Voroxpete

The good news is that pretty soon there won't be any foreign tourism to the US, so no one will have to enforce this.

Listen, you had my upvote already, your impeccable taste in music is not required here :P

(seriously, no argument with any of what you've said here. 10/10, nailed it)

but they did develop a strategy that worked until the invasion of the USSR.

Not really. What they did was to repeat a strategy that had been refined by generations of Prussian generals. Blitzkrieg was a fancy propaganda term for "Prussian manoeuvre warfare." It wasn't a new invention. Now, they get credit for realizing that the tank could be a key component in making manoeuvre warfare viable again, though that largely derived from the shock they experienced at having their defensive lines broken by tanks in WW1. But to their credit, they were at least forward thinking enough to realise that the next war would be unlikely to bog down into a defensive stalemate like WW1 had. However the notion that Nazi Germany was inventing some exciting new method of warfare out of nothing is patently false. In fact the overall level of mechanization in their military was dire; throughout the entire war, many German divisions were moving all of their supply by horse and cart. Also "worked until the invasion of the USSR" basically deletes the War in Africa in its entirety. Germany certainly had some successes there, but also some notable failures, and ultimately they were not able to achieve any of their strategic aims on that front. In short, Blitzkrieg worked until it came up against an enemy that wasn't desperately unprepared for any kind of war at all. That's hardly a ringing endorsement of its success as a strategy and more an indictment of the massive geopolitical failures that allowed the war to occur in the first place.

No, they didn't. The Nazis were every bit as much of an incompetent mess.

Their generals largely sucked; they did as well as they did because their main opponent - France - shit the bed unbelievably hard, having made all the wrong preparations to fight basically the wrong war. Poland got pincered by two great powers at once, Czechoslovakia held out far longer than they should have given the differences in military power. The Nazis made some smart choices here and there, such as going through the Ardennes, or the decision to put radios in all their tanks, but their strategic and tactical "brilliance" was entirely invented after the fact, mostly by the generals themselves in their autobiographies where they were given free reign to blame every bad decision on Hitler.

Economically, their success was entirely down to running a plunder economy. They basically wrote a whole lot of cheques they couldn't cash, then looted Czechoslovakia and Poland's treasuries to foot the bill.

They were every bit the gaggle of squabbling incompetents that this administration is. They just had really good propaganda. This is always what fascism looks like. It's an ideology that uplifts the incompetent, by design.

Yes, and I feel like I addressed that with "...those plans come with a ton of asterixes..."

If it helps, he doesn't actually believe this, or care either way, he's just extremely bribable.

It's actually insane to think about what could have been accomplished with the capital investment that has collectively gone into generative AI, public ledger blockchain, and metaverse VR projects. IIRC its over a trillion dollars. There are credible plans for more or less ending world hunger for under ten billion. Yeah, those plans come with a ton of asterixes, but the point is, if that's what ten gets you, imagine what you could do with a hundred billion? Now think about what a trillion could do. It's honestly sickening.

There's still a metaverse budget?

There is no expectation that Putin will ever stand trial for his crimes. That's not the point. The point is that he should not be allowed to have those crimes swept under the rug. Putin should be a global pariah, like Netanyahu; a man who has to fear setting foot outside his own country because of the very real danger that he could be arrested.

Just because we can't punish him, doesn't mean we have to forgive him.

The following can all be true:

• The Democrats are a right wing neoliberal party.
• The Democrats are the most left-wing option that is realistically available to American voters.
• The Democrats can be pushed further left if American progressives work to do so.
• The Democrats - at the party level - will resist such a change, but that resistance can still be overcome.
• In the long term, massive structural overhauls and the downfall of capitalism are the only things that will save America and the world
• In the near term, voting consistly and enthusiastically for the least bad option can still protect vulnerable groups from harm and create changes that lay the groundwork for those structural overhauls.

I seriously doubt that any of the decision makers involved in this process actually watch anime.

Anyone in management who cared probably didn't have enough pull / authority to do a damn thing about it.

1. Internal review also takes time and expertise. Those things cost money, and the whole point of the exercise is to not spend money.

2. No one uses generative AI because they actually care about the quality of the end product.

But even allowing for those points, it's entirely possible that they did, in fact, do quality review. Extensively. But at some point the generation costs exceeded their allowed budget and this is what they settled on. This is the thing that lurks behind bad quality AI art; the fact that what we see is often the best result out of many, many tries. The Coca Cola holiday ad had to be stitched together from hours upon hours of failed attempts. Even the horrendously bad looking end product wasn't as bad as many of the failed outputs they got.