Well Sal, the argument of the Argentinian state would be that those particular contracts and land grants which initially allowed the company to be there at all were awarded by illegal states and thus void. Generally I wasn't aware that Argentina was forcibly expropriating companies though - I was only aware of Bolivia doing so - even Chavez paid bonds/"market value" for properties that the state took over - with the exception of lands which were "owned" but laying idle.

Dear visitor, I have trouble thinking your post is not a troll because well....

Just a short lesson on I guess geo-politics and geography.

1. China is what we call very far away. It would take any invasion force literally weeks to arrive from China in the US and well, all you'd have to do is pile up a bunch of junk cars on the coast or something and they'd be fucked. I wanted to draw it on a map, but maps are big and I think that'd be too insulting :/

2. China and the US are both nuclear armed, thus they can't go to war with each other ever under any circumstances without destroying likely the entire planet. It's called mutually assured destruction and is the entire reason why no major power will go to war with each other ever again. The US may have blustered and cried a lot with the USSR but neither side really intended to utilize their nuclear arsenal at any point except in the very early days (before nukes were fully understood). The US will never fully disarm its nuclear arsenal without a tremendous change in the world - we still have a whole range of chemical and biological weapons laying around in secret locations just in case.

3. The UN is the US's tool for adding legitimacy to its imperial actions. Particularly since the fall of the USSR. The UN is supposed to function according to the precepts of "Collective Security" - however collective security tends to never work out - so a system of independent alliances are worked out and maintained instead. For example, The US wanted to invade Iraq, it tried to get the UN on board, however, the UN security council (UK, France, USA, Russia, China) didn't go in favor of military action in Iraq. So we just used our own system of alliances to invade and the UN was powerless to stop us DESPITE THE FACT that according to collective security and basically every definition possible we were the aggressor and ought to have been attacked by every country on the planet (because that's how collective security is supposed to work - the aggressor state is to be attacked by every other nation on the planet for its aggression thus making aggressive action impossible). Because at the end of the day, it was only Iraq, and such a war would have destroyed the planet.

I generally deal in European history. That said, it could drive a man to alcoholism.

However, I attended university in the US - so I had to take a lot of US history. That too can drive a man to alcoholism. I can fully agree with what Kip says - a lot of the time you just have to take a break and have a stiff drink.

Every place has its problems, things that it could easily do better, horrible things certain people have done - good and bad people to this day. I just tend to ignore nationality altogether - I could have just as easily been born in any other place - I just lucked out and managed to get into one that's relatively peaceful.

Deos this mean that... We can hope for cp_snakewater instead of g7 - because that'd definitely be an improvement imo lol. Free the drop down and chain link fences!

I just gave up on cancelling my premium because I found I'd just drink it anyhow :/

A raffle is probably the easiest way to fund this sort of thing - the old server community I came from managed to fund itself that way quite well

Even a very small cash prize would be better than nothing (10$ a person would even be something).

Step 1. Acquire unique item.
Step 2. Charge 1-5$ a ticket
Step 3. Decide who wins the unique item
Step 4. Give money to players (or run away with it and never return).

It also doesn't require an entry fee which could be a serious barrier to entry or from allowing the thing to be done regularly.

With a small staff of helpers and some budgeting for prize money you'd only have to do a few raffles a year assuming the item was a big enough of a draw and it was properly publicized so the general non-comp community would even buy in.

it could be flash player - my flash player is a bunch of shit and always starts any instance of itself at 1 volume and it's literally worse than the fact that my mouse 1 on my deathadder kinda doesn't work anymore - it's literally that annoying.

Bazbeaux's in Indianapolis - they put goat cheese on EVERY pizza for free if you ask for it.

Thank God my body rebelled against me and prevented me from playing sports at a semi-professional level so I'll never have to play against good people.

to be fair, that tumblr could insult a much larger amount of people - it sets its sights too low.

I still think of Paul Krugman as "the Paul Krugman" because my first exposure to him was from a Ukrainian professor who didn't use articles properly lol. I still hear her voice calling him "the Paul Krugman" - but he's a pretty excellent source for neo-keynesian analysis (and liberalish politics). He's still an economist, but being a Keynesian he's firmly against most of the conventional wisdom about economics coming from the anti-Keynesian (Milton Friedman) GOP.

Debt-growth ratios would be really hard data to work with because you'd have to add a bunch of footnotes for historical circumstances - since basically any data set that includes World War 2 would show clearly that debt far exceeding 100% of GDP would net tremendous economic growth lol. My favorite early intro-Macro papers were from teh students that looked at taxation and included the 1950's - since if you look at that data you'd come to believe that higher taxes results in economic growth as well since the economic wave of ww2 and the reconstruction of basically the whole world carried well into the 50's despite (relative to now) extremely high taxes in the US.

Well if interest rates for general consumers were 0 or near zero as well - there would be no reason not to take on massive amounts of debt - assuming whatever you were taking on that debt for would make you money in some way or you could structure the payments well enough not to destroy your standard of living. So it'd even make sense for a household lol.

Even though I subscribe to a political philosophy that has seen likeminded fellows of mine historically persecuted (and there are still laws on the books that prevent me from legally doing certain things) I wouldn't leave unless I had some exceptional job offer elsewhere lol.

+ I kinda like Indiana because corn fields make me happy.

It won't happen any time soon here :( Our left parties are pretty laughable.

"We do not discuss the chairman's situation" - some guy at an RCP book store when I inquired as to why their "chairman" was in "exile" in France for burning a flag in Texas in the 1980's lol.

I was involved in the mass exodus of the Indiana state section from the CPUSA as well :D So if anything I've helped break things.

Oh, and I was courted by the ALP until they heard my views on Stalin and Hoxha - now they won't even say hi to me :(

Main will be - as far as the progression goes - a bit rocky for 1-2 seasons until the number of teams remaining in main or at least the teams moving from IM stabilize.

Most of the 4 open call up teams should do fairly well - I dont think any of them are going to get downright pooped on every game. Basically what we got was the top sliver of IM - with actual IM being a few of those teams that would've been on the playoff bubble or just slightly below it, and the rest of the teams would have gone sub .500 or died in the old IM.

So it should work itself out and produce more interesting games across the board - I'm excited at least :D