NATO works by projecting a united force. Nations unconditionally backing each other up. The USA is now clearly no longer a part of that. That's not to say that the USA will do nothing if a NATO member is attacked. It might. Or not.
No need to consider. The UK and France have nukes. France even has a two-tier response. Not enough to vitrify Russia or China five times over, but enough to make them reconsider.
Limiting Nuclear proliferation was already fucked.
Trump tore up Iran's "we won't do nukes" deal, doesn't matter whether you think they were genuine or not, it demonstrates we will go back on a deal so our word isn't worth anything.
Ukraine shows that the west will not actually protect you like they claim, so your only option is getting nukes to really deter people.
North Korea and Pakistan demonstrate that you can pretty much do whatever you want with just a couple nukes, the west will cower in fear over idle threats.
No country would look at any of this and conclude that they have any choice but to build nukes to protect themselves.
Any country without nukes, that is not currently developing them, is stupid imo.. Nukes are the only thing that can guarantee sovereignty now.
Ukraine gave up their nukes.
For much of NATO history, the US is NATO. The US doesn’t want it to be like that anymore because it needs to strategically shift to the other side of the world. So, the US says “What if Europe can be NATO? If we can force them to meet the GDP commitment then maybe we don’t need to worry about them too much and commit less of our own resources to this theater.” But of course people interpret this as if the US is abandoning the alliance. No, the US just has other problems to deal with in the world.
That is the rationalization, but don't be surprised if the US would not confront China at all.
The main flow of capital in the US had been going to the mil.industry, but that is not the case anymore. It is mainly surveillance tech that is receiving capital. In a very unhealthy economy, this all looks eerily pre-'30s.
The US, right now, is only threatening weak countries, they don't have the industrial power to confront China, nor do they want it. This shouldn't be a surprise, some ideologues behind this maga-project belief in an America from one pole to the other. They believe in "spheres of influence", and as such China has their own sphere of influence. A sphere of influence means a kind of colony, where natural resources, people and industry are all resources to be extracted by them. It is the Russian model, it is the model of criminal mobs, it is might makes right, it is a multi-polar world.
Meanwhile, re-industrialization projects have been scrapped, partners have been scared of, and tariffs have hit the industry that was still left in America.
Monopolists are parasites on the economy, and the US is already very weakened from that. As the Japanese said, the US is still a great power, but the throne is empty. I suspect there will be skirmishes with other "great powers" over exploitable resources like Africa, Middle East, Europe, but I don't expect the current crop to go all-in on China.
Yes, the US has always been the driving force behind NATO. It provides close to 40% of the combined military personnel, and an even higher portion of military spending.
No longer committing to defend other NATO countries, even if their military spending exceeds the target, is abandoning the alliance though. NATO is little else than that commitment.
> but they seemed to disagree with the most harmful Trump policies as well.
I imagine Republicans such as this still populate a majority of the house and Senate. If they disagree, they are sure making an effort to do so silently.
The amount of things Trump did circumventing Congressional approval might suggest that he does not a clean pass even though Republicans have majority in both the house and the senate.
That seems like a dangerous approach. Though printer drivers do often use rasterization, especially when targeting cheap printers, many printers can render vector graphics and text as well. Print-to-PDF will often use the later approach, unless of course the source program always rasterizes it's output when sending it out to the printer driver, or the used Print-to-PDF driver is particularly stupid.
I do not think your compiler argument in support of TCO is very convincing.
Do you really need to write compilers with limitless nesting? Or is nesting, say, 100.000 deep enough, perhaps?
Also, you'll usually want to allocate some data structure to create an AST for each level. So that means you'll have some finite limit anyway. And that limit is a lot easier to hit in the real world, as it applies not just to nesting depth, but to the entire size of your compilation unit.
TCO is not just for parse trees or AST, but in imperative languages without TCO this is the only place you are "forced" to use recursion. You can transform any loop in you program to recursion if you prefer, which is what the author does.
Yeah, if only we would define seconds to be 13.4% shorter than that are, we could have 100ks days. Also, ksecs would be a really convenient unit for planning one's day: a ~15 minute resolution is just right for just about any type of appointment.
Oh, and 1Ms weeks, consisting of 7 working days and 3 off days sound nice too.
Much better to make seconds slightly larger than 2 seconds, and move to a dozenal system throughout. One hour is (1000)_12 novoseconds. A semi-day is (10000)_12.
Oh, we should switch our standard counting system to dozenal a well.
Are you really convinced that the EU, which is not even a nation and is usually laughed away for being incapable of making any firm decision whatsoever, is on a faster track towards totalitarianism than the US has been since its last election?
The EC has no democratic control, their members are not elected, only the commissioners are "approved" by the european parliament. Its actions are also obfuscated and mostly non-public (as we saw in the ChatControl case, for instance), so citizens hardly even know what's happening.
The president is responsible for the secretaries of State actions, and more generally their respective parties.
No one is responsible for the commissioners' actions, and they can't be fired. When Von der Leyen lied and refused to show her text messages where she privately negotiated Covid vaccines, nothing happened. When the EU commissioner for digital markets left and got hired by Uber right after... nothing happened, as no one was responsible.
Commissioners hold the legislative power, as they choose which laws to introduce and hold the pen during negociations. It's pure, unchecked bureaucratic power that ends up with a never ending flow of stupid regulations that weaken Europe slowly.
I'm suggesting that there are enough layers of interdiction, that you can easily 'wash' political fallout and push legislation that would otherwise get you voted out of office in local elections.
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