There was a book a while back called Guns, Germs, and Steel that delves into this topic.

The root cause, as I understand it, is that Europe is on a continent oriented east-west instead of north-south. And Europe in particular is on the part of that continent that has a lot of easy access to the sea.

East-west orientation allows you to transplant plants and animals long distances and keep them at roughly the same latitudes, which means roughly the same climate. That is a big boon for spreading “civilized” agriculture, which is what creates surplus of labor, which creates non food jobs that advance technology.

Among the common 5-7 domesticated food animals people eat today, all but one or two were domesticated in Mesopotamia, but then spread all over Europe.

Access to the sea is the other component that turns tech advantage into colonialism, because it gives the transportation. Even today, China and Russia are great powers, but they are forced to be continental powers instead of maritime powers, because nearly all of their coast lines are hemmed in by narrow seas that are easy to blockade.

There are, of course, a bunch of other factors I’m not even thinking about and competing opinions. But I don’t for one second think that any of this has anything to do with European “innate intelligence” or skin color.

I gave you the downvote because I once attended a public lecture by Stephen Hawking, near the very end of his lifetime. It had to be one of the few, very last, public lectures that Dr. Hawking had in him. And the topic of that lecture was the nature of time, and how all of the equations of motion are fully reversible, etc, etc etc.

Out of all of the topics Dr. Hawking could have discussed, that one is the one he chose. And to me, that means that the nature of time was interesting enough to him to spread around to the public. That there are live issues that are not well settled. And so on.

Since that time, I’ve not seen any major developments in theoretical physics or philosophy to shift the status quo to an appreciable degree.

This leads me to the final judgement on your comment: You are wrong. There are live issues to discuss here, and OP deserves to further explain, defend, and debate their philosophy.

I need to get you to sit down for a philosophical discourse with the Time Cube guy.

It matters a lot whether she is a US citizen or not.

If she’s a citizen, then she can shut up / lawyer up. She has a fifth amendment right to not divulge a phone or computer password, code, pin, or whatever. CBP can detain her for up to several hours, but at the end they have to either charge her or release her into the country.

If she’s not a citizen, then things are a lot tougher. She still has constitutional rights, including the fifth amendment. But CBP has a lot of leverage, because they can rule her inadmissable. Once that happens once, then it can become really hard to get readmitted later, because this “strike” is on your record.

The main thing that is tripping up green cats holders at the border currently is old criminal records. That DUI or marijuana or shoplifting charge or conviction from 20 years ago is often not enough dirt to get an LPR deported, but it is enough dirt to deny readmission if they happen to leave voluntarily.

My aunt did not like eating peas. And she hid them behind the refrigerator for more than a year.

Moral of the story: be glad it’s the underside of the table and not behind the refrigerator.

Truly a Solomonic decision.

No car manufacturer mass produces a chassis like that. That’s an unholy marriage of a suburban and an F250 super duty.

Doesn’t a Google Pixel device come with its own OS image by default, independent of Graphene OS? Is there some kind of step that we’re missing here?

Exactly. This is completely insane. The DoD has the negotiating leverage to write these right to repair requirements into their RFPs, specifications, and contracts. The idea that their procurement offices simply failed to do this boggles my mind.

Back in the war, if you had a winning design, you were required to license it, full drawings included, to many different manufacturers at fair prices. The Defense Production Act is still on the books, and it contains a lot of power to control the economy. Why is DoD handcuffing themselves?

American car insurance covers collision damage from other cars or external factors. It doesn’t cover mechanical failures. You can get extended warranty coverage, both from your car dealer or from third parties, but this is usually not financially worthwhile.

Several years ago at this point, Congress passed a bill, and that bill was signed into law by the President. What that law says, is that TikTok cannot continue under Chinese ownership. Byte Dance either have to sell the American video app business so that it is controlled by Americans, or they have to shutdown Tiktok.

Byte Dance did not sell the business, so under the law TikTok has to shutdown. This law was lawyered all the way to the supreme court, and the court said it’s a valid law, and must be followed.

Despite all of these facts, the law is not actually being followed. And Tiktok is still operating in the United States. There is no legally valid reason for it to do so. President Trump has issued extension after extension, even though he has no legal authority to do so.

The latest here is the top law enforcement officer in the US telling the app stores, “yes we know it’s illegal to keep Tiktok in your app store, but I am pinky promising we won’t go after you.”

Sadly most of the great maritime powers have signed onto the 1856 Declaration of Paris where they agreed to give up privateering as a weapon of war. The United States has not signed on, but has also not issued a letter of marque since that period. During the civil war, the confederates experimented briefly with privateering, but the Union declared that it would not.

In 2025, The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025 was introduced in Congress. This bill would authorize privateering against “cartels” (apparently any cartel, like OPEC or the American Medical Association).

They’re definitely throwing the whole book at her. But there’s also a small nugget of a case here. Having been through customs a few times, I think it’s clear that biological materials should be declared. In a normal situation, the infraction would lead to a long wait in the back room, a stern warning, and maybe confiscated embryos. Not felony charges.

But the dam companies are incentived to verify the accuracy.

I’m pretty sure that the military understands in general that the bunker busters don’t really work all that well.

I think the more relevant factors in this calculation are (1) B2 is a technology from the 1980s, (2) B2 still looks fricken cool, (3) Tomahawk was also a big deal in the 1980s, (4) Israel already did all of the work suppressing air defenses, and finally (5) the big parade the week before kinda sucked.

I suggest you read the recent unsigned per curiam order in D.V.D.. The law of the land; it is a changin’.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia does not really have a “legal” status, as he has an active final deportation order, with withholding of removal to El Salvador only.

He can be legally deported to a third country (not El Salvador) that will take him. Pursuant to the supreme court’s decision yesterday, he can apparently be deported to these third countries with no advance notice whatsoever.

Of course, deportation would make it hard to appear in Tennessee for his felony case. But that hasn’t stopped ICE before. People have been arrested for failure to appear in criminal cases, because they entered ICE detention.

People have reported being sold into slavery after being deported to Libya. Mauritania criminalized chattel slavery in 2007, but the law is not well enforced.

Another analogy can be made to Operation Praying Mantis, wherein the United States destroyed half of the Iranian Navy.

If you want top speed, Fortran is faster than C.