Post-2015 Sweden is quite difficult to immigrate to if you aren't doing it via a skilled employment visa. The requirements, along with the amount of time it takes to get simple things working properly (like a social security number and a bank account) once you do get here are cumbersome. Plus housing is an issue, you will find that it is quite a struggle to get a permanent rental contract in the major cities like Stockholm and Malmö. The language is also quite difficult for us English speakers to learn because everyone loves to practice their English with you so even when you attempt to speak Swedish they recognise you are an English speaker and change languages.
My prediction is a mass exodus from the NPT by the non-nuclear weapon states if the 2020 Review Conference goes to hell. Which I think is likely when considering the disintegrating state of modern nuclear arms control agreements and the nuclear modernization programmes being conducted by practically all nuclear powers in contravention of NPT Article VI.
Last time I checked South Africa got rid of their nukes in 1989 and has yet to deviate from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty it acceded to in 1991. It also recently ratified the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Do you know something we don't?
This is a bit of a special case, though. The decision to relinquish the nuclear weapons was directly a consequence of the end of the apartheid regime. In a sense, the apartheid government didn't give up it's weapons, so much as it knew that it's days were numbered and it didn't trust the next regime with the weapons.
> Last time I checked South Africa got rid of their nukes in 1989
You probably know better than I do.
I tend to believe that once countries get nukes, they don't tend to give them up, but I could certainly believe that South Africa doesn't have any anymore.
Fortunately (in this case), knowledge and technology isn't permanent - it takes a lot of work to maintain. Unless they have secretly trained scientists and engineers, and maintain secret facilities for most of the supply chain, they've probably lost the ability to make a nuclear weapon by now.
While many states do explore what is called 'nuclear hedging' where they remain non-nuclear but conduct research and development to shorten the potential time of their nuclear breakout (a contemporary example being Iran), South Africa is definitely not a part of this club as their rhetoric and supporting actions simply do not align with this strategy.
>I tend to believe that once countries get nukes, they don't tend to give them up
Well of course not. It's the nation state equivalent of being able to defend yourself with lethal force. It means that anyone who is an existential threat to you must reckon with the fact that you can be an existential threat to them if sufficiently backed into a corner. No nation is going to give that up.
1. The Non-proliferation Treaty on Nuclear Weapons finally collapses as a mass exodus of non-nuclear weapon states leaves in favour of the TPNW, forcing the hand of the the Nuclear Weapon States and their allies to accede into the legally binding treaty in order to curtail further nuclear proliferation events.
2. Trump gets a second term.
3. 'America first' mentality continues to have repercussions as Sino-American Cold War escalates. Allies under the nuclear umbrella worry about the credibility of US security guarantees as fears and anxieties over a 'Thucydides trap' begin to take hold. U.S. reassures its allies but when push comes to shove, fails to intervene, sending out a signal to those remaining in the alliance that they lack credible commitments.
4. South Korea will finally obtain sovereign nuclear weapons capabilities as the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula falls flat from continued DPRK aggression. Japan, despite a historically strong public opinion against this class of weapon, may eventually do so as well although much of this will depend on how vulnerable it feels.
5. Hybrid warfare will continue to define 21st century military strategy, with attacks on critical infrastructure targets such as power, water, and sewage systems taking major cities offline for weeks at a time. The lack of attribution will make retribution difficult and countries will begin to point fingers at likely adversaries.
6. Government surveillance becomes omnipresent in most developed societies. You don't watch the internet, the internet watches you and does so through a variety of technological mediums you invite into your lives, all in the name of convenience. Of course this is already happening, but in the next decade it will be taken to its logical conclusion and the majority of people will begin to understand the relationship between privacy and consumer-grade technology, namely the fact that the two are mutually exclusive. Which brings me to my next point.
7. Dumb phones will be a lot more popular than they are now. I'm talking 2000-era 3310s. You already see senior intelligence officials carrying around decades old phones for communication. They don't do this just because they like playing snake.
8. Vertical farming of cruciferous vegetables will be commonplace and most major supermarket chains will begin growing their own to sell to consumers.
I am kinda surprised no one has mentioned Tinderbox by eastgate systems! (1)
Beck Tench (2) has a brilliant youtube series (3) about how she uses tinderbox with the zettlekasten method to create associations between various notes. She also links these notes to her devonthink db so that when she is searching for something there it will also pull up her relevant notes.
I myself have been using her method in writing my masters thesis and I think, because I am a visual learner, the ability to visualise theories through a mind-map style interface has really helped my retention and understanding of them.
Not that I fundamentally disagree with their results, but the study seems like it has significant bias itself. In what context is Fox News only slightly right-leaning?
Anything critical of the current administration is not left-leaning either. In the past, most of these organizations have been critical of the Obama administration, but they weren't considered right-leaning then.
"Our Media Bias Ratings represent the average judgment of Americans. They are based on blind surveys of people across the political spectrum, multi-partisan analysis and other in-depth analyses as well as tens of thousands of user ratings. Our scientifically-generated ratings are fluid and subject to change over time as new information is gathered and biases change.
Unless otherwise noted as editorial content, all bias ratings are based on online versions of news coverage, not TV, print, or radio content."
Well I suppose that makes some sense. I have felt that Fox's online presence is slightly more neutral (though somehow more sensationalist) than their TV presence.
Edit: I do think the separation of their opinion pieces from their regular news reporting is a little bit of a cop-out though.
You're thinking of the old Fox, and possibly predicting a future Fox. Former DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile works for Fox now.
Politically, Fox does not stay put. To maximize market share, they always want to be just barely to the right of their main competition. Since that competition has gone quite a bit left in recent years, Fox has followed. By some measurements Fox is now even slightly to the left of the average American. Fox will immediately move back to the right if the competition moves right, because Fox can't risk crossing over.
You can't possibly compare the endless, breathless, full-court attack on Trump from the mainstream media with their occasional symbolic quibbles with Obama. The covered for Obama for years, all through his drone strikes, his kids in cages, his tear gas at the border, his gunwalker scandals and so much more.
It's hard to imagine a mindset where you see media treatment of Obama as comparable to that of Trump. It's night and day in every possible respect. And the donation and poll numbers from these organizations, which are generally 90-95% Democratic-leaning, confirm that.
There is a dramatic difference between the two presidents. At least as far as I know, left-leaning vs right-leaning isn't supposed to be support-blue-team-at-all-costs vs support-red-team-at-all-costs.
It's supposed to mean, would you treat blue-team or the red-team better for the same behavior?
> drone strikes
This was heavily covered. This was probably the number one thing that Obama was criticized for. I think most people agree that this is bad (for various reasons), though technically it is protecting American soldiers lives. Oddly, we don't hear much about the fact that Trump administration has relaxed rules and is performing more drone strikes [1][2].
> tear gas at the border
I also remember his immigration policies being heavily criticized. Yet, if you look at the policies of the current administration, they are objectively far worse. If the policies are far worse, it is consistent with a neutral position to be more critical of the current administration's policies than the previous administration's.
> gunwalker scandals
While they tried to pin Gunwalker on Obama, Gunwalker was really a Bush administration scandal that wasn't discovered until Obama [3][4]. That was an attempted political hit during an election year, equivalent to Benghazi. Despite that, it was covered even by the crazy "leftist" CNN [5][6].
If Obama had been meeting secretly with the Kenyan government to gather dirt on his political opponents, defending them every chance he got when it was discovered that they spent significant effort to influence our elections, and trying to remove sanctions against them, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this would be heavily criticized and covered by both CNN and MSNBC. I do believe MSNBC leans left.
This analysis only looks at whether or not the source is 'left' or 'right', and not on the quality of the source.
Google also rarely[1] promotes Chinese and North Korean state-sponsored media sources as 'top news', or Marxist-Leninist publications, or the moral and political degenerates behind New Trotskyism[2], but for some reason, that analysis doesn't take issue with this lack of 'balanced reporting'. It's only upset that a very particular, very narrow political spectrum of ideas isn't getting 50/50 coverage.
[1] Never?
[2] Isn't it obvious that we'd be better off without listening to them? /s
Google US I think it’s obvious would have little reason to promote Granma or RT. But they should have a pan-US org like USA Today and WSJ more evenly distributed. Also The Miami Herald is a pretty good paper, better than some on that list. It should also be higher ranked.
Why not? After all, as the article posits, a diversity of opinion is important for the health of democracy. What better way to introduce diversity of opinion, then news that doesn't neatly fall into the socially-left-us-exceptional-pro-business-anti-human and the socially-right-us-exceptional-pro-business-anti-human buckets?
You don't even have to turn to foreign news for that. There's no shortage of diverse domestic ideas, that for some unfathomable reason aren't being promoted.
Oh I agree we should have more diverse domestic news sources for sure. We mainly get the take from large coastal metro areas but many inland areas and some big areas (like Chicago or All of Texas) are ignored. As I mentioned, the Miami Herald is a great paper. Not only does it serve Florida well, but it also has great international coverage, specially LatAm and Caribb.
Could someone elaborate on what the use cases would be for something like this? I understand it will carry small items you buy off Amazon prime but that can't be the end of the roadmap for drone based delivery, can it?
