anachronist

Tactical nukes aren't real. They start an escalation ladder that gets you to global thermonuclear war in a few hours. Using a "tactical nuke" is just laying naked your intent to have things go nuclear while giving your opponent a chance to respond.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy wanted to nuke Cuba. The joint chiefs told him that if he wanted to do that he would also have to nuke Russia in a massive fully committed first strike.

The way this has worked is that the Japanese economy has bifurcated with the graduation-to-retirement employment being available to a ever smaller group of white collar workers called salary-men. To become a salary-man you have to go to college and get hired the year you graduate through campus recruiting. If you miss your "window" then you can't become a salary-man and will be stuck in contingent work for the rest of your life.

The people quitting in this case are not salary-men (a salary-man quitting would be pretty unthinkable) but their bosses probably are, hence the cultural divide.

Sometimes salary-men do lose their jobs due to bankruptcy of the organization for instance. Typically the solution if that happens is to jump in front of a train.

My understanding is that the employer side of this contract quit getting honored religiously during the lost decade and employment in Japan is increasingly contingent and precarious.

It’s just a suggestion.

Quebec is also where I learned the phrase "No cop, no stop."

But I think they were arrested for not saying arrêt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iHr0Hytrls

The article is rank propaganda. Coming from a supposed middle eastern journal it's pretty shameful that it didn't even mention what China is doing to Muslims in Xinjiang. Besides that, China is in taking aggressive actions against many of its neighbors, not just Taiwan but also the Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, etc. Plus the wolf warrior stuff against Australia, South Korea and the like. Not to mention the illegal armed fishing fleet operations in the territorial waters of smaller nations around the world.

In comparison, the USA illegally invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, has meddled in the internal affairs of many Latin American countries, and supports Israel.

One could certainly argue that America's crimes are worse on the margin, but the idea that one supports a rules-based order and the other does not is laughable. Both violate international rules and laws continuously whenever it suits them and they can get away with it.

I'm not even mad at Elon. He came up with a clownishly absurd idea and the media bought it. He literally described it as "an air hockey table in a vacuum tube" while laughing, and the media just went ahead and ate his ass anyway.

Some of them are flying the Confederate flag in Alberta!

Historically Europe (and the British Empire) sided with the confederacy because they saw a united USA as a potential industrial rival, whereas the south was more of a resource colony. Interestingly there was a major class divide in Europe where the working classes were anti-slavery and therefore anti-confederate wheras the upper classes saw the confederate cause being in their interest. There's a book about this called A Cause for All Nations by Don Doyle.

My understanding is that nowadays the confederate flag is used by people outside the USA who are on the fascist end of the spectrum for whom Nazi or fascist symbols are too extreme (or just illegal) in their countries.

Union Pacific's profits over the last 20 years would have paid for a high speed rail line from Chicago to Los Angeles

The existence of that entity as a private owner of critical American infrastructure, which uses it to extract rents from the American economy, has cost us at least one trans-continental high speed rail line worth of value.

He's made his bed with the Silicon Valley elite and now he has to do their unpopular things. All that money comes with strings.

It's enjoyable watching it happen to somebody I don't like for once.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro