These statements come a lot easier as a former diplomat. Let’s see if any of the current bunch have the balls to say it

What?

…dang

Can’t blame them honestly.

I live comfortably here, but that’s because my income is rather good. Is nice here if you make little or a lot. Anyone else is under huge pressure from taxes and other financial obligations like health insurance, retirement insurance and unemployment insurance. Around 60k - 65k gross income per year is where it hurts the most, where parts of your income are in the 40% tax bracket but you’re still in public health insurance. As a single, you’ll get a little less than 40k net out of that (2022 numbers, now probably worse because health insurance got more expensive). Rent close to the big cities is often over 1000 per month, buying at the moment out of the question.

All of this gets you… Germany, which isn’t bad but also not Spain for example (where I live / spent time both in bigger cities as well as in a village). Hell, even the Dutch at least have bikable cities. So… it’s not terrible, but it also doesn’t really excel…

Wrong, it was totally straight and not gay at all, because everyone said “no homo” before and after doing what you described. Just dudes having a good time

It gave them weapons they can’t manufacture themselves and kept them afloat financially despite frankly brutal Western sanctions.

It’s mostly the other way around with Iran manufacturing Shahed drones for Russia and licensing production to them.

Since they’re still able to be a thorn in the West’s side, I’d say they’re doing something right.

Most Gulf states are probably happy that Iran is getting attacked, they just don’t like that it’s Israel doing (and possibly benefiting from) it. Realistically, Iran has no allies, only business partners.

I don’t think anyone is expecting Russia to go to war on their behalf, but a more or less reliable non-Western trade and defense partner is a pretty attractive proposition.

Not in the Iran case, but CSTO is such an agreement that nobody honored, which is why Armenia froze its membership. Also Russia is years behind on their agreed weapon sales because of their own huge demand in Ukraine.

Iran has this kind of relationship with Russia as well, I don’t see how it helped them the tiniest bit. This also isn’t a West vs East things, Armenia also got fuck all despite being a CSTO member when Azerbaijan attacked them. Or remember Russia’s ally Syria?

Russia is always posturing as that powerful force that could go to war against NATO, but they can’t even help their allies against a small country that gets propped up by a single NATO member.

Every country can choose its own destiny of course, but if you think Russia will do more than send militia to oppress your population (like in Africa), you’re not paying attention.

I think the Spanish just need to get more creative with their spending or rather the accounting of their spending.

Edit: I’m more forgiving towards Spain for not meeting their goals than other nations because they seem to actually be improving the lives of their citizens, not just austerity bullshit.

Good, I wish NATO would disintegrate and European defence return to the competences of the European Union.

“Return”? It was never really there.

I don’t want my taxes to benefit the United States neither economically nor strategically.

The 5% are not a membership fee that goes to the US. What the US most often got out of NATO was that they defined the standards and requirements, which at some point required American IP and American products to fulfill those. But in the end, the leverage they had was their huge investment in NATO that also benefited other nations; once the American investments end, other nations will fill that void (hopefully).

Restricting such an alliance to the EU would rule out members like Canada, for example

The problem in the US isn’t lack of jobs, it’s lack of pay, crippling debt and rising cost of living. People have trouble fitting all those jobs into their lives. Normal people are getting squeezed and social protections are weak. More jobs won’t fix it

My original point was also that you’d need a real benefit compared to the currently available options. We did have faster air travel for a time with the Concorde (which looked a lot more like a spaceship than other aircrafts). It went away because it had a lot of downsides for only the advantage of being faster. Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to use it one day just to witness it; but in the end, it doesn’t really matter if your trip takes slightly less time; keep in mind that it usually doesn’t start and end at an airport anyways, and this problem would be even bigger for space travel. So it isn’t really something for traveling on Earth. Which brings me back to the question what it would do for a layperson…

Apart from that, you need to time your departure and arrival with conditions on Earth, so while technically you could shorten that time drastically, you’d probably need to wait some months before you can take the trip.

With the small detail that failures in your backyard are in general much less catastrophic compared to mishaps in space

My argument wasn’t against space exploration in general, but rather the democratization of space travel as a commodity; as in as in we have already democratized it so far that the trophy wifes of billionaires can travel to space. I’m unsure of scientific advances that has brought and rather think this made someone money

But the question is – why?

In the end, it’s a huge investment of resources; you can’t cheat physics. There is a theoretical floor (and a much higher practical floor) for what you need to get out of Earth’s orbit. And frankly, there isn’t that much to do for you in space as a layperson (not talking about actual astronauts who are rather scientists) except flex on other people.

I wonder if her ability to waggle her finger helped to get hired or if that even was a condition for hiring her?

Also gotta give credit to her how she doesn’t seem to panic at all and just goes “fuck this, I’m out of here” when the building gets struck.

All the best to the people who didn’t want this, regardless of nationality and faith.

This is the second time I’m reading this kind of logic (about service time).

10 years is nothing for an aircraft. This is almost the best span during its lifetime – when you have the experience with both the model and the particular unit.

To quote Airbus:

As commercial aircraft spend 30-plus years in operational service, Airbus takes the long-term view in accompanying the aircraft it produces throughout their lifetime – enabling operators to maximise performance and minimise costs, while also contributing to the overall sustainability of air transportation.

30-plus. Not less than 10.

It could be bad maintenance, for sure. But it could also be just Boeing again.

It’s such a shitty airline anyways, had bad experience both times (issues because of carry on luggage, name on ticket etc) - not directly to me, but this always caused delays on my two flights, one of which required them to unload cargo again. I only used them because they were the only one flying a certain connection, they weren’t even particularly cheap; but after the second incident, I just used a different airport because I’m not putting up with such a shitty airline.

It is the best card. A lot of people are saying it. Tremendous. Not like the weak Biden card.

It’s stupid on so many levels.

First off, it implies there is some sort or series of social masculine trait(s) that are in some way desirable. It gets even more stupid when this turns into expectations, like “you’re a man, you should X”.

It’s kind of sad but not unsurprising that there’s an industry trying to capitalize on the resulting insecurities.

I think it was a positive aspect of the MGTOW idea to reject these expectations and do your own thing.

Plex has better security, federates and shares with other plex servers and generally is less hands-on for transcoding.

Regarding security, it’d be interesting to see how secure it actually is. Yeah, the individual endpoints might be protected better, but is Plex the company maybe a single point of failure?

Godspeed