Rostere

So, apparently I can go see the new Star Wars on the 16th of December. Funny that something is released earlier in Sweden for once.

Sometimes, it's also cheaper for me to go by cruise ferry to Finland than to distant suburbs via commuter train. It's also faster to fly to Finland than said commuter train trip. Infamously, you get served a cup of coffee at the start of the trip which a slow drinker like myself does not have time to finish (almost a pun there) until you are forced off the plane.

At this point, I'm probably voting for someone outside of the parties myself. Unfortunately most folks will just blindly for red or blue, regardless of who wins the primary. It would be astonishing if people decided to flee the two party system in droves. But the fact that people basically vote for two parties is only due to the electoral systems used, where the "winner takes it all" (and in the case of a presidential election, you can only have one winner, but you could for example have transferrable votes...). There is no point in voting for a third, smaller party, because you're only taking away votes from the one of the two big sides you're closest to. That is, if you feel it doesn't matter which of the big sides win you could of course vote for a third party. Sadly, this will likely not result in you getting any representation at all for your opinions. You should really not call it two-party system, but "simple plurality FPTP" which is the actual system making people vote for two parties only.

Due to some mistakes which were made I now have 5+ litres of booze in the form of Sinebrychoff Cranberry Long Drink and Smirnoff Ice. I'm wondering what to do... Well, the composition of the air at least would contribute to changing the taste of what you are drinking... That, and there is always placebo.

Sounds good, the fact that you can rank party candidates in your vote I think is very important. If I'm to nitpick I still think that the thinking of electing X MPs from district ("riding" in this case) Y is flawed, though. What if you hand out voting cards based on which part of the country you live in (with people being allowed to use voting cards from any other place), but number of seats allotted to each party is decided instead by percentage of national vote? After which MPs for each party are elected based on their number of "personal votes" from their respective party lists, in descending order. This would alleviate the need for ordering different parties on your vote.

Cool, congratulations! Shows that good things can happen. STV is IMO not the best voting system, but close enough that it doesn't matter.

You actually make it sound like a decent game! Now, I tried the demo and walked off decidedly unimpressed due to the terrible graphics and the fact that the only thing making me yawn more intensely than post-apocalyptic environments is pseudo-Roman environments. Also, I found the writing to be not strong enough to compensate for these - admittedly largely subjective - shortcomings. So, does it get better later on? I can only speak of the state of the game about a year ago, but I firstly played it for about 2 hours. At that point, I thought that the writing was bad and the music was nauseating. Then I started it again a week later on a whim with a new character build. I realized how different the paths were and how interesting the game world was and played for 10+ hours straight. For me, AoD is in the top 5 of RPGs ever. Especially because it does away with so many stupid things from modern RPGs.

Like I said before, it is hard to argue that what is wrong with Islam today is something inherently wrong with the religion, or the religious texts. I mean, the Torah describes slavery, virulent racism (or should that be tribalism?) and genocide in order to conquer land, but that's not how Jews behave today. The truth is that the Islamic world was pretty much the centre of civilization between the years 800 and 1400 - look for example at the treatment of minorities during the Spanish reconquista for an example of how the Christians were essentially the bad guys during that time period. Then, increasingly Europe became the driving factor behing science and humanism until the 1700s, when it can be argued that the Islamic world had become decrepit enough to not be able to contribute anything at all to science, which is pretty much the case until today. Clearly, if Islamic culture has been more civilized and humanistic than Christian culture at some point in time, there is nothing in theory preventing that from happening again. Also, if you would argue that Western culture is no longer Christian but in practice atheist, there is nothing preventing the same to happen to Islamic culture. So the argument should be about why people choose to interpret religion in a specific way, and not about religion in itself.

Hmm, I think in your eagerness you've made a rather obvious omission there- Iraq. While Iraq ain't Syria ISIS has considerable holdings there and is a neighbour, same as Turkey and is certainly more involved than the US or Russia. Hmm, I think in your eagerness you forgot to read the rest of my post.

It's a rather complicated situation, not unlike Europe before WWI... The Turks are cheering ISIS and trying not to get in their way because they are helping them to eliminate the Kurds as a unified force, the Americans are cheering for the Kurds, being their "boots on the ground" fighting ISIS. For both parties, Assad is the almost forgotten third part. I would put my bets on Russia seeing Assad as their "boots on the ground" fighting ISIS too, it being the bigger threat and wanting to keep their influence out of the Muslim parts of the Caucasus region. No, you're wrong. None of the involved parties except possibly the Kurds thinks of ISIS as the biggest threat (Turkey is the contender to that title). ISIS is not the biggest threat to Assad, because he know that in a contest between ISIS and Assad, the global community will choose Assad. Assad is doing his best to eliminate all rebel factions which could win the civil war with the support of most of the global community. Russia does not see ISIS as the biggest threat for the same reasons. Turkey does obviously not consider ISIS a threat to them, they consider them to be a pawn against both Assad and the Kurds. Israel probably considers none of the warring parties a military threat, and their PM has repeatedly said that he favours a deadlock, where all the factions fight themselves into oblivion. The US does not consider ISIS their biggest threat, they consider Assad the biggest threat, because if you remove Assad, the Russians would be on the side of the moderate Syrian rebels and there would be no issue with the US bombing what they want wherever they want in Syria. Well, of course, none of the factions are a threat to the US, but you get my point. Possibly the Iraqis considered ISIS their biggest threat for some time, but now that all Shia-majority parts of Iraq are re-occupied, the Kurds have returned to being their greatest threat, since they are the only part of Iraq which could conceivably secede with the support of the global community. Now on the other hand, everybody says that ISIS is the main enemy, because that's where there is PR to be gained.

ISIS stands for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, so I'm still not sure what your point is about Iraqis. It's definitely a war torn country. Although I'm surprised to hear there are waves of Afghanis. Afghanistan has gone down the ****ters and the Taliban are taking back the country, last I heard. That means everyone must flee from there because there exists no other entity which can inspire people to fight.

So if you could choose, no budgets would be passed and the government would be in perpetual shutdown?

We'd be the only conservative country in the world, and therefore the most economically successful and freest country in the world. And really, don't Conservatives deserve their own homeland? Btw, efforts to secede haven't led to war anywhere in the Western world, and one might remember that the feds backed off when confronted with an armed population in that dispute with the Nevada rancher. Saudi Arabia is p. conservative, yet I would not call them free or economically successful...

To think that pedophilia should be legal is a fairly political opinion in my mind. What I'm saying is that it is misleading to confuse cultural and political matters. I bet not all Afghanis think sexually abusing minors should be legal. Catholicism is also a cesspit of pedophilia cover-ups, but we don't see demonstrations against Catholicism because of that - the pedophiles and pedophile enablers are implicitly assumed to be unwanted by the majority of Catholics. For some reason, we give some people that benefit of doubt, but not to others. Somehow we consider Christianity "salvageable" even though a quick read through the Old Testament reveals that it is a text which every moral person must throw onto the refuse pile. But if we learn that Mohammed married a 9-year old girl, that implies that all Muslims are necessarily pedophiles. In reality, civilized people are going to explain away the really stupid **** in their books just like Christians do with theirs. It is just a matter of spin. For any culture, we want to give the benefit of doubt to as many people as possible, which means we want to rule out the people we do not want by their political opinions - we do not want to rule out anyone by their culture alone, since a person might have the exact same political opinions as is accepted here but still consider themselves as belonging to a foreign culture. Let's make this a question about politics, since culture is a too wide concept.

I really do not understand what is up with complaining about "culture". I agree that the political views of migrants are important, and that we should not receive people who do not believe in democracy, equality and so on, but what else is there? If there is nothing more, then shouldn't we quit talking about "culture" and start talking about political views?

Well, different types of whisky are very easy to tell apart. Barrel aging also adds a distinct flavour. Since aging is the common factor among expensive whiskies, they are typically easy to tell apart from cheap whiskies. That said, there are superb cheap whiskies and so-so expensive whiskies.

We're nowhere near that plane of AI yet. We do not even exactly know consciousness even is yet. Pretty much this. The possibilities of AI in the fields of image recognition, decision-making and analyzing language and so on are huge, but actual human-like robots are far away. Today it pretty much passes for "very cool" if a robot can ride a bike or pass a small obstacle course. They are not going to be like humans tomorrow, just like cars were not about to be powered by nuclear power tomorrow in the fifties.

wat

People are too afraid of AI and robots in general. It reminds me of the hippies who want to shut down all nuclear reactors.

Hey guys, I'm in a bit of a pickle and I desperately need your help. Do you have any idea where you can find a pair of British cavalry field boots from circa 1900-1950? I could go with US boots as well, as long as the model is similar enough (many are). To be specific, I need the ones with three buckles, like these. In fact I just lost that auction and have been gnashing my teeth ever since because I need a pair of boots exactly like those, and £79 is a steal. Do you have any tips?

It would seem Russia is also interested in getting into the business of ****ing up ME nations.

Maybe if the entire Middle East moves to Europe, the West will finally learn to stop destabilizing the region.

You put too much importance in what other people say, think and do. That's my opinion.

It's a good thing I guess, in the sense that I will get some spontaneous vacation. It's a bit bad in the sense that I can't work from here. Although I do have a bit of money to burn, and the CPI here is 60-70% of the CPI in Sweden IIRC.

So, apparently I will be spending the next few days in Tallinn.