FriendOfDeSoto

There is no entity called “the world” that can flick through contingency plans. You can bet those who benefit from oil that would have sailed through the strait with no problem hadn’t the orange toddler started a war have a plan B. Whether that’s reactivating a few old pipelines or just sending ships the long way around, fuck knows. I’m not swimming in petrodollars. None of these plans will cost the same. All contingency plans cost more money. They might be raising fuel prices too much but they couldn’t not raise them at all.

No one foresaw this development because it is - and that’s the diplomatic term for it: fucking stupid. And that’s why there isn’t a plan B in place that can be used in the same way right away.

Y’all were under a king before and managed to change that.

The pace at replacing books at libraries is so painfully slow you stand a good chance to find an environment that’s nearly free of LLM influence at your local one.

It’s faster than a transaction via QR code. Also, the chip isn’t just restricted to handling payments. It can be used as key fob for your car or on your smart lock at home or at the hotel you’re staying at.

Your imagination is wild.

That tends to be the case though. Even in Europe that’s true in many cases. I think so far only France has legislation on the books that makes it illegal for airfare to beat trainfare under a certain distance.

You can’t bitch about your government spending if you don’t do the legwork;) Good luck to you!

The geographical distances also favor air traffic over anything on the ground. If the jet engine hadn’t come around, North America would have a great high speed rail network today.

Ignoring recent events in the middle east and their effect on pricing, even in Japan a flight from Tokyo to Osaka will beat the bullet train fare if you book it a month or more ahead of time. And that’s not on a budget airline. Japan gets a lot of praise for its bullet train network. But it’s really just one cash cow line (Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto) and the rest is more often than not half empty. They run it because there is pork barrel politicking and because they can sell the flexibility and immediacy of hopping on a train in a downtown location in this network, on a whim (outside the holiday congestion). Japan is also a centrally organized country where the administrative sub sections (prefectures, cities, etc.) have less say in things.

And no local in their right mind would take the shinkansen to go from Kyoto to Osaka. That’s a 40min ride or so on the normal trains. The cost to time saving ratio is not good enough.

https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/Budget

Normally, I would say the answer to a “Am I the only one who thinks …?” on the internet is always no. There will be another person who thinks that. In this case, my guess is though it’ll be hard or sheer luck to find that other person.

Do you live a life of asceticism? Do you spend money on anything just as a treat for yourself? If the answer is no, then well done you. Hope you’re happy. If the answer is yes, then you are just like the rest of us.

The Greek ones are older than the Roman ones. Jupiter = (Zeus + pater) * a couple of sound changes, where pater = father. It’s my favorite fact.

It’s conceivable that the Greeks also copy and pasted their cannon of deities from whatever was en vogue at the time. I doubt there was a process. A story was created, it somehow stuck in the zeitgeist, and a century later through a game of telephone, Bob was elevated to be god of hemorrhoids.

The Egyptians had a lot of gods for everything. Moses had to beat the poly-deity lifestyle out of the Israelites with stone tablets. The heathens in the North of Europe had concocted their own family of gods. If you go even further afield, you’ll find more and different gods.

They all kind of had a father big boss figure and then a complicated network of subs. If you have no printing press and no microwave ovens, humans naturally gravitated to stories like that to make sense of the world. The systems grew organically.

You can help stop your elected dickheads. Protest, general strike, a constant barrage of your elected officials with dissent. They were bombing schools in your name.

Iran has been under the longest internet blackout in history (if you don’t count North Korea). The things that trickle out from there are scarce and that little bandwidth may be better used to collect evidence of atrocities, ironically committed either by the regime or the US/Israel coalition. The current top 40 may be less important at this point in time. So there is a pretty high chance that you won’t get a good answer to your question.

If nothing else helps, imagine how you tickle them on the tip of their dumb nose with an imaginary, invisible feather. Imagine the surprised look when they don’t know what’s happening. It’s so annoying and they don’t have a clue where it’s coming from. They have fucked with the wrong person with an overactive imagination! By now, you’ve zoned out far enough to ignore any jabs coming your way. You wear the self-satisfied smile that only imaginary feather ticklers know.

Are they possibly romantically interested in you? Just drop a casual “you’re just in love with me, aren’t you!” when they’re annoying and see how flabbergasted they get.

I definitely cannot.

I have never heard of him. In general, I don’t find YouTube a reliable source for anything controversial. I think the CIA falls under that umbrella. So I would be very skeptical.

I fear there won’t be a solution that doesn’t cost money somewhere. Please don’t buy 3 burner phone numbers at once. I would feel bad if it didn’t work and/or you get suspected of being a criminal.

Check your current phone subscription if you have one. There might be a way to get an additional number for free or very little extra. And it might be a good backup emergency service to have just with your parents maybe even if you go down a different route for the rest.

Thanks for the correction. I’m positively shocked to learn about this.

Anything other than Signal seems unadvisable from a privacy POV. Do you have a way of talking to them live on the phone, at the same time? You can try and register their Signal on a burner phone wherever you are. As they sign up, you sit on the call and give them the phone number and security code when it comes through. Unless having Signal on the phone is itself a reason to get arrested in Russia, which frankly wouldn’t surprise me either.

I don’t know if this will work. I did it on a different service using the number on a dumbphone to register for use on a tablet once.

A British person with a German passport is also a German citizen. So they can’t not help them if they have the means.

I don’t know about the Brits. The Germans have some tight rules about dual citizenship. It will be an exceedingly low number of people who qualify legally on both sides for dual citizenship of these two countries.

As the revolutionary guard troops surround Dubai, this probably would not matter. They would try to get people out and I’m sure both Brits and Germans would evacuate each other’s citizens if it meant death if they didn’t. But if the situation allowed for more thorough investigation, I probably wouldn’t mention my other citizenship to the Germans at least.

Many folks of Turkish descent but born in Germany used to take up German citizenship and had to renounce the Turkish one in the process. But they were able to get it back once the German passport was done, which could be grounds for revocation by the Germans if they knew about it. (No longer true) In Japan it’s even harder to have two passports; kids of mixed couples often have two passports but they’re not supposed to from the Japanese side. So they wouldn’t make this known to the Japanese embassy who would care about this if the revolutionary guards were still far enough away to have a closer look.

I would not be surprised if there was a bit of horse trading going on between the embassies. So if a dual citizenship holder was rescued unconscious in a drone attack, it’s probably the first delegation on the scene who takes charge of the case. Until the victim regains consciousness and possibly decides something else - if they can without causing more trouble for themselves.

I have no experience with this so my guess is really just that. If two consular outfits arrive on the scene to help our unconscious victim at the same time, they would probably try to figure out: what’s the country of residence for the victim? If it’s not a third country, residencistan trumps the other one. If it is a third country, then where are the next of kin. If there are none, probably country of birth. If that doesn’t help they do a game of paper, rock, scissors.

(Edited, I evidently missed a major revamp of German citizenship law)

Gasoline.