It’s all up-front costs! /s

Now I’m imagining laser derby matches.

BE Man, Amazon must be really pissed off about this…

I think most, like me, read the article and found it wanting. The USA has limited resources and has to decide what’s going to get priority. The Biden Administration’s decision to focus its foreign policy on countering growing Chinese global influence is a decision that has to be made in the context of these limited resources. So blaming the US for a war that both sides have wanted and worked toward for 50 years while every US President has put in far more resources to try to prevent that war seems like the journalist doesn’t understand the basics of practically anything having to do with foreign policy. But must be the USA’s fault because we didn’t decide to spend more of our limited resources on a conflict that never goes away.

36.005970N , 114.976380W

Your own comment above basically supports the definition of tankie. Specifically, this:

The term is also used to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the crimes committed by communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin,[9][10] Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Enver Hoxha, Pol Pot, and Kim il-Sung. In modern times, the term is used across the political spectrum to describe those who have a bias in favor of illiberal or authoritarian states with a socialist legacy or a nominally left-wing government, such as the Republic of Belarus, People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Nicaragua, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Serbia, the Syrian Arab Republic, and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Additionally, tankies have a tendency to support non-socialist states with no socialist legacy if they are opposed to the United States and the Western world in general, regardless of their ideology,[4][11] such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. (emphasis mine)

I would take issue with the single word ‘fascist’ that @figaro@lemdro.id is using, as the government doesn’t need to be full-on fascist to it qualify for tankies to defend it. It only needs to be illiberal with a socialist legacy or nominally left-leaning government. So the definition is more broad than what figaro defines. But all the elements of Figaro’s defintion are literally there in your own linked Wikipedia article.

Someone has to take Ted Cruz to Mexico.

It’s more like 2.5 billion for R&D and then 2.5 billion to create the factory that builds them and the first thousand units. The per unit cost is initially high and then comes down once all the front end work is done.

And as with many programs, the R&D phase may lead to a brand new use-case for drones or an entirely different purpose for one of the drone prototypes. So there can be unknown benefits too.

Ironic… he could see the problems in others… But not himself.

Don’t forget blowing up the train tracks leading into Tokmak! It’s not really about taking Tokmak but putting fire control on the train running through Tokmak. If Ukraine can prevent resupply via the trains then everything west of Tokmak falls practically without a shot.

Poland would make quick work of Wagner. They have not fucked around in making their army one of the best in Europe in combined arms warfare. They’ve also updated their most of their materiel to Western gear (or are producing their own that is equal to Western gear) that we now know is dramatically superior to the old Soviet//Russian gear. They’ve been in on practically every peacekeeping mission across the world for the last 25 years, seasoning their officers with combat experience. They are far more competent than Wagner, to put it briefly.

How do you know the plane didn’t have a nice window on it?

There is no way to do that. You have to have a precise knowledge of the mass of fat and muscle on your bones, the exact quantity of blood and the ability of that blood to transport and deliver oxygen and nutrients into those tissues. IF you want something accurate, you’d have to precisely measure ALL of the food you eat (and water you drink) and know it’s nutrient makeup and then collect ALL the CO2 you breathe for a day and ALL of your urine and feces and test those to see what’s there. From there you can back-calculate and see what your energy surplus/deficit might be.

Fitness trackers are making assumptions to do those calculations. If you are 30 years old and 5’10" (177.8cm) and weigh 165lbs (74.84kg), then your BMI is 23.7 and you’re probably healthy and it’ll calculate X usage of calories per hour. But that won’t be accurate if you have things like fast or slow metabolism, or heart problems or kidney problems that might affect metabolism indirectly. But it’s accurate enough for most people. The more data you’re willing to put into the equation, like knowing heart rate, breathing rate, sleep, etc. The more accurate the prediction can be, but it won’t be perfect practically ever.

Yep, people in Rochester were pissed to learn this. Instead of riding the wave, Kodak execs turned the company into a donkey.

Because (Gen) X gonna give it to ya.

Did the US provide direct training in how to destabilize and overthrow a government? Because they have teams that can provide that training. It’s routinely used in the Western hemisphere. If they gave the coup leaders anti-insurgency training, that’s an entirely different situation.

The problem is probably more coincidental. US training makes units better. There’s a base level of thought in the US military though which you can describe as “you follow orders of the duly elected representatives of the US government.” If you don’t instill that base thinking, all the training does is make military units that are going to succeed at coups.

So is this article dealing with the reality of trying to rewrite a foreign military’s thought process and it’s relationship to its civilian government? Does it discuss the difficulties in doing that while trying to train them for counterinsurgency operations? If it’s just making a casual (not causal) connection between the coup leaders and the fact that at some point those leaders had US training, it’s propaganda.

It’s important to note that there is ONE qualification for a federal judgeship: be approved by the Senate. That’s it.

EDIT: formatting link

Nigeria, is literally right next door, gone through the same democracy-coup cycles in the past AND had had a functional democracy for the last 20+ years. What about that part of the world makes you think democracies can’t work?

But that isn’t how governments are supposed to work. If you don’t like a guy, vote him out next election. Nigeria should know this, as it did what Niger is currently doing 30 years ago. The reason ECOWAS is intervening is because of the amount of chaos that the junta will bring to the region. They’re trying to regulate their own area of the globe. And if look at Niger’s history, you’ll see why. They’re on their SEVENTH REPUBLIC. Because they set up a republic, then a general has a hissy fit when the duly elected leader pisses them off and they go a couping. Then all hell breaks loose for a few years until they do it again. Nigeria, in particular, should be looking to help keep the seventh republic stable.

I will believe it when I see it.