ocschwar

19 ms·

211.
by ocschwar 5y ago
Some states can assert their claims. Tuvalu is not one of them.
212.
by ocschwar 5y ago
And before that they financed a significant part of their government's budget selling postage stamps to kids like me. Recognized sovereignty can be a source of money in all sorts of ways.
213.
by ocschwar 5y ago
The hard part is keeping people living safely on the island.
214.
by ocschwar 5y ago
Brittany and Galicia are both the result of an explicit land grant to British refugees from the English invasion.
215.
by ocschwar 5y ago
China doesn't have to wait for the islands to submerge to do that. Chinese fishing fleets have violated fishing rules in Ecuadorian waters. The Tuvaluans have no chance when all they have is a few motor dinghies and M-16s.
216.
by ocschwar 5y ago
Well, a nation with a thriving Polynesian culture is probably the best place to collect atoll refugees.
217.
by ocschwar 5y ago
Tuvalu exists as a state because the international community decided to let them. They export coconuts and fishing licenses for hard currency, and there is no way they could muster the money and hardware to defend their patch of the ocean.
218.
by ocschwar 5y ago
> The rest of the city is properly fugly and depressing, communism made its mark that won't go away for next few centuries. I have some good news. Naked concrete crumbles. Especially in a place like Prague, with acidic coal smoke, l
219.
by ocschwar 5y ago
I love coffee table books as much as the next guy. And I love running around Doom levels. LIving in a brutalist building still sucks.
220.
by ocschwar 5y ago
I love how the most beautiful old quarters in the Baltic states are there because the Soviet Union "punished" those cities and didn't get Kruschyovas built there.
221.
by ocschwar 5y ago
It's almost a universal for people who live around the ruins of an older society to attribute that society's downfall to some kind of sin. The Navajos have a Soddom and Ghomorra tradition about the Anasazi. THe Welsh had such trad
222.
by ocschwar 5y ago
Camels were ubiquitous. And feral. The taming (camels remain undomesticated to this day - "trust in God and tie down your camel.") and exploitation of camels is what's anachronistic, not the camels themselves.
223.
by ocschwar 5y ago
No. What Turing did in 1937 might not have been an advance over what Godel and Church did. But if you want to make the case for building a general purpose computer out of mechanical relays or vacuum tubes in 1946, you need a semantic advanc
224.
by ocschwar 5y ago
Life on a Rez is so outside my experience that I'm not going to second guess tribal politicians on it.
225.
by ocschwar 5y ago
And any reservation where the tribal council votes to go dry, the Federal government will enforce it. (Well, to the extent that it will, you know, actually spend the money to have BIA police officers assigned to that Rez.)
226.
by ocschwar 5y ago
> Now, maybe I live in California and things are different. You live in California and things are different. You live there because you want to be in a specific location and near a some-what-specific crowd of people for work reasons. In
227.
by ocschwar 5y ago
It's not really slavery, but it's true that too many people rely on restaurants to reassure them about their place in society, which means the waiters have to make a show of being, um, in a different place in our society. It got r
228.
by ocschwar 5y ago
> On the other hand, solarpunk art is an overtly optimistic movement A solar-punk society would still be infested with Homo sapiens, with all the problems entailed thereby, so artists should be able to come up with solar punk creations t
229.
by ocschwar 5y ago
The parking facilities around the capitol will be hit first, and since congressmen have pretty fancy cars, I expect the saltwater damage will change some minds. And I'm not trying to be glib or cynical. My congressman, now Senator, Ed
230.
by ocschwar 5y ago
There is no need to compare. The issue is that there is no safe anything.
231.
by ocschwar 5y ago
So far she got legislation passed in several EU member states, influenced in the EU parliament, increased the Greens representation in parliaments all around the world, sparked an expansion of night train service in Europe, and caused cance
232.
by ocschwar 5y ago
Yeah, I guess I was wrong to call it a "freak out." They did however seemingly decide to forget about votes from anyone in an aspie-heavy profession, it seems.
233.
by ocschwar 5y ago
> He said the industry needs to dig up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, exploit No wonder they freaked out over Greta Thunberg. She started too young to have a past, and she's too set in her ways
234.
by ocschwar 5y ago
According to Google, a one off I wrote in Perl in 1998 is still in use at the lab I wrote it in.
235.
by ocschwar 5y ago
I loved using Perl for projects in the early days of the Web. For anything even remotely expressive or artistic, Perl was the way to go. But if you want to communicate scientific insight, using the write-only language is something I have to
236.
by ocschwar 5y ago
Part of the issue is that some of the public facing high risk jobs, like line cook, are hard to fill because the people who filled them are fucking dead. Of Covid.
237.
by ocschwar 5y ago
For persons of average intelligence or more, it is indeed good news. For persons of Asian appearance, living in physical proximity to persons of lower than average intelligence, it's dangerous news, unfortunately.
238.
by ocschwar 5y ago
In the Middle East, a "Tel" (as in Tel Aviv) is a hill that's the product of continuous occupation.
239.
by ocschwar 5y ago
The sheer cost of maintaining all that stuff. If you don't keep up with maintenance cost, it wears out, but it can be 20 years before the deferred maintenance becomes obvious. Do you know where the leaks are in your water line? Do you
240.
by ocschwar 5y ago
His electricity rates are the same for his house than for the nearest town center, even though it takes a lot more money to build and maintain power lines to his home than it does to pay for wiring town centers. Just one example.

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