Regarding adapting non-Western gauge track, it is worth making the transition. The item that I addressed and you dodged is timeline.

Regarding Russia rebuilding its rail infrastructure, Russia has invested a significant amount of money in military engineering brigades to repair rail corridors. Also, Russia isn’t fighting off an invading force.

You’re still leaving out Finland and the Baltics. It also depends on what Russia may attempt to take back. Putin’s current goals appears to be reestablishing control over Soviet territory. That puts the Baltics at risk. You could see Russia attempt to take the Baltics similar to how it took the Crimean Peninsula and make the EU choose if it is worth it to conduct a war to liberate the Baltics like Ukraine had to debate liberate the Crimean Peninsula.

The vote was only 52% to 48%. It wouldn’t take much to get a swing from majority Brexit to majority Remain.

Also, the Brexit vote never defined what state that the UK would leave in while the Brexit camp was arguing for all forms of post EU relationships at once.

I control all apps, so yes.

I guess Kim Kardashian’s legal look is catching on.

You need heavy air capabilities for two reasons.

First, most of the EU’s frontier has non-European gauge track. So, it doesn’t help to be able to rely on rail when you have to stop rail shipments well behind the front lines. Upgrading the rail is going to be a generational project.

Second, rail infrastructure can be destroyed and it is generally harder to get rail infrastructure back up after being bombed. Not being able to deploy forces while you wait for repairs.

Yeah, I don’t see the EU being able to have a unified defense policy until defense and foreign policy is an EU competency. The only reason it didn’t become an issue so far was because NATO was effectively the EU’s defense organization.

They renationalized the trains.

They gave up on the gondola?

Good thing I air gapped my TV.

During COVID.

It won’t collapse; you still need to build out enough infrastructure to replace fossil fuels.

What will happen is that there is going to be a massive economic shock as any fossil fuel related industry sees costs spike. For instance, I expect several low cost airlines to go out of business.

Any energy infrastructure being built will likely be non-fossil fuel.

It isn’t that surprising. Humans have gotten very good at raising chickens in the past 60 years.

Yeah, but the scale of the current set of data centers has gotten to a point where they are becoming a problem for the communities they inhabit. If data centers stayed at the consumption levels they did decades ago, I don’t think we’d be seeing organized political action against them.

That’s an interesting point. I’ll have to mullet over.

The Riddler from The Batman is poorly written because he spends the first two acts establishing himself as a person trying to right the wrongs of Gotham and honestly did a really good job at it, then had to switch to trying to destroy the city in act 3 because they didn’t want the audience to get any ideas.

So, even though Fetterman was a huge disappointment who needs to be primaried out in the next election, Dr. Oz was the alternative.

Why are you so fixated on CBS not giving Colbert a deal he wouldn’t have accepted?

Yeah, and they also seem believable as a rogue clandestine agency that the Federation is ok with having on “their side”.

Unlike the Obsidian Order or the Tal Shiar, the Federation has plausible deniability regarding the use of Section 31. Few powers seem to even know the agency exists.

And unlike the Obsidian Order or the Tal Shiar, Section 31 does a good job at being a clandestine agency. The Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar’s response to the Founders was to build a lot of ships to bomb a homeworld, something outside their expertise that gets them destroyed. Section 31, instead, genetically engineers a virus that attacks the Founders, a virus so effective that the cure is used as a bargaining chip in getting the Dominion to stop the war.

Given that cameras are readily available to the public, these glasses will likely only be banned in specific controlled locations.