Of course, neighborhoods do not exist in a vacuum - neighborhoods would want to work together to share resources and to collaborate to achieve greater goals, so confederations of neighborhoods could be formed. Each neighborhood could select one or more delegates to attend confederation meetings and speak on the behalf of the neighborhood, but not make decisions on behalf of them. Instead, each delegate would attend the confederation meeting, and meet with their neighborhood to bring them news of what was discussed at the delegation meeting. Then, in the neighborhood meetings, each neighborhood would come to their own decisions around what should happen at the confederation level, and a delegate - not necessarily the same person as before - would take those decisions, questions, concerns and discussion points back to the confederation, where either a consensus would be reached, or further discussion - which could again, be brought back to the neighborhood to share. In fact, rotating the role of delegate would be a really good idea, so that multiple people can get a better idea of the issues in the wider community and understanding of how the bottom-up power structure functions.

This sounds like a really good idea, but let me point something out: For the sake of efficiency, it would quickly make sense for most neighbourhoods to give their delegate a mandate of the type “We want something like this, but you can make minor changes to points X, Y, and Z in order to reach an agreement with the others”. For example: We want the new road to be a gravel road that’s about 2 m wide, but you can decide the exact quality of gravel, and whether the road is 1.5 m or 2.5 m in the meeting with the others. Whether we have light posts every 40 or 80 meters isn’t so important, as long as the road is well lit (just make sure the lights are strong enough if they’re widely spaced).

Further, once we get to scaling this up from the neighbourhood level to a scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, we’re going to get progressively more details and specialist tasks that need ironing out: Should there be import tariffs on any goods? If so, which? What should the tax be? Should it be progressive? If so, how should it scale? What should be the standard bridge-height on a highway (very useful to standardise if you want any kind of long-haul transport)? How many students should there be per teacher in classrooms at different grade levels, and what kind of education should we require from those teachers? etc. etc. etc. This absolutely massive number of questions that need answering, will in practice demand that your delegate receives some kind of mandate to make decisions within the limits of what you’ve decided.

The larger the society in question, the wider those limits will need to be in order for the society to be able to reach any kind of consensus within a reasonable time frame. If every detail needs to go neighbourhood meeting (O(100 people) => neighbourhood confederation (O(10 000) people) => community meeting (O(100 000) people) => national meeting (O(1 000 000) people) and back for every iteration, the kids are going to be grown before you’ve decided whether a 5th grade teacher needs minimum high-school level or university level mathematics in order to teach science classes, or even before you’ve decided on whether this should be something you coordinate at the national level or not for that matter.

Once you start giving your delegates a mandate to make decisions within some pre-determined limits… you’ve reinvented representative democracy.

Well, in the sense that Orbans primary political views are “We should build a far-right nationalist dictatorship/oligarchy led by Viktor Orban”, Magyar does actually disagree with his core political views.

How do you propose, in practice, to ensure that every citizen has a practical opportunity to weigh in on all the individual things affecting them, without giving them the option to have a representative?

Off the bat, I can think of a myriad of reasons this becomes prohibitively difficult for anything more than a few dozen people, but I’m honestly interested in hearing about a solution that could even conceivably work at a district (tens of thousands of people) not to speak of societal (millions) or international (billions) level.

Oh, definitely. But that’s also where the “upfront” part could have saved them: If they had contacted you and been direct about “hey, I’m selling utilities now, would you be interested in switching?”, then followed up with “on another note, it’s been a while, wanna grab dinner and catch up a bit?” That would have been a completely different story.

I would actually prefer that they’re upfront about contacting me because they need a favour, and then using that as an opening to catch up. If they first spend 30 min catching up before jumping to “btw, could you help me out with this” it gives the feeling that they only did the catching up to get me to help them. When it’s the other way around, it feels like they genuinely want to catch up a bit, and used the favour as an excuse/opportunity to contact me to catch up. A personal favourite is if someone wants help with something in the house and asks if I want to come over to help them out and then we can get some beers and a pizza afterwards. Having something to do together can make it a lot easier to pick up the conversation with someone you haven’t met for a long time.

It’s completely fair to ask a favour of an old friend, I’ve both asked and been asked of favours from people I haven’t spoken to in years. However, I think you should be upfront about it, and not act like you’re trying to get in touch for other reasons. Something like “Hey, it’s been a while, but I just came across XYZ and wondered if you could give me a hand?” is completely fine IMO.

“Their only motivation to stop fighting is if you take their land” is quite possibly the stupidest thing anyone’s ever said. I have a hard time believing someone actually thinks a person becomes motivated to give up when you take their home from them and make sure they have nothing left to lose. Like… I really can’t fathom what is going through this persons mind if they actually believe this.

Isn’t the Chinese army in fact subordinate to (or a branch of) the CCP though? I mean, it’s a one-part system, so it doesn’t make much of a difference, but I seem to remember that the army is in fact formally controlled by the party, not the government.

PS. Note: I’m not at all sure, just drawing off an old, possibly incorrect, memory.

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• Attack and bomb a country during ongoing negotiations.
• Wipe out a truckload of their air defences
• Use air superiority to bomb thousands of civilians
• Propose ceasefire without having achieved any political goals at all
• The country immediately starts rebuilding their decimated air defences to prevent you from bombing them during the ongoing negotiations
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Best I can do is three fiddy :/

Accidental means you didn’t have consent.

Dude… at this point you’re just looking for something to be triggered by. If I open the kitchen door and it hits my SO standing on the other side, that’s not domestic violence, it’s an accident. If my hand gets caught in her hair while we’re messing around that’s not non-consensual hair pulling and sexual assault, it’s an accident.

When accidents happen, you apologise, accept the apology, and keep having fun together.

I’ve found myself sitting alone in my car in an abandoned parking lot just listening to some music and wondering what I’m doing with my life. The strange thing is that, by all objective measures, I have a really good life. I have an SO that I love more than anything in the world, and which is fantastic to me, I have parents and siblings that I have great relationships to, I have a job that I really enjoy, and I have good friends. Despite all that, I sometimes get this need to just “disappear” for a little while and isolate myself while listening to sad music. I don’t really enjoy it either, it’s more like some kind of cathartic feeling, like theres some kind of sadness in me that occasionally just wells up and needs to be given some space. It’s quite rare (maybe once a year or something on that order), but it does happen. It’s actually really nice to see that this is something relatable - I’ve never really spoken to anybody about it.

I haven’t really been keeping up with the particle physics community, what is the “next big thing” they’re looking for? In lieu of a single “next big thing” that would be comparable to the Higgs boson, what kind of things are they really looking for at the LHC these days?

The fact that the account is 9 years old (from long before he was famous) points to a potential for this being his real account.

I’m honestly a bit surprised that some kind of net that can be shot from an under-barrel mounted grenade launcher hasn’t been developed/deployed yet. I’m imagining something like a standard 40 mm grenade casing that contains a net that folds out after maybe 50 m (or a programmable distance, or a proximity trigger). Very thin/light strings are enough to take down a drone, so you could probably easily pack a 5 x 5 m or even 10 x 10 m net into a 40 mm casing. People are already shooting at drones with rifles, I would imagine something that lets you shoot out a large net to 100 + meters would make taking down drones a lot easier for an infantryman, and being able to fire it from a standard barrel-mounted grenade launcher would make it very easy to deploy.

I would imagine that this kind of thing could drastically improve the ability of infantry to deal with drones when they are exposed. I’m sure there’s a good reason this hasn’t been implemented, but I have a hard time figuring out what that reason is.

Definitely, however a major advantage of flak over solid rounds (especially with modern automatic range finding and programmable munitions) is that it’s a very easy and cheap way to turn a 1 m miss on that 30 cm drone at 1 km distance into a hit.

The weapons shooting these munitions typically shoot anything from 12.7 mm to 30-40 mm munitions, while even bird shot is enough to take out a drone. With that in mind, there’s really no reason to not make that 30 mm shell fragment into a dispersed cloud of bird shot that would barely harm a plane, since it makes it so much easier to take out the thousands of drones attacking you. Whenever the occasional heavier target shows up, you can just disable the fragmentation effect (programmable munitions) and you basically have a CIWS.

I honestly believe that the enormous amount of drones on the battlefield today will cause a resurgence of flak as a primary AA weapon. For a while now, missiles have been the go-to, but expensive and advanced missiles can be countered by massive swarms of cheap drones. Flak cannons with modern targeting systems and automatic range finding is probably the most reasonable counter to these drone swarms.