I had a guy buy me two drinks at an expensive Vegas bar. He didn’t really even want to talk.

You chose to write a response in a different language than the rest of the thread then critique my translation.

It isn’t a contradiction but clarification. Your response implies a binary truth where only one statement can be correct. I’m noting that both statements can be correct at the same time.

Before you try to think I’m going to argue otherwise, cartel violence doesn’t justify an American military response.

The current administration may be trying to manufacture consent for a military operation, but cartel violence in Mexico has been an issue for decades. This has included the assassination of Mexican politicians.

It is the reason why Microsoft was able to gimp the Internet for so long with Internet Explorer. Companies couldn’t make money off of the browser, so Microsoft made a browser that helped defend the Windows monopoly.

Except during seismic events.

Depends on the sand.

That’s also generally more the geotechnical engineer’s call.

I’m a structural engineer. It is part of the job.

I’ve been mostly right.

I wished I worked out more right now. My problem is that I’m spending more and more spoons on my job and I don’t have enough remaining to exercise.

Do you know the deaths that happened post World War I? Do you know the deaths that happened in World War I on the scale compared to what was before?

You seem focused a lot on “America bad” and I can’t argue that an American led international order was bloodless, but the lack of a power is going to lead to increased conflict. After all, if it wasn’t for the USA, why wouldn’t Venezuela invade Guyana?

Trump has made the American Empire caustic to the international order in part because he is leading the charge to discard the international order for something else.

I feel like the issue at hand is that revolutionaries want to promise a better tomorrow without building a non-American world order without acknowledging that the various wars between the world wars are only going to amplify and that many of the intermediate powers don’t share the same political end goals.

And you just talked past the crux of my argument where a shrinking American presence can lead to war without addressing it.

Maduro said that he would invade another country. He probably would have done it if it wasn’t for a rapid American diplomatic response, the one before his kidnapping.

Borders will be in flux and those borders in flux will lead to war and death.

Not every country could be Japan or France because there was a stronger country enforcing current political borders.

In no way does this justify capturing Maduro, but Maduro was talking about invading Guyana last year. We’re already seeing various Middle Eastern countries build spheres of influence in the various civil wars in Africa, hoping to fill the void of a shrinking west.

At best, the world will have a peace similar to the one in Europe post-Napoleon where every major power gets their empire to do with as they please.

One of the things that the Cuban government has done right is its medical industry. The Cuban government is able to create world class doctors relatively cheaply and can provide relatively good health care given its relative poverty.

A normalization of US-Cuba relations is likely going to open up Cuba to American tourism.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a massive influx of Americans going to Cuba to get medical treatment there.

The funny thing is that normalization of Cuban relations is only going to royally piss off the medical industry in the USA.

It depended on the country. Countries like the UK and Poland played a major role in fighting operations and deserve praise for their contributions.

Other NATO countries contributed a lot less.

Public performance in general can be stressful; people get stage fright all the time.

Speaking to the USA, national politics became more important as the federal government became the means for funding social programs. People forget that the quality of life varied significantly between different states. You also saw a reevaluation of the limits of political morality, was it moral to let people in your country be politically oppressed.

It feels less like “one big problem” and more like death by a thousand cuts.

A lot of sci-fi was generally written to play with a few ideas. I think it would be difficult to create a narrative around several problems with different causes and solutions.

Microsoft didn’t really bet on the HD-DVD. It was a separate add on supplied at cost because that was the best deal they got from either consortium.

In contrast, Sony was absolutely shipping the PS3 as a loss leader to get drives out there, similar to how Sony used the PS2 to make DVD’s standard.