Have you been living under a rock for the last quarter century?
It doesn’t take planes, ships, or missile launchers to defeat the US military. The average American gun owner is better equipped than the insurgents that have defeated our armed forces.
Define defeat here. I think everyone in this thread confuses actual defeat with indifference and political risk. If the US military could be defeated so easily America would cease to exist, no? It just loses interest and moves on. Nobody attacks the US because they would lose.
Defeat is failure to achieve strategic goals. (The fact that you’re even asking that question is a strong signal that you have no idea what you’re talking about, and that you think rhetorical questions are a substitute for critical thinking)
Anyone who thinks America would cease to exist due to foreign military action is a fool. Canada and Mexico do not have the logistical capabilities and no one else has trans-Pacific/Atlantic force projection.
That has been my experience as well, having immigrated from Eastern Europe to an enclave in the US. We know at least a dozen families (including our own) with 2-10 acre homesteads and all of them had previous experience with gardens and dachas in the Soviet Union that they used to grow supplemental produce, so no one came into the deal with delusions of making any profit. Everyone gives away the excess to neighbors of which there is usually a lot because yields are high on hand tended trees (and dutch bucket hydro).
The single biggest reason these farms exist is because American retail produce is mostly garbage. It’s so economically micro-optimized that all flavour has been wrung out of it. The only way many of us immigrants can get back the flavors of our childhoods is by growing the fruits and vegetables ourselves, if only to have control over the varieties, the vast majority of which are not sold in stores (>95%). That nostalgia is what pays the margin.
We're not neighbors unfortunately because we're spread out all over Southern California. By "enclave" I mean the area between West Hollywood and Arcadia, where many Eastern Europeans immigrated during the post-Soviet brain drain, not a dense conglomerate like San Gabriel.
BTW you do NOT want ten acres. That is a back breaking amount of work and even with modern technology you'll struggle to cope (it's not enough to afford most heavy equipment, but too much to do manually). You want an acre or two where you have enough space to plant trees. It takes a few years from nursery to fruiting, but they are far lower maintenance.
You don't really need 10 acres. My grandparents made do with 1/4 of an acre and would have yields of 350-500 lbs of potatoes per season. That's so much that they would give it away. I have fruit trees that require almost no effort to maintain once established. My neighbors give me oranges that fall to the ground and rot otherwise. It's not all or nothing. You can have a basil plant in an apartment.
Lots of places have community gardens. Hell, I go to one in the middle of NYC, a rooftop garden run by a friend. We even grow our own wheat for bread making.
FWIW GovDeals does not care as long your scraping load is reasonable, at least they didn’t years ago when I asked them. They prefer personal scrapers (i.e. buyers looking for deals) stick to precise searches but they were okay with properly throttled site wide scraping if its a public site.
They make money not by optimizing per item profit or by exploiting information asymmetry, but by getting as many eyeballs on their site as possible to drive demand (and thus drive auction price up). They’re happy to be scraped as long as scrapers don’t bring them down because their core competency is giving municipal and state governments an aggregated platform and making the process easier from a bureaucratic point of view.
If you do the work of marketing for them (especially for free!) that’s a plus in their eyes. You’re not a competitor because they do the work of actually dealing with government departments like handling payments and paperwork.
Armando Iannucci - creator of The Thick of It and Veep - has said this in public statements. Politics is so ridiculous now on both sides of the Atlantic that he finds political satire impossible to pull off anymore. His last show for HBO Avenue 5 had to take place on a space liner for rich people with Hugh Laurie as a faux-captain who can’t keep his accent straight.
> You cannot prove it, but it's a good enough guess.
You can guess that now in the 21st century, but we're talking about illiterate peasants who never traveled past their nearest market center. It's naive to assume we can even possibly empathize with their epistemological outlook.
For example, just look at the medieval sources about barnacle geese from the 13th century (from the educated class):
> Barliates, as Aristotle says, grow from wood, and are birds which the common people call 'barnesques', having a similar nature. [1] (I chose a short quote to make a point but please read the rest of the source, it's hardly an allegorical text)
They didn't have the concept of falsifiability or anything even remotely resembling the scientific process (or critical thinking, for the most part). The literate were obsessed with the classics and just took Aristotles and Ptolemy's word for everything, until Copernicus and Kepler had their way. Anything resembling scientific knowledge filtered down to the peasants or came from old wives tails entirely.
Even now with almost universal literacy we have a significant fraction (if not majority) of the population believing in ridiculously stupid nonsense like astrology. I don't find it hard to believe that people thought that geese's life cycle included barnacles.
It's mildly anti-fungal as well, which makes it effective in dandruff shampoo since a lot of dandruff is caused by fungal overgrowth, aka seborrheic dermatitis.
Another weird/fun one is using bleach as an anti-inflammatory (topical only, of course...), although these days you can find derivative products that offer the same benefits but are much less harsh.
I take a mild bleach bath sometimes and it’s quite invigorating. Seems to kill off a lot of skin surface bacteria which can sometimes be beneficial (there’s good and bad bacteria on your skin).
Not to be done too often but every once in a while I find it helpful. Not all that different from a strongly chlorinated pool.
Another cool one, especially if you don’t have a sauna, is doing a mustard bath. You will sweat like a stuck pig
lol. They make formulations you can buy but I make my own. A cup of ground mustard seed, which I buy fairly cheap online, and a few tablespoons of baking soda, plus some essentials oils mainly to cut through the mustard smell.
Pour that in a warm bath and soak for 20 mins. Then get out and wrap yourself in a towel and continue sweating for 15 mins or so.
The RAM and CPU would still be on the same card together, and for the typical case of a single GPU it would just be 16x lanes direct from one to the other.
For cases where there are other cards, yes there would more contention, but few expansion cards are able to saturate more than a lane or two. One lane of PCIe Gen5 is a whopping 4 GB/s in each direction, so that theoretically handles a dual 10gige NIC on its own.
It doesn’t take planes, ships, or missile launchers to defeat the US military. The average American gun owner is better equipped than the insurgents that have defeated our armed forces.
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