But the idea of a modern American Empire (Post-WW2) defined by Bretton Woods and NATO only makes sense of one doesn't have perspective on what empires were like before.

America got to design the western world order after WWII, but Europe was happy to give it the reins at the time. America setting the agenda was realistically the only way to get all these countries to agree.

The whole "American Imperialism" narrative only came about much later. In reality Europe got a great deal, most countries got to set their own agenda, and the USSR was contained.

- Amazon was behind by about a year

- So far they have only hired 8,500 of the planned 10,000 employees

- Amazon did not request any of the tax credit for the year they didn't add headcount

I think everyone is rightly underwhelmed by HQ2 but I think calling it a scam is a bit hyperbolic. At the end of the day it's not actually costing the local taxpayers anything to do this

> "Since military service under current law is based exclusively on voluntary participation, such permissions must generally be granted,” the official added.

> When asked, the ministry spokesperson pointed out that "the regulation was already in place during the Cold War and had no practical relevance; in particular, there are no penalties for violating it.”

Elmore Leonard was very familiar with movie producers by that point in his career, and clearly saw a a funny similarly between what a mob does and how Hollywood operates.

At the same time, the book is almost a tender mark of appreciation towards the role a producer plays. It's one of the few stories that spotlights what a producer actually does and shows it's importance in greasing the wheels enough to actually make a movie.

Reactors that only took 5 years to build before ALARA are still safely running 80 years later. The 15-20 year build and certification time for new reactors is purely made up. The countries that are building our battery and solar pipeline (China, South Korea, Japan) are all building nuclear domestically at 1/3 of the cost of us.

More importantly, for cobalt and lithium - we still exclusively rely on natural raw resources that are still very cheap. Meanwhile we have established reserves of fissile material for thousands of years.

Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.

It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.

Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240633007_Measuring...

TL;DR: Spending might matter up to a certain point, but becomes very inefficient. It's also more effective for challenges than incumbents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_in_the_2024_United...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_in_the_2020_United...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...

Countries that follow the presidential model regularly succumb to strong man type leaders. Ironically, in the modern era when the US had a hand in helping other countries establish their governments, we specifically helped them establish parliaments.

(Also, there has been the opposite trend, which is that more money than ever comes from private donations from billionaires and other wealth.)

People bring this up regularly, but I don't think it's that relevant. Studies regularly show that campaign contributions actually have very low influence on elections.

Trump notably had much smaller campaign budgets than his opponents in both winning elections, not even including the massive amounts of brazen fraud he used to pay himself with the money.

Fundamentally, it's presidential democracy that is flawed. We have a very powerful high office, and if enough people want to willing vote in a corrupt president, there's really not many checks against the damage that they can do.

Linus has said on a few occasions that the main thing holding back user adoption for desktop is a single distro with a clear focus. What Android did for mobile.

It's clear that SteamOS could be "that guy" if Valve wants it to be.

Sprinkle in a few business sociopaths and various opportunist "influencers" and you have a semi-self sustaining feed.

"Strong claims require strong evidence". Somehow it happens pretty regularly in academia that only one method becomes acceptable and any conflicting results get herded out on technical grounds.

- You ask someone to do it

- You check their work and they made some mistakes, but it's good enough to use

- You ultimately don't know if they're doing the best at their job but you have regular performance check-ins to be safe

As ICs we can complain all we want about the quality of AI, but as far as your manager goes - you using AI is not that much different to them having an employee.

I suspect in practice this search is not going to be perfect. There are so many variations that could exist on an address.

That doesn't even begin to deal with potential "ghost" sources. A database backup. An integration with a product database, etc.

I would honestly not be surprised if there wasn't a human reviewer somewhere over these requests. (At our company, all GDPR requests are STILL manually handled).

This is NOT their opt out form, which is located here (a tab over): https://gmcontactpreferences.com/email-preferences.jsp

This is them performing a deep scouring across all of their marketing databases for your information. Junk mail, phone, etc. (Letting you include multiple phone numbers is a nice touch). This is actually a pretty big deal since these systems probably don't even talk to each other.

You even have the option to "retrieve" the data on your email address.

Never in a million years would our org let us put this much effort into this without the threat of lawsuits.