CharonY

Dude, the US has a military base in Greenland.

Well that happens when the Russian president and his puppet are running the show.

Also, there are occasionally application-based questions, which can be fairly open ended and are not merely graded by true/false parameters. They are also immensely disliked by students. True and in while it might be somewhat certain in assessing really low performance, it is often unclear what the correct parameters for high performance are. There are general correlations with productivity parameters for example, but there is little evidence that folks are able to even somewhat consistently pick the best in each given cohort. As such, any standard we set will be biased to various degree. This is why in some cases folks are stepping away from "hard" parameters in certain jobs. But frankly I still think that beyond a certain level of qualification all of this is really just rolling dice.

We forget things that are a few years (maybe months/weeks?) ago. I am also worried that there there is just so much going on that just the latest biggest thing erases everything else (considering e.g., the historic gains of the AfD). (Weidel is the current leader of the AfD, Estwaehler are folks who voted for the first time). There are politicians in Germany who called the holocaust a "Fliegenschiss" (literally, fly shit, meaning something insignificant), in German history. The world is shifting, powered by a never ending stream of idiocy. And I would be very angry, too, if I wasn't so tired.

Though Intel has multiple fabs in Arizona. They are under scrutiny for water use but have invested in water reclamation facilities. Not sure how well that works in practice, though. The idea is used and I think was heavily popularized in the last 5 years or so. But the thinking about its effectiveness has been evolving with different discussions happening in the political, academic and business spheres.

Based on reports in the first Trump term, this seems to be the usual modus operandi. I think while Trump is intellectually certainly not brilliant, he does have a sense for persons and loyalty. Or seemed to have. However, as a consequence a lot of his inner circle seem to be idiots.

Even if that was true, it would not have played out that way in front of Trump. Even in a normal administration, a VP would never jump in front of a negotiation between the President and the head of another state. Vance is not stupid enough to do that just because of his ego. Considering Trump's ego and capriciousness, it is very unlikely that Vance would have just jumped Zelensky without any coordination or agreement. Trump has repeatedly thrown Vance under the bus to diminish his role in the past.

No one except Russia wants it. And they are the invaders.

Especially a VP that has been emasculated repeatedly by the president. If he didn't have the marching order he would never have dared to make a noise.

There is little doubt that this was premeditated. The fact that the VP was allowed to do the attack made it pretty clear.

Plus there was the comment at the end that this was great television, clearly suggesting that this was a planned farce.

So what do you think would have been the right response to the US ambush?

Folks voted someone in who is known to behave like a wannabe gangster who worships Putin. For a significant proportion of the electorate seeing him behave like a gangster is probably not much of a surprise. Even worse, some would think that this was a show of strength and masculinity. Probably the same who are happy that the US government facilitated the release of sex-traffickers from Romania to the US. Shocking as this is, it is more of a confirmation of what folks suspected rather than a surprise.

I believe that the US contributed about 40% of all the funds for the Ukraine. Assuming that this stops, the remaining partners would need to almost double their efforts, just to keep things the same. Which might not be enough if the US decides to lift sanctions on Russia (though I am not sure how much impact the current ones have). At least there seems to be universal support, the question is only if additional help materializes and how fast.

Well, in addition to standing up to Russia, one can add standing up to the US. As per the NY times: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000010019918/trump-zelensky-vance-ukraine.html?smid=url-share Pretty insane. Or normal for this administration, which apparently still thinks that they are doing reality TV. I hope the Europeans step up.