As a dumb American from the outside, I feel like the EU is on a path to full federalism, and they should just get it over with. We figured out with the Articles of Confederation very quickly, even in the 18th century, that it wasn't a viable path
The EU is around only 30 years old, there's no way to push for federalism until all the cultures inside it start to internalise being European first. There's a lot of EU-skeptics in most countries, pushing too hard towards federalism will very likely break the EU apart from the push back coming from national anti-EU parties.
Just look at Brexit to see what anti-EU sentiment can do if the environment is ripe.
It'll take at least another 30-50 years for any meaningful push for federalism to be possible.
I mean they called it systray.exe, it had no other name in the Windows 95/98 interface, so what else should we have called it?
It's like at my current company, we have a legacy product called Volcano, but we don't sell it anymore. However components of it still exist in our current products/platform, so when the Volcano service fails or needs to be reconfigured, the management types get upset that we still call it Volcano. The only problem is that specific component, while not customer facing, still exists and they never renamed it. Don't bitch at me because I have to literally communicate to the support team to fiddle the Volcano button
Moral of the story is, if they didn't want it to be called the system tray they shouldn't have named it system tray dot executable, and should've been more intentional in documentation and elsewhere at publicizing a different name
> One of the largest islands on the tropical atoll, Diego Garcia, will remain a joint US-UK military base and is expected to remain so for 99 years with an option to renew.
This is not the same thing as maintaining sovereignty. The US has bases in many countries, but it's not native US soil
Yes. For example, in the town where I was born there's a US airbase. Well, I say airbase because that's what the paperwork says, its actual function as I understand it was a site for a school for the kids of American military personnel, there are no planes there.
When I worked for a defence contractor the Troubles were still a thing, so on the British base there'd be a chicane and armed gate guards, no crashing through the gates and blowing stuff up inside the base for you. But at the US airbase there was just a sign saying Condition Black (ie no danger) and you could walk in, presumably the terrorists weren't dumb enough to attack a bunch of American school kids whose parents were military given that a lot of their funding came from America...
Ostensibly the reason I'd be visiting that US airbase was vital urgent paperwork being transported personally by a British officer, who was entitled to the use of a vehicle which I was driving, to some senior American personnel - but we sure did seem to generate a lot of such paperwork and we always bought back donuts (which the Americans have on their airbase) ...
Anyway, that US airbase is definitely not American soil. I did actually own a passport, and I had the right to enter the US, but I was never asked about it because the airbase was in Britain, on British land, merely on loan to the Americans indefinitely.
yeah technically embassies, bases, and even individual rooms in international airports are sovereign in the legal sense afaik, ie that host country laws need not apply. By this logic I guess the sun never sets on quite a few empires. At the same time if we were talking about “native” then maybe the sun has always set on every empire, since protectorates, territories, or fully conquered subsidiaries will never seem native unless they were originally next door, in which case.. you’re unlikely to get that many extra time zones as part of the deal.
yes. the amount we spend to keep people alive who have little to no hope of ever recovering is immense. of course it is cruel and leads to myriad bad outcomes if you were to even attempt to have a discussion about trying to change that (it is the slippery-est of slippery slopes)
there's probably no way to actually do anything concerted about it without turning society into Logan's Run but having gone through it with a grandparent and a parent, it is clear something is broken at the end of life
They don't have to though. It would have been nice if they did something like it's free if you go work in an inner city/rural area/volunteer/etc etc but if you go into plastic surgery in Beverly Hills we're going to ask you to repay your tuition
Well, given the numbers in the parent comment they should have a surplus of $14.7 million yearly, so they could just let the surplus go back into the endowment and that would help keep up with inflation
This reminds me of the IRS phone scams. The IRS does not have an actual voice actor record their phone messages or phone tree, they just use a text-to-speech system that is commercially available
So, the scammers just use the same system so the phone messages you get from them sound like the same voice you hear if you actually call the IRS
For just a little extra money they could pay someone to exclusively record IRS messages and the voice would never be the same as the scammers (at least, until someone replicates the real voice with AI but that's an issue for another day)
