Russia has to be very disappointed about this. They really really don’t want another east-west trade/energy corridor to arise through the Caucasus to their Central Asian backyard after all the trouble of getting a thumb on Georgia.

What kind of busywork were they doing for almost a decade when they couldn’t even agree on a foundational issue like can we use it on a carrier or not?

Buildings in the UK are designed to keep heat in to defeat the winter cold and up until recently A/C has generally been deemed an unnecessary luxury so it’s not terribly common.

At the industrial site I worked at in in MS, A/C was considered crucial in the offices and if it broke they would generally start sending all people normally stationed in them who were not working on something absolutely crucial that had to be done there home as the temperature drifted up past like the low 80s or something (even in the winter all the computers could heat the office up to the 90s without A/C and in summer going outside was like walking into a mouth so you can imagine how unpleasant that was). They had certain actions and relief that they had to provide by procedure to people with long stay times at high temperature to comply with company and federal rules and it was prohibitive to do that for literally everyone so it was better to call it a WFH day for most people while the A/C got fixed.

For some jobs in super toasty areas it was unavoidable though and they’d have countermeasures like ice vests, nearby break rooms with refrigerated water and fans that they were mandated to use with more breaks for hotter and/or longer stays, etc.

That’s one of the many claims they make, yes.

For reference the main groups left standing at this point are the Iranian-backed Ansar Allah rebels AKA the Houthis and the Saudi-backed internationally recognized government of Yemen. Up until recently there had also been UAE-backed separatists who in a major offensive almost steamrolled over the recognized government in their quest to get an independent South Yemen again. Those guys got wiped out when the Saudis moved against them and heavily pressured the UAE into cutting support though, so now the south is more or less unified under the recognized government. The thing is, while the area that Ansar Allah controls looks small on a map, that mountainous area is and has historically been basically the wettest and most fertile area of the whole country (much of which is desert) so despite the small land controlled they have a clear majority of the population… I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%ish. So there’s a strange sort of balance as the recognized government is in no way strong enough to take on Ansar Allah by its own power, but the recognized government has more powerful friends right on the border that can do a lot more to save their bacon than Iran is capable of for their counterpart.

It was ultimately stopped with world war in the way it turned out, but that could have been headed off far less bloodily earlier on. If the powers that be had not gifted the Sudetenland to Germany then Czechoslovakia actually had a pretty decent set-up to defend with many fortifications at the rugged borders, far more defensible than the flat north European plain Poland had to defend against a Germany with millions more people, vast amounts of looted gold reserves and extra years of deficit spending to build a far more massive army. It could have held on while the west mobilized and attacked and wrecked Germany’s military via multiple fronts on a much smaller regional scale.

Going back earlier with the remilitarization of the Rhineland the German troops had orders to immediately retreat and if they saw any armed resistance or so much as a single French uniform. The demilitarized Rhineland was key to the cordon sanitaire of French alliances that ringed Germany.

Expansionist states don’t become easier to deal with as they grow bigger so unless you already have and expect to keep amazing relations you should probably not them keep growing unchecked. And even if you do have amazing relations you have to keep in mind that politics can change on a dime and throw that in peril.

So color revolutions for thee but not for me are fine?

Glad to see you’ve graduated on from Russia posing no threat to EU to positing that it’s only fair for them to be threatening. And against big threats you prepare countermeasures, such as not letting them swallow up your neighbors.

Which power was that?

Germany and the USSR were carving off regions and conquering small states left and right in the lead-up to WWII, both in independent adventures and their team-up via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Munich Agreement is pretty egregious with Hitler claiming it was the last territorial demand he had in Europe and Chamberlain coming back claiming he had achieved peace for our time. Only for it to turn out that Germany would use all the fortifications, industry, manpower and resources it had gained at the expense of its neighbor to roll over the rest of Czechoslovakia. So Germany became a much more imposing force than it had started out as because folks were content to just watch it snowball and not help Czechoslovakia defend itself.

What evidence is that?

Because, again, the logic from you chicken hawks seems only to be that Europe must support Ukraine fighting Russia, because it is obvious Russia is an enemy, based on the fact that they are fighting Ukraine.

Notice the issue there? Nowhere is there any threat to Europe listed.

wait, so rhetoric is a casus belli now?

In that case, isn’t this NAFO style crap direct aggression? They’re very loud about how they’re willing to fight to the last Ukrainian - of course, not when they’d be in danger themselves - but how it’s good that Russians are dying.

Russia has made no threat I’m aware of to attack any EU member. If you have evidence of such, present it. Otherwise, your weasel words are just that.

The rhetoric does matter when Russian politicians are threatening the EU all the time by saying they’ll nuke them, that ex. Baltic independence isn’t legal, that they’re states at war, etc. But there’s concrete action too. A Russian drone strike just hit an apartment in Romania and Medvedev is saying it won’t be the last one. They’ve set off parcel bombs in EU countries. Blown up ammunition depots. Violate their airspace, send assassins into their countries, cyberattacks, influence operations to boost separatists and groups like Brexit… and even if it weren’t doing all of that, a country that conquers smaller neighbors is plenty concerning on its own.

Previously the European states learned that letting some major power go around willy-nilly annexing strips of land and entire states from their neighbors does not end well. They’re on Russia’s list of unfriendly countries, are subject to Russian influence operations that are not especially appreciated and there is some evidence to suggest that Russia would seek to reclaim lands from eastern EU states if given the opportunity. Plus the occasional bombing and constant rhetoric against them. So obviously they will prefer to back Ukraine rather than letting Russia absorb it, become stronger and start eyeing the next country.

They also bombed Syria and Azerbaijan which have zero American bases

At the core of the defense paradigm. Since Ukraine has a gigantic military (currently more personnel than even France), pretty cutting edge work on drone and anti-drone warfare and has been fighting for years against the EU’s biggest land threat. They’re not saying Ukraine is at the core of Europe the continent…

It’s a very thin data set. One entry for 2000. Nothing beforehand. Then nothing for 12 years that just happen to occur during the height of invasion and mass displacement of the population.

I’m happy to see any data you have, that’s why I looked because 99% seemed incredibly high and the drop to 50% horrible and I wanted to check out that data. I agree this is sparse though it does ultimately come from UNESCO. There is a point on the 15-24 year old female youth graph for 2006 which is in the middle of that and another on 2011, which were the 72-73% I acknowledged. A decline of 8% for the youth until it started recovering in 2012 onward is what this particular source gives.

Wikipedia would suggest the literacy rate was high prior to 2000. After the invasion, there’s very mixed data, with high enrollment rates conbined with high dropout and grade repeat rates. But it’s an article plagued with dead links, so…

Where that Wikipedia article says “literacy levels were high” you can see that it also links to links to World Bank Open Data - the same source I used - except unsuccessfully. I would disagree that it was high based on World Bank Open Data though. If you look up global 15+ year old women’s literacy rates, the global average in 2000 was 76% so 64% in Iraq looks kind of bad comparatively.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say the war and mass displacement resulted in declining standards for education

I agree and that matches up with the drop in literacy rates for young women (whose ongoing education you would expect to be more affected by war in eight years of their childhood than for the adults). I was commenting just with respect to the stats because I was surprised.

I was curious and looked up adult women literacy rates for women in Iraq and this shows 64% literacy rate for women with 15+ years age in 2000 and 78% in 2021 for the same category. For female youths aged 15-24 it rose from 80% to 91% over the same time period (though in the intervening period that did indeed drop to 72-73% in their stats during the chaos of the Iraq War).

Can’t imagine Ukraine would harbor terribly much sympathy for Iran given the tens of thousands of Shahed drones that have been bombarding their cities that were either made in Iran or based on Iranian drone designs licensed to Russia. They probably figure that if Iran was fine starting this by selling such weapons to Russia that were certain to be used on Ukraine, then turnabout is fair play. They have basically no economy in Ukraine so they’re desperate for any way to make a buck to put back into military production for fending off their gigantic neighbor, anyway.

Yet new housing is built all the time. Why? Because it’s lucrative for those with gobs of money, holding all the housing.

It’s really not being built at the amounts needed (at least, not in the places that need it most) which is why there’s a housing crisis. Those who already own housing benefit more from preventing new housing from being built by anyone other than themselves. Ensuring scarcity of housing while demand is continuing to grow from the population rising and average household size shrinking makes the housing they hold skyrocket in value.

I replied to the other fellow but in no way am I calling them lazy, actually many of the drugs they use allow them to train harder for longer and as an Olympians they take full advantage of that to push the boundaries of what is possible. Those agents aren’t an “I win” button but at the highest levels people will do literally anything to push themselves to be able to shave off even fractions of a second or gain whatever advantage they can, and being able to train more and bounce back quicker is tempting.

Colombian food isn’t spicy. Spice is high in like Mexico and Central America but that’s not universal across Latin cuisines ex. I know an Ecuadorian who can’t even take a sprinkle of black pepper without having to fan their mouth. Will happily eat vigorously salted green grapes, green apples or green mangos without batting an eye though.

Let’s be real, the regular Olympics are already doped. Their entire careers are on the line with the pride (and eyes) of the nation bearing down on them and demanding results… and we think they and their teams aren’t taking every edge they think they can possibly get away with? All the time famous athletes of yesteryear are being revealed to have been up to shenanigans when science catches up to retest their samples more effectively or some investigation gets a co-conspirator to spill the beans.

There’s microdosing below what tests can detect, novel designer drugs that can’t yet be detected, therapeutic use exemptions for drugs that would normally be banned, setting up situations to evade tests unless you are prepared to take them, tampering with the sample, good old fashioned corruption… probably tons of things that would never occur to me but that would to highly motivated teams with vast amounts of money on the line.

All these reports beg the question… have they found a country that ISN’T carrying out covert schemes in Canada?

Is this supposed to signal against Azerbaijan and other countries that have arrested Russians vaguely recently or is this just a show to prop up the domestic situstion? Either way I don’t think they’re in a situation to do another “special military operation” any time soon…