They might have introduced a communist style government across much of Europe, but many of the people fighting the Germans supported that viewpoint anyway. The regimes would quickly have destablised and changed.
Until Gorbechev, communist regimes weren't allowed to destabilize and change. If they did, the Soviet Union would invade your country and rid it of counterrevolutionaries. Czechoslovakia learned this lesson the hard way.
There's a good chance that the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and France would all have worked out much as they have anyway, as the Russians would have had no reason to go beyond German borders anyway (and by the time Berlin fell the UK along with armies from those countries would've forced a second front irrespective of US involvement).
I think you severely underestimate Stalin. Stalin was no better than Hitler, and was doing his part to expand Soviet control not only after, but even before the war. If he had the ability to opportunistically take advantage of a weakened western Europe, the miserable failure and ultimate collapse of the communist system would have left the entire continent in poverty and ruin, without the Western industrial base that is helping eastern Europe to rebuild.
Also: I'm not sure if the UK could have made the Normandy landings alone in the summer of 1944. By the time the Soviets reached Berlin, the allies (with the US) were already in western Germany. Without US help (particularly the help of Patton--look up the numbers) the Allies would have probably met Stalin closer to Paris than Berlin. And there's no guarantee Stalin would have been particularly friendly at that point.
It's also rather incomplete just to ignore the US military contribution--Lend-Lease, economic aid (including to Russia), and the Marshall Plan had just as much to do with the Allied victory and the maintenance of democracy in postwar Western Europe than American troops, if not more.
Let's be fair here: it's not exactly fair to compare the US military budget with the needs of defending the US alone, since we have many obligations to other countries. Japan, for instance, only has a small "Self-Defense Force", and depends on the U.S. to defend it from attack. A lot of the peace and prosperity of east Asia stems from our obligation to protect Japan--if Japan were to re-arm, it would endanger their relations with South Korea and China, severely hurting trade. Likewise, our presence in South Korea saves them from having to get into an arms race with the North.
Then there's Europe. Europe isn't in such a precarious position anymore, and we could probably withdraw our troops, but in order to get the same level of protection the European countries would have to spend more on their militaries. There's also the fact that, even if we did withdraw, NATO still obligates us to intervene should any of those countries be attacked. Iceland is a special case--they don't even have a military, just a permanently stationed detachment of the American military to protect them. Part of this is due to the strategic importance of securing the G-I-UK (Greenland-Iceland-UK) gap in the north Atlantic.
As for the Americas, Canada is part of NATO, and anyone who wanted to invade or attack the Western Hemisphere would be a threat to us, although there's the occasional allowance for very close allies like the UK. This is the original intent of the Monroe Doctrine--Monroe intended it as a mandate to protect the Americas from foreign intervention, although it was later abused by Roosevelt to justify US intervention.
By treaty or by necessity, we are obligated to protect not only ourselves, but also most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the entire Americas. I would certainly expect that defending that much territory would require more money than the rest of the world's military budget put together.
The sad part is, most of that budget is pork. When the chips were down, defeating and pacifying Iraq took most of what we could deploy. Now, defeating and pacifying Iraq in the first place was a horribly bad idea to begin with, but the point remains--despite the spending, US military effectiveness is a lot less than we bargained for, and a lot less than anyone would expect looking at the numbers.
It is compressed air with nitrogen added for its cooling effects on a motor.
Air is a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and other trace gases. Nitrous oxide is a chemical compound. There's a difference. This is like 8th grade chemistry here. If you still can't tell the difference, reflect that breathing air causes you to stay alive and breathing nitrous oxide causes "analgesia, depersonalization, derealization, dizziness, euphoria, sound distortion and slight hallucinations".
Also, Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about cooling, but rather notes that it's more efficient at delivering oxygen.
Adding compressed air to an engine increases the amount of air in the cylinder, and allows you to increase the amount of fuel in a cylinder without making the mixture too "rich" (rich means too much gas, lean means too much air).
True, but as we've established, irrelevant to nitrous oxide, because nitrous oxide is not air.
Adding compressed gases would allow high performance to be gained out of a small motor, but would not increase the overall fuel economy of said motor.
Well, oxygen-rich gases that break down easily. Or possibly pure oxygen. I don't think adding compressed helium would help much but you are welcome to try.
This is loosely-informed speculation, but I do know that American safety tests are usually crash tests to ensure that the passenger compartment can survive a collision. I don't know much about European tests, except that they do have a "moose test" that involves testing the maximum speed that a vehicle can swerve. So maybe, just as the American tests favor heavily-armored body types, the European tests favor performance and agility. Since Europe has stricter licensing than America, they can more easily presume that drivers are capable of executing these swerves. In America we allow any idiot to drive, so we test for crash survivability. The difference in design between US and European cars probably stems from this.
So instead of Cubans being able to own property, and some Americans also owning property in Cuba, it's better for Castro to own all the property and for the Cubans to be imprisoned serfs?
It makes the individual voter more powerful because his vote has a higher probability of moving the balance of the legislature by one seat, since there are gradients at every 0.5% for a 200 person legislature, for instance, instead of a single gradient at 50%.
One possible method, for instance, would be proportional representation. Then instead of only having one significant threshold (50%) there are multiple thresholds (any percentage difference granular enough to affect the proportions of the legislature or parliament in question). Caucuses are another example I specifically mentioned from the outset.
So in other words, you want your vote to count MORE than everyone else's. After all, if you by yourself can make a real difference in a national election, that means that millions of others cannot.
Not necessarily--there are other ways of solving the problems I point out, even if you're not clever enough to think of them.
I think you're confusing the concept of "allies" with the concept of "vassal states". Allies aren't there to help you start wars of aggression, they're to help defend you if you're aggressed against.
In his introduction video he proposes the creation of a national "Change Congress" movement which would try to limit the influence of money in the electoral and legislative processes.
I'm all for this, but as the old spam form response says, "Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical".
Scalia, Alito, and Thomas could have a change of heart and become flag-burning, dope-smoking, abortion-promoting hippies, and there's really nothing that could be done to punish them.
Holy mother of fuck. I think you just came up with the best new animated comedy of 2008.
Re:Yeah, Mission accomplished, watch W take credit
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
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· Score: 1
But in Cuba, it's illegal to visit America! Or, for that matter, leave the country. Travel restrictions are a way in which Americans are more free than Cubans, not less.
He's kept up a basic healthcare system and invested his country's meager resources into finding treatments for tropical poor people's diseases ignored by Western pharmaceutical companies.
Isn't that generous of him? If he hadn't tried to hard to maintain a communist system and keep out "capitalist" influences, maybe Western pharmaceutical companies would have spent their more-than-meager resources finding even better treatments.
Re:Yeah, Mission accomplished, watch W take credit
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
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· Score: 1
However, this also happens in American Prisons and America incarcerates its own citizens at a higher rate- we just make everything illegal so we do not have to use bogus crimes like "insulting the president" to put someone away for seven years.
Cuba has judicial due process with jury trials? Cuba has legalized prostitution and marijuana? What exactly is illegal here that's legal in Cuba?
The Ag-lobby isn't particularly strong (certainly not, when compared to, say, the French Ag lobby).
You'd be surprised. There are a bunch of little farm states, all of which have 2 senators, which is just as many as California or New York. So the ag lobby is strengthened by the structural elements of the US constitution. The US also has all sorts of crap--the sugar tariff, corn subsidies, corn-based ethanol--that's intended merely to enrich the ag lobby, often with negative effects on the public as a whole. (Corn is a very poor source of ethanol, for instance.)
But let's say you're right. Let's say I was a dick a while ago. Let's say that has led me to having no close male friends. Now what? Like I said, that means no one to recommend me in groups. Does that mean I deserve to be fucked for the rest of my life?
No, it means that you deserve not to be fucked. Wordplay aside, I well understand your situation and found your response well taken.
You lose at game theory. Yes, match.com and Yahoo won't switch to his system, but if a startup or fringe player switches to it, and it actually works better, then their profits will still go up.
It's one thing to predict when a building project will be finished or when we'll reach a certain level of raw processing power because these things proceed by predictable means. But strong AI requires us to make theoretical advances. Theoretical advances don't proceed like a building project--someone has to have a clever idea, fully develop and understand it himself and convince others of it. And it won't occur to someone all at once, so we'll need incremental advances, all of which will happen unpredictably.
But I can admit there are some problems with that comparison. Torment had classic characters, a fascinating story, and important themes.
It had characters, a story, and themes? Video games don't need ANY of those to be art. Tranqulity is a beautiful, artful game and it has none of those. If video games are going to be valuable as an art form they need to do something that other art forms don't.
You have to be a Jedi Knight, obviously, but not a Master. You can be a newly-made Jedi Knight: Obi-Wan himself took on Anakin immediately after he was knighted. Anakin isn't knighted until well after Episode II, but by Episode III he easily has the standing to have padawans.
I imagine it's like being a young assistant professor: you have your Ph.D. and you can take on grad students, but you're at the bottom of the pecking order during faculty meetings. Most of the people on the Jedi Council are ancient, and even Obi-Wan is probably young by their standards. Someone like Yoda or Mace Windu definitely has the standing to talk down even to full fledged knights, especially the hotshots whose power far outstrips their wisdom and knowledge of the Force. It probably didn't help that Anakin was a legendary war hero despite being centuries younger than lots of other Jedi.
Slashdot Mirror
Until Gorbechev, communist regimes weren't allowed to destabilize and change. If they did, the Soviet Union would invade your country and rid it of counterrevolutionaries. Czechoslovakia learned this lesson the hard way.
There's a good chance that the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and France would all have worked out much as they have anyway, as the Russians would have had no reason to go beyond German borders anyway (and by the time Berlin fell the UK along with armies from those countries would've forced a second front irrespective of US involvement).I think you severely underestimate Stalin. Stalin was no better than Hitler, and was doing his part to expand Soviet control not only after, but even before the war. If he had the ability to opportunistically take advantage of a weakened western Europe, the miserable failure and ultimate collapse of the communist system would have left the entire continent in poverty and ruin, without the Western industrial base that is helping eastern Europe to rebuild.
Also: I'm not sure if the UK could have made the Normandy landings alone in the summer of 1944. By the time the Soviets reached Berlin, the allies (with the US) were already in western Germany. Without US help (particularly the help of Patton--look up the numbers) the Allies would have probably met Stalin closer to Paris than Berlin. And there's no guarantee Stalin would have been particularly friendly at that point.
It's also rather incomplete just to ignore the US military contribution--Lend-Lease, economic aid (including to Russia), and the Marshall Plan had just as much to do with the Allied victory and the maintenance of democracy in postwar Western Europe than American troops, if not more.
Let's be fair here: it's not exactly fair to compare the US military budget with the needs of defending the US alone, since we have many obligations to other countries. Japan, for instance, only has a small "Self-Defense Force", and depends on the U.S. to defend it from attack. A lot of the peace and prosperity of east Asia stems from our obligation to protect Japan--if Japan were to re-arm, it would endanger their relations with South Korea and China, severely hurting trade. Likewise, our presence in South Korea saves them from having to get into an arms race with the North.
Then there's Europe. Europe isn't in such a precarious position anymore, and we could probably withdraw our troops, but in order to get the same level of protection the European countries would have to spend more on their militaries. There's also the fact that, even if we did withdraw, NATO still obligates us to intervene should any of those countries be attacked. Iceland is a special case--they don't even have a military, just a permanently stationed detachment of the American military to protect them. Part of this is due to the strategic importance of securing the G-I-UK (Greenland-Iceland-UK) gap in the north Atlantic.
As for the Americas, Canada is part of NATO, and anyone who wanted to invade or attack the Western Hemisphere would be a threat to us, although there's the occasional allowance for very close allies like the UK. This is the original intent of the Monroe Doctrine--Monroe intended it as a mandate to protect the Americas from foreign intervention, although it was later abused by Roosevelt to justify US intervention.
By treaty or by necessity, we are obligated to protect not only ourselves, but also most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the entire Americas. I would certainly expect that defending that much territory would require more money than the rest of the world's military budget put together.
The sad part is, most of that budget is pork. When the chips were down, defeating and pacifying Iraq took most of what we could deploy. Now, defeating and pacifying Iraq in the first place was a horribly bad idea to begin with, but the point remains--despite the spending, US military effectiveness is a lot less than we bargained for, and a lot less than anyone would expect looking at the numbers.
Is Ross Perot going to run again too? I miss that guy.
You're the one equating laughing gas with air.
Let's see. From your original post...
It is compressed air with nitrogen added for its cooling effects on a motor.Air is a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and other trace gases. Nitrous oxide is a chemical compound. There's a difference. This is like 8th grade chemistry here. If you still can't tell the difference, reflect that breathing air causes you to stay alive and breathing nitrous oxide causes "analgesia, depersonalization, derealization, dizziness, euphoria, sound distortion and slight hallucinations".
Also, Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about cooling, but rather notes that it's more efficient at delivering oxygen.
Adding compressed air to an engine increases the amount of air in the cylinder, and allows you to increase the amount of fuel in a cylinder without making the mixture too "rich" (rich means too much gas, lean means too much air).True, but as we've established, irrelevant to nitrous oxide, because nitrous oxide is not air.
Adding compressed gases would allow high performance to be gained out of a small motor, but would not increase the overall fuel economy of said motor.Well, oxygen-rich gases that break down easily. Or possibly pure oxygen. I don't think adding compressed helium would help much but you are welcome to try.
This is loosely-informed speculation, but I do know that American safety tests are usually crash tests to ensure that the passenger compartment can survive a collision. I don't know much about European tests, except that they do have a "moose test" that involves testing the maximum speed that a vehicle can swerve. So maybe, just as the American tests favor heavily-armored body types, the European tests favor performance and agility. Since Europe has stricter licensing than America, they can more easily presume that drivers are capable of executing these swerves. In America we allow any idiot to drive, so we test for crash survivability. The difference in design between US and European cars probably stems from this.
So instead of Cubans being able to own property, and some Americans also owning property in Cuba, it's better for Castro to own all the property and for the Cubans to be imprisoned serfs?
It makes the individual voter more powerful because his vote has a higher probability of moving the balance of the legislature by one seat, since there are gradients at every 0.5% for a 200 person legislature, for instance, instead of a single gradient at 50%.
One possible method, for instance, would be proportional representation. Then instead of only having one significant threshold (50%) there are multiple thresholds (any percentage difference granular enough to affect the proportions of the legislature or parliament in question). Caucuses are another example I specifically mentioned from the outset.
Not necessarily--there are other ways of solving the problems I point out, even if you're not clever enough to think of them.
I think you're confusing the concept of "allies" with the concept of "vassal states". Allies aren't there to help you start wars of aggression, they're to help defend you if you're aggressed against.
Thomas Jefferson would find himself on the no-fly-list today.
I'm all for this, but as the old spam form response says, "Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical".
Holy mother of fuck. I think you just came up with the best new animated comedy of 2008.
But in Cuba, it's illegal to visit America! Or, for that matter, leave the country. Travel restrictions are a way in which Americans are more free than Cubans, not less.
Isn't that generous of him? If he hadn't tried to hard to maintain a communist system and keep out "capitalist" influences, maybe Western pharmaceutical companies would have spent their more-than-meager resources finding even better treatments.
Cuba has judicial due process with jury trials? Cuba has legalized prostitution and marijuana? What exactly is illegal here that's legal in Cuba?
You'd be surprised. There are a bunch of little farm states, all of which have 2 senators, which is just as many as California or New York. So the ag lobby is strengthened by the structural elements of the US constitution. The US also has all sorts of crap--the sugar tariff, corn subsidies, corn-based ethanol--that's intended merely to enrich the ag lobby, often with negative effects on the public as a whole. (Corn is a very poor source of ethanol, for instance.)
They already are.
Cuba needs communism.They already have it.
No, it means that you deserve not to be fucked. Wordplay aside, I well understand your situation and found your response well taken.
You lose at game theory. Yes, match.com and Yahoo won't switch to his system, but if a startup or fringe player switches to it, and it actually works better, then their profits will still go up.
It's one thing to predict when a building project will be finished or when we'll reach a certain level of raw processing power because these things proceed by predictable means. But strong AI requires us to make theoretical advances. Theoretical advances don't proceed like a building project--someone has to have a clever idea, fully develop and understand it himself and convince others of it. And it won't occur to someone all at once, so we'll need incremental advances, all of which will happen unpredictably.
It had characters, a story, and themes? Video games don't need ANY of those to be art. Tranqulity is a beautiful, artful game and it has none of those. If video games are going to be valuable as an art form they need to do something that other art forms don't.
You have to be a Jedi Knight, obviously, but not a Master. You can be a newly-made Jedi Knight: Obi-Wan himself took on Anakin immediately after he was knighted. Anakin isn't knighted until well after Episode II, but by Episode III he easily has the standing to have padawans.
I imagine it's like being a young assistant professor: you have your Ph.D. and you can take on grad students, but you're at the bottom of the pecking order during faculty meetings. Most of the people on the Jedi Council are ancient, and even Obi-Wan is probably young by their standards. Someone like Yoda or Mace Windu definitely has the standing to talk down even to full fledged knights, especially the hotshots whose power far outstrips their wisdom and knowledge of the Force. It probably didn't help that Anakin was a legendary war hero despite being centuries younger than lots of other Jedi.