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I agree that the rhetorical construct is abused all the time, and I wouldn't use it in the case of Palestine or Israel. However, from this it does not follow that the ability to just stop wouldn't apply to Russia. (This, btw, is in response to @Gorth as well, it's too much of a hassle to quote both on a similar topic.) What you both said does apply here, as does the psychological problem of resources already spent (in the same way a gambler will often continue 'because the big win is just around the corner' even if it would be wiser to just stop and accept the current losses). But I still believe that because of the extent to which Putin controls the narrative in Russia, he could stop. The goals of the operation have already changed, and Putin could declare victory right now by saying that Mariupol has been liberated, and that would be that. Now, he absolutely won't do it. But the original claim that I objected to was that both Russia and Ukraine are effectively out of options, and thus the collective west is the main culprit for the continuation of the war. This claim is just stupid, in my opinion, and I actually wonder whether the person who made it is one of those who think that rape victims generally deserve it -- the logic is similar. Ukraine has no options, because surrender just isn't realistic. Russia has all kinds of options. It won't use them, but it absolutely does have them.

Sometimes we do, I did and find much of my old views (and self in general) embarrassing. But the repetitive epic doesn't need us to stay the same, it just needs someone to play the same role. That's the beauty or horror of it, depending on your perspective.

Projected wage increase is 4.2% and projected HICP is 6.8% (projected peak 7.5%) (in comparison projected HICP without energy is 4.1%). So in 'average' wage loss is 2.6% even if we pretend that energy price spike effects everyone same and that people use all their money in products and pretend that average people don't use big sunk of their income in rents, maintenance charges etc. that aren't projected to increase, so that we can pretend people's effective income decrease full HICP percentage. And in 2023 predicted wage increase is 4.3% and predicted HICP is 3.5%. And in 2024 predicted wage increase is 3.7% and predicted HICP is 2.2%. So projected 'average' wage loss with above standard in next 3 years is 0.3%. Even downside scenario that assumes following The scenario assumes a complete cut in Russian energy exports to the euro area starting from the third quarter of 2022, leading to a rationing of gas supplies, significantly higher commodity prices, lower trade and intensified global value chain problems. Predicted HICP is 8.0%, in that scenario 'average' wage loss in with above standard would be close to that your 4% (3.8%). In this scenario projected HICP in 2023 is 6.4% and in 2024 1.9%. There is no estimates if this scenario would effect in predicted wage increases. This scenario predicts also full collapse of Russian economy. US spending in Ukraine is same as their spending in Afghanistan, so almost all the money goes to US companies, even more so than in case of Afghanistan as they don't need to pay to their troops, translators, local suppliers etc.. So US spending is not increasing 40 billion dollars when they give 40 billion dollars aid to Ukraine.

Tim Sale comic artist, probably best know for Batman: The Long Halloween with Jeph Loeb, but had been working in the industry since 1983 on a number of titles.

You need a bachelor's degree to be police over here and I support that. Defunding isn't necessary, but spend all that money on education instead. -- On a complete sidenote, North-Dakota has the happiest people in the US. Kentucky the most miserable ones. According to this https://amerisleep.com/blog/happiest-states/ anyway. Anything to take from this? States up north seem to do better than states in the south. Worldwide Finland has the happiest people according to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world - that I refuse to believe knowing Finns to be miserable bastards. Danes are far more happier in my experience.

Second straight day of 99⁰F. Tomorrow is also supposed to be 99⁰F.

I understand. However, Sauli Niinistö is almost the opposite of a scaremonger: very careful with his language and very understated in his tone. I know you probably weren't aware of this and almost certainly haven't been able to listen to him in his native language, so no blame on you. Btw, not relevant, but here's another example of the charm of Scandinavia (for me, anyway). The president of Finland came to a book fair to listen to his wife, but all the seats were taken so he just sat on the stairs. There's something refreshingly humane about that, i.e. the leader of country being in a position to do something simple like that without any hassle.

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2022/06/us-pledges-more-weapons-ukraine-milley-warns-numbers-clearly-favor-russians/368229/ https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3064765/more-than-50-nations-pledge-to-help-build-ukraines-defense/ https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-06-15/nato-defense-ministers-to-discuss-weapons-for-ukraine

cost and privacy issues preclude constant surveillance o' cops. not only that, but am thinking anybody who has seen wonky body cam footage realizes the body cams is nowhere near as effective as sometimes advertised. the cameras have a single viewing pov and as often as not whatever you were hoping to catch with the video is not revealed by the recording. have mentioned previous how there is near fourteen thousand different law enforcement departments/agencies in this country. most current law enforcement agencies can't even afford minimal body cam programs. have some kinda system which would record every second o' every work day and then provide storage for such recordings is a massive undertaking and would need be replicated fourteen thousand times. “The easy part is buying the body cameras and issuing them to the officers. They are not that expensive,” Jim Pasco, executive director at the National Fraternal Order of Police, told the Post. “But storing all the data that they collect — that cost is extraordinary. The smaller the department, the tougher it tends to be for them.” just ain't practical at this time. HA! Good Fun!

Says the one person in the thread who spouts nothing but generalized views on whatever 'far-left, marxist' boogeyman is currently the focus of (conservative, mostly) fearmongering. Did you find that CRT curriculum you were looking for yet? This thread is, as always, a microcosm that eerily reflects the issues of the world at large. If art is, as Hamlet said, "to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure" then we should probably turn this thread into a masterpice of a cyclical stage play where every month we write a new script that is essentially the same characters talking about the same things, and nothing ever changes. Every now and then an actor is replaced by another, but the roles remain the same. In a way, this is the greatest achievement of the repetitive epic.

Gaming is very established in its fundamentals, conventions, and style at this point, and there's not a lot of deviation from it. Myself and others that I know feel the same discontent and/or fatigue that you do - you pick up a game that you think looks nice, you start playing it, and within a half hour you feel like you pretty much grasp the game in its entirety. Maybe you don't know every gameplay mechanic yet, but the ones you do know are pretty much the exact same ones found in a dozen other games that you've played and already mastered, while the ones that you'd figure out later wouldn't be much of a surprise or fundamentally change how you play the game; maybe you don't know exactly how the story will go or what will happen to the characters, but you get a general feel for all of it and what it's going for...you feel like you've seen it all executed so many times before, and much better in your favorite works. You more or less know what playing the rest of the game will be like and there's no delight in any of it, so continuing to play feels much like going through the motions - depending on how extreme the feeling for the particular game is, you're usually somewhere between simply occupying yourself with something that is "fine"...or outright numbing your brain by mindlessly shambling forward. Indie games have more experimentation than AAA games, but if you look at the top indie games of any given genre, it's largely going to be stuff that doesn't really depart from their given niches much more than the tired AAA offerings. On top of already feeling a kind of general gaming depression, these storefronts where you're trying to find something (anything!) that's different to enjoy instead bury you under endless tidal waves of samey stuff in a sickeningly over-saturated market that makes it all feel rather impossible. Everything culminates in the general feeling that either gaming has changed or you have (and it's probably a bit of both on top of getting older and having experienced it all already)...and maybe it would be better if you just find something better to do with your time. There are exceptions where something in particular magically hooks you, but it is rare and fleeting. Unfortunately, these sorts of problems pretty much also apply to every other medium of entertainment (...and possibly every source of entertainment in life in general - everything starts to get tired when you've seen or done it too many times). tl;dr: I recommend taking up dance again, .

Chris Roberts did that when he got me to pay for the Wing Commander movie

Still will come out before Star Citizen.

Organizing a chest for Xbox is a bit annoying having to constantly press the D-pad to get it to the correct spot. My current work around is to increase my overall storage and have a specific chest for every single item in order to use the quick move feature. If there was some sort of shadow ability (similar to the hot bar tool effect currently) to where it would be possible to quick move multiple items of the same category into a large chest and have it snap organize nicely, that would remove this tedious organizing time for counsel players. As a side effect, it may provide a goal for players to fill their storage up! Simply an OCD suggestion. Thanks!

Yeah, that's literally what I thought of as I was writing that. I only have to shovel a foot of snow a few dozen times each winter to make up for it... Still, it's very nice to have 10% of the entire world's fresh water supply right next to you.

It was 50-60 F for most of the day today...a bit warm for my tastes. Lake Superior not pulling its weight, .

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/police-academies-paramilitary/612859/ I took part in a volunteer police training program and came away with a similar feeling. I was idealistic and pro-police entering the program, and by the end I was pretty cynical about the whole thing.

Hey man, sometimes we change! I was curious if any of my old political takes could still be found lol. It's funny as I doubt I'd consider those social views "far left" now. One of the biggest differences in my world view since then is that I no longer believe that there's a clear distinction between social and fiscal policies and that the two are more tightly coupled than I once thought. EDIT: Oh man this one is GREAT "Republicans will rethink their platform" after 2012 election. I mean they did, but definitely not in the way I probably would have predicted! One last EDIT: Ahahahahaha

Scholz, Macron and Draghi visit Kiev to support Ukrainian EU candidacy Coincidently the Russian gas flow to Germany is almost halved.

The translation is wrong. He didn't use the term WMD, he described thermobarics as weapons capable of causing great destruction. There is a difference there, right? All WMDs are capable of causing great destruction, but not all weapons capable of causing great destruction are WMDs. The guy is a lawyer and strict with his language, so I'd wager he's chosen his words with care. As for which media, that's a fair point and one I'm not able to ascertain. Russia has plenty of equivalents for The Sun, but I'm not sure if it has equivalents for quality media anymore. It used to, but a lot has changed in the past 3+ months.

Police departments are paramilitary organizations that spend an exorbinant amount of time training in the escalation of violence, rather than focusing on de-escalation. The argument for defunding the police is to put more resources into social work and mental health care, which are severly lacking in most communities. Cameras are cool, but if you've trained officers to pull out a gun at every traffic stop, then video footage doesn't really help that. The entire training process needs to be overhauled. Thank you for attending my TED talk.

I think I should outsource my work to some people, I can look productive that way.

so, no real support for the liars accusation? a few anecdotal examples but nothing which would support the conclusion it is, "a good rule of thumb to assume cops are lying in general"? therefore, before we get too distracted, the recognition o' the hasty generalization and how you were doing exact same thing as bruce has not in any way been diminished, yes? *shrug* HA! Good Fun! ps maybe counts as spam, but am gonna repeat, again, how in spite o' fantasies 'bout what protect and serve means and the higher standard the public always wishes cops be held to, the Courts don't see any such duty or responsibilities. deshaney, catlerock v. gonzalez and warren v. dc all make it abundant clear that the public suffers from a serious disconnect regarding cop standards and duties, and considering how US communities keep lowering hiring requirements for cops and their pay is a whopping $55k per annum on average or thereabouts, expecting heroics sacrifice and honesty is not particular realistic. in spite o' what the public imagines is the higher standard for cops, no such standard exists and in point o' fact cops don't owe any duty to individual citizens for aid or defense regardless o' obvious distress.

I think it has pretty general appeal for the most part - strong and distinctive characters, a bit of stylized action, good humor, serialized storytelling, and it's only 26 episodes long. Everyone that has watched it here (which is probably around five people) seems to have liked or loved it. I finally watched Barefoot Gen (1983). It's that movie...I'm sure at least a couple of you have seen the famous clip. All of them on YouTube are in SD, while I got the joy of seeing it in HD (albeit not great HD).

sure, lets' start with the hasty generalization and the failure to offer any support other than feels. keep in mind, in the US alone there were 10 million arrests made in 2019 'ccording to less than perfect fbi data. near 500k o' those arrests were for violent crimes. 'ccording to not fbi sources, is 'bout 700k personnel employed in US as law enforcement. golly. if we are going anecdotal, is not difficult for us to name more than a few occasions from this board wherein posters reached conclusions 'bout law enforcement malfeasance way before any real info were known and in more than a few such cases the s'posed police wrongdoing were revealed to be not what were being claimed. got stats to back up the i find and i think stuff... something other than gut level confirmation bias? HA! Good Fun! ps in absence o' stats or academic studies regarding the unique untrustworthiness o' police, we would be willing to at least consider the logical specious but nevertheless persuasive offering o' years o' personal experience gleaned working close with law enforcement.

The body swap definitely wasn't for comedic effect. They pretty much broke the 4th wall outright saying that it wasn't ("that sounds too much like hijinks" or similar). Indeed, the episode was crafted masterfully to illustrate the central conflict between emotion and logic without pontificating about it, with the two logical humans trying to lighten up a bit, Spock between listening to a vulcan and a human to mirror his heritage, and the alien of the week using empathy in a non standard but logical way to get people to show they actually understand their reservations. Well ok, it wasn't masterful, but it's Trek, not Shakespeare (having said that, and in the spirit of the summary below: "haha imma drive my girlfriend to madness and suicide after murdering her father because I'm paranoid about my mother boffing my uncle after murdering my father; ps everyone except Horatio dies in finale which is a trope that gets drilled out of 10 year old writers"; days of out lives tier plotting there Will and you reused the 'everyone dies in contrived circumstances' ending multiple times too) Y'know, I'm pretty sure I can think of a dumber one. "Get frustrated at lack of progress, kidnap Pike and send him and their negotiator down to a hostile planet to fight an Invisible Enemy in the hope that Understanding Ensues and they don't end up at war when either the Enterprise tries to reclaim their captain or the negotiator, amazingly, dies fighting said Invisible Enemy and they think it's Picar^H^H^H Pike's fault". Which is, of course, the actual plot to a top 10 episode of TNG.

Does "I play mostly mobile" etc. these days mean Switch/Deck? I still think of it as phone/tablet. I tried phone/tablet games initially, and some of them are all right for brief time wasters but no desire to touch-smash a screen constantly or have a controller attached to those for anything more complex. Plus it's not PC vs other format for me. Mostly it's just ... the industry has changed a lot + when I do play something my feeling is often "this is cute/cool but I can't be bothered to sit here and keep playing or do the "git gud" process (if needed), so I turn it off. The core concept or loops of most games is always the same and I'm bored of that loop, no matter how different the details around it might be. Edit: it's akin to when I became bored of fantasy novels, or the film industry etc. I should take up some (low-key) dance again maybe. Turn the family room into a dance-room. Maybe I just don't want to sit in front of a screen anymore.

Faithless! StarCitizen will be like Starfield, but good. Finally, Starfield 5 will have a decent competition.

Catching up on last week's Strange New Worlds episode. 20 minutes in... yeah, just one word: Nope. edit: To elaborate, this episode was, next to being somewhat comedic, almost entirely crew interactions and a really weak "A"-plot about negotiations. It's barely there so calling it an A-plot is a bit of a stretch, but nothing in the crew interactions is worthy of being called a plot (let alone A-plot) either, so that's about the measure of it. I noticed I don't care about any of the crew members enough to watch their interactions and be satisfied with them. Things this episode was about: How Nurse Chapel fell in love with Mr. Spock, I question I asked myself every time Majel Barrett-Roddenberry mooned at Spock in TOS. Not. Doctor goes fishing, wears a funny hat. Ha ha ha. First Officer and Security Officer, both very unfun and serious people play "Enterprise bingo" to learn how to lighten up. Spock dreaming about fighting himself, literally, so we can have an action scene. Spock switching bodies with his fiancee. Aliens of the week negotiating by trying to make the other party understand their positions in the stupidest way possible. It was all so rote, and nothing was good enough to actually be fun. Body switching two Vulcans, come on. The comedy of body switching episodes is based on actors playing each other's roles (characters need to be different enough for the comedy to work), and that only works for well established characters that are likeable, not Spock and his guest starring fiancee*. I feel about this episode like Lindsay Ellis felt about the new The Beauty and the Beast film: *Arguably the body swap wasn't about the comedic effect but for character growth, but that should have been handled differently.

That is pretty simplified reality. As it is energy and imported goods that are causing most of the inflation. So it effects will not be evenly distributed among citizens. HICP increase without energy is predicted to be 4.1%. So people who live in cities and use mass transits as their main form of transportation will not actually see any change in their living standard, which is majority of population in EU. It is the minority population that live in countryside that will see their living standard drop. So prediction is that average person/median person will not see any major change in their PP

Battle.net Gfted1#1596. Hit me up if youde like to splode some mooks.

Saw today on Twitter that an alumni of Josh (nowadays history professor specialized on medieval medicine and religion) consulted on Pentiment: to the Tweet

Yeah, I like analysts like Michta who think big and can see the big strategic picture. His overall geopolitical conclusion is absolutely correct. The war in Ukraine is ultimately not just about the future of Ukraine. It is very much also about the future of Europe.

Mine is very first underground with drippy walls and creaky flashing emergency light. Soldiers done, Invisible Mr. Cthulhu somehow done, found the stuff I needed to find, it seems I'm in a finish line, finally thank gods...well helllooooooo, babby's first Controller! Was some Amnesia Dark Descent levels brown pants experience. People always say CoP's better, more polished etc. but IMO it doesn't have a quarter of Shadow's atmosphere.

Im surprised this game even has issues now that they have infinite microsoft money. Worst case reuse the story and setting of Pillars 1 but in first person like Skyrim, or third person like Dragon Age.

I had no idea I wanted a screaming metal cover of PSY's "Gentlemen," but apparently I did.