Isn’t a khopesh sharp on the other side of the curve from a shotel, though? It seems like sharpening the inside was the big innovation that makes shotels distinctive

By “bigger” here I should have more explicitly made clear that I meant in population and economic terms. A bunch of largely empty land is not that significant in regards to the international balance of power in North America.

This only leads us back to my initial question. If the point of NATO is to keep the smaller members dependent on the US, why do you think NATO is asking the smaller members to increase domestic production? If you think that any Canadian effort can only possibly be inconsequential, fine, that’s a matter of opinion, but according to you that is not necessarily the case for Europe (or at least, some European countries). So is NATO intentionally undermining its own purpose by doing this?

I ignored the part about Europe because the position of “NATO exists to keep Europe dependent on the US” is just as much at odds with the article’s opening of “NATO says it wants its members to develop national plans to bolster the capacity of their individual defence industry sectors” as it was when it was about Canada.

You said “The whole point is to make the vassals dependent on the US militarily which allows the US to control the politics of these countries.” I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to be asking about how this relates to Canada when you said “these countries” on an article that is primarily about Canada, and you’re now saying “The point isn’t to make Canada more dependent on the US”

If NATO was disbanded tomorrow, Canada would still have to work with the fact that its neighbour is a lot bigger than it. It seems to me that even if it cannot meaningfully escape American influence altogether, at least not for so long as America has as much power as it does, there are still always degrees of independence. So how is NATO wanting an increase in Canadian domestic military production a move to make Canada more dependent on the US? Or, if in your view it makes no difference whatsoever, how is this request relevant to it at all?

If Canada were to increase domestic military production, how would that make it more dependent on the US in your view?

That seems rather at odds with the opening paragraph of the article, which is explicitly saying NATO wants Canada to have better domestic production and planning

It looks to me like the first one was taken with the front-facing camera of a phone, and those often have a horizontal flip option

Not to mention the disingenuousness of leaving out how they lost to Hindenburg and Ludendorff in between those two

Ethnic Russians were the largest proportion of the killed in action by quite a margin, let’s not pretend that they weren’t doing their part. Ukraine was too, of course - the people that pretend Ukraine just jumped ship and shacked up with the Nazis at the first opportunity are doing an unbelievable disservice to the millions of Ukrainians that died fighting the Nazis - but the huge population disparity between Russia and every other Soviet republic does show in the data.

The reason it exists is so bizarre too. It stems from the rivalry between the republics of Venice and Ragusea (modern day Dubrovnik). Venice was gradually asserting control over more and more of the Adriatic coastline and Ragusea didn’t much fancy sharing a land border with its rival, so it just gave up one tiny stretch of land each to its north and south to the Ottoman Empire. Venice would therefore have to come by sea or risk angering the Ottomans. Eventually Austria manages to annex the Dalmatian territory of both Venice and Ragusea, but the Ottomans still held those two tiny strips of land. The Ottomans were not typically on the best of terms with Austria, and they held on to the two tiny bits of Adriatic coast up until the treaty of Berlin in 1879. By this point, Neum (the Bosnian one) had been part of Ottoman Bosnia for 179 years, so the borders were pretty damn entrenched, and they survived through the shifts to Austrian, Yugoslav, and eventually independent Bosnian-Herzegovinan political structures. So a petty but clever move of hiding behind a bigger empire in the 1600s created the tiny bit of Bosnian coastline today.

Amateur napkin maths time, feel free to point out mistakes I have probably made:

Rice and wheat are humanity’s two biggest food sources by a fair margin, so I’ll take the average of them. Cooked rice has 1300 kcal per kg, and white bread has 2650 kcal per kg (both per USDA), so that’s an average of 1975 kcal/kg. An adult man needs about 2500 kcal per day, and an adult woman about 2000. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to pretend everyone is an adult and call the average 2250 kcal per person per day. That works out to 1.14 kg of our rice/bread per person per day. The UN’s estimate for the world’s population in 2024 is 8,161,972,573, so multiplying that by 1.14 gives us 9,298,449,766 kg, or roughly 9.3 million tonnes per day. Multiplying up to get the value for a year gives us 3.4 billion tonnes. China’s waste food according to this graph would be about 3% of the total requirements, or enough to feed the entire population of Pakistan, the world’s 5th most populous country.

Most Indians do live in the north of the country (or at least, the north is the most densely-populated part, whether it is home to an actual majority of the population or not), but that’s actually the humid subtropical part. Compare this population density map to this climate map. Of course it’s possible that you’re still right that it’s the climate and some other factor pushes India’s rate down regardless, like the massive population density meaning high demand for food or the country being quite poor per capita compared to the others on this list

So what’s going on in Brazil to make the per capita rate so high? I can’t think of any explanation that would make it such an outlier within this set of countries

They definitely exist here, waffles just come across as quite dessert-coded to us. British Chinese cuisine is its own separate adaptation of Chinese cuisine though, rather than just being American Chinese.

The Travellers’ Encore from Outer Wilds

Ghassan Massoud (the guy that played Saladin in Kingdom of Heaven) would have been perfect

A pizza oven is about 450 C, so I’ll figure it out based on this graph of the temperature in the Earth by depth.

0 to 500 C = 80 px
6.25 C per pixel
450/6.25 = 72 px

0 to 100 km = 54 px
1.85 km per pixel

Line y coordinate at 72 px x coordinate = 9 px
9*1.85 = ~17 km

The deepest hole we’ve ever actually drilled is the Kola superdeep borehole, which is a bit over 12 km deep. This is a fair bit short of our ideal pizza oven temperature, but it did see temperatures of 180 C, which is certainly enough to cook a pizza.

We don’t even use the same type of imperial either

If France could just lie for a few years and say that they’re adopting the British system, it might persuade us to finally metricise properly out of spite and I’d be extremely grateful to them

I do have a 10 L pot, I use it for making stock and beer