Well the difference between pushing for something and forcing is exactly the difference between soft power/influence and colonialism. Sure people may have different values but people can change and even in your country some people may find refreshing or even life saving to know that different perspectives exist. As you said maybe half of the population is against it... Maybe the other half is ok with it ?
Soft power is usually influence when followers fall in line without a push. And at least in these parts of the world it worked pretty well till mid-00s or somewhere around the '08 crisis?
When ambassador is trying to openly meddle with democratic processes in hosting country... It's a wee more than soft power and influence. Especially when both pro- and against- sides read it as „pass those laws contraversial even in US itself or else we won't defend you from muscovites“.
Regarding different perspectives existing, anybody consuming at least a tiny bit of media (western or not), knows that different perspectives exist. No need for ambassador to say anything. Showing off your lifestyle in media in a positive light is the best way to promote it, not push it down the people throat. It worked well for decades and the trend is clear. But for some reason in the past decade or so some people decided to ditch worked well.
In that specific case, ~ 1/4 supported the law, over 1/2 were against, remaining didn't care. Ultimately the law did not pass in parliament. The smaller party that pushed the law the most is no longer in parliament. A major party that co-pushed the law lost later election, with some members of the party attributing that to overall cultural wars narrative, the party leader resigned and the new leader of that party is much more conservative.
Soft power is also building roads and hospitals in Africa (see: China) because you want the country to deal with you first (because they’ve you as a friend, even if you both know it’s a transactional relationship) when they go to sell resources they have. It’s not just trying to strong arm people into doing things they don’t want to do.
You have a deeply antagonistic view of all of this. Is there a reason? Do you think that the EU doesn’t employ soft power? That China doesn’t? Do you seriously see no difference between, for instance, seeing value in large numbers of people speaking some English and having a positive view of your country, and whatever “bombing for democracy” is supposed to represent?
It is only shortly mentionned in the video but it seems like one of the main issues is what happens when water starts infiltrating your hole (it's unclear how much the glassified walls of the holes are a protection against that) and then you waste a lot of energy vaporizing liters and liters of water.
Unless... you close the hole at the top to collect the steam and have it turn a turbine to recoup electricity expenditures ?
If the hole is 2 miles long, I assume the steam would condense before reaching the top. And I guess lowering the pressure again, so I don’t know if that’s possible. But I’m not a physics expert.
At depth, natural gas is in the liquid phase in the reservoir due to high temperatures and overburden pressure. Once the drillbit penetrates the seal of the formation containing natural gas or other liquids then the gas will begin to be carried up the annulus of the well in the drilling mud to the surface. As it moves closer to the surface it expands and crosses into the bubble point into the gas phase which is the dangerous condition that leads to blowouts and the loss of the well and potentially lives at the surface.
It is important to be able to detect the formation boundaries and to have the mud weight tailored to the expected pressures within the target zones so that blowouts can be avoided. Pre-drill predictions of downhole pressures are made from seismic data and can be extremely accurate, especially when correlated with borehole data from regions with similar geologic history.
I did pre-drill pressure predictions as a geophysicist. Very interesting stuff.
Here is a little info about well control and gas kicks.[0]
How do you pre-drill side paths ? Isn't being able to drill the hard part ? I am not saying it's dumb but from what I know about the industry (almost nothing) it does not seem simple at all
It's true that it's not entirely clear but it seems there's a nitrogen gas that pushes the gasses back up ?
It's also not clear how much of the rock mass actually resolididy instead going away as gas but for the part that does, it seems to be do so in a fashion that resembles mineral wool.
I did come back to C after some years. I liked it because it made me suffer but in the I prevailed so I felt good about it. Now that I am back at it I remember all the pain of trying to enforce abstractions at compile-time with the C preprocessor. I am now considering Zig or suicide.
If having someone intall transmission (or your favorite torrent client) is not a hurdle, I like the privtracker approach a lot :
https://privtracker.com/
The reason I like it more is that most torrent clients can run in the background by default so it's not dependant on keeping a browser tab opened
It made it to the frontpage not so long ago but it'd be a pity if you had missed it
I have done that too much. When learning now, when I read the solution, I always make sure that I am able to implement myself, else I don't consider I learned it. I apply the same for LLM code.
The nice thing with neovim is that people got together to make Neovim distributions. I'd recommend starting with one and you will learn by tuning it to your preferences because if you have to get some work done, this will take a lot of your time imho.
I still use vanilla vim + ALE linter + ctags + makefiles for simple C/C++ projects but once you start to get into webdev with ten different syntaxes and tools, it gets hard to keep up.
But if you have the time and curiosity to explore of course, it's worth it
Hey! Thank you!
I actually wanted to start out with NvChad but then I became quickly overwhelmed with how many things are added that I do not know of. I also do not mind configuring nvim for hours, it's like tuning your car, the process is the hobby, not the result! I also found that I can incrementally then understand each added plugin and I am also more aware what is part of the config.
But it's worth noting what you say about the webdev part... let's see if I can keep up :D
