If there was a suitable banquet hall, why are state receptions held on the South Lawn by every admin?

Not passing judgement, making an observation

That’s a reasonable way to think about it, but what “should” happen and what “does” happen are different.

It seems like historically, state visits happen at the White House, which to me makes a lot of sense given the logistics of hosting foreign entourage.

The US is a world power, part of being a world power is being able to project that power, including through aesthetics, compare the aesthetics of a state visit in the Kremlin and Great Hall of the People vs. hosting in a temporary tent on a lawn.

Why is defence of it insane? The article makes a good point re: state guests and needing to erect tents to accommodate them.

Genuinely curious

Yes, but the EU is currently a US vassal and surprisingly weak as a driver of any geopolitical decision.

I wish the EU would have closer relations with the PRC as a balance to being screwed over by the US

Unfortunately such a system doesn’t exist. Britain used to be hegemon before world war 2, then the US, and soon the PRC.

I’m not part of the imperial core (US), so I’d rather deal with Beijing than Washington in foreign affairs.

Unfortunately, my country already has all those discriminations, so the only thing that would change for me is dealing with a more cooperative rather than extractive “pole”

China is orders of magnitude more of a force for good than the US is.

China becoming hegemon would unironically be amazing for humanity

What Trump is doing makes a lot of sense. It’s just standard iconoclasm.

Authoritarian regimes routinely destroy historical monuments to erase a past they oppose, promote their own ideology, and control national identity.

Meta returning to their roots it seems

So… if you tax millionaires, they won’t simply leave?

Hmm…

The current Labour government believes it can revive the economy via incantation if it yells Growth 3 times in the mirror at midnight

I think most companies don’t have a three nines SLA with their customers, yet were sold the idea that cloud (… and then serverless) should be the right decision for them.

When the initial cloud migration happened I’ve seen a handful of startups and scale-ups go bankrupt doing lift and shift

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with what you’re saying, my point is more towards the tribal consensus that was built in the tech community around 2016-2018 that the cloud is the future, for everyone, and that managing your own infrastructure is being a brute

I was going to reference this Medium article on how paying extra for “uptime” and reliability isn’t just a 50-100% premium, but many times a 7-8 figure premium. These figures are make or break a business model type figures.

The irony is that Medium, a site hosting mostly static content, is still down due to the AWS outage.

pay a premium for the same amount of CPU & RAM you could’ve gotten from your classic VPS provider fire your sysadmins and hire DevOps Engineers at 2x the salary raise a ticket with AWS and wait every time you need more than 5 instances of the same compute type oops, our biggest DC got knocked offline, here’s some compute time credits

the cloud has been the biggest scam in tech history

I’m finally migrating from iCloud Photos to Immich next weekend. I finally have my NAS setup going

Laws are not immutable, they can change to adapt to technological advancements. Currently, we’re still at the mercy of declining mental faculties with age.

This doesn’t contradict the statement above. Also Mitch McConnell isn’t president, is he?

How have we as a society accepted policymakers that will probably not live to see the consequences of their policies

Another China win:

The age limit for a minister-level appointment is retirement at age 65, and a person older than 58 will not be viewed as an eligible candidate. Department directors have an age limit of 60. A vice premier must be under 68 when appointed and must retire by 72.

Hades 2, finally out of early access and enjoying the storyline and the new polish