In addition to its geopolitical value, Cuba has some of the most favorable geography in the world for agriculture and tourism. It's 4x the size of Hawaii and conveniently located for America, Latin America, and Europe.
They also have a highly educated population, a rich culture of music and food recognized around the world, and low crimes.
It has the potential to be a world class travel destination - the only thing holding it in irrelevance is its own despotic government and the US's sanctions on said government.
If you were a profit-driven imperialist, Cuba probably represents the largest untapped opportunity in the Western Hemisphere.
There are three things that I think go underrated about America's manufacturing problems:
1. A lot of industries offshored simply because the owners of the facilities just sold and shipped off rare/expensive/important equipment to other countries without a second thought. Especially tool and die equipment. So a lot of industries in countries like Korea and China or India literally use the exact same equipment we used 80+ years ago. Even if we wanted these jobs back, the countries & businesses in question are too smart to ever sell the equipment back at nearly any price (why we can't manufacture them again is a whole other problem).
2. As Jensen alludes here, the cost of energy in the US dropped through the 60s but then flatlined. We became too dependent on fossil fuel and "comfortable enough" consumer prices. But the energy intensive heavy industry all moved to places with nuclear power or heavily subsidized power sectors.
3. The lack of any sort of public welfare solution is a distinctly American industrial policy failure. Manufacturing depends on labor force flexibility - both in finding the right people for jobs, as well as just dealing with stop-and-go or seasonal work. But Americans having their healthcare and retirement tied to their jobs and full employment is a huge boat anchor on both the workforce and industry.
I almost feel bad for the people who instigated the War on Terror. They did not know how badly it would go - and they worked really hard and tirelessly to build and sell their illegitimate case to the American public.
This administration is making the same mistakes - but in living memory of the first, with a less noble prize, and with complete derision of Congress and Americans' intelligence.
The first political memories i have are the aclu telling everyone who would listen and many who wouldn't that this is exactly the slippery slope invading afghanistan would lead to. Don't feel sorry for anyone who was allowed to do politics from that period
Why? They accomplished their goal (making money in Iraq for US business interests, expanding the power of the presidency massively) and have suffered no consequences.
I’m not sure it’s the same. Seems like one man at the top just wants to continue chaos to divert attention from bad poll number, inflation, pedo friend circle etc.
Isn't this one more related to the "War on Drugs"? The people who came up with these wars against abstract ennemies knew exactly what they were doing, fighting against another country/government is very limiting, once the war is settled you need another reason to start a war. When you go to war with an idea/concept you can continue your forever wars and raise taxes for/increase investment in the War related industries as long as you need to prop up your economy and get reelected.
Trump got reelected with slogans like "no new war" and in less than a year he started at least one (arguably I'd say two with the 12 days wars as Israel knew ut couldn't win this one without American bombers) also makes me think none if this is a "mistake", just a long term plan to keep power.
This is about oil and resources and maybe a proxy attack on China more than anything. A friend of mine called this as soon as that huge oil deposit was discovered off a small neighboring country’s coast. He said, “Venezuela is going to try to claim it, and the US will take them out.” I thought he was full of shit when he said it, but now I’m pretty sure he nailed it.
I don't want to defend Trump - starting a war is about the most serious thing a country can do, and doing it unilaterally is terrible. Trump should be condemned for this.
But most of those doing the condemning were also supportive of Pres. Obama (or at least refused to condemn his actions) back in 2011 when he attacked Libya, and in 2013 and 2014 when he attacked Syria -- all of this happening after we should have learned from what we were doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those people who didn't protest against Pres. Obama's illegal actions have lost moral high ground to protest against Trump.
The 2011 action in Libya was an international effort carried out under a UN authorization to protect civilians, not a unilateral move by Obama based on a fabricated rationale. There were limited airstrikes and aid to rebels, but the US did not directly take out Gaddafi or make any pretense of "running the country."
Obama deliberately went to Congress for authorization to strike the Syrian chemical program in 2013, and after it quailed from taking a vote, the strikes didn't happen.
The 2014 strikes were against ISIS, not Syrian government forces, and carried out under the existing AUMF authorization to combat Al Qaeda and its affiliates. One can argue whether ISIS qualified (even the administration at the time acknowledged it was a stretch and wanted a more clear-cut resolution from Congress), but it definitely was a major terrorist threat in the region and had been working with AQ in the past.
2011 was 15 years ago. I was not even legally adult back then. And even if I was old enough back then, people are allowed to change their opinions in 15 years.
Those people were not condemning Fordow. But nearly everyone has high ground on Trump, so they don’t base their objections on simply having the high ground. He’s unfit to be president.
My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer and his generation just accepted his oddities as part of his personality.
I think one of the paradoxes of our age is that we are overtly more accepting of different lifestyles while being less accepting of personalities faults. Having low EQ has always been a thing and yet in the social media era we've been very comfortable ostracizing those who suffer.
> My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer
It's interesting how much the definition of "severe" Autism has changed in common language. Typically, someone with "severe Autism" would not be capable of holding down a complex job like engineering, let alone having a successful career and a family.
The families I know with severely autistic children (now young adults) are still working on basic self-sufficiency without a job or in one case basic verbalizations. So it's strange for me to see someone casually described as having "severe" autism but also having a successful engineering career and a family.
As an autistic who used to have a career and a family, and is now back to rocking back and forth on a chair unable to speak when any stress is applied, consider the possibility that it's “strange to you” because you don't know what you're talking about.
i mean even what you describe pales compared to my neighbor (or some of my distant cousins), they simply cannot live by themselves. they cannot write, they cannot really speak, they cannot work or feed themselves (as middle aged adults). so i guess it depends on what you call severe.
I blame the DSM for this. DSM 5 merged multiple diagnostics into a single "autism spectrum disorder", which means that the average case of autism became more mild overnight. This moved where the boundary for "severe" autism is in people's heads.
I disagree. I don't think average people are influenced by DSM 5 definitions as much as they are by social media or TV shows.
The people I know in the medical field are becoming frustrated by how often parents bring their children in requesting an autism diagnosis when their child doesn't even begin to meet the current DSM definitions of autism. The social media version of autism has become its own separate entity.
This has caused a second-order effect where the severe ends of the autism spectrum are getting erased from public perception. It's really sad to encounter parents who think their child is autistic (diagnosed or not) who run into children who are severely autistic, as often they'll reflexively try to draw dividing lines between the severely autistic child and their own. It's sadly common to see these parents try to insist that "something else is wrong" with the severely autistic child because it's entirely different than what they've come to view as autism through their TikTok and Facebook groups.
I was diagnosed with Asperger's. Nowadays, I say I'm autistic. I don't see how this wouldn't skew the perception of people who know me to think that autism is a more mild condition than it used to be.
I disagreed about the part that the DSM 5 is to blame.
If you were diagnosed with one thing but decide to tell people you're diagnosed with something else, that difference doesn't appear to come from the DSM.
Asbergers is not a thing anymore. It has been folded into autism, which is now a broader diagnosis than it once was.
I'm sure the powers that be had a reason to combine them; and I am no where near qualified to have an opinion on if it was good idea or not. But expanding the definition of autism to include milder forms was 100% a choice that was made.
The fact that the public perception subsequently shifted to view autism as less severely disease seems to me to likely be causally related.
If someone is able to live independently and hold a stable job without psychiatric medication then we can't reasonably claim that they have a "severe" mental health condition. This applies to autism as well as any other condition.
There is always a social acceptability component to psychiatric diagnoses. It was not that long ago that homosexuality was classified as a disease.
Being less accepting of neurodiverse people being different is directly linked to greater need to diagnosing them as society does not accept their differences.
In some cases there is expert acknowledgement that some differences are not necessarily a bad thing. For example:
> It can be helpful to think of ADHD not just as a deficit or disorder but as a ‘difference’. Some people view some aspects of their ADHD as strengths in certain situations or environments:
I have an in law that has severe autism issues that had a career and children. They never advanced in jobs, couldn't hold friendships, got neglected at work and kinda abused, got bad assignments. They were a lawyer for a long time, so the law itself was useful to them and their autism, but clients were hard. Their marriage was clearly strained the entire time before their spouse passed. It's been years and they still can't grieve or process the loss, likely due to the autism. Their children don't have these autistic issues, afaict, and those relationships are strained now that the grandkids are here and the children have leaned more about the issues of the grandparent.
Still, made a successful career of it, saved well enough into 401ks, and is now a millionaire.
In those days, their autism was just a quirk, one most people didn't like. And if they had help and strategies when younger, they would have been more successful and had a much better life.
Traditional publishing is a weird world. They have the shortsightedness to want to force AI into everything. But also it sounds like they still assigned human technical editors who took the job seriously.
My takeaway is that whatever effect there is must be so small as to be meaningless. The issue has been so thoroughly studied for so many decades. Even the cancer risks associated with moderate alcohol barely exceed the confidence interval - we're just collecting noise along the way.
Worrying about foodsins and sacred purity rituals with superfoods, air- and waterfilters are just existentialism anti anxiety religions. This field of science could have been several millions fatherOurs..
As someone who loves analogue things, you could basically repeat this for every pursuit humans make. The things they care about are cheapened by convenience - but then they will mock people who still care about manual transmissions or mechanical watches or what have you.
I think LLMs are fun. It does not get rid of the problem solving or troubleshooting or decision making. If anything, for me it completely resparked the hacker ethos in me. I got my start by being an idiot "script kitty" - so I am used to building bodged together things with code I only liminally understand.
There are so many new things I am trying and getting done that I feel like I am only limited by my creativity and my tolerance for risk.
Counterpoint, the cost of "owning" offline games is not zero and their lifetime is not infinite.
I have a stack of old games on CD (or older) and getting them to run on anything is a massive pain in the neck. (In fact, for nearly all that I care about I also have bought a Steam license in addition).
Ultimately, everything comes down to user experience. We can pat ourselves on the back for buying something forever, but experiences and the media they are stored on are both transitory.
Yea 100% it’s not as easy to use. But as far as I’m aware Steam doesn’t provide any guarantee games will keep working and GOG actually has it as a mission statement that, as least those selected as “Good Old Games”, will[0]. Now of course that requires GOG to survive so it’s sorta the same thing like you’re saying.
But I’d argue there is a material difference between “if you try hard you can run an original copy of Doom” and “if business X decided so you can never access those things again”.
Not to disagree, but proton has made it quite easy to run games I've previously struggled with. The nice thing is that it works with any binary, not just those you've purchased. Yes, it's wine, but valve has done wonders for its performance and compatibility.
And if it doesn't wanna work on Proton, GEProton might work. I've had a few games like that. (I usually default to the latter and use the former as a fallback.)
GOG's mission statement is applied very selectively. For a long time they did not support windows 10, and even now it's really spotty. It's frequently on a per-game basis, and sometimes games that used to work, don't anymore.
Yeah but at least you can get the games. On my old MacBook (my only "modern" Mac), Steam auto-updated itself to a version that no longer runs on that machine. If that was my only computer (luckily it's not), I'd not only be completely locked out of the games I already installed, I'd also be unable to install any others -- despite the fact the games run perfectly on the machine. At least on GOG I can just go to the website and download the installers, no matter what [relatively-recent] computer I'm using.
The other day I was using an LLM for worldbuilding. It helped me design a theoretical world that would be orbitally locked to the sun but still have habitable conditions. Then you can work out characteristics like typical windspeed, crop conditions, how shadows behave, etc.
I'm all for banning LLMs from writing prose. But the endless pearl clutching about LLMs is driving me insane. It's a really good research tool! It does things no other resource can. It can aid creativity.
People insisting on these carpet bans on LLMs are being unrealistic. You can not go back to a world before Google or Wikipedia exist either.
They also have a highly educated population, a rich culture of music and food recognized around the world, and low crimes.
It has the potential to be a world class travel destination - the only thing holding it in irrelevance is its own despotic government and the US's sanctions on said government.
If you were a profit-driven imperialist, Cuba probably represents the largest untapped opportunity in the Western Hemisphere.
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