Zoraptor

As said in the nVidia thread they are supposed to have decent availability due to being delayed for two months- and the bad press about the nV5000s does seem to have penetrated the bubble rather more than usual. Both of those ought to be positives for AMD. And consumers really. Still, no top end card is a major minus and AMD will have exactly the same 'problem' that nVidia has, ie that consumer graphics are the least profitable use* of their expensive and limited fab space so there isn't really that much motivation to push market share and aggressive pricing vs pushing the same for AI/ pro graphics/ CPUs etc. *except the MSony console chips in absolute terms, but those largely fund the consumer graphics' development so have a different plus

May depend a lot on availability too, can't buy a nVidia card if there aren't any for sale. Obviously all rumours, but 9070 is meant to have decent supply due to it originally being slated for a January launch while nVidia's launch numbers are not meant to be great, again. The negative talk about the 5000 series also seems to have resonated rather more than some of nVidia's other prior issues.

Old World is good. And that's from someone who doesn't like one unit per tile much at all. I'm a bit behind on the dlc though. Bruce and Elon wouldn't like it due to the DEI influences.

US pauses military aid to Ukraine. (not 100% confirmed at this point but enough for reuters to run it)

Europe hasn't been able to spin up production of something as simple as artillery shells after three years, and that's something which is basically the same as it was 150 years ago. As always it's very easy to talk about production, far more difficult to actually do it. The great irony is that the war has shown you don't have to spend vast amounts. The most effective weapon in the entire war and by far the most cost effective is a cheap drone with a cheap warhead at maybe, maybe, 1k per use. Yet you know most of the money will go to kewl toys like €30mn Leo2s, planes and further investment in precision weapons that aren't very precise when the opposition has decent jamming capability. You need to use GDP PPP, not GDP raw (ie take into account discrepancies in how much stuff costs to buy country to country, not just use absolute monetary values). With purchase price parity the EU economy (28tr) is almost exactly 4 times Russia's (at 7tr), not 10 times.

First ten minutes of our tv news bulletin was talking about that 'plan'. Not going to escape the accusations that everything done is about making people feel good about themselves any time soon. Indeed, it seemed to be the result of one of those self help books where you're told to constantly talk about the best case scenario as if talking about it will make it happen. Not even really the concept of a plan- hence Starmer and Macron not even agreeing over a one month partial truce being part of it is telling. They haven't even really got Zelensky on side- "long long way from peace", needing 200k+ peacekeepers etc. OK, the guy makes Trump look like a conservative- and consistent- negotiator since he's also said peace is needed as soon as possible. Even the wildly biased are pouring cold water on it- eg Frank Gardiner's BBC article. Three questions about the whether the 'peace plan' could work and the answer to all three is 'no'.

Ukraine has no proven exploitable Rare Earth deposits, though they have a lot of other stuff. The closest is Tantalum and Niobium, neither of which are capital letter Rare Earths, and neither is economically exploitable. And we're speaking relatively tiny amounts like 300mn USD of Niobioum. Which is a shame in some ways since they're what you get from coltan which is one of the minerals being fought over in Congo. It's pretty much entirely so Trump can say he's getting a win and 'value' for US taxpayers. You can read the deal's text in various places: 'concept of a deal' is not much of an exaggeration, at all, and it's clearly designed solely to get signed rather than achieve anything. Which would have been a win for both sides. Trump could even have kept up the aid under the pretense that it was all going to be paid back It doesn't make any sense, except in the context of Trump being Trump. Which is unfortunate, but not much anyone can do about it. It's hindsight* more than being disingenuous. We know what actually happened, and that just about any other option could have turned out better than what we got. I wouldn't necessarily have advocated for it and most of the other suggestions were ones I would personally have advocated for first. It may just be a problem with two non politicians meeting but it has also been an issue for Ukraine in general. They've picked unnecessary diplomatic fights with Poland, India, China, Africa and have had a distinct tendency towards maximalist demands even when it was clearly not the best approach. *not entirely so though given how Zelensky said he was going to approach things.

Forced? Doesn't seem like Zelensky was marched in at gunpoint. He could have said no to the press conference- it would hardly have turned out worse. He could have grinned and borne it instead of reacting. He could have decided to have someone else there as well, or to use translators to slow things down, or to try and wind things up. Once again, Zelensky said that was going to be his approach beforehand, and Trump reacted exactly as you'd expect him to. Can anyone actually say that they thought a "very direct" approach to Donald Trump was a good idea? They'd done the hard work by making the minerals agreement utterly nebulous, he only had to make it through the signing It's all very well talking about ambushes and humiliation and implying that Zelensky was brave and stuck to his guns or whatever but that ignores that Ukraine needs the US while the US does not need Ukraine. Doesn't matter if that is an unpalatable fact, it is a fact.

Don't know if it was poor prep or a (bad) plan. Zelensky must have- must have- been told how best to handle Trump. The reactions of the Ukrainian ambassador weren't exactly subtle as things were going downhill. Even if he wasn't it's not exactly rocket surgery: massage the guy's ego and talk about how ready for a deal you are in general terms. Normally you might blame Trump more but... you kind of have to deal with reality, even if you don't like it and the reality is that Trump is Trump. Zelensky behaved exactly as he said he would before the meeting and Trump reacted exactly as you'd expect. If anything it took him longer than you might expect given it was ~50 minutes and things only blew up in the last 10. Dunno, I'm fairly cynical by nature especially when it comes to geopolitics and I find it difficult to believe that was what Macron wanted- too much risk of a permanent break occurring, and Macron talks a good talk* but is inherently risk averse. Might make sense if he's already written Ukraine off as a lost cause, but I can't really see that. *one of the funnier things is reading breathless headlines like "Macron to send troops to Ukraine!!!" and checking the context to find that he actually said he'd send troops, if there was a ceasefire and international agreement accepting them. So, not sending them any time soon in other words. Also stuff like planning to spend 5% of GDP on defence; easy for him to say, but Not Going to Happen.

Don't know what Macron thought he was doing getting Trump to invite Zelensky to the WH. If you were going to lobby for the meeting you had to make sure it wasn't going to be bilateral at least, so you could try to smooth things over at the first wrinkle. A public bust up was always going to be a very, very real possibility. Zelensky isn't Macron and he isn't Starmer- his normal approach could not be better calculated to annoy someone like Trump and he very publicly said he would keep his normal approach (eg be "very direct"). It's all well and good being true to yourself or whatever platitudes people may trot out; but you should also do what is best for your country when you're its leader* and that isn't getting into a spat with its biggest supporter over the previous three years. *And that's whether or not it was a 'planned' ambush. Indeed, it's quite probably worse for Zelensky if it was planned since if it was he ended up giving them exactly what they wanted.

Eh, the problem with saying Kravchuk supported membership is the historical context- if you say he supported it then you have to say the same about Yeltsin, and Putin too. The only concrete step Kravchuk took was joining PFP, which Russia did as well. And, PFP was only formalised as a pathway to join NATO in Dec94, after Kravchuk was voted out.

What actually happens and what people expect to happen aren't necessarily the same, so what happens is largely irrelevant when explaining motivations. Hitler didn't invade Poland- or the SU- expecting to be shooting himself in the ruins of Berlin a few years later, though it was a predictable result of trying to fight most of the rest of the world simultaneously. Bush didn't invade Iraq expecting to be bogged down in an insurgency 5 years later, but he should have. Bob didn't bet the mortgage money expecting his sure thing to lose. People make mistakes, even predictable ones. There's no reason to believe that stopping Ukraine joining NATO was not the reason for Putin invading just because it resulted in other countries joining and he didn't get the results he wanted. It's the one thing they've been 100% consistent on. In any case while Sweden and Finland loved talking about their 'neutrality', they weren't neutral to most practical effects. We kind of had this discussion a few months ago. The polls were even lower for Ukraine, yet every single leader except Yanukovich and Kravchuk supported NATO membership.

Showing Trump and Bibi sunbathing disqualifies anything from 'looking nice'. Not quite as bad as the ethnic cleansing though.

It doesn't have to be part of the agreement for that to happen. Trump can send- or not- stuff without it being formally mandated- and it doesn't seem like much is formally mandated, certainly not with any great detail. The obvious answer is that no NATO and no troops removes the reason for the invasion; so there won't be subsequent ones. It's clearly not something Putin was actually keen on given it took him 23 (or 15, though that was clearly not anywhere approaching full scale) years to invade in the first place. (That's one of the issues with assigning blanket motivations as if people are cartoon villains: a cartoon villain Putler bent on expansion for the sake of it would have invaded Ukraine far earlier. A cartoon villain probably would have invaded the Baltics before they joined NATO too, not stopped short of Tblisi in 2008 and a bunch of other things. There wouldn't be a Belarus, wouldn't be a Kazakhstan, wouldn't be an Armenia and as a consequence almost certainly wouldn't be an Azerbaijan. One of the great ironies is how Clinton seemed like a good President at the time but so many of his decisions turned out to be garbage in retrospect, including expanding NATO without any accounting for Russia- something he was repeatedly warned about by people like George Kennan. If you want(ed) Ukraine in NATO, you should (have) invite(d) Russia. Couldn't have that though, then Europe might realise they didn't need the US.)

The more cynical might regard that as more of a concept of an agreement than an actual one. Every hard choice kicked down the road so both sides could claim a win.