Zoraptor

At bare minimum Ethiopia and Kenya have intervened in Somalia.

It was a bit more than bad blood, since Interahamwe were literally literally the remnant Hutu genocide gangs from 1994. (Not Bruce, but the legal justification for the intervention was fine, under international law. You can 'invade' a neighbour if they're unable to prevent cross border raids against your country. It's certainly an oft abused position though, and the Rwandan intervention was not just about raids any more than for others who abuse that justification like the US and Turkey. OTOH, that specific war would almost certainly have happened in some form with or without Rwanda as the central Congolese state was and largely remains extremely weak with the country being an impoverished mish mash of ethnicities and local power blocs theoretically ruled over (up until recently) the decidedly non democratic Laurent Kabila)

The magazine she partnered was Bitch Magazine, which I thought would run into the naughty word filter but it seems not. And it does have a physical media version so far as I can tell, so not actually an emag. That was for Tropes vs Women, prior to the kickstarter. Feminist Frequency was a product of her time in university, but so far as I am aware was always media analysis rather than academic in nature. It certainly doesn't claim to be academic in nature, from their site: "Feminist Frequency began with a borrowed camera and some lights. In 2009, Anita Sarkeesian started making videos examining pop culture from a feminist perspective. The videos aimed to analyze modern media’s relationship to gender, race, and sexuality, and we have always advocated for the just treatment of all people, offline and online."

Well yeah, technically, it was a rogue strike from the civilian CIA rather than from a military general. That's not exactly running counter to the overall point though, indeed, having rival operators stepping on each others' toes is an illustration of it being shambolic and not in any way a denunciation of it. The natural evolution was exactly what we got a decade later- CIA backed Syrian rebels actively fighting against Pentagon backed Syrian rebels.

She did a relevant Masters, but undergrad was media studies or similar, and Tropes vs Women was established in partnership with an emag, not a university or similar. She's definitely a media personality rather than an academic. I'd agree completely with Hurlshot, except for her not cashing in on the harassment. That she 100% did, how to maximise publicity and run a media campaign is one of the things she would have learnt in her communications courses.

The very first drone strike, like ever? There was also the infamous case from February 2002 where some poor Afghan farmer got droned literally because they were tall. And that's off the top of my head. Considering how much effort the US goes to to obfuscate the negative nature of its drone program- everyone killed by them is a terrorist, unless it can be proven otherwise so no civilians are killed etc- it's surprising there's even those examples, and they're only known because of the turf war to sometimes literal war by proxy, between the CIA and the military.

Don't know, it was a non rhetorical question. In order to establish whether there's cancel culture for books and who is to blame you need to establish if anything has been 'cancelled' and who is doing it. Not much point arguing about something that may not even exist.

It looks far more that that info is just irrelevant rather than inaccurate. It doesn't really matter if some parent(s) complain(s) about, say, Harry Potter 5 times over a 20 year period, it's pretty obvious that HP/ Rowling didn't get 'cancelled'* even if a random library actually removed it instead of thanking the parents for their concerns and transferring the correspondence to the circular file. But if nothing else, the consistent appearance of certain titles in those lists year after year makes it obvious they haven't been cancelled, whatever the complaints. In order to be cancel culture the thing actually has to get cancelled. The question really is how many books actually get 'cancelled' by the censorious 'left' compared to the censorious 'right', not how many complaints there are. The only question about 'accuracy' is the number of complaints, typically 3-400, and even that is more about relevance. You'd have to suspect that even the most slacktivist of woke campaigns can get more than that tweeting over a far shorter period than a year, and will typically target the publisher rather than libraries. *and of course the great irony is that now it's the wokesters going after Rowling because she has the wrong views on gender... On Lula, the main defence for him is that everyone in Brazilian politics is corrupt, but at least he brought millions out of poverty instead of (well, in addition to, more realistically) just adding more to the divide between rich and poor as has been usual practice from the likes of 2% Temer and Bolsonaro.

That's the problem with having a virus and its disease have different names. There's no evidence- so far as I am aware- that obese people are more likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2; but they're more likely to get its negative effects covid-19 and more likely for them to be serious. So whether they're moire likely to get it depends on whether you're talking about covid19 or the virus. Most of these studies coming out recently are scientific/ statistical confirmation of stuff that has been known anecdotally for months. So you have myocarditis, obesity, effects on capillaries etc all being Published recently because they now have enough good data to confirm what was already 'known' and for there to have been proper peer review.

Kind of funny how easy people are to manipulate and how utterly naive they are to even the most basic PR moves. Literally everyone familiar with the Royal Family knows who asked how dark the baby's skin colour would be, it wouldn't do the slightest damage to name everyone's racist uncle Prince Philip as the person asking that question. It does more damage not to name him because speculation, and Meghan Markle 100% knows that. Archie doesn't get to be a prince because Prince Harry publicly said he didn't want his children to have titles literally years ago, and Archie doesn't qualify for being a Prince. She's also not Princess Diana, coming into the family blind as an innocent (more or less) 19 year old, she's a TV actress in her 30s. Harry is also at best thick as two short planks. Yeah, everyone in the royal family feels trapped, not a secret, Liz the QM famously hated Edward VIII for abdicating and forcing her husband to be King. They still do it though, with a smile. I'm sure they'll be very keen to reconcile with brave Harry who spoke his mind after... running away and leaving them to take up his slack. Ironically Harry and Meghan come across as utterly entitled. They wanted only the perks of the RF and none of the downsides and for everything to bend to them. And they'll run the money side of being royals into the ground, on their own terms. To quote the great philosopher Scott Steiner: "no simpy". Quite the opposite, in fact.

Most of the AyyMD crowd is banned from the Intel sub. Rocketlake just doesn't really seem to have any big positives to balance out the obvious negatives. The Intel hype machine is also starting to annoy a lot of Intel loyalists who have been waiting for a new desktop architecture for 5 years (!) and were actually expecting the claimed 19% IPC gain. But anyway, how many uses does rocketlake beat Zen3 at even excluding gaming though? They're only doing 8 and 6 core versions so they're very much in the 'gaming' market segment, too expensive for the budget office PC type set up and for anything multithreaded it gets brutally murdered by the higher core counts of 5950/5900. Its main advantage is AVX512- which has very few applications while turning the CPU into a blast furnace- and having an iGPU that can be leveraged for some tasks and is pretty decent. Don't think there's confirmed pricing out (?) but the indications from the Anandtech article is that they will be more expensive than cannonlake but still perform worse than Zen3, and in some uses regress from cannonlake. There is certainly a decent case for some of the cannonlake cpus as a budget option still since their price/ performance is good.

What next, "I was really hoping that Intel would at least be competitive this gen so AMD would be pressured to drop prices"? That's a bit harsh on 14nm- the new chip has major weaknesses which were strengths for previous 14nm offerings. Latency for example, where Rocket Lake is little short of awful compared to Cannon Lake. It's not that 14nm isn't antiquated, but there clearly are architectural problems with the backport despite the IPC gains, hence the poor gaming performance compared to a 9900k even with a theoretical 10%+ clock v clock lift. Ultimately the situation isn't because of 14nm showing its age so much as Intel's decision to tie architectural advances to process, and then 10nm being so problematic for so long.

Microsoft Exchange hacked, by China this time. Might be time for the big US corps to upgrade their protection from McAfee, and the NSA to deprioritise dragnetting gran's chain emails and funny cat videos for some industrial espionage prevention?

I imagine it will be used a very great deal, at userbenchmark.

I have to admit, that review is kind of selling me on QG as well. I've been looking for a replacement for Dark for a while. Closest was Discovery S3, but while that certainly was depressing it wasn't so in the right way.

Fortunately I'm on the hills already, and not quite in the right place for an evacuation even if at low altitude. A tsunami that reached my house would need a Chixulhub asteroid or a 9.9 MM earthquake, and in either event the tsunami might actually be the lesser effect compared to the nuclear winter etc. A 7.3 a 7.1 and a 8.1 earthquake all within ~6 hours of each other makes for an interesting morning. The tsunami didn't really do much except stir up sediment and give an early high tide but you definitely wouldn't want to be in the water at least. It does kind of remind me of when we had international media phoning up about the Fiordland earthquake (7.8 and on mainland NZ rather than a long way off shore) and being baffled that no one was injured let alone dead and how its biggest effect was startling the mythical fiordland moose.

SARS-CoV-2 confirmed to directly attack cardiac muscle. Myocarditis (heart inflammation) is one of the major 'long covid' contributors and may be deadly by itself due to arrhythmia and other indirect effects.

That's the 'Brazilian' variant for anyone just reading the headline and wondering. Readily able to reinfect and rendering vaccines ineffective would be a real concern, if it's somewhat increased reinfection and somewhat decreased vaccine effectiveness that would be more or less as expected. There's clearly some ability to reinfect among all variants, since the earliest confirmed reinfection was mid last year well before the Brazilian variant was isolated.

And that is the crux of the dispute. Null Zero is the lack of a number, the complete reverse of a really real number- it's the mathematical equivalent of using 'literal' for something figurative and thus a literature infringement. Whoever included it in 'Real' numbers was clearly some sort of liberal arts major rather than a proper mathematician, had no doubt been on the turps and was possibly age addled too. It isn't included in Integers or Whole numbers for good reason, it should not be included in 'Real' either. A proper numerical system would be Ø or similar used for the unique entity made from the equation a-a=x with 0 being used as a placeholder for base increments. Null zero does not behave like a normal number because it is not a number but a prisoner of definitions, it should be excluded to properly address its unique qualities. This is a hill I'm prepared to die on.

Real numeric systems exclude zero though. Zero is not a number, it is in fact the lack of a number- or even a numeric singularity. For how does one define darkness, except as an absence of light? At very best it functions as a place holder, but that is not true zero, as illustrated by all place holder 'zeroes' being expressed differently when using a different base system. Think about it a second, it not actually being a number explains why you cannot divide by zero and the numeric singularity explains why if you multiply anything by zero you get zero- it eats the real numbers, the whole numbers, the rational and irrational and turns them all into itself or some undefined non value. Zero is numeric cancer, numeric prions, a numeric virus; it is not some saviour nor is it simply a mathematical concept, it's the cuckoo in the nest. To show my utter loathing I'd end with ceterum censeo nullum esse delendam, except it already has been. :philosoraptor:

Drought as a reason for shortages and price hikes for microchips? Reminds me of the price fixing shenanigans with RAM a few years back where all the producers had weird 'problems' simultaneously. TSMC is definitely in the price gouging phase of market dominance, and probably will be until Apple buys GloFo or something. Samsung have zero Taiwan fabs and even the assemblers/ AIBs based in RoC actually assemble almost everything in PRC, so it shouldn't be a problem for nVidia anyway. AMD's problem is still MSony having coordinated their console releases and taking up 80% of their fab space. Fundamentally of course the problem is that inflated prices benefit everyone in the production chain, so long as they're being bought at the end still. I'd expect a lot more odd explanations of price rises until someone decides to look at price fixing. Whereupon, miraculously, the problems will clear up.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy found guilty of corruption. Not for campaign financing rule breaking itself but for attempting to bribe a judge investigating it. He's also still facing charges of accepting money from Gaddafi- who, of course, Sarkozy lead the campaign to kill, no doubt coincidentally.

If Hershey uses local milk there's no reason to add* butyric acid as a 'preservative' at all, unless for some reason they want to store it longer term. Higher acid products tend to have longer shelf lives than 'straight' milk by a factor of maybe 4 times. Of course long term storage kind of defeats the purpose of fresh local sourcing. To be strenuously fair to them, there are seasonal milk shortages as cows dry off and have to go through another pregnancy cycle to start producing again, but those are managed and staggered, unless the US system is significantly different from elsewhere, and those limitations are present in Europe/ New Zealand/ anywhere else too. Overall, if they are selling butyric acid tainted chocolate as a matter of course it would be 100% a deliberate choice presumably to save money. *technically if it's lipolysed it's breaking a 4 carbon acid group off the end of a fat molecule rather than directly adding butyric acid, though the effect is the same. Naturally it would be lactic acid sending milk 'off' most of the time which is not fat related but lactose sugar metabolism, iirc. Butyric acid is from the fat elements going off instead, or in this case adding an enzyme to cleave it off.

They do their 'live' testing in other countries, eg Brazil for sinopharm. Their approach is also the most traditional one- attenuated/ dead virus- so does not require extensive development, and at least in theory they can do side effect based tests with or without the virus being present, it's only the efficacy tests that are difficult to do (and hence farmed out elsewhere).

To paraphrase the great philosopher Mick Dundee: That's not a conspiracy theory, this is a conspiracy theory... Everyone knows there are shortages of gpus and cpus. The reason for that is not Intel and to a lesser extent Samsung crapping the bed or high demand for hardware due to everyone staying at home because of covid or supply side issues due to shipping being completely asterisked; the real reason is that the foundries that make them are now too busy making the microchips that are going into the vaccines to make enough cpus/ gpus. Think about it sheeple, you know it makes sense.