It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’ll probably do the job. Depends on what you want to do with it. There’s fewer people choosing this path, which means that when things go wrong, you’ll have fewer sources of information to help.

Some old Dell office PC with a good amount of RAM and an SSD would be just as well.

And my point is that they won’t try it again, because the Cuban Missile Crisis is probably the closest the world has come to nuclear war.

Yes, which is why they won’t.

That’s really it. The start and end of why the embargo is even still there. It hurts both Cuba and (to a lesser extent) the United States. It benefits nobody, but there’s some loudmouth Cuban expats who want you to believe Batista didn’t have it coming.

If Russia wanted to do that, they could.

I’ve been watching The Great on Hulu. It’s an explicitly fictionalized account of Catherine the Great in Russia, and I generally recommend it as long as you keep its subtitle of “An Occasionally True Story” in mind.

Anyway, the actual Catherine the Great was one of the Enlightened Despots of Europe. For the sake of argument, let’s say everything she did was absolutely amazing, and raised millions of people out of serfdom and into education and opportunities that were completely closed off before. Basically, the absolute best case you can ever make for the monarchy.

6 generations later, Russia is ruled by Czar Nicholas II, and there’s no other way to put it: it’s a fucking disaster. Russia hadn’t been industrializing the way other powers had in the 100+ years between then and Catherine, but Nicky drags the country into a war against a country that had. The inevitable happens, and it gets so bad that Nicky gets shot by revolutionaries in a basement along with the rest of his family. As brutal as that execution was, it’s hard to say the Bolshoviks were wrong for doing so.

So even in the absolute best case scenario, better than any monarchy could ever do for real, it doesn’t last. It can’t last. You may get a good one once in a while–and even that is a stretch–but the next one could easily be a monster that undoes everything.

Being hard is the point. (That’s what she said).

In making that attempt, we have to solve a lot of problems. How do we make a self-sustaining ecosystems where humans can live indefinitely? Can humans live that long in reduced gravity without issues? Can children be raised to healthy adulthood in reduced gravity? Is human pregnancy even possible there (probably is, but we don’t know that for sure)? Are there technologies or genetic engineering that we could use to solve the issues we encounter?

How do we mine asteroids? How do we manufacture things in zero gravity? How do we build the Internet to handle latency measured in minutes or hours or days?

These are all hard problems, but if they were easy, then they wouldn’t be interesting.

And I’d say the same for ocean colonies. That’s hard, too. Not quite as hard, but hard.

Moldova is a major tax haven, right? Is this going to start changing that?

As far as what he’s wearing goes, it’s just a bunch of gold and jewels. Little that would actually help anyone do anything. We only consider it wealth at all because of the capitalist context around it.

Right–everyone in the world is just winging it. Some of them are winging it in ways that create dead children.

I hate that you’re right.

Russia has some odd game theory incentives because their nukes probably haven’t been well maintained. Now, the rest of the world has to assume they work. The consequences of being wrong about that are too great. However, if Russia actually launched a nuke and it fizzles, that’s a pretty good indication that their nukes don’t work in general. It’s therefore in Russia’s best interest to keep pretending that it will launch a nuke, but never do it because that would remove all doubt.

And then they’re fucked. With the nuclear taboo broken–fizzle or not–nobody will complain when NATO gets directly involved in conventional ways.

Married into a Scandinavian family. Scandinavian baked goods are amazing.

There are intelligence briefs that we get from Israel, and the money we give them tends to boomerang right back into the US military-industrial complex.

OTOH, Israel collapses in a week without US support. Maybe politicians should realize this and use it to tell Israel to knock it the fuck off.

When do politicians realize that Israel needs the US a whole lot more than the US needs Israel?

Remember when everyone was praising Bolton for going against Trump? This is why you don’t simp too hard for people who have already shown who they are but happen to do one good thing.

Next: Liz Cheney.

Given Putin’s theory that nations comprise a set of territory they’ve historically held–Ukraine and Alaska being “rightfully” Russia’s–he surely wouldn’t object to China taking this part, right? And Kaliningrad goes back to Germany? He’ll be good with all that, right?

It’s a shipping lane, so no.

Inflation is a basket of goods. Yes, you can pick out specific things that are rising faster than overall inflation, but people don’t buy just those.

There have been alternative means of measuring inflation, such as the old Billion Prices Project (stopped in 2016) or the Penn State ACY index:

https://sites.psu.edu/inflation/

In practice, they tend to track CPI fairly close.

There was a giant drop in the number of men in the Soviet Union during WWII. This has had “echos” in their population pyramid every 20 years, where there’s a shortfall of new babies being born. They never had a baby boom the way the US did.

This affects all the old Soviet states, including Ukraine.

All that is to say that Putin was a real goddamn idiot by launching a war right in the middle of one of these echos when they’re already having population issues.