That’s the 2026 thinking cap at work!

Starting a war with Canada would just accelerate the collapse

you have to ALSO maintain a strong military presence in BC and Yukon all the while the locals are trying to fuck you up and the rest of Canada is engaged in guerrilla warfare not only there but also against the US presence in Alaska

the US would be militarilly bogged down for DECADES

I agree with you, but I would wager that Canada’s participation in the F-35 program has more to do with not having the land bridge than your points. We’re already doing our version of “little green men” in Greenlands, so it’s hard to use history or what makes fiscal sense as a guide.

I’m on team No Land Bridge, but I also see the US never giving up Alaska.

I don’t see that happening. It’ll be like what happened with the Ford where it quietly goes into maintenance. Maybe the crew doesn’t get medals because of the attention they drew.

If anyone proposed cutting off Alaska today, I would call them an idiot.

I agree.

A land bridge wouldn’t really help with the finances. There’s already a few roads that go all the way up to Alaska. Most things going from the lower 48 to Alaska still are shipped by sea or air.

We’re acting like finances are infinite already, and as long as people keep trading in dollars they are. And in this scenario we’re not considering what does/doesn’t make sense; we’re considering the idle thoughts of one person worried about his image.

I was working on an argument to try to justify having a big road all the way up through BC to Prudhoe Bay, and having a railway as well, but I can’t make it make sense with the pipeline already in place unless you just really wanted one or were trying to add a dependency on railway travel to that area. Greenland doesn’t make sense to me, either, and that’s apparently moving ahead.

But in the scenario we were considering, the US simply can’t afford to maintain these “nice to have” territories anymore. It’s like when you lose your job and have to cut back on expenses, sometimes insurance is something that has to get cut.

As long as there’s a market for US dollars the US doesn’t have to drop anything. I know I’ve made a dissatisfying, reductionist argument, but it is what it is. In the event that people still trade in dollars we can keep on as we have, and as long as we don’t go around alienating allies and threatening to not fulfill military treaties there’s no reason that should stop. If that did happen then going to war is a time tested way of giving the economy a boost.

Can Alaska even survive as an independent nation?

I think the US annexes parts of BC and Yukon to make a land bridge to Alaska before it gives it up. I’d see it giving up on rural parts of Pennsylvania, all of WV, and Illinois first. I know there’s no mechanism for a state to secede, but what about splitting into parts and only one part keeps the state name/legal status, and the other part just becomes a landlocked entity that has to pay a protection racket but gets $0.00 in federal funding back?

Alaska with its oil, refineries, and spots to park radars make it too nice of a place to hold onto. If in some misguided attempt to Own the Libs or whatever the US did split off Alaska, then whenever someone got up there from CONUS again they’d find English as a third language, if it all, with Mandarin second and whatever native tongue as the first language.

you know what I ate in Afghanistan for six months using a little burner? I ate Ramen noodles … that’s what I ate, and I was happy to have it, because the alternative was an MRE or something cooked by the Afghan guy who was too stupid to be given a gun and they let him be the cook,

Six months times around 30 days in a month times three meals per day is 540 packets of ramen noodles. My maruchan beef (flavored) packet says 370 calories per packet, so that’s 1110 calories or so per day, for six months, in a war zone. Press X to doubt.

Hyperbole is fine in some contexts, but that’s not enough calories to operate with, and you’d have gotten diseases from malnutrition. You supplemented that all-ramen diet with something, likely ratfucking MREs as you felt like it since you’re too good to eat one and call it a meal, AND you had access to a chef (hyperbole)!

Reports are starting to trickle in that the drinking water is dirty/tainted with oil and there’s not enough to drink/bathe/clean. I’ve read comments that suggest some percentage of the people on the ship are bedridden. No parts to repair the thing that was broken yesterday, the day before, last week, last month means no parts and the thing stays broken. Extend that to all the little systems on a ship in a hot/humid area, and yeah, things are probably looking worse than being marooned on an island.

It’s a little immaterial anyway. The job of getting the ship headed back home is done. The questions about how the people in charge evidently didn’t plan for that deployment, didn’t see this coming, didn’t listen to reports while it was happening, had to bend to media pressure to get it fixed, and had to weaken US positions in other areas in the world to adjust are still valid and unanswered. The people on the Lincoln aren’t going to stop existing now. You can’t keep them locked on the boat for six more months in port to put back on 40 pounds of bodyweight in some cases, and everywhere else there will be cameras. You can’t expect everyone to lie forever.

And, yet again, this easily avoidable situation with an easily predictable outcome carried out by the world’s best logistics operation is bringing up questions about what else isn’t being done that we’re just not hearing about?

I’m going to say “no.”

First, I’m going to recommend the Wheel of Time book series as it’s a pretty good read. It’s also a long read, and part of the fun of the series is how things are set up very early on that took years to come to fruition for the reader. The whole series took from 1990 to 2013. There was a lot of speculation on the internet about what a passage meant, and what it could be foreshadowing, and that was part of the fun, but all that material is spoilers now so if you think there’s a chance you’ll read it, try to avoid forums about it.*

Before the first episode of the show aired the showrunner said that he was going to “correct” some of the mistakes the author made. Between that and a leaked draft of the first episode there were some skeptical feelings about the show. Ultimately the show proved the skeptics right. Early episodes were different enough from the books that later plotlines from the books wouldn’t have been possible if the show had continued.

The subreddit ran fine for years until the show. People were cautious about posting [Spoilers through X book], and other posters were good about catching slips in that area, there were threads dedicated to periodic rereads that could catch newbies so they could go through the whole experience from the start, so for an outsider to come in and start tossing bans, and then to track those people down and keep banning them was just one more reason the site as a whole went to pot. It’s just one of the reasons I got to witness.

It’d be a tough series to put to TV anyway given how signifcant minor seeming details can turn out to be later on, even with a team that cared about the outcome of the product. They apparently didn’t have that.

EDIT TO ADD: $RDDT has an interest in keeping large players like amazon happy. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out $RDDT sold amazon a marketing package that included no bad publicity about the show.

• There may still be places where people can swap theories without spoilers.

Amazon buys the rights to properties and uses them for chum to fish for viewers. They don’t care about the property or the fans, and when they screw it up so badly that they can’t get even longtime fans of a series to watch, fuck you they’re keeping their chum. See: Wheel of Time.

They screwed it up so badly that the mods for that subreddit would ban people who criticized the show and went on to ban new subreddits (r/whitecloaks gang) created for the purpose. The shadow runs deep in some people.

If you feel like there’s a need to exclude yourself from the machine you helped build/create/market, then perhaps you shouldn’t have been involved in that machine.

If not flock then someone else would’ve done it, and there’s no way to know if someone else is already doing it, or has already done it, but those are problems for a different day. I do know that if I mixed up a 2 and 7 whether intentional, by understandable mistake, or by negligence, I’d be in trouble. Arguments have been made in the past that bodycam footage generally should not be shared because it captures people at their worst, having the worst day of their lives when police respond to a disaster. Flock’s using the “eh, good enough” approach to find an acceptible limit for how many people they cause to have their worst day ever.

Or “only a little can’t hurt.”

I haven’t been all over that area, but at night when there’s nearly nobody on the road it does have a feel to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin-walker

Almost every place has its own myths.

Why would a chef put in more effort to create what is arguably an inferior result?

Because they saw someone get sick after eating “raw” steak once in nineteen dickety-two and don’t think it’s safe, or they read it in a magazine a very long time ago, and they don’t think it’s safe. “Raw” in this case would be any pink whatsoever. If you bake it long enough at the right temperature on a drip pan you get no pink in the middle and no char.

Source: I’ve eaten a lot of shoe leather steaks in my life.

I haven’t been through your situation, but I did keto by choice once. The number of “that’s not good for you!” people that had hidden nutrtion degrees they never used was staggering. The number of people who slipped carbs into my food thinking I wouldn’t notice is nonzero.

Your list of foods you can’t tolerate sounds awful.

Author sounds mad that in his Comprehensive Database of All People there are too many people that have the Category field set to NULL to be useful to use in a paper.

Additionally, this sounded familiar so I went back and looked, and it seems similar enough to this post that I’m going to link it, and I’m going to be a sorry sack of crap and paraphrase my comment on that article: this article reads like one of those meetings about women’s issues where they only have male speakers. I’m actually a little suprised it wasn’t the same author.

Is it really a matter of, I’m gonna have to buy a whole bunch more HDDs to copy everything over to, encrypt, copy it all back? What’s the best (Linux) software for a mass copy task like that to be sure it works correctly?

Yes. If budget isn’t an issue then I would even recommend a whole new rig for the process, and here’s why: there are several Linux distros now that have the option, upon install, to do whole disk encryption where you have to enter your passphrase to get the computer to do anything at all. This is probably the safest, easiest solution available to you. You now have a brand new computer that’s never not been encrypted to copy stuff to. RAM and drives will hurt, but I think most modern processors have cryptographic instructions built in, so it may not take a large processor at all.

The downsides are that it’s a bad time from an economic standpoint to be doing stuff like that, and that you’re eating a large amount of technical stuff all at the same time. If you don’t get it right then you might lose all your stuff.

For me it would mostly be my desktop and my nas.

I’m gonna have to buy a whole bunch more HDDs

Depending on when you started storing data and how long it’s been since you touched your current solution, it might be just a few larger hard drives: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2025/

Go ahead and add up how much storage you’ll need and decide if you’re doing any kind of RAID. I recommend at least a mirrored RAID.

Give us a hint about what RAID you have on the NAS? How much storage used/available?

I agree with your sentiment, and that the world should work like your hypothetical.

how could they possibly ever know

Lawyers doing lawyer stuff. As to why, you said it:

I made mega money and they found out

We’d have to have real lawyers weigh in, but for the most part I think unless you found an undiscovered market then they won’t care. Programming isn’t unique in the respect that the tools you need to do world-changing work aren’t that different between what you might have at home versus a well funded computer science research lab, but you’re much more likely to stumble into a marketable app than you are a quicker FFT.

elders require care because they can’t care for themselves. they regress into infancy as they age and their body/mind deteriorates

This isn’t true of all old people.

what the fuck are you talking about?

Age alone can’t be used as the only determining factor for having the capability for independence at either end of the age spectrum.

After the torx bit snaps off in the blueberry, what size EZ-out gets it out the best?

Another good one would be “Questionable Consent.”

[from article ]We have just over two years to finish the work and I know you’re impatient.

So, my evolving understanding of this is that it takes about that long for the first signs of autism to show up. So I have a few honest, unresolved questions.

• With no ethics to slow us down we have to start witholding vaccines ASAP to hit the two year deadline. Is that correct?
• MMR takes two shots to get full immunity. If the schedule is spread out and making the falsifiable assumption that vaccines cause autism, how long would it be before you could meaningfully prove it?
• Again, with no ethics, you’d need for some of the population to get a placebo and some to get the real deal.
  • Is that correct?
  • Has a study that large ever been performed where placebo/real been kept track of over multiple doses?

As it stands now I really don’t see how we get helpful data out of this.