Well… this is more about purity of form… my descriptions above are what happens when each form is taken to its exclusive extreme, so it’s not necessarily distopian, it’s the consequences of reality.

If you had even one perfectly benevolent person you could have a perfectly benevolent dictatorship, though it would still have scaling problems when the one person can’t handle every issue that comes up. If everyone were perfectly benevolent then pure collectivism could work, though there’s also a scaling problem if every person must participate in decision-making for every problem all the time.

Rigid adherence to any structure becomes its own sort of totalitarianism. None of these can really be good (or utopian) in itself, the only really good option is to keep the structure itself flexible, but with a strong enough set of guiding principles to prevent local abuses.

• Authoritarian Left - unstable, doesn’t scale, dependent on the efficacy of the central planner, prone to despotism. (dictatorship)
• Authoritarian Right - bureaucratic hell, systemic inflexibility, adapting to new circumstances requires a chain of approvals from bottom to top, prone to tradition-based decision making. (the military)
• Libertarian Left - groupthink, requires constant engagement of all elements, prone to stagnation if there is no majority consensus, prone to mob justice events, prone to suppression of individuality. (the Borg)
• Libertarian Right - chaos, unpredictable outcomes for any particular element, prone to local injustice for elements in local groups, prone to “might makes right” in local groups due to lack of broad oversight. (feudalism)

Common law, right? Even if the resolution doesn’t have a practical impact now, it’s important to set a precedent (hopefully to prevent such things in the future).

Yeah but where you gonna park it?

This is essentially the crux of the issue. Congress can designate funds in the budget for aid to Israel and they can specify what the funds are for (military equipment, humanitarian aid, loans, etc), but they don’t have the authority to perform the actual transfer of the funds (or material paid for by the funds) to Israel, that falls under the authority of the executive branch. Congress can provide the money but they can’t actually force the spending of the money.

Praise be to the system of checks and balances.

I don’t know why you’re getting downvotes, I think you’ve got it right.

If we’re digging a hole to China, it will be literally through Chile.

And the solution to this is always to raise minimum wage, because skilled labor pay must be higher than unskilled labor pay. If minimum wage goes up, other wages must also go up in order to attract and keep workers in more demanding jobs. Raising minimum wage fixes wages across the board.

Frankly, I am actually at a loss at what else could be done and it’s heartbreaking.

Yeah, I don’t think any of the typical political or economic pressure tactics will have any effect on the Taliban. The only thing that will end the oppression of women in Afghanistan right now is a direct military intervention to remove the Taliban from authority, followed by a sustained presence long enough to substantially change the culture. A new generation would need to be born and grow up with a different value structure that treats women as equals (so like, 50 years minimum). And that means running the country’s public institutions, rewriting its laws, enforcing justice and re-educating/indoctrinating its population, which is morally ambiguous at best.

I don’t think there is enough united global will to support that, and it’s an ethical minefield of one culture imposing its beliefs on another (which has some nasty parallels with the imperialist/colonialist days). There’s no fix that doesnt involve violence that I can see.

You sir are in luck. The Daimler Ferret can be had for about US$40k and is street legal in many places, though I expect the maintenance cost is prohibitive.

There are many variants, with and without the mounted turret:

It’s small enough (tiny, really) that you can park it in a 1-car garage, and they were widely sold so there’s actually a lot of them on the market. You can literally have this as a personal vehicle, for less than the average US annual income.

Yes

Only if you can demonstrate that subsurface travel is possible given current technology, and therefore reasonable to account for.

If Democrats controlled the House the bill would likely not have passed there in the first place.

In any case it doesn’t matter because the Senate will probably never vote on it, and even if they did and it passed Biden would veto it.

It’s also important to understand that this bill would not add any new arms transfers to Israel, but only compel the completion of existing transfers which the executive branch had chosen to withhold.

Ultimately, the point is that Congress does not have the authority to force the transfer of US military equipment to a foreign power. The disposition of military equipment is the purview of the Department of Defense, and trade with other national governments is the purview of the Department of Foreign Affairs, both of which report to the President.

So in May the (majority Republican) House passed H.R.8369 - Israel Security Assistance Support Act:

This bill specifies that no federal funds may be used to withhold, halt, reverse, or cancel the delivery of defense articles or defense services to Israel. Also, no funds may be used to pay the salary of any Department of Defense (DOD) or Department of State employee who acts to limit defense deliveries to Israel.

This bill attempts to force the completion of arms sales to Israel. This basically amounts to the legislative branch meddling directly with how the executive branch conducts foreign policy and defense policy, which the White House objected to (completely correctly). Biden threatened to veto the act if it were sent to him. The bill was placed on the Senate’s legislative calendar on May 21, 2024, and has not been voted on. It will probably not go anywhere at this point.

The executive branch has already been actively delaying some military equipment transfers to Israel, that’s why the House pushed this act.

Slav is an ethnicity, or at least an ethno-linguistic group, and it’s much broader than just Russia. Russian is just a nationality. Russians (specifically) are not an ethnicity unto themselves. Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and Bulgarians (among many others) all fall into the Slavic group along with Russians.

You can’t be racist against a nationality. Maybe jingoist, but jingoism is typically identified as considering a particular nation to be superior to others, rather than inferior to others.

TIL Russian is a race

It’s healthy to cut toxic people out of your life… but another interpretation of this is that she’s giving someone “the silent treatment”, like a 6-year old.

Someday soon I’m sure we’ll get that paperless office.

Because TikTok told her thats what the olds were doing.

Ah, I didn’t realize that was a limitation.

So here’s an article about packaging a 16-bit application with winevdm, an open source 16-bit emulator, into an MSIX which makes it installable and launchable as if it were a single application: Running 16-bit applications on Windows 10 64-bit.

Definitely a more complex process though.

I also suggest looking for the software on myabandonware.com because they collect community-built fixed versions of older applications, especially games. If anyone has made a fixed version for this game, it will probably be there.

This is not really true:

While it is true that American-made vehicles, weapons, and other supplies have fallen into the Taliban’s hands, the value of this equipment has been wildly exaggerated as rumors and memes circulated on social media.