Have another go at reading the post. The question wasn’t what’s stopping the US from building both, the question was whether OP’s explanation does justice to the status quo. My first sentence includes the word “also,” indicating that this is additional information that I found wasn’t sufficiently weighed in the single paragraph.

This is a thread and I read other people pointing out other things. So I didn’t.

If you’re being spat on you might be talking to a llama. The extra L is for liberal. Don’t say antisemitic stuff. That’s my sincere answer.

Edit: OP is a troll who edited the post.

I think you need to read more of the article you neglected to link to. I also think your irony gauge needs adjusting. Thank you for rage baiting with us today.

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.

Of all the foods available in the world, you thought of a lemon? Allow your imagination to eat some ice cream. Or a strawberry. But a lemon?

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.

I don’t find it credible any more unless rambling like that is delivered on a white house balcony with a man in an Easter Bunny costume standing alongside.

If they don’t know that they’re committing a mortal sin by spamming other communities, I say let them. When they get to the pearly gate and ol’ Pete is like no guys y’all punched a ticket for downstairs, they’ll know they fucked up.

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.