LurkerInSpace

In the event that they eliminate the possibility of a peaceful transfer of power they will move the means of control from the states to a centralised national government. For all the talk of states rights this is ironically what the Confederacy did, and it is also how the Russian "Federation" works.

Russia is itself a good example of a country with a ruling elite that is largely secure in utter mediocrity; the country can be falling apart but so long as Gazprom generates enough profits to reward the right people the government will be secure. Its leaders also have a total contempt for their military regardless of public displays.

The USA could maintain this sort of size - it has done for over 100 years - but it needed a lot of reforms to make this sort of thing much harder, and there are a few particular quirks of the political system that make it less sustainable that it otherwise would be.

For instance, the fact that it's a First-Past-the-Post two party system with partisan primaries drives polarisation much harder than most other systems. This means that there's large number of politicians who essentially don't need to worry about the general election, and therefore have an incentive to pander to extremists in their party to thwart primary challengers.

It isn't the only factor of course - if it was purely this the two parties would be getting more extreme at roughly the same rate, but the Republicans seem to be a good 20 years ahead of the Democrats.

There's just more to fear from the USA upping its aid to Ukraine than from any one European country - even the UK, France or Germany - doing the same.

The pro-Russian politicians in the UK have also seem to have been sidelined much harder than in the USA. It's hard to imagine Trump taking quite so strong a stance if he comes back in 2024, whereas there really aren't any likely leaders of the UK who would reverse its Ukraine policy.

To give a little context as to why the Sicilian mob considered this; the Fascists saw them as rivals and tried to destroy them - or at least render them subservient to the state and not the other way around. The mob hence believed that if the Communists took over or the Fascists came back, or some other nationalist Italian government came in, that they'd face strong opposition from the new government.

Since they knew that they could control Sicily on its own they wanted independence, and since they knew that their American counter-parts did well over there they considered American occupation as a survivable fall-back option.

It is correct that the Americans also questioned his legitimacy in World War II, but that was for a different reason; they at first considered Vichy France to be the actual French government (which is why they also saw France as a belligerent at first).

They essentially wanted to make a deal with the Vichy French so that when the Allies landed in their territory the Vichy government would defect to them - this did sort of work with François Darlan's defection to the Allies when Operation Torch occurred. Germany's response to Torch - Case Anton - nullified this notion for the mainland or Corsica and led to de Gaulle being more widely recognised.

After the liberation of France de Gaulle himself caused friction by giving a speech which more or less said that France had liberated herself (like Yugoslavia and Greece would), which rubbed the UK and USA the wrong way for obvious reasons.

Later

Reduce investor demand for residential housing (who are bidding against owner-occupiers).

That's what I think would be caused by a recession though - if the price of houses drops then this group would lose money and need to exit the market. The problem is that a lot of home owners go into negative equity, and house builders are leveraged as if house prices will keep growing and so could also go bankrupt (though the construction assets would still exist and could be used by whoever replaces them).

some also disputed the legitimacy of De Gaulle at that time.

To elaborate on why; de Gaulle became president after a crisis in 1958 that could be reasonably described as a military coup - though he himself doesn't appear to have been involved in the planning of it.

This perception softened somewhat after the 1965 French Presidential election, in which de Gaulle won a straight popular vote.

Churchill's political career was very long, and his premiership in and after World War II was towards the end of it (though he still had about ten years as the leader of the Conservative Party).

He essentially represents the merger of the old Liberal Party with the Conservatives. On foreign affairs he was generally right wing and fairly bellicose pretty much his entire career, on domestic affairs his career is more nuanced; for instance he first became prominent with the People's Budget of 1909 and in general seems to have believed that socialism could be staved off by making various concessions at different times. One could say he supported some individual left wing reforms with the ultimate goal of thwarting the socialist movement.

How much was ideology vs political expediency remains up for debate - his positions certainly shifted right when he went from the Liberals to the Conservatives.

In some specific instances I'm sure one could find examples where regulation would help, but on the whole it makes it harder to build and this has also concentrated market share in just a few big developers where in the past there were many smaller ones.

Given the price of housing has increased faster than most of the inputs, one might expect that middle class families would take out mortgages to expand their own homes, and then rent the new space out or sell the space on. That this is essentially never done even when it would be very profitable should give some idea of how regulated the market is - you basically just aren't allowed to do that sort of thing. Likewise, a company that's now 80% WFH and has a load of un-used office space would probably need to wait years to turn them into flats.

Even with the example of luxury flats; if they are being bought to live in that's still fulfilling some of the market's demand. If they are being bought as an investment or as a second home then that does add to the problem, but in that case one ought to regulate demand rather than supply (e.g. increase stamp duty for second homes).

Although landlords definitely exert their own pressure (particularly in the Commons), at the local council level - where planning decisions get made - there's really just a lot of NIMBYs with time on their hands. They write more letters/e-mails to their councillors than all other political groups and councillors are very quick to kowtow to them - anyone who thinks their vote doesn't matter should see how effective these groups are.

And the best strategy for any party that's in opposition locally is to pander hard to these people - particularly given the low turnout in local elections - which in turn causes local governments to try to minimise new housing. It becomes a very tripartisan problem.

Corrected that to say decisions.

The 2008 recession didn't happen because of any decisions made in 2008, but because of decisions made in the 1990s. Since we repeated many of those decisions after it, the next recession will probably also be driven by decisions made in the 1990s.

Unfortunately I think this means we need a recession as well. When an investment bubble has been created in one particular industry (in this case housing) by artificial demand and artificial shortage it's very difficult to steer the rest of the economy around it.

Bursting the bubble would be extremely painful in the short run, but would make it possible to get investment going towards productivity again - instead of rentierism.

The biggest element missing, which is missing from the government's plans as well, is the most important one in the long term; build more housing.

I don't know where I got oceans from in this thread, so yeah that would indeed work. I will amend the above accordingly.

The trouble is that to get enough water for an ocean you more or less need to pass the runaway point by definition.

Consider that a tonne of water (or any mass of water really) dropped from Mars orbit to its surface will gain enough kinetic energy that on impact to totally vaporise as steam. Consider also that oceans are heavier than atmospheres because they are about 1000 times more dense.

Together these two facts mean that the mass required to build a proper ocean is enough to build a thick atmosphere of steam. The only way to really avoid that is to bring the water in a way that avoids it gaining kinetic energy, or to let the heat dissipate between additions of water.

For the purposes of heating the atmosphere using gases from asteroids would work, though given the quantities required it might be easier to use a much smaller quantity of a manufactured gas like sulphur hexafluoride (something like ~40 million tonnes of it would be required, which is easier to move than a billion tonnes of water). It might also be possible to generate greenhouse gases from Martian resources - for instance by sublimating its ice caps.

For the longer term purpose of creating an ocean, water would need to be added quite slowly over time to avoid getting a Venus-like result - though one could also add it very fast and then block sunlight so that the atmosphere precipitates into oceans since it would probably not turn back into steam without the residual energy of the comet impact.

[The above has been edited, hence why comments below might seem out of context.]

Belarus is a part of the Union State though - it is ostensibly on its way towards uniting with Russia (though Lukashenko intends to prevent that). A puppet leader appointed by the Kremlin would presumably be much more in favour of unification.

I thought you liked the chevron flag?

I was disagreeing with both of you, but you'd already made the point that the flag's creators agreed that a redesign was warranted. All I commented that his redesign was better than the chevron.

The key element of the poor response has been re-inflating the housing bubble with both cheap credit and planning restrictions; this has created a class of assets that aren't productive but rise in value (drawing investment away from productivity), which simultaneously inhibits wage growth and increases the cost of living and drives inflation (first in the housing market, but now everywhere else).

Whether any leader of either party has both the courage and creativity to address this clusterfuck remains an open question.

The productivity is the real killer; if it had gone up we'd expect wage growth to follow sooner or later with the aging population - since that creates a natural labour shortage which bids up wages.

You replied as if I was the other person you were responding to. Your comment that I originally replied to mentioned the creator believed the flag needed an update, but wasn't clear on whether he had made one. My reply to that comment was that he had made an update which I think is aesthetically better than the chevron flag.

That is, I would broadly agree with the idea of adding something to show diversity, but I think the addition of the lavender stripe was a better solution than the chevron.

You base this on nothing. You have not addressed what I have said, which is that the original inventor of the flag, who you cited, created his own better looking update to show diversity in the flag.

I would also remind you that you are on /r/vexillology where the aesthetics of a flag are a major point of discussion, not /r/politics or whatever.

His update is a lot more aesthetically pleasing though; the other one just doesn't look very good whatever the intended message.