Just idle curiosity but are basements and underground structures more common in areas high up in the mountains or way up in the north like Hokkaido?

In the American South we don’t usually have basements and they say it’s because you don’t need to dig down far to get past the frostline (whereas in our north they apparently have to dig down a fair distance to get to where the pipes wouldn’t freeze from below and once they’ve excavated that much you might as well get a basement anyway) and we also generally have high water tables that make basements dicey except in certain areas. My grandparents lived at the top of a hill on a plateau or ridge and unlike many people in the south they had a basement mostly cut into the slope of the hill (though it had a door leading out where the slope dropped down so maybe it doesn’t fully count), but even with the somewhat further down water tables there they constantly were running a dehumidifier in the basement due to the moisture and on occasion in heavy storms the walls would seep in water.

Imported types (ex. from the German states) for printing presses didn’t have it because it was an English only letter. Rather than coming up with expensive home modification (which some did anyway eventually but not en masse) there were easy alternatives because use of th was already established and also the letter y kind of looked like thorn in the fonts of the time so you could also sub that in.

Convenience of just doing a workaround rather than paying more money for a more English type modification won out and with so many using th and the thorn disappearing soon the use of the y that looked like thorn dropped out also.

It’s not necessarily the vote itself that does all the heavy lifting. Politicians pay a lot of attention to the stats of which groups are consistently voting and which issues are important for them, much more so than for what is important to the population at large because their bottom line is appealing to the people who show up to vote. Even if those votes are associated with their opponent if it’s a big enough block then throwing a bone to attract their vote becomes appealing.

For example, old people are one of the most highly consistent blocks of voters and (in our aging society) a growing one, too. Everyone wants to appeal to them as the math gets a lot harder if old people totally reject you! So with politicians competing for their support, social security & medicare make up over 50% of all the increase in government spending (not including more interest in the loans to pay for that which is also very substantial), even though the government already spends six times more on the average 65+ person than on the children and young adults <26, despite the latter group being substantially more likely to be in poverty. It’s not an economically sound decision, investing in the youth would provide better returns for society by setting them on a better trajectory for all the working life they have yet to live. But most of the ages in that younger block are not allowed to vote and the older near 26 are very inconsistent at voting, so their concerns really do not matter to politicians except insofar as the children are a concern of their parents who are much more likely to be voting.

Even if a movement is very popular with the general public, if that movement isn’t in the habit of voting politicians aren’t likely to stick out their neck for it if there are other more reliable voters they can appeal to. Because that would be seen as a wasted effort that won’t help them to win. But if a generally unpopular movement or view is popular with voters then politicians will tend to stand by it no matter what the general public has to say.

SAF for Sudanese Armed Forces

Not all sea critters are so “kind”

There are advantages that CANDU had for Canada that aren’t as great for most other countries in the world. The main benefits are that you don’t need to enrich which is industrially demanding (enrichment requires you develop and maintain those capabilities or rely on another party that does) and that you can do online refueling. That was attractive for Canada because they had a relatively underdeveloped industry so doing all the heavy upfront costs of establishing it for enriching while not being able to make fuel for many plants was a tall and seriously expensive order while buying enriched fuel kind of puts you at the whim of someone else. Plus didn’t need to make a large pressure vessel which would have been difficult for Canada back then. And back in the day light water reactor capacity factors were hot garbage with outages all the time (and not quick outages either but long sustained ones) so refueling while still generating was awesome though eventually you do need a very extended retubing outage after a few decades. It also benefited Canada because Canada has both a massive amount of uranium ore and the largest water resources of any country. So they have ample inputs for the relatively simple processing of uranium into unenriched fuel and water to produce heavy water.

These are not as much the case for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia doesn’t really have a problem with being somewhat dependent on foreign suppliers and throwing around money (otherwise the deal wouldn’t be happening), they will apparently be testing over the next two years if they consider it a better deal to develop indigenous enrichment through this or not bother and just rely on the US doing it in their country. Generally though they are looking to spend money to carve out non-hydrocarbon areas of the economy to diversify out to so if they can do indigenous uranium mining and enrichment and sell that to others that would be considered a win. In any case, American companies will provide substantial assistance on setting this up since it’s not being developed independently. Light water capacity factors really tightened up and are now in like the 90%s rather than 60-70% so online refueling isn’t quite as attractive as it once was. And, unlike Canada, they don’t have tons of water resources and have to do a lot of expensive processing of seawater to even get water for drinking; you have to process an enormous quantity of water to get heavy water, particularly in the purity needed for reactor water grade.

Consider that even Canada is building a light water reactor rather than CANDU for the latest expansion at Darlington, a site which is otherwise all CANDU and had the latest actually built CANDU reactors in the country. Evidently they felt the economics worked out better that way or the people who have been doing CANDU for the longest would not be swapping horses like that.

Previously the US was demanding that Saudi Arabia normalize relations with Israel before it would support this. Since that’s no longer being held over their head, this could be considered as a hit to Israel and as a win for the Saudi-Turkey-Qatar-Egypt block.

Bear in mind that as refineries are destroyed or damaged, that means a lot less crude oil is being consumed by the refineries. The price of crude can legitimately go down even if some of the crude oil supply is destroyed in a situation where even more of the demand is also being blown up. Ukraine blowing up Russian refineries means that they don’t have much in the way of refined products like gasoline to sell but because those refineries are no longer consuming the crude oil they are having record crude oil exports. Doesn’t make them nearly as much money as the refined products though which are in a squeeze.

Couple of nitpicks.

newly annexed territories in the far East

I would argue that it’s not really newly annexed as most of the far east was nabbed by the time of the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk and present day borders were more or less set by 1860 though some wiggling occurred in between.

They say they’ll pay them well but their commanders pocket the bonuses and pay, and send the men to die in meat waves.

Certainly Russia has huge corruption issues, this definitely happens and people run into bureaucratic issues all the time in getting what they were promised to be paid, but it’s not literally all vaporware. You need some veterans returning and be seen spending high or barring that at least their families observed spending the death benefits, if it’s all stolen in it’s entirety then your willing recruitments are going to dry up and limit you to convicts. The federal subjects of Russia have been in something of a competition with each other to recruit as many people as possible so that their heads will look good to the Kremlin so being limited like that would put them on Putin’s naughty list. Even regions like St. Petersburg that are comparatively rich (and therefore have a populace far less accepting of such a hazardous job when there are decent paying alternatives) compete in this by using their economic strength to recruit less expensive people from other poorer regions to keep their own recruitment numbers up. So there’s effectively a bidding war going on for anyone who will sign a contract nationwide. And since Russia has huge income inequality death benefits that are like a couple years worth of income in a rich region can be decades worth of income for impoverished regions even with variance in the regional contribution to the benefits. Because of this poorer federal subjects like Tuva have actually generally seen a pretty substantial growth in GRP, household bank deposits and tax returns even while bearing a disproportionate share of the deaths in the war.

So yes death is very likely and many do get scammed out of the full amount of what they were promised, but there is nevertheless still a tempting hook to draw in people. Many are one way or another securing life-changing amounts of money for themselves or their families in the poorer areas of Russia by invading Ukraine.

That said… this doesn’t seem to be a terribly stable framework. The high payouts have been funded by nationalizing oligarch assets for resale (targeting especially ones that seem less loyal), raising taxes and cracking down on local elites, raiding welfare outflows and of course selling a huge amount of natural resources, some refined. But the Ukrainian campaign against refineries and logistics has destroyed many of their best exports, reselling oligarchs property has diminishing returns (would-be oligarchs don’t want to be suckers if there’s a high risk to buy in and then wind up nationalized themselves so for saying something wrong so the Kremlin has been having to resale the properties it seizes at significant discount for them to consider it as worth it to buy the properties quickly enough for the Kremlin to get the money it needs right now), and the high taxes and low welfare combined with a gas crisis are damaging local economies and making people upset, while cracking down on elites upsets the elites. Since the point of incentivizing so many people signing contracts was to avoid public unrest, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the escalating payments necessary keep the frontlines staffed without causing public unrest anyway, you could expect for the Kremlin to stop bothering and eat the less popular ways to get more men. And indeed now you have scenes in places like Penza where men are being rounded up en masse and forced to sign contracts although that comes with problems like videos circulating of their wives demanding to say goodbye to their kidnapped husbands but not being allowed to do that and so calling on God to damn the recruiters.

If you zero out their balance but there’s no transaction, that doesn’t match up and will easily be reverted. If you make a fake transaction that is also easy to dispute and revert. Most digital things have backups or histories where you can compare and clearly see if some funny business occurred. That’s why most scams involve social engineering to convince the target to willingly transfer money in some method that can’t be easily reverted rather than editing databases.

This is a really really powerful development for defending territory but not as great for going on the offensive as drones can’t directly take and hold territory. To take territory you need ground troops and armored vehicles.

A concentrated group of people that can be taken out at once or an expensive vehicle are tempting priority targets for drones, and drones are more readily replaced than men or tanks… and both sides have them. So attempting to take large swathes of territory is most likely to make whoever is attempting to advance get punished since they have to put prime drone targets in drone range to make the attempt.

So most advances such as they are are being made by tiny groups of people or individuals who infiltrate into the gray zone/behind enemy lines and then secure themselves a hiding area to operate out of before maybe linking up for larger maneuvers. The situation doesn’t really lend itself to big movements in the front lines even with a ton of people dying. In a way it’s kind of reminiscent of how trench warfare and machine gunsmade defending territory very powerful and led to the western front being mostly deadlocked with offensives being insanely bloody until the tank was more well developed and brought more mobility back to the offense.

For the most part Ukraine is content now to target Russian logistics from a distance. If the Russian supply chain is in shambles that weakens Russian use of drones and artillery at the far edges of their reach which could enable offensive operations that aren’t quite as suicidal as they are now.

There hasn’t been much conscription on the Russian side (though recently that’s changing) because conscription is tremendously politically unpopular, most people joined the war on that side by willingly signing a contract because they’re offering huge sums of money compared to what Russian people outside of the biggest cities can make.

Dr. Oz is also nuts so it was kind of cooked regardless of what happened past the primaries

It’s a popular place for people in many of the poorer former Soviet republics to work in since Russia had a larger economy and more opportunities for higher paying jobs than back in their home countries, knowledge of Russian is widespread with historical Soviet influence/continuing Russian influence, diasporas are already there as a support network since it used to be one country and it was not especially restrictive to go over and work.

That said Russia’s far right has been venomous about this since their Islamophobia doesn’t mix well with a bunch of Muslim people arriving from Central Asia. Groups like Russian Community have been attacking mosques, people who look foreign, stealing from them etc. and as the state is sort of scraping the barrel on bodies to send to Ukraine in some communities have far right militias actually partner with the police and work in their operations with the name of establishing “order”.

This law in the post and tightening of visas is red meat to those sorts of far-right factions in exchange for their continued support.

My great uncle got embarassed over this early on in his career. His boss invited him to dinner on Saturday and so he showed up with his wife around noon since that was the typical understanding in his home region. The boss thought he was crazy and told him off for arriving hours earlier than expected.

They still call the midday meal dinner and the later one supper, though I say lunch for the middle one and use the words dinner & supper interchangeably.

See: how Germany was treated post WWI.

The reparations scheme in the Treaty of Versialles had a far worse worse bark than the bite. Over 60% of the amount requested were C bonds that charged no interest and had no schedule for payment and so were basically a fiction designed to make the peace look better for Entente civilians furious at Germany over the war but without excessively burdening Germany. The A and B bonds were less than what Germany had offered to pay up.

However, Germany almost immediately set about not paying the payments it agreed to nor making up for it in shipping out goods like coal to France which was a flexibility that was permitted to make payment easier for Germany. That caused a crisis so they actually offered to pay Germany for each shipmint of coal to France to make it easier for them to keep paying… and they STILL continued to default on their obligations dozens of times even as the coal quotas were lowered. France and Belgium got fed up with this since much of their richest land had been turned into a moonscape by the war, they were in economic crisis that the reparations they were not receiving could help with, and Germany appeared to be acting in bad faith on meeting its obligations, so they launched the occupation of the Ruhr to secure the resources to pay off the German reparations manually since Germany wasn’t contributing as had been threatened earlier.

This was not an especially great economic salve because the cost of the occupation ate up most of the reparations they got. In the meantime, this incensed Germans and the government had the Germans in the Ruhr strike and largely refuse to work for the foreigners. They needed money to keep not working, so the government paid them more and more paper marks to just sit on their butts. Churning out a huge amount of money to go to non-productive ends after already having a policy of spending crazy amounts of paper marks to secure gold-backed currency and paying the massive debt owed to German people (the German war effort in WWI was financed by debt rather than more taxes) led to hyperinflation which devastated the German economy and also made the internal debts more or less irrelevant at the expense of all the Germans who thought they’d be seeing a return on those loans to the government. Though, the gold based foreign debt not so much.

This led to a lot of political instability in Germany which frightened the US because if Germany had a coup from the political extremes then they might decide to default on their debts entirely which would be really bad because that could destabilize France and the UK which had massively borrowed from the US. So the they got together with the Dawes Plan to end the occupation and get Germany massive amount of loans which were used to stabilize the currency and provide the capital to establish incredibly productive industry, thereby boosting Germany’s economy significantly such that it had more ability to pay reparations and loosening tensions so that they were more willing to and for the first time they were consistently meeting the payments.

Five years later however they were already looking to get it further lowered and that succeeded with the Young Plan which devolved other foreign control of aspects of the German economy to Germany while reducing payments and getting Germany more loans. It would have gone further but while hammering it out an unprecedented financial crisis struck America. The contagion from that spread in quick order to Germany which had significant American debts.

The economic crisis led to political crisis and Germany opted to refuse to pay reparations at all, which also locked it out of being able to borrow from anyone so that was kind of a shot in the foot. America stepped in and made the Hoover Moratorium where Germany didn’t have to pay any reparations for a year. That was considered not enough either and a new conference was called at Lausanne where Germany sought total end of reparations. The reparations were reduced to a paltry 3 billion marks (miniscule compared to the advertised total at the start of the Treaty of Versailles of 132 billion marks) but the Treaty of Lausanne wasn’t fully agreed on so in that vague realm Germany kept paying interest but not reparations based on the Young Plan before Hitler scrapped paying anything at all. It would take another world war for Germant to start paying money again.

Really the Germans were in a material sense better off for it because they got a huge amount of productive industry created off of American loans, consistently stiffed the UK and especially France who were both burdened by their debts to the US and did not get the expected relief from reparations in the intervening years, and America didn’t really make off well in the end from the massive loans to most everyone either because essentially everyone in Europe defaulted on those loans by the early 30s.

Yeah yeah Taco Friday and all but there is great food to be had in Norway, it’s not just the noble potato

It’s kind of common now for people to think Turkey and Azerbaijan are in lockstep agreement but that’s not necessarily always the case, particularly on the subject of Israel. Turkey views Israel as having committed genocide in Gaza but Azerbaijan does not, they do not have the same policy stance.

This difference is in part because Erdogan is a relatively religious leader who has cultivated Palestinian ties for years; it’s in his interest to make statements against Israel for his beliefs, the sentiment at home, and for his cultivated connections in the Islamic world who are convinced at this point as well, so he has all the reason in the world to openly call out Israel for genocide. Aliyev on the other hand is secular to the point of actually cracking down on undesired religious expression (ex. Iranian preaching in Azerbaijan or the Gulen movement back when Erdogan was pushing it) and his country has a formerly Soviet population that is mostly irreligious so in practice he has domestic flexibility to even align with Israel as he sees fit. So Aliyev instead has promoted relations with Israel since he was opposed to their common enemy of Iran anyway and that allowed him access to military equipment and economic benefits since back in a time where Azerbaijan was militarily very behind the combined forces of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Among the benefits of the partnership were Harop drones (loitering munitions) that Azerbaijan used to systematically demolish thoroughly fortified and entrenched Armenian forces from the air.

Actually we have cables from folks speaking with Aliyev on Wikileaks where he is documented as directly criticizing Erdogan (very frequent in general in the cables of that time since Aliyev thought he was a religious nutjob) on his foreign policy regarding Israel.

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10BAKU134_a.html

BAKU 00000134 004 OF 004

19. © Unprompted by U/S Burns, Aliyev spelled out the reasons Azerbaijan decided to sell gas to Russia last year, noting that "“Moscow had asked” and offered a good price for gas that was surplus anyway. But the real reason, Aliyev confided, was that the sale illustrated to “our Turkish friends” that they will not be allowed to create a gas distribution hub. "Aliyev made clear his distaste for the Erdogan government in Turkey, underscoring the “naivete” of their foreign policy and the failure of their initiatives, including the loss of support for Turkey among traditional international friends because of Ankara,s hostility to Israel. He noted that in his view, there had never been any merit to the notion of a “moderate Islamist” government in Turkey, and that Erdogan,s insistence on promoting Hamas and Gaza ) when other Arab countries were notably silent on these issues ) had brought Turkey no benefits.

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BAKU52_a.html

11. © The President complained that the current Turkish Government is moving toward political Islam and away from secular democracy. He said that he could not understand Erdogan’s harsh attacks on Israel with respect to Gaza in light of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan remaining silent. He noted that Turkey was in essence supporting pro-Iranian forces by siding with Hamas. “This will ruin everything that Turkey has built in its relations with Israel, including excellent economic, military and intelligence cooperation . . . With Turkey having this position, it is difficult for us to continue our joint foreign policy,” the President commented.

So the matter of whether or not Israel committed genocide is actually an area where there is a fair amount of daylight between Turkey and Azerbaijan.

Closest thing I have attempted to grow to a pineapple is Spanish moss which somewhat surprisingly is in the same family. Tried to establish it on some trees in my backyard but unfortunately in storms the wind is so strong that it all got blown off after only a couple months. Probably didn’t help that it was a huge drought going on simultaneously.

I do the native plant thing for wildlife thing so when the cardinal or mockingbird nabs some blueberries or the aphids are covering a stem of my black-eyed susan then all is going according to plan. Usually I find that if some insect population starts going too crazy then it won’t be long before their predators roll in and re-establish some balance. Aphidtown clears out quick when the ladybugs stay a spell…