I’m not arguing that Russia is trustworthy. I’m saying that nuclear retaliation is a standard policy for any nuclear power.

We’d be relying on an other Stanislav Petrov to save us. I don’t like those odds.

That’s a brilliant plan. Nuclear armed countries generally have a policy of “live and let live” once they get nuked so that should work out great.

There’s quite a lot of disagreements between historians on why there’s an electoral college https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k5hv2m/what_was_the_founders_purpose_in_creating_the/

We have a lot of laws that protect people from government. The complement to such a policy is that we reduce the amount of protection government has from people.

If you assume that your government is bad or that it will inevitably become bad then this is a great policy to reduce bad government. The flip side is that if we expect government to protect us from individual bad citizens who have gained a lot of power.

That seems unlikely, since the constitution doesn’t really include safeguards against someone like Trump.

The founding fathers were afraid of a King (at least some of them were). They put all kinds of limits on the power of the executive but they assumed people would follow those rules. They never really considered the possibility of a private citizens gaining so much power that they can ignore government.

That would be true if he were secretly using those charities to enrich himself but there’s no evidence of that at all.

There’s an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, “nepo baby”.

Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather’s grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.

Elon’s father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn’t get you recognition from old money families. Buffet went to public school.

They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.

It isn’t even the root of the indo-european languages and the Indo-European languages are just one of many language families around the world.

Source I am from Austria. :)

In terms of her affect on the Green party, those numbers make it look like she’s fairly run-of-the-mill. Her first one was low and later on she posted numbers similar to more famous candidates.

I did a quick search on where those candidates are and it seems that many of potential Green party candidates are in swing states. It also looks like many of them are specifically siding with them because of their stance on Gaza.

That suggests that she’s just fine for the Greens and is likely even helping them. She’s a problem for Democrats because there’s an assumption that those voters would switch to the Democratic ticket if they don’t vote Green.

My question was more along the lines of the “(not so) the great (wo)man” hypothesis.

Let’s imagine that Jill Stein was permanently abducted by aliens. What do we think would happen?

Would the Green Party just collapse?
Would the former member just join the Democrats?
Would they start a new party?
Or maybe someone new would take over who could do a better job?
I think we’d likely just get someone who’s functionally equivalent.

Is she really responsible for the problems of the US Green party?

As near as I can tell the EU Green parties had a different trajectory. They initially started winning seats in parliaments on purely environmental platforms. Those MPs actually started pushing green agendas in various parliaments. That, in turn led to more people voting for them. Eventually that had to adopt policy positions beyond the environment and they tended to be pretty left.

The US never had Green party members in a position where they could actually do anything useful about the environment. That means they could never fulfill their primary goal in the US. So when they tried to branch out the same way the EU Green parties did, they just turned into a vague hodgepodge of leftists ideas.

Is there any suggestion that Jill Stein’s replacement would have any chance of saving the US Green party?

strains credibility

Not sure why.
Security professionals are constantly complaining about insiders violating security policies for stupid reasons.
Security publications and declassified documents are full of breaches that took way too long to discover.

The Navy may have great security protocols but it’s full of humans that make mistakes. As they say, if you invent a foolproof plan, the universe will invent a better fool.

The original article said the Navy hadn’t provided all the details.

It looks like those 15+ people included at least one person who should have been monitoring for such things and a bunch of people who wanted to follow sports.

They didn’t give the password to most of the crew and they tried to keep the commanding officers in the dark. It sounds like everyone involved faced disciplinary action.

Those chiefs and senior chiefs who used, paid for, helped hide or knew about the system were given administrative nonjudicial punishment at commodore’s mast, according to the investigation.

It looks like that’s an administrative process. https://jagdefense.com/practice-areas/non-judicial-punishmentarticle-15/ Potential penalties are listed near the bottom.

The original article goes into more detail https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

It sounds like there were over 15 people in on the scheme. At some point people noticed that there was some wi-fi network called “STINKY” and rumors started circulating about it. It took a while for those rumors to reach senior command. Then they changed the name to make it look like a printer, which further delayed the investigation.

It doesn’t look like they actually scanned for the access point. I suspect that’s because it would be hard on a ship. All the metal would reflect signals and give you a ton of false readings.

They only eventually found it when a technician was installing an authorized system (Starshield seems to be the version of Starlink approved for military use) and they discovered the unauthorized Starlink equipment.

The Starlink receivers have gotten fairly small. It seems like that was pretty easy to hide among all the other electronics on the ship.

The original article says there were over 15 people involved https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

With that many people, it’s only a matter of time before someone spills the beans.

There are several steps they could have taken to make it much harder to discover. I expect more and more people will take those steps and we’ll never hear about it.

We’re likely to see a variant of Moore’s law when it comes to satellites. Launch costs will keep going down. Right now we have Starlink with a working satellite internet system and China with a nascent one. As the costs come down we’ll likely see more and more countries, companies, organizations and individuals will be able to deploy their own systems.

A government would need to negotiate with every provider to get them to block signals over their country. Jamming is always hard. You could theoretically jam all communications or communications on certain frequency bands but it’s not clear how you would selectively jam satellite internet.

There’s a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they’ll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.

There’s nothing false about all the dead civilians.

This is a horrible ad hominem attack and actively fuels racism.

Wanting Israel to stop its genocide is a good thing. Antisemitism is a bad thing.

If you insist on equating the two, antisemitism will stop being a bad thing. That would be bad.

This is just insane. No normal person would doubt that arms shipments are a military subsidy.

Reply or not. I’m blocking you.

That sounds just fine. I’m pretty suspicious of someone who claims that being able to save 30 seconds typing that post would make you more tech savvy.