DreamShipWrecked posted:

While that was mostly flippant, I would say that the majority of the country didn't know it was even a part of us until they started being under threat. I do honestly wonder the response versus if they nuked, say, LA.

Mustached Demon posted:

Support are troops

Taerkar posted:

Remember the Gulamo!

Trabisnikof posted:

Has North Korea even threatened to use nuclear weapons recently? The threat of a missile strike in the waters near Guam doesn't automatically mean nuclear weapons.

Thus far it is mainly the US threatening the use of nuclear weapons, right?

Mustached Demon posted:

evilweasel posted:

the nuclear weapons are a trump card

Too Shy Guy posted:

I just realized I no longer interpret this phrase as "valuable resource towards success". Now my brain reads it like "inexplicably stupid action that discourages everyone else from playing".

quote:

The congressional quest to repeal and/or replace Obamacare will apparently take another futile turn today. Politico reports the conservative House Freedom Caucus will file a discharge petition to force a vote on a straight Obamacare repeal bill similar to those both Houses passed in 2015. If 218 members sign the petition, the bill will scoot straight to the floor without committee clearance, which rarely ever happens. It would, however, be entirely in keeping with the strange procedures Republicans have used all year in dealing with health-care legislation.

The idea is twofold: to give House conservatives another chance to say “not our fault!” after the Senate’s failure to pass legislation last month, and to put RINO moderates who two years ago voted for the legislation on the spot — and perhaps subject to primary challenges — for flip-flopping on an identical bill now that it actually matters. You can bet conservative groups like Heritage Action and FreedomWorks will have a fundraising and messaging heyday with this latest doomed effort.

...

One definite problem with this HFC drive is the strong possibility that the president and his Twitter feed may jump on the crazy train and act as though Congress is going to end this long year of searching for a partial Obamacare replacement plan by just going back to the straight repeal bill they could have enacted months ago. Keep in mind the Congressional Budget Office estimated ORRA would boost the ranks of the uninsured by 32 million and also cause a big spike in individual insurance premiums. It’s unlikely non-HFC House Republicans — or the House GOP leadership —want to have to defend that position yet again, particularly since they know the Senate has decisively rejected it. But somebody needs to make one more effort — perhaps with hand puppets — to explain it all to a president angry that somehow or other Congress can’t keep its promises.

Trabisnikof posted:

Has North Korea even threatened to use nuclear weapons recently? The threat of a missile strike in the waters near Guam doesn't automatically mean nuclear weapons.

Thus far it is mainly the US threatening the use of nuclear weapons, right?

DreamShipWrecked posted:

NK spends half their day lobbing rockets into the ocean, they can't nuclear equip all of them. The implication is that whatever rocket they make that can actually hit anything will be a nuke.

That being said, it's probably a good idea to remember that they might be able to hit Guam with whatever trebuchet they have made recently but it's still roughly less than a third of the distance than what they would need to hit the mainland. If they doubled the distance they might hit Hawaii.

Covok posted:

Man, this thread loves to chickenlittle. Trump is a giant wimp. Emperor has no balls. He'll never go to war. It ain't happening. You can all relax.

HappyHippo posted:

Presumably any missile they send towards Guam wouldn't even have a payload, correct?

stillvisions posted:

Yes, but when the missile is "intercepted" they can say it contained whatever they want it to contain and was targeting whatever is politically expedient. Then Trump gets to play with his toys.

DreamShipWrecked posted:

NK spends half their day lobbing rockets into the ocean, they can't nuclear equip all of them. The implication is that whatever rocket they make that can actually hit anything will be a nuke.

Radish posted:

This got lost on the last page.

The fact that people use his line about how he's pro diversity despite pages of his arguments against that is so frustrating. It's the same idiotic "well we can't know for sure he's racist in his heart just because he said an ethnic slur" but in a nerd's middle school level sociologist paper. Part of male/white privilege is a whole system centered around giving these assholes the benefit of the doubt to a farcical degree.

boner confessor posted:

pearl harbor was a relatively obscure territory in the atlantic, not even a state, and america lost its mind when it was attacked

Young Freud posted:

Or the DPRK will shoot missiles a mile out of the territorial waters in hopes to provoke a reaction. The US won't even wait for confirmation of a nuke to start military action, which is what Un is planning on.

Trabisnikof posted:

But NK isn't threatening to strike Guam. Why would they nuclear arm a glorified missile test?

Azhais posted:

Yeah, but that was attacking military assets. If that happened today and Japan only attacked some random brownish people in some place that is technically part of the US but not really because they're not even a state so how good could they be, I give it a 50/50 that Alex Jones would be ranting on how it was actually a liberal false flag

Azhais posted:

Yeah, but that was attacking military assets. If that happened today and Japan only attacked some random brownish people in some place that is technically part of the US but not really because they're not even a state so how good could they be, I give it a 50/50 that Alex Jones would be ranting on how it was actually a liberal false flag

boner confessor posted:

for political reasons the gulf coast snakes around and takes up half the atlantic coast as well at least until southern virgina

no it doesn't make any sense, which is why it's beloved itt

Shayl posted:

As a female programmer, gently caress that Google memo and the guy who wrote it.

Covok posted:

Man, this thread loves to chickenlittle. Trump is a giant wimp. Emperor has no balls. He'll never go to war. It ain't happening. You can all relax.

evilweasel posted:

they're discussing guam because it is a military asset

Paracaidas posted:

I'd be interested to see if urban/suburban/rural concentration of wealth is useful as a predictor of a state's political ideology (similar to ethnic composition for The Primary That Shall Not Be Named)

Azhais posted:

Yeah, but that was attacking military assets. If that happened today and Japan only attacked some random brownish people in some place that is technically part of the US but not really because they're not even a state so how good could they be, I give it a 50/50 that Alex Jones would be ranting on how it was actually a liberal false flag

boner confessor posted:

doesn't matter, from the perspective of an outside observer there's no way to know if the nuclear capable missile hurtling towards your territory has a payload or not, same as you can't rob someone with an unloaded gun and duck charges of assault with a weapon

Azhais posted:

That was more a "If some random civilians on a remote territory got attacked" thing, and that wasn't someplace the current administration really cared about, would the bulk of the population actually care

Fluffdaddy posted:

You have no idea what you are talking about. I mean it would take 5 seconds to google about Guam and why it's a part of the US in the first place.

evilweasel posted:

this is dumb

tons of countries have the capability to track icbm lanches and determine their trajectory (because of that whole cold war thing) and nuclear isotopes would leave an incredibly obvious signature if they were on a missile that was intercepted and blew up that everyone would be able to verify or disporove

also, it is dumb because we'd probably fail to intercept the missile

Lote posted:

A lot of people forgot about the Maine.

boner confessor posted:

guam has a giant airbase on it and like a third of the island is owned by the military

the reason america wanted pacific islands in the first place like guam and pearl harbor is that you completely need them if you want to be a big dick who can project force across the pacific ocean

boner confessor posted:

sort of but not really

two of america's ten biggest metro areas are in texas. no MSA based in vermont or new hampshire cracks the top 100

quote:

The idea behind ARPA-E was to find the best of these ideas that the free market had declined to finance and make sure they were given a chance. Competition for the grants has been fierce: only two out of every hundred are approved. The people who do the approving come from the energy industry and academia. They do brief tours of duty in government, then return to Intel and Harvard.

The man who ran the place when it opened was Arun Majumdar. He grew up in India, finished at the top of his engineering class, moved to the United States, and became a world-class materials scientist. He now teaches at Stanford University but could walk into any university in America and get a job. Invited to run ARPA-E, he took a leave from teaching, moved to Washington, D.C., and went to work for the D.O.E. “This country embraced me as one of her sons,” he said. “So when someone is calling me to serve, it is hard to say no.” His only demand was that he be allowed to set up the program in a small office down the street from the Department of Energy building. “The feng shui of D.O.E. is really bad,” he explained.

Right away he faced the hostility of right-wing think tanks. The Heritage Foundation even created its own budget plan back in 2011 that eliminated ARPA-E. American politics was alien to the Indian immigrant; he couldn’t fathom the tribal warfare. “Democrat, Republican—what is this?,” as he put it. “Also, why don’t people vote? In India people stand in line in 40 degrees Celsius to vote.” He phoned up the guys who had written the Heritage budget and invited them over to see what they’d be destroying. They invited him to lunch. “They were very gracious,” said Majumdar, “but they didn’t know anything. They were not scientists in any sense. They were ideologues. Their point was: the market should take care of everything. I said, ‘I can tell you that the market does not go into the lab and work on something that might or might not work.’ ”

Present at lunch was a woman who, Majumdar learned, helped to pay the bills at the Heritage Foundation. After he’d explained ARPA-E—and some of the life-changing ideas that the free market had failed to fund in their infancy—she perked up and said, “Are you guys like DARPA?” Yes, he said. “Well, I’m a big fan of DARPA,” she said. It turned out her son had fought in Iraq. His life was saved by a Kevlar vest. The early research to create the Kevlar vest was done by DARPA.

The guys at Heritage declined the invitation to actually visit the D.O.E. and see what ARPA-E was up to. But in their next faux budget they restored the funding for ARPA-E. (The Heritage Foundation did not respond to questions about its relationship with the D.O.E.)

Fitzy Fitz posted:

Strongly considering moving to Guam right now to take advantage of the explosive drop in real estate prices.