continuing to trade witch Cuba.

I mean, it’s stupid as hell, and will never work, but that’s about the extent of it.

The US ain’t paradise, I am not gonna argue that. But we were talking about naval policy. We definitely don’t have children serving in the navy 😜

I mean, they don’t have to be allowed in international waters, you just need to get all the planet’s seafaring countries to dedicate all of their naval resources to a blockade of the US.

The cheaper option is to realize that the USN is generally pretty serious about enforcing freedom of navigation in a way essentially noone else is able to, which is a net positive for the planet. Even when you factor in some of the shady activities and plain old fuckups that they are occasionally involved in.

Frankly I’d be thrilled if China would actually act like the modern global power they clearly want to become, rather than joining Russia in some 1800s imperial LARPing vs the rest of the world.

Except those waters aren’t Chinese territory, which is the entire point of doing freedom of navigation cruises…to remind them of that fact

The recent China-Russia operation was also in international waters, and you’ll notice it’s only a handful of senators making a stink about it to get some publicity, the military was pretty clear that it wasn’t a problem. They just shadow it like they always do.

I suppose it’s the natural result of wanting to keep the show on as long as possible, when you’ve only got one good idea for the story arc. You need a lot of filler.

I’d like to see more shows done in the style of Babylon 5, where the creator had the whole 5 years written out from day 1. There was very little in the show that felt like filler or treading water.

Which also may explain why books are being brought to TV more frequently these days. But, TV showrunners have a bad habit of taking a good novel and totally mangling it in the translation to TV, so it’s not a guaranteed win.

It’s mostly decent, some interesting twists, but also plenty of dumb stuff in it too. It’s only 7 episodes, so even if you don’t end up liking it you haven’t wasted much time!

I generally find watching in release order tends to work better than chronological order at least the first time thru. The episodes are written assuming you aware of future events depicted in previous shows, if you aren’t they tend to lose a lot of their impact.

Congrats for getting thru TAS, I have tried and I just can’t.

It’s just one of my fans!

The Empire focused half of the show that was mostly made up specifically for the show is EXCELLENT tho, and really worth watching.

They should have just stuck with that and called the show Empire IMHO. Would have been an instant classic.

Frankly, you’ll enjoy Foundaton more if you don’t read the books first. Otherwise, you’ll be sitting there shaking you head wondering why they continuously mangle the core concept of the books so badly, despite characters occasionally directly stating how it works (only for the same episode otherwise showing utter disregard for said statement)

Show was killed way to soon. It was pretty solid!