“Huge REACTION to GENOCIDE” — there, I fixed it for you, you gigantic piece of shit, Netanyahu.

The Orange TACO demonstrating why the only way to deal with America for the next 4 years is to completely ignore them and work with the rest of the world for trade. Trump doesn’t honor the trade deals that HE negotiated (Canada and Mexico, for example) and has no problem throwing out the any deal when someone whispers in his ear about some new thing. Negotiating is utterly pointless. He is the boy who cried wolf and clearly there is no wolf at all. Why should the world care if America wants Americans to spend 200% more for magnets? Or oil? Or electricity? Coffee? Cars? Groceries? Etc… etc… etc. They voted for this. Let them suffer. The rest of the world will be just fine. This is the path Canada is taking and the rest of the world needs to wake up and cooperate — without the USA.

Thailand literally told them (publicly) that they don’t need their help… and then he tries to take the credit anyway. He truly is the biggest loser.

While this is obviously true now, in hindsight, it’s certainly not fair. The entire western world put all of their eggs in the USA basket… why? Because after WWII there was a real sense that the USA was trustable. That they would work toward freedom, democracy, and (importantly) expanding markets in the world. The USA made the basket and the rest of the world piled in their eggs. Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary (Panama, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc all), the world continued to believe the lie that America was happy promulgating. Nobody reasonable believed America would take a hard right turn to fascism and voluntarily elect a leader that would throw the basket — the basket they made to always favour America — in the trash. But here we are. Yes, the world never should have agreed to America putting itself at the top of the pile. But we did and now the world is busy re-orienting without America. I think that’s for the better, but then again I’m not American. I think Americans are in for a rude awakening when the Trump policies actually come home to roost… of course he’ll be gone by then and they’ll just blame whatever democrat inherits the burning hulk of America that he leaves behind.

Actually, I would say you sound more like the cave person in this discussion. “Sounds great, let’s do it” is not a reasoned nor analytical approach.

Is it possible to build it? Maybe. Perhaps even probably. Does it make sense to build it? That’s a much better question. Overwhelmingly, the scientific response, since Regan first proposed it, has been “No”.

The biggest problem is the “plus 1” problem. Say you have an array of 100 killer satellites, each with an intercepting missile. Well an adversary can see all 100 satellites, and simply has to launch 101 ICBMs — or 100 cheap “dummy” missiles and 1 real one. It only takes 1 getting through to vaporize an entire city. The killer satellites would likely be a billion dollars or more each, and they are rendered completely useless by a relatively inexpensive fake missile — mostly costing just the price of fuel. You can’t take the chance that any launched missiles are not real, so you must intercept all of them. No matter how many killer satellites you have, it will be trivial to swamp them with cheap fakes and have a few real ones hidden in the volley. Inevitably some of the real ones will get through.

There’s another huge problem someone else alluded to — such a satellite system would be trivial to completely destroy before even launching any ICBMs. The most likely deployment would be LEO (low earth orbit). Destroying any satellite (either from another satellite or from a ground based launch) would send debris out in every direction. That debris would then collide with other satellites, starting a chain reaction that would likely take out most of the satellites in LEO trajectories around earth (including things like starlink, etc).

There are tonnes of other problems with Star Wars/Golden Dome/Iron Dome but just these 2, I think, make it a complete non-starter with our current technology.

I get how seductive the idea is. And one day, perhaps with high energy lasers and technology we clearly are decades away from today, then it might be possible. Spending 100+ BILLION dollars on this today is simple a pipe dream — or the greatest scam in history (more likely).

“Ever since nuclear-armed intercontinental-range missiles were deployed in the 1950s, the United States (and its potential adversaries) have been vulnerable to nuclear attack. This is very unnerving, and has caused our leaders to search for some kind of technical fix that would change this situation by making it possible for us to defend ourselves against such an attack. Fixing this situation is also very appealing to the public. As a consequence, new systems for defending against ICBMs have been proposed again and again, and about half a dozen have been built, costing large amounts of money, in the hope that a technical fix could be found that would make us safe. But none of these efforts have been successful, because the difficulty of defending against nuclear-armed ICBMs is so great.”

https://www.404media.co/scientists-explain-why-trumps-175-billion-golden-dome-is-a-fantasy/

Another grave tragedy ignored by the right-wing media in the US (ie: all of the media). THESE ARE GOOD PEOPLE, DOING GOOD WORK FOR LITTLE-TO-NO MONEY, IN THE WORLD’S POOREST AND DIFFICULT REGIONS AND AMERICA - ONCE AGAIN - HAS LEFT THEM HIGH AND DRY. Does anyone believe any of these programs are coming back “after 90 days”? These people need to eat - today - they can’t wait around hoping that the USA comes to its senses. America has — once again — proven that it is a friend to no one, and, by all rights, should have no friends. Any country trying to appease these monsters will find themselves annexed or worse.

I’m just gonna go ahead and refer to it as the “Gulf of Canada” — the way Trump is leading America, Canada will extend all the way down there soon enough.

And Google can go fck itself for capitulating even before being asked. Fck that company.

Organic Maps is very good. One killer feature is that it can run completely offline, doesn’t track you, and is considerably more battery friendly than Google Maps.

And if you’re on an Apple device, Apple Maps is actually quite good now and probably has the lowest battery drain of any map app (on Apple hardware).