Would you have supported Western companies selling entertainment products to the population of nazi Germany just to avoid burning bridges? Lol.

Who said anything about the US? It was the soviet union that got humiliated in Afghanistan, and they had to withdraw. A nuclear power, the soviet union (=russia plus who they colonized) wasn't able to prevail. A much smaller, weaker russia won't be able to conquer Ukraine just because there are 3x as many russians as Ukrainians.

russians should focus on stopping their unprovoked, criminal, fucking war against Ukraine, instead of enjoying the spoils of the Western world they publicly despise but privately idolize and yearn for. They should grow a pair and overthrow their 21. century Hitler.

> they'll feel really, really dumb in about 10^77 years

No, they'll still have 9 times that long ahead of them.

How TF was Excel groundbreaking? It's an incremental iteration on Lotus 1-2-3, which was an incremental iteration on VisiCalc.

Nothing is killer app about "Excel". Spreadsheets? Sure. Excel merely achieved market heft by shady tactics from convicted monopolist Microsoft.
Nothing revolutionaly about "Excel". It's a mediocre copycat product and has always been.

> 92% of California's gas is produced in refineries

I'd go out on a limb and wager that 100% of California's gas is produced in refineries. Gasoline doesn't grow on trees and isn't just pumped out of some mythical gasoline wells.

Of all places, why does California subsidize the polluting oil industry, and people and enterprises that emit lots of CO2?

Taxpayer money is spent on artificially maintaining higher capacity than what would be available if market supply and demand were allowed to do their work.

Pricier gasoline leads to faster conversion to hybrid and electric cars, while channeling taxpayer money to make gasoline cheaper increases carbon emissions.

One may or may not be environmentally concerned, but California promoting electric mobility with one hand, while subsidizing oil consumption with the other just doesn't make sense.

Since we're in fantasyland already with the notion of US merging with Canada (because the GOP wouldn't want a 40 million, Democratic-leaning voter base), I'll pretend to play along with the details.

> We'll take Alberta (oil) and Quebec (hydro). Canada can keep the rest.

Look at the map, there's also Alaska. There's no universe in which the USA would take Alberta, but wouldn't take at least British Columbia, and likely, Yukon, lest Alaska is connected via a thin strip only. Should this happen in this fantasyland, there's no real stopping there, because the Northern provinces have a lot of natural resources, and act as a buffer area against russia. It'd be unusual to annex most territory except like three non-coastal, Southern provinces that happen to border the USA.

> If speed mattered then the world wouldn't be using Python or Javascript.

I get what you want to say (use Fortran, C, Rust, Zig, Odin, assembly, even C++ or Swift etc. for speed).

But Python and JavaScript cannot be mentioned on the same page.

Python is an abysmally slow, interpreted scripting engine defined by its own single implementation (so it's more of an infrastructure than a real language). Until recently, or even today, there's not one Python, there's two, Python 2 and Python 3.

Meanwhile JavaScript has a standard, and multiple, standards-conforming, competitive implementations, and incredible performance via JIT for what started as an interpreted scripting language.

JavaScript is easily on the order of 100x times faster than Python for broad classes of workloads.

And this kind o excuse is, ladies and gentlemen, why shitty, slow software gets written in the first place. Because there's always something else that can be blamed for being even slower. Or because "we have fast enough hardware now". Then we're surprised that an Office 2025 (however it's called) opens as slowly, or even slower than Office 2002 (?) while not immediately providing anything more powerful upon application start.

Many EV drivers rarely brake with the brake pad, it's possible to brake in sudden, unexpected situations, as the regaining of energy can aggressively decelerate the vehicle. One more reason for going electric, ot at least, hybrid.

The area is already suspicious, if the roof and bonnett are 1.8m2, how can the entire car be above 10m2? Which is rather large? Is it a very vertical van?

Also, it sounds too good to be true. What are the caveats? What's the durability of a "fraction of the human hair" layer? How expensive is it to apply it? Should Mercedes owners, known for mostly having garages, park outside? Etc.

> 'Comrade' ?? Where are you from? The 1950s? This may come as a colossal surprise to you but Putin is not a communist, he's a strange combination of a predatory capitalist, a pre-WWI Russian imperialist and a mafia boss who happens to have access to nuclear weapons.

It's you who is living under a rock. All what uou describe also applies to other commies throughout the Soviet Union. Or do you think they were fighting for the proletariat? Lol. Also, putler is a conmie-trained KGB agent first and foremost, look up his resume. That he's pretending to be christian and conservative is lipstick on a pig. It bamboozles russians, European far right parties and MAGA Republicans.

Given the recent and former events of cable breaking via dragging and stretching them by dropping their anchor in European waters, why don't Meta and actual telcos crowdfund a couple hundred billions to finance Ukraine beating russia into a normal, hopefully broken up set of countries?

> at which point how is that different from a little death?

Who knows, maybe we die every night, and the morning person who inherits my memory merely believes he is me.