u/LymelightTO

Yes, they do this, it's called "flying private".

Yeah, I'm probably an 11 year old bot account, good call.

The facts in all of these cases better align with the "sometimes, Trump incidentally takes a course of action that may benefit Putin" hypothesis than they do with "Trump does things to deliberately advance Putin's interests".

Trump clearly doesn't want to quagmire the US in Ukraine because he's been told that it's important to pivot to Asia and the realpolitik of the situation is that Ukraine is essentially the "weaker" of the two nations involved in that conflict, so if Trump wants the conflict to end, he feels Ukraine should make more concessions to Russia, because Russia is willing and potentially capable of persisting and escalating inside the existing status quo, seemingly indefinitely. Trump is unwilling to directly escalate aggression because he doesn't see how it would directly benefit the US to do so. The US would expend resources and political capital to push the balance of power a little in Ukraine's favor, without decisively winning the conflict (because nobody will actually invade Russia or instigate regime-change), until such a time as the US basically loses interest and then the balance will swing back to Russia.

Ultimately, Ukraine's territorial interests are more to the benefit of Europe than the US, and that's the fundamental underpinning of a lot of his gripes that touch on your other points about NATO. He views the other NATO members (correctly?) as largely freeloaders on the US contributions to the alliance, whose premise is more about providing them physical security than the US. The thing he perceives to be weakening the alliance is that nobody in the alliance actually took it seriously until post-Ukraine, and now it's obvious how unprepared everyone else was to push back on serious Russian aggression in Europe, which was the entire point of NATO. It doesn't seem like Trump opposes Europe taking a more hands-on approach to supplying Ukraine with materiel and resources, as long as it doesn't dangerously escalate the conflict into a situation where the US is obligated to intervene.

and by threatening to annex allies like Greenland and Canada.

He hasn't really elaborated here beyond a vague "security of the hemisphere" rationale, but the implication of his interest in these things seems to be to counter the influence of Russia and China, because both Denmark and Canada have been unserious Arctic security partners, if they are who the US is supposed to be relying on to do that. I mean, obviously he's going about it in a way that is not going to strengthen the relationships between America and its partners if the status quo persists, but his opinion seems to be that America's partners are ineffectual at actually doing anything to advance the bloc's interests, so does it matter? The status quo results in the US gradually becoming less secure, so something has got to change to reverse that trend, and he's willing to try threats if polite suggestions haven't been working.

I dunno, I don't think that he's at all tactful, but he's also not entirely incorrect that most of the NATO members have been in dire need of a wakeup call about the fact that they've essentially been daring the US to rip the security blanket that it generously lends them right off, for decades at this point. You can't do the thing that Germany did, where you performatively laugh at Trump at the UN when he tells them that their economic reliance on Russian gas makes them vulnerable to Russian aggression in Europe, and then blame Trump for not putting the defense of Ukraine on the US taxpayer tab years later, saying he's a Russian asset.

Generally speaking, I think the popular belief that "Trump benefits Russia/China" seems at odds with the other popular belief de jour, that "America is declining, BRICS is ascending", which seems to be a belief irrespective of the POTUS. If you believe the latter, you're saying, "In the status quo, China/Russia/et al. win, and the US loses". However, Trump's whole thing is unpredictably disrupting the status quo, taking big foreign policy risks, that sort of thing. At a bare minimum, you have to be uncertain of what the impact of flipping the table in very sizeable ways will be. He's clearly taking risks for a purpose, and it doesn't line up for that purpose to be "helping Putin", when often the foreign policy risks he's been taking are very clearly aimed at degrading the capabilities of Putin and his allies.

I mean, no, what he said was, "You're a very smart guy (according to the WSJ), but this [, tariffing Canada, ] is a dumb thing to do".

So the thing he's calling dumb is the action of implementing the tariffs, not specifically the POTUS.

It's also analysis the writer could have performed in 2015?

I mean, I don't disagree: the man has a forced rhetorical affectation that he uses to pretend to care deeply about everything, and once you've heard him use it 2 or 3 times, you realize it's just acting. And then you see his off-the-cuff gaffes ("Thanks for your donation to the LPC", I don't know how many times I've done blackface, etc.), and you realize that he's "really" the kind of person you'd expect him to be if you just read the bio: a fratty, rich kid son of a former PM.

Separately, I think the policies he helped advance, which were no doubt mostly conceived by the brain trust that orbits him, were kind of bad. But he's come off as a phony since forever, this should not be news to anyone at all.

While we're at it, start telling them that they're not getting Montreal, the St. Lawrence, or anything beyond the southern bank of it, because no serious country would ever cede those things to a bunch of clowns.

I did enjoy the brief era of black and Asian Wehrmacht soldiers we got from this, though.

Reporters do that, but then r/Canada mods lock and hide the threads.

cue

Saudi Arabia at least tried to do a show trial and throw the criminals who carried out the murder under the rug

India will likely feel that it's in a somewhat different position, because it can contend that the victim was a "terrorist", and so this was a justified response to preserve their security.

In the Kashoggi situation, it was clear that he was a journalist, or at worst an activist, so there was no argument that his crime, as perceived by Saudi Arabia, was anything other than simply being invited into the inner circle of the House of Saud as a Saudi public intellectual, and then daring to leave and publicly criticize their governance.

I'm curious to see where it goes if Canada puts out some Red Notices with names and photos of the killers, though. How far will they have to go toward proving publicly that they are perfectly aware of exactly what happened before India will cave on denial/ambiguity, and simply admit it either felt justified in its actions, or actually return the killers to a Canadian court?

Guess they might be able to ask their friends in Russia how best to play this, they're the undisputed pros.

“Owning multiple homes” is not the problem, the problem is that “owning a home” is currently an entitlement to make an immense amount of money, because:

• we have an increasing demand for housing due to high annual immigration targets
• anytime someone wants to build anything, we slow them down with regulations and pearl clutching about the location and composition of the housing, so that it’s “just so”
• Canada builds really fucking slowly

Fix the speed at which things get approved and constructed, or reduce the rate at which additional housing is demanded, and then buying property will not be an entitlement to make an immense of amount of money using leverage, because it will once again be speculative, and some of the speculators will end up on the wrong side of the trade, dumping their multiple properties for cheaper.

The problem is that everyone that is in charge of these systems is a massive beneficiary of the status quo, as most are multiple-property-owners and/or landlords. What needs to happen is that someone at the federal or provincial level needs to come up with a “streamlining” law that demands municipalities meet a certain threshold of new housing starts annually, or the consequence will be that other projects, that do meet minimum requirements, will be fast tracked and approved regardless of what the municipalities want.

It will not be popular, especially in Toronto and Vancouver, but that’s consequence of sitting on your hands for nearly a decade.

You need a prescription, yes.

There are some companies that I believe will currently prescribe it (Rapamune/Sirolimus) in the US in a kind of pill-mill tele-health sense (GetHealthspan), and then I would imagine that you could subsequently take that prescription to somewhere like CostPlusDrugs, and get 30 1mg pills of the generic for $57USD.

Depending on your dosage, which is also something there's no real consensus on for the "aging" indication, you'd take 3-8mg a week, so it will work out somewhere between $5 and $15 per week to do that, indefinitely.

Not sure how much it would realistically cost in the long-term, between recurring appointments with the telehealth company, whether you could actually get the scrip filled by a third-party reliably, or whether those companies will be around in the long-term to continue prescribing.

The two other avenues are obviously "buying from online pharmacies" and "concierge medicine", using an MD or care team who is very familiar with the current research, and comfortable with exposing themselves to the risk.

The first seems risky, unless you're also prepared to do the work of verifying what you're being given is actually rapamycin using your own laboratory testing, and then assuming the risk that even randomly testing some pills from every batch might not perfectly insulate you from impure or adulterated medication. People seem to suggest Indian pharmacies kind of act as a "pre-filter" to Chinese drug manufacturers in terms of quality, so they tend to be better/safer, but who knows. It seems to me like the risk of taking unknown pills from the internet for decades would outweigh any marginal long-term lifespan extension benefits they might have.

The second is certainly expensive (~$10k+ per year of membership, plus the healthcare costs for most models I've seen), and probably limited to particular VHCOL geographic areas in the US, like NYC and the Bay Area.

If you're under the age of 60 or 70, not already very fit with a good diet, and not fabulously wealthy, I wouldn't mess around with it today. The research looks promising, but the research also says it's effective at extending lifespan in older model organisms, like the mice in the ITP trial. If it works in humans, it will certainly get easier to access and cheaper, since rapamycin is generic. (There will probably be new, specialized, on-patent, rapalogs for aging, but average physicians will be fine prescribing rapamycin for an on-label indication of aging when you're in your 40s, or whatever.)

I would expect matcha to be the best of these teas, because you actually drink the entire “tea substrate”, versus just steeping it?

I wonder if eating the steeped, e.g. sencha, leaves seasoned with a little vinegar is “even better” for you?

I was thinking this the other day when it appeared in Bryan Johnson's supplement stack, I hope he knows.

Here's the/an interview, with plenty of spoilery speculation and book-referencing.

TL;DR