Nautalax

Germany declared war on the US shortly after the US declared war on Japan after Japan did Pearl Harbor.

As to why a focus on Europe seemed prudent, Germany and occupied/Axis-aligened Europe had substantially more industry and productive capabilities than East Asia back then while also having a similar population so for one a Nazi order in Europe could make use of extra time to prepare all manner of weapons much more effectively than the Japanese could.

Secondly the Nazis were imposing a giant threat to the British and USSR both with close proximity to their industrial heartlands. If either one is beaten or comes to the table then the situation becomes way worse for dislodging Germany. If the British become neutral then say goodbye to their vast navy, the staging ground to invade from across the Channel, and their bases and manpower from all around the world. And if the USSR loses then without the massive eastern front overshadowing everything else the Nazi’s resources can instead go to making coastal defense impassable, plus they get a massive amount of oil, slaves etc. Either of those outcomes make an amphibious invasion from the US much harder to successfully pull off. And both benefit from a boost to their morale from being told the US will help Europe first.

Japan threatening China and local European colonies was not great but comparatively less dire since those areas were way less productive than what occupied Europe was. Plus if you help Europe first then a lot of those countries with extensive holdings in Asia may feel obligated to restore their colonial territories by joining against Japan. The same doesn’t necessarily hold true for if you went the other way around first.

All that said, there were points in the early stages of America’s entry into WW2 where the war in the Pacific was taking up more bandwidth depending on what was going on and what actions they were able to perform where.

$105411, a household income in the top 10th percentile globally, isn’t enough to afford minimal quality of life?

edit:

The Shared Economic Prosperity (SEP) Measure, a companion to the MQL, compares the income needed to achieve a minimal quality of life (as defined by the MQL) to actual income distribution, revealing a stark imbalance. In 2023, the bottom 60% of households earned just 22.1% of all disposable income but needed 39% to meet MQL. On average, these households earn $38,000 per year, falling more than $29,000 short of the MQL.

Why would you take an average out of the subset of the lowest 60% and make a statement about that entire 60% not being able to reach MQL, that’s some goofy math.

By credibly warning that he intends to close the airspace he can make airlines think twice about flying in Russia in general and near Ukraine in particular, likely damaging the Russian economy even without actually lifting a finger. Who knows how serious he is

I wonder what was promised to Chevron to change their minds. Companies are usually pretty hesitant to throw around billions of dollars into a country that has previously seized similar investments, and the pay-off is a sour crude that is more difficult to refine and not as desired so they can’t command that high of a price. There’s a reason why Exxon-Mobil is quoted in the article as saying that Venezuela is un-investable, despite that pissing off Trump. And one of the other links in the article was saying Venezuela could require more on the order of one hundred billion dollars to get to four million barrels a day (which is roughly the peak production they once enjoyed) so in light of that seven billion while enough to be a giant risk for an individual company it doesn’t come close to rejuvenating the industry for Venezuela either barring wild success on a slim budget.

Maybe it’s like a play for the cameras. Say some words and Trump can throw around his favorite words like deal and billions, cash in on whatever approval that nets you, then quietly curtail much of the money some years down the line when Trump is out of office.

Apparently these particular drones were found on a tarmac or field from what other reporting is saying, so they were probably snuck in rather than directly flown in.

In upstate New York one of my college friends borrowed my car and was driving around with it. My car had a Norwegian flag decoration on it and some guy pumping gas at a gas station mistook it for the Confederate flag, pointed at it and said, “yeah the South will rise again!!!” while my (Asian…) friend was also filling up. When she got back she had a lot of questions for me about what kind of flag it was since she wasn’t familiar with the Norwegian one.

Never ever seen a Nazi flag in person and I’ve lived in the Deep South for about a decade. Confederate ones are super common though, albeit less so than just a few years back.

I’m not up on whatever trend but it may work in some cases provided they’re not just marinating in filth (there’s definitely a difference).

I got psy-op’d by society into being very anxious about possibly smelling around a date since I sweat easily so I ensured absolutely every time before one was a VERY thorough shower and scrub til’ I was practically raw, generous application of deoderant, etc. and applied a light bit of tea tree oil before I went on a date.

On one of the early dates with my now-wife while we were watching a movie, she finally turned to me and said that there was some sort of smell to me that was giving her a headache for the past few dates and asked if I could just not use that moving forward.

It turned out that she actually hated the deoderant and tea tree and so on and actually some sort of wire is crossed in her head such that my natural body scent smells like passionfruit to her (she very positively rates passionfruit). So my early efforts to come off as if I have never had the concept of sweat in my life were directly sabotaging my attempt to appeal to her nose, in addition to making me feel insecure about it when there was really no need.

Kind of surprised that he’s still giga-popular given the massive war in Tigray a while back and the partially related issue of vast swathes of rebel control in Amhara, Oromo and Tigray areas but then again a couple years of 9% GDP growth can smooth over a lot of problems I guess

Any new housing is still helpful for alleviating the crunch. If a rich people see a fancy new apartment and move in, that leaves the old places they had occupied available to be rented or bought and they have to be offered at a relative discount to what they would have been otherwise because the rich people prefer the fancy new place. (Note: if people in that area are snapping up housing at a faster rate than housing is being made available, that would still manifest as rising prices but with the prices rising at a slower rate than they would have otherwise.) That’s an opportunity for the less rich people to secure a spot where the rich people used to be, so they move out of their older and less nice places and so on to relocate. Within five years or so that propagates down the vacancy chain and opens up low income housing as well.

Also many times any kind of new apartment is called “luxury” as a marketing gimmick since it’s not really a controlled term and it makes people think of it as a more attractive place to live.

More housing needs to be built to alleviate the housing crisis. Unfortunately with housing also doubling for many as their largest investment and a retirement vehicle all rolled in one, people get absolutely furious if anything is done that would appreciably reduce the price of housing. Because homeowners make up so much of society and particularly politically influential society those interests are very politically difficult to take on.

So I think it’s accurate to say that the US unintentionally ushered the current regime into power by putting in an unpopular puppet dictator to replace an elected leader who was popular with his people (Mossadegh).

Mossadegh was very popular initially, and remained so through the end in urban strongholds of support. But especially as time went on he was opposed in rural areas which then held the bulk of the population of the country, and there was slipping of support even in urban areas as the economic pain of the British sanctions mounted over time that caused his political strength to weaken as the promised gains from nationalizing the oil did not materialize. So against this backdrop of declining support Mossadegh undertook increasingly bold measures to ensure he could still enact his preferred policies, which stepped on many toes. In the 1952 elections of the 17th Majlis he literally went “STOP THE COUNT!” and halted the elections after the votes were tallied for 79 members, the minimum quorum for the parliamentary quorum to be met. That was because the places that were quickest to have the votes tallied were the urban areas where he had most support, so the longer he waited and the more votes to come in the stronger he expected the opposition to become. He increasingly ruled with emergency powers, alienated former allies like Ayatollah Kashani, and eventually went so far as to stage a rigged referendum to dissolve the rump parliament after deadlock and resignations in the Majlis threatened to derail his ability to enact his agenda. By rigged I mean like it was not a secret thing at all, you had to go to a different tent to cast a no vote than you did for a yes vote so it was obvious if you were dissenting and in the urban settings there were armed mobs and security forces surrounding the polling stations with signs calling people traitors if they weren’t voting to dissolve so it was a pretty intimidating environment to publically disagree in. Outside of those urban bases of support, the rural areas were not even provided ballots under the excuse that counting their votes would take too long in the urgent national situation. Many people voting in the affirmative were also permitted to vote multiple times. In these circumstances the opposition boycotted the elections and unsurprisingly the yes vote to dissolve the Majlis won by >99.9%.

To be clear I think it was wrong for the US and UK to interfere in Iranian politics like that but there’s a reason they so easily found support for the coup and fertile ground for riots and protests against Mossadegh; his former popularity had very much faded by that point outside of his most ardent partisans.

The shah was also a great deal more popular at the outset of the coup, only to also blow it but much more disastrously in later years. He too would become increasingly authoritarian and undertake measures like establishing SAVAK in 1957 (which was prone to torture and assassination) and banning all opposition parties in 1975 which didn’t do him favors in public opinion. And unlike Mossadegh who at least was able to hold onto support in urban areas, the Shah ended up alienating more or less everyone. The monarchy’s traditional support base was in the conservative countryside, not so much the cities which had been the strongholds of Mossadegh’s support. But the shah wanted to create a modernized and centralized secular state, a goal at odds with those of the bulk of his supporters. His “White Revolution” was supposed to make an independent royalist powerbase from peasants given land from land reform, enfranchised women from secular reforms and so on while also taking the wind from the sails of left wing urban groups like Tudeh that hated him by enacting measures they supported. It wound up backfiring because it pissed off the landed elites and clergy that had previously supported him, but didn’t generate as many independent enriched royalist farmers owning their own land as hoped for. Many peasants got plots too small to be effective and while familiar with physically working the land were still often illiterate and didn’t know how to navigate buying seeds and equipment and so on that their landlords had handled in the past. They weren’t helped by stretched government which was embarking on all sorts of vanity projects in dealing with the changed circumstances and could not compete effectively with the farmers who could and so had to sell out their land and go to the cities for work. With the flood of labor coming in the wages could be set low and so those new workers wound up poor and disgruntled; urban poor often had to rely on the charity networks established by the clerics to survive. With the clerics now pissed off at the shah, that previously supportive element of the shah’s powerbase flipped to being hostile yet due to the new urban networks actually grew in power rather than becoming marginalized by the secular reforms as intended. And for the previous urbanites, while their interests were generally helped out by the reforms they were nevertheless put off by all the political repression and violence and the bad memories of the coup and so were not that enticed back into supporting the shah. So the shah found himself basically isolated domestically and in respects to foreign ties he had burned bridges. The West was mad that the shah was asking OPEC to keep or raise oil prices high which was helping to fund Iran’s many projects, and there was a big push for human rights which made supporting Iran look awkward with SAVAK’s crueler activities being widely publicized so that also put pressure on the relationship. Even the west didn’t really back the shah’s government by the end when they viewed its fall as inevitable and tried to pivot unsuccessfully.

Idk for this case but in many authoritarian countries anti-corruption is often a nominal goal while the real target is something else that may not sound as noble… even while targeting legitimately very corrupt people.

The whole ruling clique may easily be skimming from wherever they can (so long as it’s not too egregious or clearly harmful to the goals of their leadership) as one of the perks for being up there which is an easy way for leadership to buy loyalty of subordinates. That also makes those subordinates “dirty” since their leadership that watched it happen has great evidence to cite if for whatever reason they are not satisfied or impressed by the underlings who partook. Then those lower people can be cracked down on (even legitimately!) for corruption even if their real crime in the eyes of the government was on dissenting about a certain policy or the like. Tasty carrot as bait to partake and later fear of the stick of exposure and punishment.

Uselessness can be useful for a different context. For example, the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge is flourishing today in part because on account of the sand it was considered agriculturally useless land that farmers struggled to do anything with during the Great Depression. So it was easy for the government to buy out the stakeholders and begin protecting and recovering that special ecosystem.

In the case of pine plantations, they are quite useful to people because they fairly passively produce a vast amount of wood that the owner of the land can sell at their leisure.

However, in the course of optimizing the pine plantations for economic benefit, the benefit to the wildlife is reduced. More densely packing the trees means that you have more wood growing in the same area rather than leaving unused space. But in doing so that means less sunlight hitting the ground. That energy goes to making more wood rather than to supporting the groundcover, and the groundgover is the more important of the two for most animals.