Can I push you to give it a try - places with honesty boxes feel like places with honesty boxes if that makes sense.
Obviously you might get your car egged once - but you can get eggs anywhere.
If it's any help, my (admittedly very nice) corner of Bristol has a couple of honesty boxes for eggs and things about the place and I've never seen any trouble from it.
I'm considering placing a sign on the wall saying to knock for eggs next time we want to get rid of some. I think that's a fair compromise.
We get a lot of crime around here... The issue with an eggs honesty box is that it's likely to be a nuisance to the neighbourhood. If people are willing to smash windows, I doubt they'd think twice about throw some eggs around. In fact we got egged ourselves a couple of halloween's ago...
As opposed to the story about the person who leaves their unwanted furniture outside with a sign reading "Free- Please Take". It sits there undisturbed for a week.
Then they replace the sign with one that reads "$10- put cash in letterbox"
Within an hour, the furniture is gone, though of course there's no cash!
I guess it's very location-dependent. I live a ways off a pretty busy exurban road in MA and if I leave somewhat useable stuff at the end of my driveway with a free sign it will probably be gone withing a few hours.
Does it keep teasing a war with China - seems like China keeps teasing an attack on Taiwan and the US is deliberately ambiguous on how it would respond to such an attack.
I think all this talk of who would win often ignores that factor to. There is no realistic total war scenario between China and the US - China doesn't have any desire or capacity to role tanks into Washington and the US doesn't have any desire to role tanks into Beijing.
The war, if it comes will be China trying to take control of Taiwan and the US intervening on the side of Taiwan. Victory for China looks like Taiwan under PRC rule, victory for the US looks like Taiwanese independence.
With that in mind "all" the US needs to be able to do is make the cost of the invasion/maintaining the supply lines too high. If I was China the drones I might worry about the most would be underwater!
It makes sense when you remember that the vast majority of football is played by purely amateur players - the rules need to handle a village school as well as the world cup final.
On the battery front that really is just a function of your use. I've got a smart phone I use purely for work, which in reality means sending a handful of messages in a day. That battery lasts 5 days or so.
Also my first phone, a "bomb proof" Nokia died when it fell out of my pocket into a shallow pond. Most modern phones would survive that no problem!
I don't know for sure (not in that world) but wouldn't this make sense from a compartmentalisation perspective?
You have a person that knows X and a person that knows Y, but knowing both X and Y is vastly more valuable. To keep things secure you ban the X group from knowing about Y things regardless of how they found out.
It's going to produce absurdities sometimes, but the basic principle makes sense.
You've hit on part of what I think the reason may be. The C in SCI is "compartmentalized" (or "compartmented" depending upon what era you're from). Keeping information separated reduces the damage from compromise, but also prevents cleared people from seeing the big picture, which might confront the viewer with some ideological conflicts, and make them more likely to leak.
Both Boyce and Snowden leaked because of their ideological opposition to what they saw.
The truth is that "we" (the "good" guys) are doing the same rotten things that the "bad" guys are doing, and being part of that world can make you feel soiled. If "we" chose the high road and didn't stoop the level of the "bad" guys, it would put "us" at a competitive disadvantage.
To survive, you need to rationalize what you see against your own values, and have a mix of patriotism and respect for the rules.
There's an ever-present danger of becoming corrupt within this culture. I've never been an "ends justify the means" sort of person, but most CIA/NSA people I've met are.
Populism is definitely a part of democracy, but it is a criticism from "responsible" politicians for "irresponsible" ones.
Obviously this is all politics so you needn't worry about the specifics of what actually is populist.
But, imagine two "responsible" politicians.
One who believes in lowering taxes as a worthwhile thing, and acknowledges cuts to services as a negative impact that is outweighed by the good.
The other believes in higher public spending, with the negative being higher taxes, outweighed by the better services.
Both would be angered by a third candidate that came along promising both lower taxes and higher public spending - just the "popular" parts of their respective manifestos.
Potentially - it's not like a strictly defined term. With mainstream political parties you'd more often think about specific policy areas than the whole business.
I’d respectfully submit that the reason it’s not well defined is that it’s a pejorative deployed by the establishment in both the left and the right to disparage substantive policies they don’t like, rather than a principled label for a particular political approach versus another.
So, we often look back on the old days with rose tinted glasses. But let me recount my IT classes from the 90s.
We'd sometimes go to the library to write something up in MS Word. We always liked this because it would be a good 5-10 mins to boot up some kind of basic Unix menu. You'd then select windows 3.1 and wait another 10-15 minutes for that to load. Then you could fire up word and wait another 5 minutes. Then you could do 5 minutes work before the class was over!
Coming from a UK background something I've been long curious about is is there a constitutional reason for when the opposition presidential candidate is selected.
It seems like the current way of doing things leaves the opposition rudderless through most of a presidential term, followed by a bitter fight where their own side rip each other apart followed by only a few months to try and establish oneself as leader in waiting.
Could the democrats do their primaries now? It feels like that would
1. Distract from Trump so he doesn't get run of the news
2. Mean that all the "candidate X is a bad democrat" stories could be long forgotten by the next election.
3. Give a pedestal to the actual presidential candidate as the go to person for the media to get reactions from
4. If they turn out to be genuinely terrible there's a lot of time to find out and potentially replace them.
Primaries are actually a relatively recent innovation. Before that, the candidates just appeared from the party machines. All of the ugliness went on out of public view.
For the last several elections people complained that there wasn't much difference between Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. And there isn't. They are a center leftish (by American standards) bunch.
The party has a small wing further to the left, but it just isn't enough to put forth a strong candidate. That is the biggest ugliness we get now: they don't feel represented and often, they don't vote.
> Coming from a UK background something I've been long curious about is is there a constitutional reason for when the opposition presidential candidate is selected.
That's a very interesting point. On the other hand, the GOP did have a leader through the Biden administration - Trump.
Even when they don't, such as under Obama, they do have effective means (Fox, social media, etc.) and content (effective, disciplined talking points) of communication. The Dems have neither.
the problem is that running any sort of campaign that effectively reaches the continental and population scale of the US is incredibly expensive. Bernie Sanders for example raised $228M during his primary campaign in 2016. it would be hard to see how to make that happen more frequently.
Constitutional? No, except that states run the primaries.
... but when the primaries are is encoded into state law, so it would be a challenge to change it for every state if one wanted to shift when "the primaries" as a whole concept are.
We do something very similar. All pay goes into a joint account and all the bills and joint expenses come out of that one.
We pay ourselves each an allowance that covers our personal spending. That's basically everything I spend money on by myself, so lunch out, treats, games whatever.
I think its a really good way if avoiding any worry about "wasteful" spending. What we each value is different. If we need to tighten our belts we just reduce the allowance, we don't need to fight over what specific spending is or isn't acceptable.
Can you explain how does "we don't need to fight over what specific spending is or isn't acceptable" works? do you simply cut the personal spending symmetrically?
It's not actually really come up fortunately, but we have an agreement that we have £X allowance a month for our own spending. We don't then need to justify what can come out of that allowance, and if we need to cut back on that spending it will be a general cut back not "spend less on beer" specifically.
Obviously join expenses like meals out would still need to be cut back too, but we're at least doing those together in the first place.
Obviously you might get your car egged once - but you can get eggs anywhere.
If it's any help, my (admittedly very nice) corner of Bristol has a couple of honesty boxes for eggs and things about the place and I've never seen any trouble from it.