A failed launch, as in an initially successful launch that went wrong in the air, can afterwards be spotted even on commercial satellite images: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/09/satellite-images-suggest-test-of-russian-super-weapon-failed-spectacularly/ The usa and nato probably know long before those amateur spotters do.

If the rocket fails to launch at all when the button is pressed, then noone will be allowed to know probably. It could be that they tried to launch 10 and only 1 ignited, or maybe there was just the one. Russia isn’t going to tell the truth about anything so it’s anyone’s guess. If it fails to ignite, then I’d expect them to just pack up the rocket again and continue to pretend doing maintenance and have soldiers guarding the stuff.

I’ve stopped giving USA republicans the benefit of doubt years ago, Trump’s first year in office was enough to convince me. I’ve accepted that they are comically evil and that they have no redeeming qualities. So if I see something that is comically evil, then I’m not going to invent possibilities of why it might not be as bad, because in my experience it will turn out that after a little digging, it’s actually worse.

Also the administration was given the opportunity to justify or explain their actions by the reporter, and they chose not to, most likely not because they didn’t want to, but because they couldn’t do so in a matter that did not make them appear like spiteful bigots. There’s no point in inventing possible defenses for them if they could not provide them themselves.

They have already created gender neutral restrooms, according to the article these windows are not in those.

There’s 2 stalls visible in the picture. The walls are not floor to ceiling, the doors have larger gaps above and though it isn’t visible, I expect also a gap below. It’s not clear if there are vertical visibility slits on the sides of the doors. But they’re clearly just stalls really.

But it doesn’t really matter how the stalls are, the way that we know that this is targeted spite and bullying, is that windows are being cut only in a specific subset of the restrooms. They’re trying to shame and intimidate the kids that are in those restrooms.

The people who vote for her seem like the useful idiots to me, she herself more seems like a traitor to the old values of her country and the purported causes of her party. She loves foreign autocrat dictatorships and there’s nothing green about helping republicans win elections.

So I’m thinking out loud here and this is probably going to be controversial … But what if Harris took on a comedian (or an oaf) as communications director, to purposely do gaffes and create controversies, so maybe the for profit media might like her more. Basically a modern court jester.

I always thought things like Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes were very funny. A bit embarrassing for sure, but also pretty funny.

Apart from that 1 diner, she is also openly supportive of several talking points of Russia, such as saying that … nato expansion is to blame for Russia invading countries; the USA shouldn’t support Ukraine; after the euromaidan revolution neo-nazis came to power in Ukraine …

And she also has geopolitical goals of Russia that she thinks are good ideas, which she basically shares with Trump: supporting Brexit, disbanding NATO and saying that the USA should abandon smaller nations to Russian and Chinese aggression for appeasement. Worded differently of course, but that’s what it comes down too.

And she must also know that Russian agencies have massively promoted and aided her in the past. She’s more than a useful idiot for Russia imo.

Some cruise missiles are able to do all those, like the tomahawk missile fe: https://www.naval-technology.com/projects/tomahawk-long-range-cruise-missile/

To me, this drone missile looks like a smaller, much cheaper version of the traditional cruise missile. Cheap to build (relatively), easy to transport, fast to launch, hard to intercept: scary times for Russia.

In 2022 there were some stories of how people on work visas were unable to jump ship while others were fleeing en masse. And now after all the tech layoffs in the USA, I imagine that finding another company to sponsor their visa, has become a lot harder still. So that’s one group still working there: people who will be deported if they lose their job.

Probably, I agree with your reasoning. I was just dumbfounded by the massacre and my first thought was that they had been collecting corpses in the trucks, but after a few trucks like that, that made no sense anymore. Then you provided the probable answer in the comments.

I only saw all the corpses inside those seemingly intact vehicles, didn’t even notice the tires.

I want to add: The guy dressed like active russian soldiers and he never had outward signs identifying him as press. The vehicles he drove in on the frontline were those of the russian army, so again no markings of being press. Thus Ukraine attacked some Russian soldiers, one of which happened to be an embedded war journalist. Afaik, Ukraine did not actively seek out or target a journalist.

This attack by Ukraine is not the same thing as the Israeli or Russian army targeting journalists. If a journalist clearly marked themselves or their vehicle as journalists, then they were more likely to be attacked by the Israeli/Russian army than if they hadn’t. Russia has even been using guided missiles to target hotels because foreign press was staying there. And given that Russia actively targeted journalists, that might be an explanation as to why this russian propagandist did not mark himself as a journalist, but imo it’s more likely that he just liked cosplaying as one of the boys.

I’m not with the tankies, but I do think you have a misunderstanding of how gerrymandering works, so I wanted to try explaining it.

Part of gerrymandering is packing:
The committee packs as many voters of the party they want to discriminate against, in as few districts as possible. This creates a lot of wasted votes in those packed (now safe) districts, which will benefit the other party in other more contested districts. So yes, the gerrymandering benefits the republican party when looking at ALL districts, but democrats within the packed districts have very safe general elections.

AOC is elected in one of those safe packed districts, so in that way she “benefitted” from the gerrymandering. I’m not going to hold that against her though, she didn’t make the map and the fpp voting system isn’t her fault either.

This picture shows it best imo: in one of the disproportiate examples there’s a majority of blue voters, but thanks to 2 packed blue districts, there are more yellow representatives. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#/media/File%3ADifferingApportionment.svg

Currently this post sits at 5 down votes, so it’s not just that some people are unable to learn from the past, it’s people who are unwilling to learn from the past.

If you’re presented with evidence that what you want to do, will not work and will have negative consequences and you still want it to go ahead, then I have to ask: Why?

Why insist on doing something again which has failed in the past and which will undoubtedly fail again in the future? What is this meant to accomplish?

Some people are unable to learn from the past. And the last time this happened isn’t even that long ago.

In 2012 then candidate president Hollande did a surprise announcement of a 75% tax on earners of 1m+. And it was such a surprise that even the fiscal expert on his team was surprised.

Before Hollande was even elected, rich people started responding by changing their domicile to outside France, often also actually (part time) emigrating.

After getting elected Hollande then tasked his government with implementing such a tax. And that whole lengthy process was a political disaster, ending with the implementation of a heavily watered down temporary tax.

The chronology: https://www.lesechos.fr/2015/01/chronologie-de-la-taxe-a-75-sur-les-tres-hauts-revenus-avant-disparition-197994

After implementation the tax failed to bring in the projected money, because well, people react to what they perceive as overtaxation + the overall economy wasn’t doing so great due to this and other policies of Hollande: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/france-s-75-percent-tax-rate-offers-lesson-revenue-estimating/

Half an article with a graph of the effect on wages, the rest is behind a paywall: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/06/28/quand-la-taxe-a-75-a-ete-supprimee-le-nombre-de-contribuables-declarant-plus-de-1-million-d-euros-par-an-a-augmente_5482849_3232.html

In 2017 Hollande was the most unpopular french president in history and he did not run for reelection. Not solely because of this tax, but it certainly didn’t help.

And that was 75%. So a 90% tax on the rich is just incredibly dumb populism.

I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t ads that put a firm like TomTom on a downward slope. This was actually the first time that I’ve heard someone proclaim that ads are the reason.

If your business is to sell maps + navigation devices for money and then the times change and now nearly everyone already owns a smartphone with built in gps + some car manufacturers provide sat nav as a default + another company is giving access to a map away for free, well then your business is in trouble.

I’ve never even heard of ads in TomTom or Garmin, since I stopped using a dedicated sat nav once I had a smartphone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the things they tried to stay afloat after smartphones became ubiquitous.

Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it’s going to be worse in the long run.

Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company’s chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.

Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.

I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D

And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…

This is also something that many people outside of the USA don’t understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to answer.

Afaik, high internet speed requires higher frequencies and high frequencies reach less far + have less penetration through/around obstacles. That’s what makes providing “4g” virtually everywhere easy (good enough for phone calls at least), but if they want to provide actual high speeds everywhere, then it suddenly becomes not so easy (nor cheap).

That the USA and Canada don’t provide proper high speed internet access/choice to many of their rural citizens is caused by the rent-seeking mentality of their network companies + the governments that enable this. Most of those rural citizens live in places where there are more than enough people for it to make economic sense to invest, but investing would lower short term profits, so they don’t. Instead those customers are stuck with the choice between a single provider who is offering bad service, or no service at all. And as we’ve seen with the Boobies American, they’ve got enough of their dumb citizens convinced that they are oh so exceptional that this is the best that they could ever expect.

Tbh, that 4g coverage up north looks pretty damn good for how few people live there. To me it just makes no economic sense to provide that good a service there. So I’m curious and as a Finn you might know: does it make economic sense or was this investment done for other reasons?