The biggest thing I will miss when I finally move to Europe is how rarely I encounter smokers in public in the US. I can only hope Europe keeps making smoking less enticing, because it’s really jarring walking around a beautiful city and having to smell smoke everywhere outside.

2500 years ago we didn’t have computers and cell phones. We do now, and they all use gold.

My computer and my phone are preeeeeeeeeetty important to my life, though.

The value of gold lies in the fact that other men may be disposed to work their ass off in order to have some shiny things to gift to women in order to have sex. As you can imagine, the power of gold amongst married couples drastically decreases.

Gold is actually useful for things other than jewelry.

Do most people have bars of gold sitting around? No. Do most people have gold jewelry like wedding rings and earrings and necklaces? Yes. Can those bars of gold sitting in banks be easily melted down into coins in the event of a society collapse? Yes. Can Bitcoin be usable at all without internet and power? No.

Yes, the thing that doesn’t work in case of an internet or power outage. Yeah, that’s a good idea to use in societal collapse.

but the core idea is one of prosociality and female safety

No, it isn’t. That’s not at all why the separation of sexes exists for Muslims.

It’s about the fact that once a woman reaches a certain age, she is now eligible for being owned by someone other than her father and must be treated as exclusive property that only one man can own. Restricting their movements and not giving them the right to drive a car or vote or do other “normal adult” things is all the same as separating the sexes and making women wear certain clothing.

Yes, this will definitely protect farmers. I mean, it won’t, but at least they will FEEL like it protects them.

People eat veggie burgers for a reason, and it isn’t because they think it is actually meat. You can call it whatever you want.

Windy roads make people slow down for all the turns. Narrow roads make people slow down because most don’t have a great sense of how big their car is. Bumpy roads make people slow down and wakes people up. Even how lanes are painted changes how people drive.

It’s not the hubris of man. It’s scientific research over decades and decades that has shown many captive animals are unable to survive without humans. This isn’t just some hippy or business person making uninformed assumptions about how animals work. Animals who have never been taught how to hunt on their own, or how to communicate with others of their species, will slowly die of starvation. It happens all the time when animals are let loose in the wild with no skills.

If you don’t believe me, go watch Naked and Afraid. Nearly every episode is about how these adult humans who have a production team ensuring their safety can’t catch any food and get sick from bad water and mostly starve for the entire duration of the challenge. That’s what captive animals are like. They have grown up with nobody to teach them anything useful. The only people who do well on the show are those who have had years of training in how to survive in the wild.

There’s a big difference between playing a show IN a country and playing a show FOR a country. We rightfully give people shit for performing for Trump at the White House but not for performing for a bunch of normal people in Los Angeles.

How are you going to kinetically disrupt a satellite with $8000?

You think you can kinetically disrupt satellites with $8k worth of hardware?

It’s almost like I immediately said that was a completely made up number that had no basis in reality.

Two things can both be true:

1. There are classified programs that Greg Mello may or may not know about that are capable of countering all three of those weapons listed. There might also be classified Russian programs that are capable of countering those counters. And you can be sure we know at least something about those countering counters. Kill Chain analysis has been a huge focus area for the last few years, so the US military has developed ways to counter threats.

2. Golden Dome is still a wildly expensive, fanciful, and technically infeasible program. Even if we know exactly how to detect and counter these threats, the US is a gigantic fucking country with TONS of border to enclose. It’s one thing to have a way to detect, track, target, and shoot down one of those three things. It’s another to do that for 40 at the same time in wildly different areas of the world (made up number since I have no idea how many weapons Russia is able to unleash). It’s a lot easier to protect an area the size of New Jersey than it is to protect the entire US.

Yes, one of the biggest international festivals in the world, drawing 500,000 tourists PER DAY, being targeted for likely geopolitical reasons is simply local news. Definitely not of interest to people outside Munich.

Oh, they’re offensive, all right.

Having spent a ton of time in Bavaria, yeah, it’s closer to Texas or the Midwest than the South.

I fucking guarantee every single one of the locals out there spraying people and yelling at tourists has been a tourist at some point in their life. Even if it was for a day trip to Madrid or Valencia or Bilbao, they were tourists who didn’t deserve to be attacked just for seeing some place new. They are just hateful hypocrites who like annoying people for fun.

They have a legitimate concern with housing prices and how the government has allowed (until recently) Airbnb to drive up their housing costs. But the tourists aren’t the problem. And if they want to get rid of all tourists, let them A) find out how much their economy relies on tourism, and B) never be allowed to leave their city again.

I never said I was against that. I’m just trying to figure out the much harder act of implementing that very simple view of the world. If you just say, “here’s a new country that’s fully democratic with equal rights for all… but it now includes both Gaza and West Bank and is 73% Jewish,” you have effectively given Israel an even larger country. Hell, in the US we have universal suffrage and equal rights for everyone from the ocean to the ocean… but only theoretically. Ask a black man how equal he feels in the US, even though he has all the rights and suffrage of a white man. That’s how Palestinians would be treated except probably way worse.

The details beyond that are what is actually difficult and why peace hasn’t been achieved. It’s all fine and good to say, “we should all be happy brothers” but it ignores how hard that is to do when the two brothers want each other dead. I’m in favor of a two state solution along with reparations, but that will also be very difficult to achieve, as evidenced by the many times it has been attempted over the decades.