The continuing American embargo on Cuba after the Cold War has always been toddler tantrum level of pettiness.

I thought Obama had finally closed that chapter, but I was wrong.

There are two considerations.

For the American government and corporations, Chinese espionage is an obvious and real threat. NVidia doesn’t want China to steal their chip designs and the Pentagon doesn’t want China to steal military info.

For American private citizens, it isn’t really a threat. It’s actually preferable in a way, because you know they won’t disclose whatever they learn to the American government. You might even consider buying a fully “designed and made in China” device, which the NSA might not have a backdoor to.

This only makes it more concerning to the American government, because they lose control over their citizens.

Storage tech is indeed the laggard.

The most readily available form of stored energy is still natural gas.

We really need to change our energy pricing and taxation to reward green ways to store energy better.

Also, having been on the other side of such a situation: it’s not cool to pressure or guilt trip your guests. Either be hospitable and let them do whatever they want, or don’t invite them.

If people aren’t hungry, then they aren’t hungry. Maybe they are on a diet, maybe they misunderstood OP’s intention and ate beforehand. Maybe they are recovering from something and don’t want to eat too much.

And as for the two that did not showed up. It’s a good practice to reconfirm the night before. Sometimes people forget. Sometimes life gets in the way.

If they did reconfirm and still didn’t show up and did not have a good excuse, then I would start looking for better friends.

Hope OP has better success next time. I do understand that the situation sucks.

But it’s also a situation that, in my opinion, is preventable.

Exactly. Every time the UN does something, people say “they can’t enforce it”.

Well, that’s the whole point of the UN. To resolve things without using force.

It’s a good design, designed by people who learned from the horrors of WW2.

It’s sad to see how many people nowadays forget those lessons and are itching for global war.

The only country that can be blamed for destroying Iraqi industry is the USA. Two decades of war, one decade of sanctions and another decade of war (by Saddam against Iran) sponsored by the USA in the 1980s.

Obviously, Iranian industry will outcompete Iraqi industry at this point in history.

Iraq needs to rebuild and they need outside help.

I’m not gonna defend Iranian war mongering. And neither will I defend Turkish war mongering, or IS, USA or Israeli war mongering.

But the only path forward for Iraq is by making peace with the two power brokers in the region: Turkey and Iran.

And that’s what the current government is trying to achieve. The Turkey-Iraq corridor and the new port they are building are going to lay the foundation for their future prosperity.

As for Iran, Iran is desperate for allies. It won’t be that difficult to find some mutually beneficial relationship with them.

It’s more-or-less geographic destiny that Iran and Turkey will become the dominant powers in Western Asia.

They both basically ruled the area for most of history.

The best we (the West) could do is nudge them towards human rights and peace and friendship. For Turkey, that’s mostly a done deal.

For Iran, that was exactly what Obama tried to do. And it’s also what Iran has been trying to get for the past 25 years.

Iran is inherently on a path towards secularisation and more dovish policies. It’s the threat of war by the US and Israel that keeps the defense hawks in power.

Iran, especially, will never fully trust the USA - and for good reason. But they do want better relations with the USA. They just don’t want to get burned or bombed.

Thank you. I thought I had checked Wikipedia.

It seems smack in the middle between Eritrea and Yemen.

Does anyone know exactly where in the red sea this is?

I want to know if it’s in Yemens territorial waters or not.

He said those things towards the end of his life after he had been smeared for years.

Prior to that interview in 1983, he had criticized Israel for the atrocities they committed in Lebanon and people called him an anti-semite for comparing Israel to Nazi-Germany.

Eventually, he said fuck it, and went full anti-semite.

I don’t blame the guy. He’s only human and people can only take so much shit before they turn into bitter old men.

I used to think Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-semite. I also used to think Roald Dahl was an anti-semite.

But after researching what they actually said, it’s clear that they were just smeared, because they weren’t racist enough against Palestinians and (shockingly) thought Palestinians deserve human rights.

Honestly, I am now highly skeptical whenever someone calls another person an anti-semite.

The US never did anything about Rachel Corrie or the USS Liberty or Hersh Goldberg-Polin. And we can probably add hundreds of Palestinian Americans to the list, but even their names aren’t known in the mainstream media.

It seems the USA capacity to care depends on how much AIPAC will allow it to care.

They aren’t combatants or PoW, taking them hostage was a human rights violation from the beginning.

But Israel can’t really expect Hamas to follow Geneva conventions when they themselves violate it a hundreds times as often.

Hamas is trying to keep as many alive as they can.

But (a) 2000 pound bunker busters don’t discriminate between Palestinians and Israelis and (b) if the IDF comes too close to the hostages, their guards have to decide whether to let them go alive or to kill them.

In the case of the Druze guy, I can definitely see Hamas choosing not to kill him. But in cases of Israelis who also served in the IDF, the rational choice is to kill them instead of giving the IDF a propaganda win.

And finally, sometimes the IDF probably accidentally kills them and tries to blame Hamas if they can get away with it.

They could have had all the hostages back in October. Hamas just wanted back the hostages that Israel holds.

And again, they could have had all the hostages back in May.

Netanyahu seems committed to genocide and the hostages are collateral damage.

It’s deranged and I am ashamed our western leaders are cheerleading this.

It always surprised me that the country that pioneered Lean production techniques has always had such an enormous waste of labour resources in their office culture.

They have one of the lowest GDP per hour worked of all Industrial nations.

Italy, Spain and Germany have way higher labour productivity, while even Turkey edges out Japan.

Not Bibi, but AIPAC and CUFI.

And also, the Democratic party itself is quite Zionist, with Blinken en Shapiro perhaps the most well known Zionists.

Democrats don’t want AIPAC and CUFI to support Trump. Wavering on Israel will actually rile up the evangelicals to turn out massively for Republicans.

The sad fact of the matter is that 75% of the American electorate will support Israel regardless of how many kids they kill.

And the remaining 25% are actually split between Republican and Democratic voters and don’t hold sway in either party.

One thing I don’t understand is, how can polio resurface after 24 years?

I am tempted to think that it was intentionally released, but perhaps someone has a less evil explanation?

It’s also by design.

The flaws are designed to be exploited by the rich and powerful.

Correct.

But nobody is enforcing compliance.

So they can just keep it on American servers and sell it to OpenAI or share it with the US government.

Also, there are a lot of bots copying everything on reddit and other sites. Even if reddit would comply with GDPR, these bots cannot be traced and cannot be fined.