I don’t need to explain why someone could be deeply anxious interacting with US border officials… it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. And since looking anxious is a sign that you could be concealing things, thus drawing more attention from border officials… Coaching on how to handle an experience and avoid that anxious spiral and minimise the risk for such travellers… But I’m curious if this is legal. Or if it is legal, would it be construed as evidence of intent to deceive should a traveler do this and wind up being investigated in such a way that it turns up that they have undertaken such practice?

Also, holy ** I thought it was bad and probably going to be maybe 10-25 times higher… based on the utter devastation I have seen in satellite imagery… but over 150 times more…

The proportionality math for population density is just… ghastly.

like the typical comment are things like before and after satellite image comparisons and taking it at face value the claimed target exists for the sake of arguing the point… and they would say things like “that building needed 1000 pounds max and that’s probably overkill, you would probably want to just use two 500 pound bombs one on the first pass, and one on the second if it was still standing, heck I’d probably have argued for three 250 pounders bombs with penetration aids and have flow the sortie in a staggered pass so after each drop the next pilot can confirm if the target is still standing and drop theirs if necessary, but using a 2000 pound bomb is nuts on a target that size, they have air superiority and significant ground control to ensure minimal SAM risk from MANPADS, if I had suggested a sortie like this when I was a [whatever their rank was/is], it would have severely hurt my career due to how recklessly wasteful I would have appeared”

And that kind of commentary came up a lot in certain circles. Not even arguing the validity of the targets like the whole “hidden bunker under every second building” stuff… just legitimately tactical assessment of construction typical of the region, the cumulative seismic and shock load damage from prior nearly weapon detonations, and the honest appraisal that it was extremely overkill to use bombs that size… it was morbidly educational in a way.

His position as co-head of the nominal “department of government efficiency” only exists due to the legitimacy it has been granted by the recognition granted to it by the incoming administration… otherwise we would all be calling it some variety of the first buddy’s pet think tank and arguing over if the incoming administration would even pay attention to it or not… that is a government granted position of power, a position that it is pretty hard to argue is not part of the government that grants it legitimacy… therefore making it a position in government… even if it’s unpaid and advisory… it’s still practically in the government if not legally (for all the conflict of interest reasons you highlight)…

I’m not trying to make a civics or political science case here… I’m talking politics as the exercise of power by government upon the governed… he is currently having breakfast lunch and dinner with the incoming president, making arguments and shaping the cabinet, and contributing to the transition team… he’s involved with government… he’s “in” it.

So legally it isn’t in government yet, however as it is officially part of the elected governments plans, you can make a sensible argument that it is part of the incoming transitional government that has been elected and while having now power due to not being sworn in yet, is indeed part of government by nature transition teams and the president elect having status in government by way of things like security briefings and other rights and privileges normally only held by the incumbent government like increased security protection…

It would be like saying a government in exile (a well established precedent of history) isn’t a government and none of the people in it are in government…

Given the geopolitical context it’s extremely unlikely that they were willing to make a statement, even as vaguely shaped as the whole, “nato or nukes and we choose nato” thing was… in essence, why mention nukes are a possibility if you don’t think you can realistically build them?

And this makes a lot of sense, because Ukraine was at the heart of a lot of the most sophisticated work done in the Soviet Union, and as befits their legacy as the birthplace of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power in the Soviet Union, they were (prior to the invasion and war) the 7th largest user of Nuclear power in the world by total output at 13 gigawatts, and they are only beaten by France in terms of how much of their national energy production is powered by nuclear at 55%… they have retained a significant nuclear industry and they were even considering starting up domestic nuclear fuel fabrication prior to the war, which is indicative of them being able to do a lot more than just “run a nuclear power plant”, coupled with their domestic uranium reserves and the wartime entrepreneurial spirit they have brought to the entire field of drone warfare… I don’t doubt that someone somewhere in the government had a thought one day cursing about the failure of their allies to follow their obligations under the Budapest Memorandum, and decided to get some pretty smart people to work out just how hard it would be to get back their nuclear capability. With such a significant nuclear industry, getting plutonium and just skipping all the difficult uranium enrichment stuff would be comparatively easy for them.

And from prior published research on the matter of nuclear proliferation, it’s not as hard as a lot of people would likely presume… in 1964, the USA commissioned the “Nth Country Experiment” which can be sort of summed up as “we took 3 brand new phd physicists with no idea how to make a nuclear weapon, and timed how long it took them to work out how to build one without letting them peek at any of the classified info on how the existing nukes were built, they have to do the work from scratch with just public info and their brain smarts” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment … from scratch with, significantly less information than we all have available to us online today, if took the three of them 3 years to do. Ukraine has all the modern public information you or I have access to, likely a not insignificant amount of leftover classified information from the Soviet era, even if it’s just oral history and the spotty memories of long retired experts who were involved in building Soviet era nukes… and as recently demonstrated in the new domestic tactical missile and long range drone development efforts they have the capability to stand up domestic production of complex weapon systems… I think they know exactly how long it would take, they have a timeline, they have a rough idea what it would look like and they probably have a list of potential delivery platforms from their current arsenal… they just probably haven’t started actually, “making anything”

> I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire.

In the USA it’s clear that voter suppression and gerrymandering have allowed for partisan groups of elites with both progressive and conservative views to hold onto power for decades as the voting public they represent feels more and more like their vote does not matter, or that they are unable to vote due to their financial situation (no time off, no money for transit, no money for required identification, required identification needs a fixed address and their homeless, etc)… it’s pretty dire… and I have always been kind of shocked how it’s managed to limp along with such statically low voter turnout for decades… money is speech (citizens united) and media are allowed to treat made up news as entertainment with no need to distinguish really from fiction (FCC vs Fox News)…

I don’t see any way the situation doesn’t eventually lead to demagoguery… because at some point your public is just so disenfranchised that a demagogue doesn’t have much work to do beyond “I’m not them, get the fuck out and vote for me so I can change things”…

But the problem with a demagogue is that even if they don’t turn dictator, they are by nature of their rise to power, going to be very dictator like, it’s their choice, their charisma, their force of will that motivated the voting public… the only problem is that the checks and balances to prevent the demagogue from becoming a dictator, have only been barely tested, first with FDR, then with Nixon, one who died before the change to the system was relevant, the other begrudgingly bowed out before the system had to fully engage with the issue...

How would you do it better?

About the only “general purpose” visual programming language I’ve ever come across that is genuinely trying to be able to do all of it, is DRAKON https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON

And even then, complexity can be a challenge because depending on how the software is architected the diagrams get unwieldy to read as more logic lives on a single layer… DRAKON does have a pair of little tricks that makes it a bit less confusing to work with than a lot of node based programming tools. The first is that lines cannot cross so you avoid the tangled knot diagram issue, the logical flow is relatively clear from your entry points to your exit or loop back to start. The second is that it serves as an abstraction to other programming languages, allowing for use of traditional tools and techniques to debug and analyse the output programs if needed, and then once you’ve identified the problem you can make changes to the diagram, export and then compile the program again after confirm your diagram changes had the desired results in the intermediate format.

And before anyone asks what’s the point why not just program in the target language? First I’d like to point out that TypeScript is a thing, and then second I’d like to highlight that it was designed to aid in the comprehension and maintenance of algorithms in the aerospace software world, it’s meant to allow you to look at a diagram see the data flow and logical code paths and visually check that you haven’t forgotten things, heck you could confirm you had covered all your necessary conditions with some coloured pencils on a printout… which might feel foolish in an era of automated checking tools which we have today, but this was developed in the the Soviet Union in 1986 as part of the Buran space program, it solved their genuine needs for how to make checking code for correctness easier for humans, and has stuck around because even with automation it’s one of the few visual programming languages that managed to strike the balance between going to high level or giving too few tools for abstraction.

Nothing is perfect of course, it has issues, like every programming language does, but it’s been a useful little tool from time to time when I needed to collaborate on fiddly algorithms with non-programming experts who understood what the software needed to be doing way better than I did, and I understood way better how to make the software do it than they did. I’d encourage anyone who ever gave visual programming a shot to check it out even just for the sake of curiosity, and possibly learning a useful new flowchart diagramming standard even if you never use the compiler.

This isn’t an inspiring group… I expect a non trivial percentage of Biden voters are literally just going to the polls thinking ”he’s the least worst of these people and the others would be so insanely worse that it’s my duty to vote for this guy to make sure the people who believe in the other guys don’t destroy my country”

A mandatory age limit (which remember is enshrined at the other end, we have precedent for someone being too young for the office of president) would force the Democratic Party to nominate a different candidate, who Biden would be obliged to support out of party loyalty since he is being forced to retire due to the age limit, and we might see a less “Passive” Democrat campaign that would be holding the other candidates to the fire on their various problems, from brain worms and heavy metal poisoning to dozens of felony charges and a felony conviction pending the obvious appeal after sentencing…

As for the future when people might live longer…

again from the outside… I’d like the USA to be less dominant because the monopolar world has been a destabilising influence that has slowly allowed US based business interests to corrupt the governments of allied countries and pressure long term changes that have had devastating effects like the current NHS situation in the UK, and the various small countries whose governments have lived and died at the whim of US foreign policy due. While broadly speaking in the long long term the USA has been a good steward of its global power… it has been at its best when it was competitive against other global powers and not sitting on some global throne of power just deciding who gets aid funding or pressuring for treaties like the TPP which have deeply pro business anti consumer political protections built into their bones…

why the big preamble? Well in the long long term i imagine that by the time a healthy person is fit enough to run a global power at the age of 125 (extrapolating from the current age relative to the 80 year cutoff in question) i imagine we’re going to be in the situation where smaller powers have significantly asymmetrical influence… if space travel and eventual efforts at colonisation succeed… eventually they will assert sovereignty due to the classic cycle of colonial development… either the colonising power expands fast enough to maintain their control over the colony or the colony being at a distance (be that economic, logistical, political, or something else) the colony will eventually drift away from the parent developing its own identity and want independence… if we have lunar, asteroid or mars colonies… I don’t see how a lunar colony with enough mass drivers already built for cargo and logistics reasons… couldn’t make any government on earth sit the fuck down and grant them independence… the relative merits of that independence movement are for the future to decide as it’s entirely hypothetical… but my point is that the world will be different… and if the world is different and things have changed, maybe you could just change the damn law and update the age… it seems so obvious you would just raise the age if there was sufficient political support.

And thank you for anyone who followed my rambling short sci fi thread to its blunt and obvious almost non-sequitur ending, I hope it was at least a mildly entertaining read.