Tango

Is that Peter Serafinowicz? AKA the original, pre-Witwer voice of Darth Maul? AKA the live action The Tick? AKA the inventor of the Butterfield Diet Plan? It’s hard to recognize him sometimes.

In this context, “lost” means they died, not just wounded. The wounded add another million to the casualty total for Russia.

Seems like a perfect foundation for an SNL skit: Gilligan’s Island except with:

• Putin as the Skipper
• Lukashenko as Gilligan
• Steven Seagal as Ginger, the Movie Star
• etc

It’s perfect for SNL due to how nobody under 30 will get any of the outdated pop culture references

North Korea was untouchable from the beginning due to all the artillery it has embedded in the mountains, aimed at Seoul. The Korean peninsula was a hostage situation whereby the North would destroy Seoul at the first sign of trouble and nobody, not even the USA, was able to do anything about it.

North Korea sought nukes not for security but to give it options for further extortion.

Yes that’s my guess as well: the prospect of stealing even a fraction of the business that Amazon does would probably make the whole thing worth it, and to that end, the main thing eBay brings to the table is the kind of pre-established brand recognition that money can’t buy.

I suspect one of the stumbling blocks will be liability. Software generally needs updates to stay ahead of new cybersecurity threats as they’re discovered. Any proposal for releasing serverside code (so that people have the option to continue to run servers themselves if they want to continue playing a heavily online-focused game) will need to address how to limit a developer’s legal liability from such a release.

Let’s say Blizzard discontinues WOW, and I, as a player, obtain serverside code from them to run my own server for myself and my friends. Now, let’s say that some hacker group discovers a new exploit that is unpatched on my WOW server, because no patch exists, because the serverside code is abandoned by Blizzard and provided to me “as is”. Do I have any legal avenue to sue Blizzard for whatever damage is caused? Because that question contains a lot of grey areas and “it depends on whether…” caveats. Which is by no means an insurmountable problem to solve, but the question does need to be asked, and both sides will have valid arguments in both directions.

The question of “what burden of legal responsibility will the developer continue to bear as a result of providing server code which continues to be used long after they’ve stopped maintaining it” will need to be clarified.

Speaking to delegates at the summit during the trip, Carney also emphasized why Canada is so focused on Europe.

“As the rules-based order … is rebuilt, it will be rebuilt in Europe,” Carney said.

I suppose that makes sense. In business, when trying to compete with a well-established monopoly, one of the most crucial things to consider is brand recognition, and the EU is, at this point, the global entity with the most “brand recognition”, out of all the countries/organizations that still believe in the concept of the rules-based order.

You say you still care for me  
But your heart and soul needs to be free  
And now that you've got your freedom  
You wanna still hold on to me  
You don't want me for yourself  
So let me find somebody else  

Set me free, why don'tcha babe  
Get out my life, why don'tcha babe  
'Cause you don't really love me  
You just keep me hangin' on  

TBH I would have thought that Nigeria was relatively wealthy as African nations go, and that the net flow of migrants would be inward rather than outward. Can anyone tell me how wrong I am?

So the upshot of this article seems to be that Kenyan communities, hundreds of them, each have their own local gang/militia which is sponsored by one politician or another, with the politician using the gang as an enforcement arm, attacking rival politicians, attacking adverse protests, etc. The problem is so ingrained that one academic describes it as “Kenyan culture”. The government and police make strong statements to the effect of “we’re cracking down on them, we’ve investigated them, we’ve got the names of the sponsors, and the problem will be solved soon”, but there are no actual actions visibly taking place to effect said crackdown. In fact, police seem to turn a blind eye towards or even perhaps collaborate with the gangs, with gang violence taking place regardless of police presence.

Ultimately we’re just gonna have to switch to EVs whether it’s convenient or not. Life is life and sometimes you just gotta suck it up and adapt to changing conditions. We’ll figure out all the little tricks for keeping batteries working the same way we figured out all the little tricks to keep diesel engines working: through trial and error and lots of cursing, followed by revelatory “ohhhhhhhhs” and word of mouth - sometimes even intergenerational word of mouth.

And we can talk and talk about which type of engine performs better but at the end of the day, humanity’s gonna keep starting wars over fossil fuels for as long as they’re valuable, driving the prices up higher and higher, so sustainable energy is the only path forward with any future, not just environmentally speaking but financially speaking. If you’re a self-employed haulier and you’re approaching retirement age, I could see why you’d wanna try and make your combustion engines last you to retirement. But anyone who’s buying, needs to buy electric or they’re sabotaging themselves. Because the big companies are gonna kick and scream against EVs and solar for as long as they think they can squeeze a little more profit out of fossil, but as soon as they make the switch to electric they’re suddenly gonna start lobbying government to tax the fuck out of anyone still running fossil. If you haven’t made the switch by then, you’re gonna be fucked.

It happened with the banking crisis: the entire system was geared towards keeping that game of musical chairs going as long as possible. But once one or two big names started to offload their CDO and CDO ^2s, things all changed very quickly and suddenly the players that already had chairs were eager to get the music to stop as quickly as possible. It’ll be the same way with fossil fuels: it’ll look like it’s gonna last forever until suddenly it’s dead.

I didn’t know acquittals could be appealed.

Plus streaming services have a habit of cancelling series suddenly. Taking Lucasfilm (not even the entirety of Disney) for an example, Willow and The Acolyte were great shows that just got axed with no resolution. How am I supposed to feel invested in new shows if I have no reason to think they’ll get conclusions? It sapped my enthusiasm for the universe so much I didn’t even bother with Skeleton Crew or Maul. Thankfully Andor got an ending.

Jacking up the price repeatedly in the first few years (since every service except Netflix is still relatively new) isn’t a great way to build consumer trust. I think most platforms were banking on popular IPs (Star Wars and Marvel for Disney; DC, ASOIAF and Harry Potter for WB; LOTR and The Boys for Amazon; Star Trek and D&D for Paramount; etc) to trigger some kinda compulsive “gotta watch 'em all” response from fans of those IPs, but if you ask me, it seems more like fans are starting to burn out on those franchises. I’m a huge Star Wars fanboy and there’s a Darth Maul series out and I can’t even muster the interest to watch it.

If he’s capable of resurrection after being dead for 46 years, I’m certainly going to listen to Jean-Paul Sartre.

True but if it’s THAT obvious then there’s no need to say it, either. Every European soundbyte that urges Ukraine to accept territorial losses undermines its negotiating position with Russia in any peace talks. You don’t offer final concessions as an initial position. The optimal negotiating position for Ukraine is for Russia to be hearing “we’re behind Ukraine 100%; don’t give those Russian bastards a thing” from Ukraine’s allies. It doesn’t need to be the truth. Russia doesn’t even need to believe that we mean it. But Russia seeing its negotiating counterparties bravely hiding weakness is better than Russia seeing its negotiating counterparties so close to the brink that they’re not even capable of putting on a brave face anymore.

Russia isn’t publicly, officially acknowledging any painful realities on its side, even though we know the challenges it’s refusing to acknowledge, so we shouldn’t be the first to blink either. This isn’t a negotiation between friends.

Politicians don’t need to idly shoot the breeze on foreign policy just to please voters. There are some subjects where sharing idle opinions off the cuff is counterproductive. To quote The Godfather: “never tell anybody outside the family what you’re thinking again”.

300kg is slightly less than four average-weight grown men.