It's San Marino. The entire country is mounted on a flip-top like a bathroom trash-can lid, covering an enormous number of missile silos. Why do you think they've been left alone for a thousand years.
The goal should be no hyperpowers at all. There's probably a place for at least four superpowers: the US, an EU with more coherent military integration, Russia, and China. If there was more unification in Africa or South America then there might also be the formation of suitable powers there.
It's a strength through diversity thing-- we want multiple different styles of government and economy to survive so each one can steal from the others' playbook. We can't guarantee that liberal democracy and free markets are the best solution for our next global crisis.
Well, the example I gave above-- in the early Socket 754/939 days, ASRock sold a bunch of boards with an extra slot that would take a daughterboard that contained a Socket AM2 and DDR2 slots which would theoretically allow a significant upgrade on the "same" mainboard. Not sure anyone ever bought it, since it cost as much as a new mainboard.
The most famous example of this style of weirdness was the ECS PF88, which could be equipped with a Socket 939, LGA775, or a Pentium M depending on daughtercard choices.
But there was also some novel features-- motherboards with tube amplifiers on board (AOpen AX4B-533), a few generations of "instant boot mini-Linux environments", and some more sophisticated debug tools (I recall some firms trying small LCD displays and voice prompts to replace 7-segment POST code displays-- considering a 128x32 all-points-addressable OLED costs like $1 in quantity of 1, why are those not standard when the motherboard costs $300+?!)
They used to make zanier products (the stuff with ULI chipsets and CPU upgrade slots) back in the 2000s when they were a lowend brand competing with ECS. The feature set between boards is less diverse these days.
Yeah, he was one of a long string of lunatic leaders, which evidently "democracy" has done little to temper. The thing I recall about him was a bit in a reference book to coins and currency: at one point in the 1950s, the central bank issued a 500-hwan note that had a large central portrait of him (the overall design looked like a cheap riff on US currency of the time), and rapidly replaced it because he concluded people folding it in half across his face (as people do with banknotes) was some symbol of defiance to him personally.
They don't teach that style of crazy in dictator school.
As for the "Korea is a puppet and exists only as long as the US props it up", duh, but I figure there's perhaps some chance to exploit some "we've been under the yoke so long we no longer notice it" and "we're a big strong country that thinks it can actually engage internationally" mentalities to loosen the fixation with copyright and chasing those imagined license revenues that will never materialize.
You'd think there's a whole soft-power paradigm being missed here.
The value of export content well exceeds the license fees you negotiate with the English repackagers. Think of how entire generations view Japan favourably after a steady diet of anime, samurai/ninja stereotypes, and kaiju movies.
Flood the market. Free international rights for all. Sponsor your own damned fansubs if you have to. Use it to soft sell your culture, history, and branding. We need 24 episodes of an isekai animation featuring a bishounen Syngman Rhee stat.
They lose the war and pull the trigger, and everyone from the janitor on up is prosecuted by the PRC as saboteurs.
They win the war and have blown up the factory? Goodbye #1 export product.
Its only value is as a hindrance to peaceful negotiation. The threat is actually more useful as a "we'll pull the plug if you abandon your defence commitments" rather than "we'll pull the plug when attacked". That bludgeon prevents Western powers from seeking a managed, Hong Kong/Macao sryle reunification strategy.
At one point it appeared cheaper than conventional insurance; dome people might have been chasing that instead of religious kookery.
When I worked for a firm too small to offer insurance, and there was still a mandate with teeth, a broker I visited suggested it because it was ~$250 per month compared with 400 for real insurance.
Gotta say, though, the Hexbears are havibg fun with it. Some communities seem sort of dour by comparison.
FWIW, SDF probably skews a bit anarchist, but if there's a founding principle behind the organization, it's "a harem of cute girls, and they picked the PDP-11"
Right there that's where we went wrong. Back when Dracula was in charge the prices of groceries were reasonable, and he only needed a few virgins a year sacrificed.
My company originally said you got two free days off per year, outside the accrued PTO: one for your birthday, and one for parity because office #2 got a state holiday that #1 didn't.
Now they moved to the "unlimited PTO" gimmick which has no right answer for how much time you can take off, so I follow the old PTO accrual schedule for my seniority as a guide.
I'd think random was probably both cheap to inplement (once you have a database, ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1 is easy) and great for engagement (encourages repeated gacha-pull behaviour looking for an interesting new sub).
I wonder if it portends a degradation of the subreddit concept as a whole-- why let people navigate to a focused section directly when they should be looking at an algorithmic feed that delivers "almost what you're looking for" in a way that maximizes scrolling.
Okay, my checking account is no longer guaranteed in the event of your inevitable ambition-related collapse. Are you going to pay me speculative-investment class interest rates to justify me trusting you with the money? Or should I just go back to notes under the mattress?
Just to be clear, the chicken sandwich itself holds no ill will to the homosexual community. Sandwiches are generally incapable of hate.
Sadly, the ghouls that own the company that makes the sandwiches are incapable of reaching the same level of human empathy that an inanimate foodstuff can.
Aside from that, you ain't missing much. It tasted weird and sweet 20 years ago when they started selling them here, before the controversy.
It's San Marino. The entire country is mounted on a flip-top like a bathroom trash-can lid, covering an enormous number of missile silos. Why do you think they've been left alone for a thousand years.