Bonam

The public will keep "discussing" stuff (as if it matters) meanwhile real innovators will simply solve the situation through technological progress. Solar will become the cheapest and best form of energy, energy storage will become omnipresent as all kinds of battery powered devices connected through the internet of things charge and discharge to compensate for swings in energy usage and generation, and electric cars (and trucks, ships, etc) will become the cheaper and better alternative to ICEs/diesels. All of this will happen in the next 20-30 years... the most progressive green policies might hasten that transition by 5 years and the staunchest opposition might slow it down by 5 years but those +/- 5 years are unlikely to be pivotal in the end result.

You can try to teach someone something, but you can't learn it for them. When I was going through school I distinctly remember critical thinking being emphasized, but just like anything else, many people didn't get it.

Yep. That's pretty much what I said too. I just think Putin is pretty discerning when it comes to what places he thinks he can get away with trying to restore his empire in and which places would have too high a risk of serious confrontation with the West.

And?

Well, expansionism has generally been the doctrine of almost every ruler of every country throughout all of human history up until WWII. It's only since then that the international regime of essentially fixed borders has been a thing.

Well, US nuclear weapons and delivery systems were state of the art in the 1980s. But they haven't improved much since then. Doomsday systems like MIRVs were essentially un-counterable in the 80s, but today the US nuclear arsenal would possibly be insufficient to saturate concentrated ABM defenses. Any strategic tension between the US, Europe, Russia, and China will inevitably lead to the technological advancements of the last 40 years being incorporated into strategic nuclear arsenals and delivery systems. Likely the first casualty of renewed tensions would be the Outer Space Treaty, which the US and the USSR essentially agreed to to not bankrupt themselves. But today, launches are much cheaper and placing weapons in orbit reduces their delivery time to targets from 30-60 minutes to just 2-5 minutes and eliminates the need for forward nuclear bases in countries near the target.

Troops that can be hastily pulled back. It's unlikely Putin would deliberately prevent their departure or target them. He wants to enhance his own power and Russia's power, not engage in an apocalyptic war.

That's where the nuclear threat and deterrent comes in. Something Canada doesn't have. Would the US really risk nuclear conflict to protect the Baltic states? Especially with a Trump presidency? He has advocated isolationism and not bothering to protect allies that don't pitch in enough. I suspect that if Russia decided to roll tanks across the border into Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia, the US would take no military action, though they'd surely impose severe sanctions and issue many harsh condemnations. The US and its allies would likely draw the line at Poland, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, but it's very unlikely Putin would ever try for those to begin with.

Of course it's a sham. The people who want to bring in a million "refugees" have absolutely no interest in security.

Skiers also have 50 some odd words for snow. But they don't go around demanding everyone else use them.

So what you're saying is you have bad taste in literature.

Lol. Add one more school to the "don't hire anyone that went there" list.

If stupid isn't a protected class yet, it should be! It's very unfair to stupid people if smart people get hired over them for jobs, after all. What is the pay disparity between stupid people and smart people and why is society doing nothing to address it? In fact that very word "stupid" sounds like an intelligentist slur...

Yeah I've seen some of those already. I agree that there are certainly issues caused by how news if presented to people via Facebook. I've seen plenty of nonsense in my own feed, mostly from the other side, since most of the people I know here in Seattle are all lefties it's a never-ending stream of social justice nonsense that they all obsess over. I was just answering the question that was asked.

Good photo to illustrate our future dystopia...

"Wanting" a boob job is different than feeling like you NEED to have your biological sex surgically changed to be able to live the life you think you are meant to live. If someone is having an existential crisis about needing a boob job, one might question their mental health as well. Personally, I'm fine with adults choosing to do whatever they want to do to their own bodies, but it is not wrong to stop and think about whether a person's problems with their born gender are a result of things going on in their brain. Given that it has to do with how one feels and thinks about oneself and one's gender, it seems more than likely that the issue is a neural one. I don't think it's so far fetched to contemplate the possibility that the reason we "treat" transgender people through gender re-assignment surgery is because adding and removing body parts is easy and understood, but messing with brain function and chemistry isn't. Using the term "mental illness" provokes hasty reactions from people, but what I believe TimG is trying to say is that if there is nothing wrong with an individual's body - that is, for example, if it works fine in the biological functions of being either a female or a male, but the individual feels that their biological sex doesn't suit them, it might be worth asking - is the discrepancy really caused by their body, or is it their brain? How many people who feel that their only possible solution to feel right is to transition their gender would consider, for example, taking a pill that would permanently make them feel "at home" in their current body? Would developing such a treatment be inherently immoral? Would offering it to people be a transgression of some sort? I don't think it would be.

It is. And the average facebook user has 338 facebook friends. So that means there's always new content being posted. Among those 338 friends, you'll likely have people that share, react to, or comment on, random news articles, and those can show up in your feed with a note that says "Joe liked this" or "George commented on this". And if you ever click on any of those types of articles, facebook will then remember that as something you're "interested in" and sometimes show you articles like that randomly, even if none of your friends interacted with those articles. While it's a good algorithm to show people content they might be interested in, it also tends to create an echo chamber effect, since it will present you the kinds of information that you react to (that could potentially be stuff you disagree with - a friend of mine was commented that Facebook always shows him all kinds of far left opinion pieces, but that's because he always gets mad and comments on them).

Pretty much, yes. Everything on here is just banter. None of the people on this forum are the ones making Canada's procurement decisions.

Oh, got it. Thought your reference of 450 was to the number of Blackhawk, my mistake.

Blackhawk Helicopters? Don't think so. The US has over 1000 active F-16s, for example.

Simple. People are on Facebook anyway to talk to their friends, post photos, look at friend's photos, etc. Facebook intersperses this set of social information with third party content it thinks you're likely to click on, including both ads and news. If you're just sitting there in your free time and browsing Facebook and see a news article or video with an interesting headline, you might click on it and read/watch it, even though you would not have actively sought out to look for news during that time. This tendency to actually read/watch the article/video may be increased if you see that one of your friends has commented on it. Many of the articles shared/linked on Facebook ARE from well respected news sites, but of course many others are not.

Yeah I don't get it either... I guess Trump cares which is why this topic came up again. People care what that clown tweets since he's gonna be president now.

That's true about pressure increasing as well. Though the atmosphere would be unbreathable for humans long before that point, in any case. Seems that humans can't breathe normal air much past 10 atmospheres or so, and have to breathe special gas mixtures. Meanwhile the boiling temperature you mention of 647K corresponds to what, ~250 atmospheres? About as hot and dense as Venus, at that point, so by the time you get to 647k you've long since lost the battle to prevent it from running away If you're definition of running away is that it will continue to increase indefinitely, then there is no temperature at which it will do that since radiative losses to space scale with T^4 and there are no feedback phenomena that are faster than that across a large range of temperatures, and in any case the Earth's effective surface temperature could never exceed that of the Sun. You're right that on billion year timescales the Sun's brightness will increase leading to warming that way but that is of course a bit tangential to the debate regarding climate change, which in the human context is on decade-century timescales. I don't have calculations to back up the 15-20C claim, more just a hypothesis based on the increasing evaporation rates of water at that point. Water just doesn't stick around long at temperatures exceeding 50C, The oceans don't have to boil to evaporate away. Even if the temperature doesn't actually run away to exceed the boiling point, an Earth without liquid surface water is a dead Earth.

Sadly not specific to communism; almost any flavor of authoritarianism uses these same tactics. And yet people still fall for it.

So then do you now agree that the people who would react violently to someone peacefully burning a flag are "bad people"? Rather than sympathizing with such action as you previously mentioned?