I think you're missing a subtlety of the situation. You're right that gothic cathedrals were enormous undertakings, and that the enormity was itself a worshipful and meditative act that drew in the entire community, current and future.
Even with the CNC machines, this is still a multi-decade endeavor that will span generations because the number of monks (and outside support) is small and not getting larger. They've scaled down the work required to match their capabilities, and still creating something that will last centuries. Relative to their community, it's still a cathedral effort.
His statement is all generalities. "Decisions are made by POTUS". Not "This decision was made by POTUS"--that part you're supposed to infer from the previous. He's being quite careful not to address this instance.
The Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild were also a result of the Butlerian Jihad. All three started as schools of human development in the absence of powerful technology.
Also, Herbert's point about dependence on machines creating machine-dependent humans, trapped in a deterministic arc of evolution, feeds into his larger themes about open-ended evolution and its arms-race. It's not just a throwaway backstory.
I don't think it's that obvious because another thing that's obvious is how much Trump wants to be Putin. He looks at dictators and admires them, envies them, identifies with them. They're the only people he respects, hence his willingess to humble himself and the US to gain Putin's approval. And before that, it was Kim John Un.
No neighbouring country would want to add a population centre with a million Russians to its polity because then you'd have a million Russians agitating for closer ties to Russia, if not actively facilitating or planning a coup.
Lithuania, to the north, has a population of just under 3,000,000, of whom Russians are 5%. Take Kaliningrad and suddenly they would be 30% Russian.
Poland is 37,000,000, so Russians would only be around 3%, but that's enough to cause a lot of trouble, and they gain nothing they don't already have besides a ready-made fifth column.
As a Russian, I’d love to tell you that there’s hope, but unfortunately I agree. Integration is not as simple as “you’re in the EU now”, it will take time.
Frankly, the best way to approach it is probably leaving Königsberg / Kaliningrad be as its own state [1] for a bit, and do whatever EU integration programs do. If it works out, you’ll get a million Königsbergers who are a bit nostalgic about Russia but want nothing to do with it otherwise.
One final thing I’d like to note is that the “alien passport” approach taken by the Baltic states mostly, well, alienates the titular nation and Russians right now. If the path to integration was more clear and Russians born and raised in, say, Latvia didn’t feel like second-hand citizens, they wouldn’t really want to have closer ties with Russia either.
[1]: disclaimer for the эшник reading this: this is in a hypothetical scenario where Kaliningrad does get separated from Russia as a result of the “special military operation”. please don’t hurt my family
>No neighbouring country would want to add a population centre with a million Russians to its polity because then you'd have a million Russians agitating for closer ties to Russia, if not actively facilitating or planning a coup.
As the other commenter said, Kaliningrad / Konigsberg could be an autonomous area / city state (of which the EU has a-plenty already), with some form of Euro-integration (associate/candidate membership, etc) which allows for a gradual integration process.
Kosovo shows the formal path for that.
Hopefully, not the historical one.
(After all, if there's anything Russia taught the world, it's the power of Little Green Men)
Ukraine still has deep pools of manpower to tap--they still don't conscript anyone under the age of 27. Running out of soldiers isn't their problem, especially since they very conspicuously switched to a defensive strategy to preserve lives and use drones as a first wave attacker instead of infantry.
Time favours Ukraine. Absent a really shocking reversal in all western aid, they're surviving and advancing. Russia, meanwhile, is incurring deep structural damage to its economy that shows up already as huge labour shortages, high inflation, and high interest rates, along with war-driven destruction of infrastructure. It's steadily marching to a point where economic collapse, internal unrest, or both, demand that Russia withdraw from Ukraine.
Putin either doesn't know or doesn't care that they're not winning, and any replacement for Putin will be Putin*2, so it'll take something societally catastrophic to force the issue, which becomes more likely every day. As long as Ukraine just hangs on, they win by not losing.
Supporting another's right to something doesn't entail helping them exercise that right, and not facilitating their exercise doesn't call into question your support for the right itself.
They're not talking about inspecting or controlling speech on the network, they're talking about speech outside their network and how it relates to them and their relationship with Mullvad.
There are different grounds for being granted a green card. One of those is that your employer wants to hire you permanently, and can't find an American to take the job. Getting a green card doesn't require an employer's sponsorship, that's just the most common application for green cards.
So having AI in the US requires us all, collectively, taking that 1% chance of the end of humanity? It would be too expensive to properly sandbox the models, we'll just externalize that risk of the end of humanity?
Even with the CNC machines, this is still a multi-decade endeavor that will span generations because the number of monks (and outside support) is small and not getting larger. They've scaled down the work required to match their capabilities, and still creating something that will last centuries. Relative to their community, it's still a cathedral effort.
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