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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. It’s going to cause a problem but it gets a bit more complicated than that. The facility has to be in use for a diplomatic or consular purpose. You can easily think of obvious examples where this doesn’t work. If the PRC constructed a small airfield next to its mission in say, Vancouver with the permission of the Canadians, and then started flying drone sorties from it against Seattle and proclaimed it was an inviolable facility that wouldn’t work as a defense. Even if Canada agreed, you can’t use a consulate as a military base to launch attacks. This is a grayer area of course, but revolutionary states in the Middle East have a history of playing in this gray zone. Plenty of terrorist attacks have been planned and launched from diplomatic facilities. The Libyans famously shot a protester in the middle of London from their mission. The aforementioned BA bombings were planned and directed inside of the Iranian embassy in Argentina. You generally lose inviolability if a facility is used to break laws. The normal response is expulsion but in this case the facility is operating with permission of the Syrians. The presence of so many IRGC operatives raises the obvious question of what the facility really was— they weren’t doing visas or promoting commercial ties.
  2. I boxed for a few years in junior high and high school in the valley and I learned many life lessons, most importantly “if a wiry little Mexican guy is ready to fight you, you don’t want to fight him.”
  3. All of them are retired NCOs and they live at the tower with families. Oddly, Royal Navy sailors weren’t allowed to do it until the 21st century, something to do with a difference in oaths they take.
  4. Ok you maybe have done something more fun in London.
  5. Wtf? The Yeoman Warder’s tour of the Tower is legit one of the coolest things to do in London. The best is to arrive in time for the first tour of the day to beat lines and have a warden who is just starting the day.
  6. You should tell him that, hope you’re not too attached to your arm.
  7. There are dogs that are just going to bark. Smaller dogs with a few exceptions are going to bark more than bigger dogs, they aren’t badly socialized or poorly trained they are just adding value where they can. Hounds like to bark just to hear themselves. There are quiet breeds. Basenjis are vocal in lots of ways but don’t bark. English and French bulldogs don’t bark. Big, confident and stately mastiffs of all types rarely bark.
  8. Went to dinner in Prague last week and the restaurant owner had a Czechoslovak Wolf Dog just hanging out. When he takes an interest in your roast chicken, you’re tempted to just gjve it to him.
  9. I would hire anyone who listed a Leisure Suit Larry score on his resume on the spot.
  10. Greek-ish grilled shrimp skewers and veggies, grilled eggplant and roasted garlic baba ganoush.
  11. @mchookem, this is fun to watch come together and I am glad to see it shaping up. My advice (toss it or use it) to anyone going to Europe is this— once you have the basic sketch, you should CUT activities and destinations before you try to fit any more in. I know that’s painful as you look at a trip like this but it has always paid off for me. Getting the most in and having great photos ends up being more rewarding for your friends than for you personally. Seeing the Med is awesome, but even more awesome is just to give up a bit and experience where you are. If you are finding a day or block of time, my best advice is to simply not fill it. In your case, I’d just leave unscheduled time in Florence or Rome. You can wander around, you can go back and get deeper into a place that caught your eye, you can do a last minute side trip that you didn’t think about. But you won’t regret it. In nearly all my travels in Europe, the unscheduled “let’s see what comes up” have been the best. Except when my kids demanded another aquarium. Fuck that. There are fish in the U.S.
  12. The short answer is that this is going to be a bigger problem for smaller NATO Allies that have to square off against Russia’s forward deployed mass and stop an initial onslaught. We will be fighting a very different war. We would be foolish not to take notes and adjust but tanks and artillery still have a place. We are also seeing the extreme value of strategic aviation and the ability to disrupt the adversary on their home field, the extreme importance of long-range fires (we need to get better at this) and that artillery remains the Lord of War.
  13. Negative points for using “Czechia,” LOL. This is going to roil the EP and provoke some uncomfortable questions. It’s good to throw a spotlight on this but Russian activities in the gray zone will continue. Budapest and Bratislava are the current safer harbors in the EU.
  14. We announced our own suspension in November, along with other NATO Allies. Russia formally withdrew. Today’s move is just Duda formally codifying that suspension in a law the Sejm sent to him. It’s a big deal but has been in the works for some time and was predicated by Russia’s formal withdrawal.
  15. I am super sympathetic to interviewees especially entry level stuff where the background and resume is all shit from school and service type jobs. It’s hard to flesh something out and stand out. I generally end up hiring based on if they seem smart and together. If someone brought up WoW it would super high-risk/high-reward. Emphasis on risk. It would play better than some bullshit volunteering resume padder though.
  16. I think melding is optimal, but you need to have some bias built in to favor a failure one way or another. If you’re selling underwear or smart TVs or refrigerators— sure, I am fine with the MBA guys winning. If you cheap out too much and build crap, then the market can punish you. If you’re building airliners, or chemical factories, or nuclear reactors then I’m sorry. The engineers need to win over the MBAs. There has to be some balance and optimizing but if it comes to a fundamental disagreement, the engineers need to win. It’s more important for the product to succeed than the company.
  17. Extremely enlightening. The world is certainly lucky that this kind of dehumanizing rhetoric and world-view is confined to Israelis now that the Nazis and Imperial Japanese were defeated. I can’t imagine what the Near East would look like if this kind of radical ethno-religious hatred was held by any other groups! Scary to even think about.
  18. In the Soviet Union, the party put unqualified “workers” in charge of industries based on political purity and stocked government agencies on the same principle. In the United States, we put unqualified business majors in charge of industry and their regulators with similar results. I am only half-kidding that business schools are a menace and should be shut down. An organization chases its values. Once you shift from “make money by building good airplanes” to “make money,” things go to shit. https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/ This excerpt is about the 787 and not 737.
  19. Comments above are dead-on. Making a politcal/sociocultural hot-button comment or charged remark and expecting me to share it or challenge you. Instant “nope” for wanting to get to know you better.
  20. Lots to catch up on here. Miller’s Crossing is amazing, a masterpiece. For me, a single scene puts it behind Goodfellas. The Tommy gun scene. I can live with a thousand round burst as a stylized choice. But the cartoon death where the guy stays standing up firing into the chandelier is just that— a bit of cartoon action that yanks me out of a moody noir. Topo Chico is the shit. It just tastes better and the cold glass bottle adds to the experience.
  21. I can’t think of anything I want to own less than a fancy horse. Maybe an Alfa Romeo or one of those snakes that gets big enough to try and eat you.
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