Yeah your soldiers eventually want to retire and spend all that loot they got to live in luxury rather than run the risk of dying in more war. They’d been at it continuously constantly for over a decade and India looked like a tough nut to crack with massive forces like the Nanda Empire up ahead and even relatively petty king Porus had put up a stiff resistance that killed a decent number of Greeks.
Later on one of the prominent warlords (Eumenes) was betrayed by these men because, even though he otherwise came off better in a fight against rival warlord Antigonus, the all important baggage train containing decades of booty, wives and kids was captured. So the veteran silver shields who are mostly old farts by this point mutinied and delivered him bound to the rival warlord Antigonus to ensure their long years of war would not be in vain.
Thanks for the luck! That’s actually exactly sort of what I’m looking for. I want to help out the native plants so I can get all their weird insects and also the critters that eat those insects. So if it is native, grows easily and makes a lot of material that supports critters then that’s all gravy for me, and longleaf pine is a keystone species for the area too.
Ex. I also have partridge pea nearby which I think is also given the side-eye for being messy and just springing up, but it’s like a caterpillar factory for cloudless sulphur butterflies and has had a ridiculous number of bumblebees all over it.
Yeah… I didn’t apply a mulch layer around it and I didn’t clear the competition around it unless it was approaching the height of the tree which were mistakes compounding on the root being messed up. Still watering it but I’m going start looking into where I can get a little one in a plug instead of a potted version. Apparently most plugs are bought in bulk with minimum orders of a few hundred or a thousand near me but I’m not looking for quite that many haha
edit: I can actually get individual ones for $3.50 apparently so that’s cool
There’s a VR game that models the cave so you can climb around it, though they don’t actually let you go down into where he got stuck. You can see it though, insane crawl getting down there and then you see the hole in the ground he plunged through headfirst. It’s at ~19:00 in this video made by one of his attempted rescuers who explains some differences between the model and the actual cave.
EWUUnsolved got some actual footage of the rescue attempt released by the Utah County Sheriff’s Office and put it up in this video which also shows some of the cave although the old camera footage is blurry and it has a ton of watermarking on it. Still insane footage and honestly amazes me how they were able to come up with so many ideas to try on such short notice
Hmm I will investigate further as there’s light! I was meaning to clear out some of the plants surrounding it anyway to reduce competition so I should be able to get a better picture up close.
I took a closer look and didn’t find any insects munching on it, even when I moved the straw aside to look at the bark. Though while I was out in the yard I did see that the persimmon fruit was being attacked by a ton of stink bugs so I was able to use that advice there. Thanks!
That gives me some hope so I’ll do my best! I think it would be more or less functionally impossible to drown that particular one because I have a sandy soil that drains quickly and it’s on bit of a slope too. Great soil for discouraging fungal rot but unfortunately not so much for retaining moisture, at least in the top couple feet. A bit better further down than that where the increasing amounts of plinthite/ironstone and clay do a better job of holding onto moisture for adventurous taproots to suck up.
People intentionally say stupid things on Twitter to rile up viewers into arguing in the replies (free engagement!) and get even people who hate them to share their “content”
I never had any interest in drinking alcohol, the smell is horrible and while you can supposedly push through and acclimate to it fairly easily and there are mixes that will mask that harsh scent/taste I never really saw a reason to do that since there were very clear examples around me of people screwing up their entire lives with alcohol.
Sea shipping is incredibly efficient which really helps make such surprising things possible with a strong enough comparative advantage. That said, it’s still an added friction, does take time and adds in some more risks. Being close counts for quite a lot if that trade is more or less freely allowed.
Looking at this World Bank data for Denmark in 2023 (latest year it was tabulated for), it actually has next door big neighbor Germany as getting ~13.7% of Denmark’s total exports followed by Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway before getting to the US’ ~5.0%. Somewhat more distant European heavyweights like the UK, Poland and France follow not terribly far behind before you get to enormous economy China. Swap it to import and again neighboring big economy Germany is providing a whopping ~20.3% followed by Sweden and the Netherlands before you get to China’s ~6.5%, then Poland, then the US’ ~4.6%. Not far behind trails Norway at ~4.5%. So Norway has a relatively similar share of Denmark’s trade going either way compared to what the US has, despite having an economy multiple hundreds of times smaller than that of the US. That proximity really helps!
The US in the same data is importing roughly the same ~14% share from each of neighboring Mexico and Canada as well as giant super focused on exporting China, and going the other way US exports are double to both Mexico and Canada what they are to China. Despite the Mexican and Canadian economies even combined together being like a fifth of China’s economy.
Also most of Canada’s population is distributed pretty near to the very lengthy border with the US, intermittently broken up by challenging terrain and only a comparatively small fraction is coastal. This has had the effect of encouraging parallel north-south trade corridors going across the border. If those flows instead are directed east-west to Canada’s ports which are also already stretched then the existing infrastructure can also potentially be limiting even with Canada signing a ton of amazing trade deals. Check out this picture of Canada’s road networks and see that there are some rather surprising bottlenecks.
All that said Canada should absolutely seek the best trade deals it can get with as many countries as possible in the circumstances. But I think it may be difficult to find enough low-hanging fruit still left to make up for such a huge gap, surely if it were that easy to expand trade so massively it wouldn’t have been ignored prior to this point of crisis?
Apparently a lot of people (particularly younger generations) are increasingly getting hooked on gambling and are even psy-op’d enough to consider it as a part of their retirement strategy
That’s like the worst of both worlds because it both barely does any damage to Russia’s war effort but people would think it was devastating to civilians
Dirty bombs are a meme weapon that would barely cause damage except psychologically. If it spreads everywhere it’s too diluted to do much and if it remains concentrated then the scope is too small to affect many people. Their sole advantage is that people are terrified of them because they are ignorant about how bad they are as weapons. So no a dirty bomb is not spreading across Europe and killing hundreds of thousands of people, a hypothetical dirty bomb is literally nothing compared to the thousands of nuclear tests, Chernobyl release, Kyshtym disaster etc. that did not have death tolls anywhere remotely near a million. Even the actual atomic bomb strikes on populated cities of Japan combined did not kill a million.
This is not to say it would be good for Ukraine to use dirty bombs, absolutely not. Negligible damage to Russia except for causing a massive scare to their people that would be condemned globally makes that a terribly counterproductive option to undertake vs. keeping on bombing refineries and so on.
Fedorov was the guy in the Ministry of Digital Transformation who back in February 2022 tweeted at Elon asking for Starlink which got them that shortly afterwards back in the time when it was very good publicity to back Ukraine. In more recent times he was in charge of trying to convince Elon to restrict Russia’s use of Starlink and to allow Ukraine to use Starlink in Russia. So they’ve been having a lot of texting and video calls to that end which evidently worked.
With Fedorov having gotten what he wanted out of those talks, being an acquaintance of him and knowing that Elon sometimes supports foreign politicians, I guess he figures it doesn’t hurt to puff Elon up with this sort of message made a day or two back in case Elon helps support his bid for the leadership:
Elon Musk is prorably the most important tech person and entrepreneur in the world for our country. By shutting down Russia’s illegal use of Starlink on Ukrainian territory, @elonmusk and @SpaceX protected our air defense, saved our air force, and spared thousands of civilian
For background Fedorov has become very popular in Ukraine for his modernization efforts to crack down on corruption in military procurement and focus on drone warfare. Zelensky recently fired Fedorov from his new position of Defense Minister which was a very controversial move that no doubt worsened their relations with each other.
I was curious and looked up adult women literacy rates for women in Iraq and this shows 64% literacy rate for women with 15+ years age in 2000 and 78% in 2021 for the same category. For female youths aged 15-24 it rose from 80% to 91% over the same time period (though in the intervening period that did indeed drop to 72-73% in their stats during the chaos of the Iraq War).
It’s common for a lot of authoritarian places to have laws that are selectively enforced. Since the enforcement is rare many people don’t bother following them but if someone bothers someone high up for any reason then breaking the law (that tons of other people break all the time anyway) is an easy excuse for the authorities to come down like a sack of bricks with a pretext ready. Being higher profile makes it more likely that you catch the eye of someone who hates you so it can be safer being some random person too low to notice instead. Though higher profile people also have more people ready to defend them generally so if you do get on someone’s list it’s better to have people in your corner who will make noise and maybe get punishment lessened or called off.
