Being from the Detroit area, I find many of the comments here naive as one can't compare Detroit to an average urban city.
To understand what Detroit is like, watch a film like "Escape from New York" or a WW2 bombing documentary.
There are areas with no police or fire forces.
Also, the soil around mfg. plants (and downwind) have metal contamination. The air quality used to be worse than anything in China today, with choking curtains of black and red soot and oxides which precipitated into the soil.
So do your homework, get your firearm certifications and spend some time there before any relocation or investment.
It is a great location if you want cheap industrial space or your own truck marshalling yard (true story) and you don't need city services like elementary schools. Check out "Detroit Steel" to see more:
a lot of detroit's problems also stems from the existence of grand rapids. i'd imagine if a company wanted a michigan office detroit wouldn't be the first on the list despite being the bigger city.
> in the US, it’s basically impossible to involuntarily lose citizenship
Over the past 20 years, several laws have been passed that erode proof of citizenship:
- id documents with an expiry date are not usable after that date (expired passports used to be accepted for domestic non-travel uses)
- the Evite database decides whether you can work at many companies
- parish records are sometimes deemed unacceptable as proof of birth, disallowing the reissue of other documents like passports
- some people have duplicate SSNs
- in the past year, a small number of people in both the USA and Canada have been told their original and valid citizenship documents were not valid by Immigration, with the burden of proof on the citizens.
Compare that to losing one’s permanent residency, which can happen because of something as simple as forgetting to tell the government that you’ve moved.
> I'm now locked out unless I upload a driver's license or passport id to prove my identity.
No, If you wait long enough (12-24 months of inactivity) they'll email you a magic "open sesame" link that bypasses the login screen. No account password or session cookie needed.
There's several interesting things about this:
1) You could modify the "open sesame" link to login as anybody else who is inactive.
2) Your profile will be slightly broken, as they do numerous software updates weekly apparently without migrating inactive account data reliably.
How do I know this? My gf handles 100% of our social media presence, so I just have a FB account for occasional software testing. HTH! :)
> Isnt the point of the certification to be the expert? I'm just a math guy that can read.
Enrolled Agents (EA) are very good on average as tax accountants. Not perfect, but if talk to them mid-reporting period and they'll have heard of new rules.
Beyond that, what you need to know about "professionals":
1) The job of a CPA is to collect their fees.
2) The job of a lawyer is to collect their fees.
3) "Professionals" rank larger entities ahead of individuals in fees and advancement.
> Because as I understand it, the US was largely aloof until Germany started pursuing atomic weapons ...
No. The USA public was isolationist until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Germany stupidly declared war after Pearl Harbor in sympathy with Japan.
The key things to understand about WW2 are:
1) Germany and Japan declared war on a country they couldn't invade because of geography.
In other words, the USA did not have enough deterrence at the time to prevent WW2. [paraphrasing Victor David Hanson]
The B-29 was the ultimate weapon in WW2, not the atomic bomb (which was dropped from a B-29.) So much so that Russia spent vast resources after WW2 copying it down to the last rivet.
2) The USA was already the "arsenal of democracy" a year before Pearl Harbor. Historians regard Pearl Harbor as more of a trap than a victory for the Japanese, which would have required both sinking all of America's carriers plus a successful land invasion of Oahu to end well.
3) All sides thought that bombing the enemy's cities would break their will to fight. As any chess player knows, people will fight to the bitter end with very few exceptions.
Thats great, thanks! Im working on getting the blog up and running, and plan to cross post there, along with any news about the platform. Feel free to email me any suggestions... my address is on the bigcgi site.
I'm ambivalent about WW1 since the US didn't do much fighting (too late into the war), and it was mostly trench warfare that wiped out European royalty, not necessarily a bad thing IMO.
But the inter-war years and WW2 are a fascinating epic.
The WW2 European conflict resulted from Germany losing WW1, but not being occupied. The WW2 Pacific conflict resulted from the USA embargoing Japan after they "colonized" Manchuria.
I thought somewhat similarly about World War I not being as interesting as later 20th century history until I listened to Dan Carlin's excellent "Blueprint to Armageddon". It's a multi-part Podcast going through WWI. I loved his style. Each episode is a few hours long, but it goes quick.
Check out the movie "The Blue Max". Initially, WW1 pilots were selected from the nobility. The death rate was so high that they ran low on nobility and were forced to recruit pilots from commoners. TBM is about the transition.
The soundtrack is also a favorite of mine. I don't think any other piece of music captures so well what it's like to fly.
WWI is super fascinating. It sort of marks the final transition period from stand in a polite line and shoot at one another style warfare to modern warfare.
“and the war itself is really cool” that is such a weird statement to read. Maybe “interesting“ would fit, but “cool“? I wonder if any of the people who died in the Ypres/Passchendaele region, or Somme, would call the war “cool“.
The documentary has plenty of shots of tanks entering the battlefield. Probably my favorite part of the whole thing to be honest. It goes from men on horses to seeing tanks roll through.
The first world war is a bad example. While the war was absolutely started by royalty, they did send their sons to the front to die along with commoners.
> Although the great majority of casualties in WW1 were from the working class, the social and political elite were hit disproportionately hard by WW1. Their sons provided the junior officers whose job it was to lead the way over the top and expose themselves to the greatest danger as an example to their men.
> Some 12% of the British army's ordinary soldiers were killed during the war, compared with 17% of its officers. Eton alone lost more than 1,000 former pupils - 20% of those who served. UK wartime Prime Minister Herbert Asquith lost a son, while future Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law lost two. Anthony Eden lost two brothers, another brother of his was terribly wounded, and an uncle was captured.
The hubris of the British at the time, where they fully believed that the war would only last a few weeks and they'd be 'Home for Christmas', is mainly what led to many sons of the Upper Class willingly signing up to fight in droves.
Alas, as we all know, the war lasted a lot longer than 'a few weeks'.
WW1 directly impacted the ability of many large estates across the UK to survive beyond the 1940s. It changed the cultural and class landscape of the UK significantly.
This has probably been thought, at least publicly, about almost every offensive war waged by a democratic nation. Few civilizations (there are exceptions) would stomach a war that they knew from the outset would last for years.
Cousins King George V and Tsar Nicholas II actually made a concerted effort to mediate with another cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II. However he seemed to be more influenced by his war-mongering generals, especially Von Moltke. If the blame for starting the war can be laid at any door, it is his.
One also could interpret WW2 in the Pacific to have been caused by the US forcing Japan to open up to foreign trade by sending Commodore Perry and his fleet. This ultimately resulted in the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate and lest to the nationalistic Meiji restoration.
After that some elements in Japanese politics tried to get respect from Western powers by making nice nice and imitating Western culture. That didn't bring the hoped respect and better trade deals though. Japan ended up learning from Western empirialism and got it's respect by showing some military might on its own.
You could only interpret it that way if you believed that every step in the process was a necessary progression from the previous one. That is a very big stretch over the time scale of the 1850s to the 1940s. At every stage there were possible alternative choices that would have resulted in different outcomes. Don't make the mistake of believing that what actually happened was set in stone at the beginning like a row of falling dominoes.
This is a difficult criticism since it applies to nearly every human interpretation of history. Cause and effect are so wired into our perception of the world. It's like saying, don't be fooled by your eyes, you're not seeing the truth, just a reflection of photons on your retina. Technically true, but totally useless.
No, it's not like that at all. The outcome was not determined in advance because there were multiple possible outcomes. People could have chosen to take different actions than they actually did. The events of the 1940s were not set in stone in the 1850s.
I don't disagree with that. I'm saying that no events are ever set in stone, so you can't talk about history without tying together events that are only partly related.
The same is true for the US response to Japan's invasion of Mongolia and Japan's response to the US response. If any step along the way had been different the outcome would have likely been as well.
An important point here is that it's much harder to find a clear starting point of WWII from a Japanese perspective. The whole thing pretty much was a mess starting with Commodore Perry's arrival.
To understand what Detroit is like, watch a film like "Escape from New York" or a WW2 bombing documentary.
There are areas with no police or fire forces.
Also, the soil around mfg. plants (and downwind) have metal contamination. The air quality used to be worse than anything in China today, with choking curtains of black and red soot and oxides which precipitated into the soil.
So do your homework, get your firearm certifications and spend some time there before any relocation or investment.
It is a great location if you want cheap industrial space or your own truck marshalling yard (true story) and you don't need city services like elementary schools. Check out "Detroit Steel" to see more:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6403968/