The latter still makes the news in the West sometimes, not every year. HNers from those countries might give us some insights about how much their people feel it important.
For what it's worth, China has had past or current border disputes with every neighbour of theirs. They have issues with India, Japan, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, to say nothing of Taiwan. The ridiculous nine-dash line they've come up with contravenes international law and basic common sense.
If you meet an asshole in the morning, you're unlucky. If you meet nothing but assholes all day, you're the asshole.
A lot has changed over the years. While the soviets were supplying India and propping up their puppet state in Afghanistan the US used Pakistan as a proxy.
But by the time the US were hunting Bin Laden a lot had changed and support has been trailing off.
Now most recently Trump has been growing the US pro-Israeli - and basically being broad-stroke anti-every-kind-of-muslim - policy and actions in the gulf and has put the now-meagre levels of ongoing US aid to Pakistan completely on hold.
And once a level of "story points" is achieved within a Sprint you can't go backwards and you can't deliver less value to the Customer. There is no room for re-evaluation. Forwards, moar!
As per Tame Impala's Elephant:
He pulled the mirrors off his Cadillac
Because he doesn't like it looking like he looks back
Looking back gives the impression of missteps or regret. We have no such thing!
I love both, for similar but different reasons. Hackers captures the naive idea of the scene really quite well. It's goofiness allows the naivety to remain, past the overwrought characters and Hollywood's downright misunderstanding.
It feels like it's accidentally great.
But then again, maybe it just tickles to the surface the sense of wonder I had way back then.
Accidentally great, yeah. If I allow myself to believe that the producers of Hackers knew they were making a spoof of Hollywood hackers in general, I can sit back and enjoy it as a masterpiece.
But at the time, that was not at all clear. And I'm still not actually convinced. It certainly wasn't marketed as a comedy; it seemed to be drinking the same drama-aid as The Net and other breathless wankery at the time. In which case it's a terrible movie that only becomes watchable as an exhibit of wankery.
This feels like a special case of "suspension of disbelief".
I really disliked hackers when it came out, except for the sound track. Never saw it again until some twentieth anniversary watch party, and from that distance saw it for what it was and found it amusing. ... I still wouldn't call it a great movie, but enjoyable enough or at least I now get why people like it.
Certainly far better than The Net, as low of a bar as that is.
If you have a high-quality digital version of a movie, you can use one of the CRT shaders from modern emulators to make it look like any old TV you want.
I am a fan of baseball, and in 2021, there was a real MLB game played at the original filming ___location. It started with Kevin Costner leading the players out of the cornfield.
This is kinda way off-topic, but that feeling of the "bringing back" something that had been lost to time that Field of Dreams provides, I get the same thing from the movie Midnight in Paris. Like a literally palpable warm, comforting, everything-is-alright feeling (mostly from the Salvador Dali encounter).
I thought the current administration, and the republican party in general, were for smaller federal government and giving more autonomy to the states, eg. Shutting down the federal department of education since the states can manage their own education systems independently.
Now they're trying to step on state based decisions?
Is it purely an "I like this but I don't like that" decision process?
The great irony of the party of small government is how over-reaching and heavily involved they want the Federal Government to be for the things they don't like.
The GOP is not the party of small government. They are the right hand of the uniparty of big government, which sometimes LARPs as the party of small government.
There are real small government parties in the US, they just don't get any real traction thanks to the deliberate efforts of the uniparty to keep all real competition out.
This is due to the heavy lobbying on the part of the existing automobile manufacturers combined with the fact that meeting the goals would seem to be a big disruption for the industry.
..which includes companies like Hyundai, Kia, General Motors, Ford, Honda, etc. (which are currently the biggest players in the EV market behind Tesla in the U.S.), and of course the usual players without much headway in the EV space: Toyota, Subaru, Mazda, etc..
The ZEV sales requirements start with the 2026 model year, and steadily increase:
From the context of our socialist society's current far-left overton window featuring social wealth redistribution pyramid schemes (OASI, which meets the SEC's and CFPB's statutory definitions of a pyramid scheme), socialized medicine and healthcare (medicare, medicaid), socialized education (public school system, taxpayer-subsidized higher education loans to students, taxpayer-funded tax advantage status for higher education institutions), yes.
From the context of the overton window of individualists, anarchists, voluntaryists, and even federalists, hahahahaha, LOL, not even close.
Trump is a big-government left-wing socialist who has vocally pledged not to touch OASI, Medicare, or Medicaid, which collectively cost about half of the entire federal budget. Socialism has simply been so normalized in this country that even left-wing statist socialists like Trump can be perceived as right-wing authoritarians.
My understanding is that China and India don't tend to get along politically.
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