Bonam

Around 2015. That's when the latest wave of increased... "sensitivity"... started. That's when everyone started to be worried about "cultural appropriation", "microaggressions", "being an ally", "intersectional disadvantage", "cisgender privilege", etc. But, this is the first wave of this bs that is having some real pushback from reasonable middle-ground people (i.e. the increasing number of university professors who are starting to speak out against the atmosphere now found at many universities), who previously just kind of took the increasingly stifling anti-free-speech inclinations of the modern left as an annoyance to be ignored. Haha, I wouldn't question the wisdom of "ingenious" people either.

Most people pay their taxes spread out throughout the year as it gets taken out of each pay check. When taxes are filed in April, they usually only either get a small refund or pay a small extra amount to compensate for the discrepancy between how much tax they owed and how much they paid throughout the year. You'd know this, if you paid taxes.

Most renters have no idea, they just see a single number rent bill, not a breakdown of how much of it goes to pay what kind of expenses. Here in Seattle, renters overwhelmingly supported a massive property tax increase, and then endlessly complain about rising rents. Not paying something directly and visibly means that most people are not aware of it, since, as I explained before, people are idiots. Another obvious example here in Seattle: people overwhelmingly support the new $15/hour minimum wage, and endlessly complain about increased costs at grocery stores and restaurants, again not realizing the two are linked. If you do point out that the two are linked, you are considered rude.

Hardly. And only ~10% of people pay property taxes, anyway.

Hardly anyone understands the nuances of governing, regardless of age. Hardly anyone thinks about unintended consequences, regardless of age. People are idiots and vote idiotically. I can't think of any evidence that would suggest to me that teens would vote any more or less idiotically than anyone else.

Your question states that the two halves of the empire found themselves in similar positions, and yet one fell while the other persevered, and tries to find a reason why. The point I was trying to make was that there isn't always a good clear-cut reason, "time and chance happeneth to them all" as the quote says (I remembered it randomly when I was reading your post and then you mentioned Christianity). Why was the British revolution peaceful while the French was bloody? Why did America rebel while Canada remained content? Why did the tech industry develop in Silicon Valley rather than anywhere else? The course of history can be changed by a single decision, by the courage or cowardliness of a single front line soldier, by the sour mood on a certain day of a certain politician, by someone getting sick and missing an important meeting, etc. It's not a very satisfying answer, but it is a fallacy to assume that every historical event can be understood as the direct and reasonable result of measurable factors like population, economic performance, quality/quantity of military armaments, etc. Dozens (or perhaps hundreds) of books have been written on the fall of the Western Roman Empire analyzing the various factors and causes. It is, after all, one of the most pivotal events in the history of human civilization, probably along with the Bronze Age collapse, the Mongol Invasions, the discovery of the New World, and WWII. The more of them you read, the more you will understand that there is no agreement on a single factor or group of factors.

"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." - Christian Bible (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

Tax is assessed on income (and sales, property, etc), not on people. Unless the infant is working, they don't pay tax.

No, and none of these kinds of questions are worth thinking about it. Treat everyone as an individual, period.

Personally I think the BDS movement is wrong and I disagree with its motivations, goals, and reasoning. However, I support the right of people to their free speech and free expression, including the right to boycott things they don't like. When it comes to this particular law though, as far as I understand it's not a free speech issue; it's a government funding issue. The government is not telling people they can't boycott Israel and threatening them with criminal or civil penalties if they do. Rather, it is specifying that government funding should not flow to companies that boycott Israel (to those debating this topic, please read past the headlines). Therefore casting the debate over this law as an attack on free speech is not reasonable, in my opinion. Individuals and organizations have the right to free speech, which means no interference from the government in expressing themselves, but it doesn't mean they have the right to taxpayer money.

Then those black people are obviously racist, because they are judging that white person in your example solely based on the color of his/her skin. It's not a "difficult issue", it's a completely cut and dry issue, with the only difficulty being because many confused Western "progressives" believe that being racist is possible only if one is white. This is false enough in the context of Western countries, but is even more absurdly false when they try to project this framework onto other countries that they know nothing about.

Maybe Trump will make a tweet about it. Other than that, it will be ignored by Western governments for sure. Even if they go full genocide with extermination camps and all, chances are it would still be ignored. What's the chance Canada will take in White South African refugees fleeing persecution?

I don't know... it actually makes a lot of sense that foreign policy and military spending would depend on the threats and alliances that a country sees in the world. If you have lots of allies and are insulated from threats, not much need for a big military. If you have lots of enemies and not many strong allies, then a big military becomes very important. Certainly American policy changes in response to increased or reduced threats from other nations, such as reduced spending on strategic weapon systems towards and after the end of the cold war, or increased focus on the Pacific theater now with the rise of China.

Nothing. They could easily be even worse (yes, things can always be even worse). But you can hardly expect Canadian defense spending policy to change within 1 year of an American election. If it becomes clear in the long term that Canada shouldn't rely on the US for defense, it might eventually change.

The Trump "era" will last at most 7 more years. That is, if we initiated any capital spending now, we still wouldn't have any new hardware by the time he's out of office.

Dunno how much relevance such lists really have. For example, this linked list puts Egypt well above Israel. Does anyone doubt what would happen if the two fought yet again? Even worse, it puts Russia within 10% of the US in terms of its "power index", but the reality is US military capabilities are many times superior to those of Russia. That said, the military is simply not a priority in Canada. Australia is its own continent and much closer to potentially unstable situations in the Asia-Pacific region as compared to Canada, which is in about as safe a location as possible on Earth and where most of the population assumes that the US will shoulder the burden of protecting the continent should such a need ever arise.

Yes, even many 4th generation descendants of people who left Palestine 70 years ago are still not able to get citizenship in Jordan, Lebanon, and other Arab countries. I agree, if they did get citizenship, it would weaken their claim to be "refugees" who need to "return" to Palestine. But the reality remains that most of these people never lived in Palestine and have no more "connection" to Palestine than European Jews who considered Israel their home because generations ago, their ancestors lived there. Meanwhile, Israel is inhabited by people who have been actually born in Israel, in many cases for 2-3 generations. You can keep using the early 1900s as a reference point in your arguments but the reality is that Israeli Jews are not about to pack up and migrate to Europe or America.

Actually, you have it exactly backwards. The majority of people who today identify as Palestinian were born outside of what you want to call Palestine. Specifically, most were born in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Chile, or after 1948 within the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel. On the other hand, the majority of Israelis were born within Israel (although their parents or grandparents may have migrated from Europe or from elsewhere in the middle east).

Doubt that will happen. Even if Chinese companies make a knock off of a popular jet like the 737 and duplicate Boeing's international supply chain domestically (not an easy task even for China), it will take decades of flight heritage to build customer confidence in a new aircraft company. Furthermore air travel is tightly regulated and aircraft for sale in most markets have to meet a wide variety of certifications, and ones from China that blatantly infringe on patents and international trade laws would likely be hard to sell outside China itself.

I'll give you my honest opinion as a bit of a fusion insider. I don't think fusion will ever be helpful to address climate change in the way that most people envision, for the simple reason that solar is getting cheaper so quickly. Unlike many other energy technologies, solar panels are just solid state, semiconductor-type products, and they follow a Moore's law like path for cost/performance. In another decade or two, no other power source will be competitive with solar for cost / $. Solar energy IS fusion energy, the reactor just happens to be a ways away. The energy storage problem for solar energy is so much simpler to solve than fusion energy that there's just no contest. Even after fusion is developed, the problem is it will be hard to make cost effective, for a number of reasons. 1. The technology involved is fundamentally expensive compared to what you need for other large scale power plants. Even once all the science and engineering is done, you fundamentally need gigantic superconducting magnets, liquid helium cooling systems, exotic materials that can withstand intense neutron bombardment, dangerous radioactive gases, precision diagnostics for rapid feedback control, and advanced pulse power systems. Most of these require rare and expensive materials and precision manufacturing, and are fundamentally not necessary for any other large scale industrial process meaning that economies of scale will be doubtful. 2. The physics of fusion are such that the bigger the reactor, the easier it is to get to work. While ITER is targetting 500 MW of thermal power, the reality is that any large scale plant based on the ITER (tokamak) design would need to be >5 GW to be efficient, stable, and anywhere close to cost effective. Unfortunately, almost no electrical grid is designed to be able to distribute > 5 GW from individual sources. Instead, grids distribute power from multiple smaller reactors which rarely exceed 1 GW. To make effective use of fusion energy based on the ITER concept, national energy grids would have to be upgraded specifically for that purpose (although there are other fusion reactor designs that may work better at smaller scales), adding further to the cost. 3. In 20 years, well before fusion is close to ready for prime time, solar will be < $0.01/kWh. All that said, fusion energy IS very important. Why? One simple reason: space. Fusion energy offers greater energy density and power density than any other energy source that we have a serious chance of putting into practical use this century. For both space power and space propulsion, fusion will offer new possibilities that are not otherwise achievable. Solar energy becomes much less effective in the outer solar system since you are farther from the Sun. While Mars might plausibly be colonized using solar energy, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn cannot be, and they are in many ways the more intriguing targets. Fusion energy even has high enough performance that interstellar journeys to some of the closest star systems become conceivable on human-relevant timescales, whereas without fusion the best you could do is thousands of years. Fusion energy will be the foundational technology of humankind's expansion off Earth. And, in the meanwhile, fusion energy is of great interest for applications in naval reactors. Fission reactors pose proliferation and contamination risks that fusion ones would not, and for the military, as with space, the cost of a reactor in an aircraft carrier or submarine is not as important as it would be for a commercial application. Fusion even offers possible applications in aircraft propulsion though that is farther off. The biggest help that fusion may be able to provide to help when it comes to emissions would be if fusion reactors become employed in trans-oceanic shipping. Shipping (on ships not on land) is responsible for 17% of worldwide emissions, and if you replaced all those oil powered ships with fusion reactors that would be a big help.

Individuals who hunger for power enough to dedicate their life to it go into politics. That's the sole and only reason for parties to want to win: power hungriness of the individuals that comprise them.

That's what I was trying to say... it literally will not be possible to know when the research facility was half built until it's been fully built, because so many of the steps of building the facility involve as yet unknown amounts of effort to successfully complete. For example, I worked on a particular piece of a diagnostic system that will be used in ITER, which was part of an ongoing R&D process to develop. When ITER was designed, it was known that this diagnostic would be needed, but it didn't exist and no company or university in the world knew how to make it. About 10 years of research later, we managed to achieve the specifications required for ITER, but it could just as easily have been done in half the time or been found to be essentially impossible as far as the people who wrote up the original ITER timeline could have guessed (in fact, they vastly underestimated the difficulty of the problem). There are thousands of other such parts and pieces of the ITER facility. Stuff that has known specifications/requirements, and that someone assigned a rough guess to in terms of how much time and budget they think it might take, but that require technology that does not yet exist or on science that is currently being researched. Therefore those timelines and budgets could (read: will) turn out very different in reality. For example, the current projected cost of ITER is about 10x the original cost estimate, and it's almost certain to balloon still further before all is said and done. None of the above should be taken as me trying to put ITER down. In fact, I'm a big supporter of building it. But it should be realized that as cliche as it sounds, "the journey is more important than the destination". The science and engineering learned in the process of building ITER will be just as (if not more) important than the results once first plasma is achieved and research commences. Many of the advances made as a result of the effort to build ITER (including the diagnostic I mentioned above) are already in use at other, smaller scale, fusion energy research experiments as well as in wholly unrelated commercial applications. It's still very much possible that ITER will fail. The best guesses of the word's foremost scientists in the field of fusion energy suggest that ITER will be big enough to achieve a long duration confined burning plasma, but that was thought before about some of the last generation tokamaks and turned out to be wrong. It could turn out that new, previously unencountered instabilities will affect the ITER plasma, after all, no one has ever tried to contain a fusion plasma with magnetic fields for more than a few seconds. But even if this happens, all that will have been learned and developed throughout the ITER build will still have been worth the $100b price tag.

ITER is a very cool project, and as someone that's contributed to parts of it, I can tell you with certainty that there is no meaning to the statement that it reached a "half way milestone". You'll note the article doesn't even mention what this milestone is. The reality is that work is ongoing but the timeline is always in flux, as some tasks turn out harder than expected while others (rarely) turn out easier than expected. Unlike building an office building or power plant, most of the work here is brand new and there are contributions from hundreds of private companies and universities each developing new pieces of technology that will be a part of ITER. Further the article is misleading because it implies promise of a "new source of clean power by 2025". Even if there are no further delays (there have already been many) and first plasma is achieved in 2025, that would then only be the beginning of a minimum 5-10 year research campaign. ITER itself will not generate any electricity, it is only a research facility. If the 5-10 year research program starting in 2025 is extraordinarily successful, there may be just enough physics and engineering understanding to build a prototype power plant, which would likely take another 10-20 years to construct (ITER has been under construction for 10 years so far but design started in 1988 and first plasma is still 7+ years away). This prototype would then operate its own 5-10 year research program to demonstrate and optimize things. Only after that would there be any realistic hope of designing and building a commercially viable power plant (i.e. maybe in 2060). And that's if everything goes extraordinarily well, beyond the wildest dreams of anyone actually involved with technical aspects of fusion energy research. That said, fusion energy is an important field of research and will possibly someday yield great benefits, and the science and engineering expertise gained as a result is well worth the cost, but these kinds of "hype" articles are not particularly representative of reality.

Huh? Everyone agreeing on something is usually the surest sign that it's wrong.

"It's wrong when Jews do it." ™