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Also, tends to get glossed over, but Agamemnon technically had no interest in Troy. Wouldn't matter either way to him. But he sided with his brother, and when Agamemnon goes in, he goes all the way in. He went to mad extremes, until it finally cost him all his friends and allies and life.

I read it as "Agamemnon can't take an L and move on". He has to be seen winning. He is very capable in battle, if not as good as Achilles or Ajax, and about the only guy keeping the army together. But he can't accept any loss, even trivial ones. Family trait in Greek myth.

Most lines are actually under 100 mph when you include stops. But even if we assume a higher average of 175 mph, that's over 13 hours. Then you have a layover (overnight?); there will be no more than one train daily. I'm not saying it can't be done. But twice the time is the optimistic number.

Well, unfortunately I think that's borderline. HSR from Norfolk, Virginia to Billings, Montana would require no less than one transfer, probably at Denver. That's 2,300 miles, assuming you have a reasonably direct route. Could be more in practice. Average Shinkansen speed is 140 mph.

I would be more than happy to see a new US state, but Puerto Rico's collective message about whether they even want this is hopefully muddled. Most people *appear* to want to status quo, and only choose statehood if the status quo is deliberately removed as an option.

Presented without comment.

Well, the entire historic point of Washington was that the place started as a rather unpleasant bit of swamp nobody lived in.

The capabilities of several major bureaucracies will need to be rebuilt from scratch.

I'm also assigning zero value to its space business.

I still remember reading that book, getting to the end, and realizing I had no idea whatsoever what happened in any of it.

I agree; I'm glad he's doing his thing, even if that thing is usually not for me.

Yes, but this is BlueSky and if we can't be unreasonably, obnoxiously pedantic, what truly is the point?

Yes, that is all true. The issue of representation in Britain was not a quiet issue, though, with major unrest before and during the Revolution. The British government partly resisted the pressure for another half-century.

You know... it kinda looks like Heracles is going to brain the Buddha.

But penguins can already do nuclear physics. They just choose not to, except for Dr. Tuxedo, the Foul Fowl.

That is true: it was not that the taxes were too high. The colonies were unwilling to accept Parliamentary taxes without prior agreement at all, at whatever level.

This actually, literally did happen - but only after Britain lost the thirteen American colonies and had to re-assess how everything worked together. And even then, Britain did lose its empire piecemeal, partly because they didn't want to make a full integration.

My answer is that, Yes, absolutely Britain could have resolved the tensions, kept its colonies and even become much greater for it. But it would have required a significant change of government structures to adapt, and a new way of looking at the Empire as a whole.

This is one of the key problems of distance, yes, but also implicitly the nature of colonial governance. There was no representative of the Crown or Parliament in all the Americas, short of some customs officials. The problem of the colonial system was that there literally was no system.

I..e, there were various proposals to deal with the problems, but quite often British politics literally had no way to "ingest" the message. A small colonial delegation visited General Howe before the Revolution turned bloody to try and work out a solution. But Howe had no authority for that.