Like, every service by law being available in both seems like overkill. It’s good to have services available in other languages than English, so there’s no reason to shut it down proactively, but native languages, Mandarin and Punjabi seem like equally major priorities without Quebec.

I suppose French on every label would also be overdoing it, although without that it would feel less like home.

Wait, it does?

See, that just seems like “it’s ideology, but also billionaires are there”. European businesses don’t want tariffs, but there’s still European tariffs. The simplest explanation would just be that it wasn’t their call.

It feels like you’re starting with your conclusion and then building a story about it to end at whichever facts are appropriate for the instance. It’d be more convincing if you could put it in a form agnostic of where and when it’s being applied. Like, when do billionaires want tariffs, and when don’t they? Then, does it actually predict policy decision?

Yeah, there’s estimates going both ways for conditions of ordinary people in the European Medieval period. There’s probably more than one truth - it was non-uniform and lasted a millennium. It was also a pretty poor region after the collapse of Rome, so even the rich could only be so rich. Stone age hunter-gatherers would have a pretty much perfect Gini for the same reason.

For richer premodern regions like the India and China estimates are much higher (here’s a really recent analysis on some of them). Ditto for societies before the Medieval period, although usually they just go off of house sizes for that and the results can be so high they seem impossible. It’s also worth mentioning Gini has some problems for this kind of thing - the paper I link emphasises other metrics more as a result.

Looking at modern dictatorships, Russia is said to have most of the world’s billionaires, and their official 2021 value is up at 0.880. Unofficially it’s probably worse. Other dictatorships report lower values, but anyone connected to the third world knows they’re bullshit and the elites own absolutely everything. The US is also an outlier; Canada is 0.726, Iceland is down at 0.649.

There was only more inequality after the renaissance. Much of that time was democratic.

No? The first modern thing that people will even claim as democracy is the US at the the end of the 18th century, and it was very rich, male and whites-only. Before that you had the age of absolutism, and before that you had various republics like Florence or classical Athens, but imagine voting bodies at least as exclusive as the early US and pretty unstable, with periods of effective dictatorship. Ordinary male citizens gradually got rights over the 19th century, and the first unrestricted, universal suffrage appeared in New Zealand in 1893.

TBF inequality kept increasing in the democratic US, but then it went down in the postwar era, which is unprecedented in history. Being equal before the law doesn’t mean equal in practice, but it’s just kind of common sense that it would be closer.

Hmm, no, you’re right. XFCE had it’s first release in 1997 vs. 1999 for GNOME. I guess I just didn’t hear about it until GNOME started having controversy.

neither was resource hogging sugar coated unconfigurable GNOME as we know today.

Yeah, that might be the real thing. Tails had it’s first release in 2009, and it’s possible they just haven’t moved over yet.

I’d guess the reason they didn’t go the Castle Bravo route is probably just that it’s hard to work deep in the arctic, where you as the USSR can test with minimal (but not zero, RIP Severny) impact. There was also the official justification that the extremely clean burn was the point of the test, which would be defeated by contact with and activation of the ground. It seems SHRIMP from Castle Bravo weighed 10 tonnes, so picture adding a nose and tailfins and maybe some electronics to it and you’d still have a more practical weapon.

Here’s the aerodynamic casing for the Tsar Bomba (empty, which is how it can sit on that dolly):

Well, yes, if it loses a ton of water it will get cold and freeze. OP suggested water loss would be fairly manageable, though. I guess the question is just how much it would lose, exactly.

I guess it’s also worth noting we’re assuming deep space here. OP didn’t specify, if you’re right next to a star you have the opposite problem.

For one thing, inequality is still way lower than it was before democracy.

Wouldn’t the US working in ever deeper cooperation with both China and the EU be better for business? Billionaires move pretty easily between all three anyway.

By all appearances they’ve never fully committed with China because of the ideological gap, and are cutting out the EU now do to new, emerging ideological differences.

Taking in Africans is political poison right now in Europe, and outsourcing local industries has never been super popular even if it makes sense.

I’m sure it will happen, Africa will develop and start taking on lots of low-end manufacturing and similar, and Europe will probably be a very good customer. But, in terms of a strategic alliance for the EU, most African nations are not a contender. South Africa maybe.

It’s a nitpick, but boiling causes cooling. If you dump water into space you actually do get a mix of ice and steam/vapour.

Otherwise, yes. If we assume most of the water is still inside the plant it will take some time to cool.

TIL it’s called the “systems reply”. Looks like there’s a few named replies I never came across.

Ah, okay.

IIRC only for a tiny, non-selective subset of users unlucky enough to pick your two bad nodes. Otherwise Tor would basically be dead.

Was XFCE a thing when the project started?

If you don’t trust your own hardware or are worried about a session being compromised it also offers some protection - especially if you have a physical read-only switch on your media.

Tor isn’t on postquantum encryption yet, which is less than great.

Besides that, about as good as it gets, and at the cost of being less usable.

Yeah, but it’s open source, so so what? When people say this it seems like either cope to justify doing nothing, or some kind of ritual purity thing.

Okay, undeliverable in the same sense their tanks are by air. Sure, you can load a T-34 (which looks like it also comes in at 27 tonnes) on an aircraft, but it’s not intended as a scalable way to use them. You’ll remember the plane was almost knocked out of the sky by the blast as it flew away. It was also the only model they had that could do it, and it couldn’t go very far with such an unusually heavy load.

The largest nuke that saw actual service was the 25 MT American B41, which had impressive yield for it’s size, despite, as you can see in the wiki’s picture, still being a very significant device. There was also a project to design bombs of unlimited yields, but the scientists were basically just goofing off, and the army told them to stop it.

The modern Western (and Chinese?) design is at the other end of the space - being as small as possible while maintaining efficiency. They have just enough of a fusion stage to support full burnup in the fission stage.

More of a history question than a science question.

I mean, Western nuclear powers tested pretty close to/deliberately on their own troops and civilians in the coming decades. It’s possible the decisionmakers didn’t fully appreciate the effect of radiation on health, although the scientists would have certianly known it’s dangerous. At best they could have claimed ignorance of the exact long-term effects, and I’m not even sure about that.

Also consider the main landmasses nearby were Korea and China, which the US was also racist against, and which were at the time under Japanese occupation.

It’s back down to kilotons, actually, albeit hundreds. The tens of megatons thing was to make up for the inaccuracy of early delivery methods; now firing more small bombs is preferred. And the Tsar Bomba was undeliverable - purely for show.

They’re also a lot cleaner now, too - Fat Man and Little Boy were quite dirty, so significant fallout did happen. Little Boy was used in an airburst, and so it’s mess was distributed pretty globally through the stratosphere, but Fat Man’s came right back down in black rain.