fuoqi

Well, "permanently fuck the planet" can be a matter of perspective. The great oxidation event "fucked up" the planet for anaerobic life, but we would not exist without it, so it was a huge blessing for us. Even human CO2 emissions could be viewed as a huge blessing for biosphere in the far future since it releases captured carbon ("the currency of life") thus significantly delaying the timeline of atmospheric CO2 depletion to levels at which photosynthesis becomes impossible.

Hallelujah! It's quite a shame that this hack had to be used and the logical trichotomy of UTC/UT1/TAI got broken. Computer systems (and UNIX time in particular) should've been using TAI from the beginning with leap seconds being tracked together with time zones, but I guess it's better than the previous mess.

>My point was that the constitution of the US is based on ideas, and the country could be open to any territory, independent of location

It seems you do not know anything about Puerto Rico and its history of shameful US meddling.

The existing "big" nuclear reactors are already more or less in the "happy" range. The problem is irregular building schedule (you can have 10 reactors in works today and 0 for the next 50 years) and extreme regulatory overhead.

Ideally, you need a "pipeline" with one reactor being built every 2-5 years and streamlined regulatory environment where you can use the same project "template" with minimal adjustments. This way building expertise is not lost (i.e. the industry does not need to re-learn everything for every project, which is very costly) and even can be accumulated to reduce costs further. It applies not only to the building part, but also to regulatory bodies.

The problem is that you need to operate ~100 reactors for this, so it can work only for large economies able to provide the "baseline" demand. China and to a lesser extent Russia do this, which does result in significantly lower nuclear plant building costs for them. Europe, SK, and US have dropped the ball hard here.

>I hope we see a different CA for each ccTLD in the future.

Completely agree with this and IMO it's how the system should've operated from the very start. Unfortunately, I highly doubt that the CA cartel will let go of the power (and associated cash flow) voluntarily.

>I recognize that Russia is making this change for MitM spying

Nope, they do it primarily out of necessity, because of the mounting pressure on the previously used CAs. The MitM capability is just a nice side bonus.

>So I empathize with the sarcasm, but best not to offer MitM proponents (whether in Russia or the U.S. or elsewhere!) an argument that could be used against your viewpoint.

If browsers truly cared about user security they would've provided reasonable conditions for supporting national CAs:

- Limit its authority only to respective national domain zones.

- Mandate use of Certificate Transparency handled by an independent third party to prevent MitM.

But this debacle only shows that western-controlled (especially financial) systems can be and will be used as a pressure tool, so any large sovereign nation will not trust them as they would in the past. And the taken actions only contribute to further fragmentation of the Internet across national and block borders.

Nuclear submarines often operate without any escort. Russian nuclear icebreakers and floating SMRs also do not have heavy military escorts.

I wonder how much would it cost to build a tunnel as an alternative to the Panama canal to fundamentally resolve the drought issues. 1.8 km is comparable to ~80 km (probably a shorter tunnel will suffice) and dimensions are also similar (at least for the old Panamax).

>the USD doesn't have strength and power because oil sales are denominated in dollars. You have it backwards.

Not quite. The "petrodollar" deal has helped to bootstrap and anchor the USD strength at a somewhat critical moment of history after the gold peg was "temporarily" suspended, which was effectively a default of the US government (second in the 20th century!).

Sure, today trade of oil in USD no longer plays a significant role in supporting its dominance, but it still plays a role. Together with other factors (such as increased weaponization of the USD-led financial system) rise of alternative settlement systems corrodes the network effects on which USD relies. Each blow in isolation may be insignificant, but their accumulation could become critical owning to the extreme non-linearity of the network effects.