Why would the Taliban want to shoot down a plane? They’re not terrorists like IS or Al-Qaeda and they’re not antsy enough to shoot down a plane first and think later like Iran are, nor is it an active warzone… They just want to commit human rights violations in peace and shooting down a plane is a golden ticket to foreign intervention.

Green is actual data, white is straight lines connecting the green, but they don’t have data.

The cut across Northern Iran is just a straight line, but they will have stayed north of the border.

There’s a difference between libertarians and republicans looking to make more money. Most of the supposedly anti-taxation anti-regulation billionaires just want less tax for them and fewer regulations for their business; everyone else and especially imported products can be taxed more to give the billionaire’s company more subsidies, and regulations to prevent competitors from growing or starting up is even more welcome. Even when it comes to personal freedoms, they don’t care and will gladly support the government in reducing those freedoms if it earns them some sway.

This all goes directly against the libertarian principles of government non-intervention in the free market and people’s personal lives, both of which are vastly more important than just reducing taxes, which supposedly comes as a side effect later (even if in reality taxes would probably stay the same as you’d need to provide more assistance to low income people)

This isn’t to say that more principled libertarians are necessarily noble or right or whatever compared to people who just want lower taxes, just that saying it’s about reducing taxes and giving power to corporations is buying in to the direction that corporations are trying to move the ideology in

Be generally aligned with the right

It’s gotta be authoritarian right though… I can’t see a pro-immigration, pro-choice, pro-gun, anti-tariff, anti-corruption (generally pro-freedom, that thing republicans pretend to like) libertarian getting anywhere with trump, it wouldn’t surprise me if a tankie got along better given they’re into most of the things trump likes

Planes don’t fly great circle routes though, there’s overfly fees, weather, mountains, ETOPS and just plain politics… This route looks ordinary compared to some international routes, eg Helsinki to Singapore where you dodge Russia and Ukraine for politics, taking you way below the great circle route, then Turkey for overfly fees and Iran for politics, taking you almost back up to the great circle route, before dipping down again to avoid the Himalayas

Of all the people who deserve money, corrupt politicians and lobbyists are the only two groups who deserve it less than people like musk

I think the best option is for workers to be able to get shares in the company they work at via an optional salary sacrifice scheme (so that it reduces the tax you pay, rather than letting you buy them with your after tax income)… If you care about the business, you can get a stake in running it, if you don’t you can collect your paycheck and go home.

The stock market shouldn’t exist however - when you leave the business you can either keep the shares, or return them to the business for “a fair price” (the amount you paid after inflation? or maybe just the current purchase price). Shares bought like this shouldn’t be able to be sold - only those owned by the founder(s) can be, with the caveat that they must be offered to workers at a reasonable price.

That system eliminates both forcing “responsibility” on people who don’t want it, as well as removing people parasites who want to destroy the business to make a quick profit, as well as allowing people who’ve worked there longer to have more of a stake.

Workers owning the business < people who care owning the business

That can take the form of workers, but equally founders or just people with an interest in what the business does. Equally though hard to get a founder who doesn’t care about what the business does, but many workers genuinely just want a paycheck and to go home (myself included).

The problem is, stock markets and the existence of easily tradable shares, options etc. actively encourage people who not only don’t care about the business, but would be willing to mess it up for short term gain.

Wheres the part that starts off as a perfect half bagel at one side but is barely atoms thick by the time you get to the other?

By good morals I mean it came up about the time that people were moving from tribes where they knew everyone personally to settlements where it was impossible to… it sounds weird now but “don’t steal from strangers”, “don’t kill strangers”, “share your harvest with strangers in need” etc. were actually pretty novel ideas which needed to be taught and helped a bunch with ensuring people could co-exist with more people than they had relationships with

Nah, it was originally about making sure your population had good morals, then about controlling your population more generally, then about making money, then about banning fun for some reason, then about making money again

It’s been quite the wild ride

Product placement is advertising, and as such saying “no ads” while not blurring out product placement would be misselling the service

The Italian economy always used to be on par with UK, France, Germany, but look at it now…

Better a muzzled monarchy than a power vacuum every time, it’s worked in the UK, Spain, (um… probably elsewhere but it worked well enough in those two places after their autocratic dictators kicked the bucket, and look where it left Russia and to an extent Italy - mafia, economy stagnating etc)

I was under the impression it was the intersection of the venn diagram of communists and imperialists, as long as imperialist means imperialist (defined as using economic, military, diplomatic and cultural power to influence countries around you in a way that is beneficial to you, and may be either beneficial, inconsequential or detrimental to them) and not just “western and capitalist”

The lack of rich people doesn’t imply freedom - people who are forced to hunt, gather, fish or farm for subsistence only with no reward beyond that are enslaved to the need to produce food and find shelter, but that differs from a society where there’s sufficient food and shelter, it’s just hoarded by those who have too much

Additionally the presence of rich people doesn’t imply a lack of freedom - you could have a “safety net” system where everyone is guaranteed housing and enough grains and beans/similar to survive, and if they want more they can work for it (some of the taxes from this go towards compensating farmers and builders), giving people the freedom to not have to worry about survival, while also allowing for people to earn lots of money and buy nice things if they want and/or can

That’s a lot of expense compared to just importing US-grown hops, as there’s a lot of soil to adjust

And yeah, trademarks on plants are no joke, there’s a bunch of restrictions on buying/selling them etc.

Hops are highly sensitive to the soil acidity and minerals in terms of the compounds the plants produce, so sharing plants is largely infeasible, plus because it’s the US many of them are trademarked so there’s no sharing for that reason

I get it’s a big jump, but I’ve been clear I’m restricting it to the most popular types of beer and explained why US bred and grown hops had the good fortune to be the most aromatic disease resistant hops, so I still don’t think it’s unreasonable

Again, none of this applies for styles beyond 3-7% golden beer fermented with yeast only, and even then there’s a few exceptions for certain styles where the aromatics are different (eg bitter, which is less about the aromatic hops and more about the earthy notes of the bittering hops), but for the most popular lagers and pale ales I think it holds

So there’s obviously a split between objective fact and opinion and conjecture, but:

• Outbreaks of powdery mildew in the early 20th century meant it became somewhat infeasible to grow most aromatic and flavoursome hops, leading to research and breeding programmes to produce disease resistant hops with other desired characteristics
• Most of the mildew-resistant hops were wild and from the US and Canada
• Hop breeding and research started in the UK but ended in the 2000s
• Oregon State University has been breeding hops for almost 100 years
• The USDA also has their hop research center in Oregon
• The US is responsible for 40% of hop production, of which over 98% is in Oregon, Washington and Idaho
• Cascade hops, from the USDA research center in Oregon, started the craft beer movement due to the combination of high flavour and disease tolerance
• German hop research started in 1926, but only had any real success after the 1980s

So essentially, the US has just got very lucky when it comes to hop production with good soils and disease resistance, while German beermaking was set back leading other styles to become and remain popular, such as very lightly hopped wheat beers, sour beers where the acidity comes from the fermentation instead of hops, and more recently Belgian style beers that are stronger abv so the stronger alcohol taste substitutes for some of the strength of the hops

There probably are also studies, but they tend to look into mechanisms/variations whereas this is more of a series of coinciding factors which don’t really need much research to make sense