Zoraptor

Yep, Trump's perception already being bad is the key factor. Political pundits always seem to fall into the trap of thinking as political pundits instead of as voters in an unusual election. That's why they got the last election wrong consistently. Trump is an excellent campaigner (not an excellent candidate, he should lose to an Urkel plushie) because he knows what he has to do to win. His support base is at this stage rock solid, so his aim isn't so much to attract new votes but to suppress Biden's vote. In that respect having a bun fight is exactly the right move because it drags Biden down, not because it will get more people voting Trump. Pundits and even polls saying Biden won aren't relevant, far more important are how many people it alienated who would have voted Biden before watching the debate.

Armenia is almost completely irrelevant to everything outside its immediate region, perhaps excepting its enormous and influential diaspora. Azerbaijan is a major hydrocarbon producer. There's no realistic risk of spillover, the fighting is probably the Azeris mostly trying to get the Armenians back to the table on more favourable (to the Azeris) terms. There's no doubt if they could retake Nagorno-Karabakh they would, and that would involve a lot of refugees since that region is 99% ethnic Armenian and the Azeris... well, anyone can duckduckgo Ramil Safarov to find out how Azerbaijan treats its citizens who murder Armenians; even if they didn't actively drive all the Armenians out they'd likely flee.

I could literally feel my brain cells dying while watching. Missed the start, and even then couldn't stick it out to the end. I have to say that the commentators who are seemingly surprised and appalled they got the verbal equivalent of pie throwing rather than a debate certainly shouldn't be surprised. Trump is fundamentally a salesman rather than a debater, and proper political debates don't suit his style at all. Pie throwing on the other hand most certainly does, and you cannot debate someone chucking pies but also tend to look stupid if you start chucking them back.

As someone who grew up in New Zealand in the 80s... Though I feel vaguely dirty posting even a 30+ year old ad for a Nestlé product.

Dragged in in much the same way an alcoholic gets 'dragged' into a succession of bars etc. Erdogan is revanchist, Azerbaijan is literally their only friend in the region and there are an inconvenient bunch of Armenians between the two countries who had better be careful in case they end up taking another long spontaneous walk while forgetting to take sufficient food and clothing. They are operating the Azeri EW systems and drones already, shooting down Armenian planes is a small step. Having said that, the Armenians have good reason to make the claim since they have a defensive pact with the Russians that doesn't cover Nagorno Karabakh Artsekh Republic but does cover Armenia proper.

Finished the new Lucifer season. Not great, not bad; not particularly worried about the relationship drama nor the rather abrupt ending (obviously due to covid rather than writing per se) but it does rather have one glaring flaw which so very many shows have in exactly the same way...

That end bit was kind of the aim, though I'd say not specifically of Carth; given the overt similarities of it to PST which subverted general fantasy tropes and K2 subverting the most persistent SW tropes overtly. The point isn't that he's a gritty Carth, it's more a commentary on the logical end point of the SW stereotype Carth represents. You get a similar commentary on the biggest trope in terms of The Force too, where by any out-of-universe analysis it's outright capricious. Atton is way more a take on the 'noble smuggler' trope and case study Han Solo than he is a deconstruction of the Anomen/ Carth/ Sky/ Kaiden Biostereotype- which is so cardboard it hardly needs deconstruction. Specifically, the stereotypical noble smuggler in SW kind of appears conflicted and nuanced, but never actually seems to smuggle anything 'bad' and never seems to do anything genuinely 'bad' either, including those in the EU who stay as smugglers with their own personal militia etc even after the rebels win. Can't say that about Atton, he has the facade of the noble smuggler trope but whereas if you dig below the surface of a Han Solo or Talon Karrde you find a heart of gold beneath Atton Rand lurks an outright psychopath who gloried in the pain of others. It was pretty obvious Avellone had read a lot of the SWEU because apart from the obvious PST links (Atris/ Trias; Sion/ Ignus; Nihlus/ Vhailor; Kreia/ Ravel) you also had a bunch of subversion of its tropes and Kreia's force philosophy was borrowed more or less wholesale from Vergere's.

British troops were/ are 100% deployed to Syria proper- specifically NE Syria and around Al Tanf in the south. Officially, they're kind of Schrondingers deployment, when Turkey invades it's grossly irresponsible because French and British troops may get hurt, if the US withdraws the French and Brits will have too as well so the US should keep on "taking the oil"; otherwise those French and British troops... aren't there. They were also 100% training rebels in Jordan in exactly the way described. They also (along with other western allies and Israel) 100% extricated more than 1000 (local) personnel from southern Syria when that front collapsed and surrendered, including some from Jaish Khalid ibn Walid (ISIS) areas. They also arranged for payments to groups like the White Helmets knowing that many/ most were active fighters, specifically because they could legally pay humanitarian workers like medical staff or police but not fighters. They also manipulated media coverage to suppress evidence in the media like 40% of nerve gas victims arriving at hospital before the attack even happened and embiggen the impossible 'super sarin' mix of chlorine and sarin Macron made up. The only thing the Anonymous leaks show is what mechanisms they used to do it. You're not going to get UK media talking about how they were manipulated by their own government into supporting cannibals, rapists, ethnic cleansers, child killers* etc- and they're almost certainly under the aegis of a National Security Letter equivalent anyway. *southern front weren't too bad actually, but like most got co-opted by Al Qaeda/ Jabhat al Nusra which was when Jordan cut off support. Having said that, the Turkish supported thugs that media decry in Kurdish areas and are currently being sent to murder Armenians were overwhelmingly... the western vetted moderate opposition, when that existed.

The assurance was post facto though, and more specifically post Lehmann's. The cause wasn't a governmental guarantee, it was peak 'free market' stupidity. It certainly codified the 'privatise profits, socialise losses' mentality but again that was post facto. The fact that it could happen again is because the government did not fix the fundamental issues, if they had fixed the issues a government guarantee would be irrelevant because... it couldn't happen again. It's like the banks setting themselves on fire in a fail proof money making scheme- the government putting it out because the fire was going to take out a load of collateral damage isn't the problem, the problem is (1) the banks starting the fire and (2) when the government doesn't punish the banks nor prevent them doing the same thing again in 20 years time when they believe they've found another perpetual risk free money machine. Neither of those are the consequences of governmental intervention, but rather the reverse. In most developed countries that is actually how things works. the government pays most of the cost (eg 75% here) and recoups it in added tax over the recipients' lifetime.

You had a housing bubble because of speculation largely caused by the repeal of government regulations, not the regulations themselves. It tanked the economy because banks expected house prices to never stop rising and thus did a whole bunch of predatory NINJA loaning which was designed to bankrupt the person taking the loan- but since the house was collateral and appreciating the bank still got the interest over the first few years and its costs could be recovered from the appreciation- which they then bundled up into aggregate future trading schemes on the basis of them saying they were AAA standard and made derivative schemes to eke out more profit betting on their AAA status. If anything the cause was lack of regulation and private entities being 'too big to fail'- with a healthy dollop of scenario fulfilment and wishful thinking from 'experts' who thought they'd discovered a perpetual money machine. You can blame the government for repealing the regulations, and for not doing anything concrete to punish the speculators nor prevent it happening again; but the primary cause was free market greed and stupidity. The US student loan system is obviously stupid, but it's stupid because fees are too high for many to have any realistic chance of paying them back whatever they do. Doesn't happen most places because... government intervention. The problem isn't government intervention in the US, it's that government intervention way too often (always?) gets co-opted into crony capitalism, corporate welfare and porkbarelling. Then there's US agricultural subsidies, sold as being to help keep mom & pop farmers in business but which have actually resulted in massive consolidation via corporate farms designed specifically to milk/ corn/ alcohol/ beef/ ham/ chicken the system. At least EU and the CAP actually does subsidise the mom & pop types properly.

Fighting breaking out again between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Not much doubt that it's the Azeris starting it, as Turkey has been importing their Syrian cannon fodder/ jihadi child beheading rapist kidnapper cannibal ethnic cleansers there over the past 2 weeks just as they did in Libya. Tried it a few months earlier too, since they though Turkish drones would be a game changer but they failed utterly against an integrated defence. That is near exactly what actually happened here. Not just for agricultural workers either, the big scam is 'path to citizenship' stuff where you advertise a position with awful conditions/ reject all candidates/ hide the advertisement then claim that you cannot fill the position and need to bring someone in. That person literally pays for the privilege, since after 3 years they can apply for Permanent Residence and then citizenship. For most of that 3 years their employer holds their passport and pays them nearly nothing while charging them for accommodation etc. If they lose the job, complain, fall out with the employer they get deported; so they don't complain. 'Funny' thing is that the only reason it's stopped now is because of covid, though to be fair we've actually had a few 'slavery' type- one literally for slavery- convictions under the current government as well. Really though, if the workers were eastern european women working as prostitutes it'd be utterly obvious what was going on with forced accommodation and their passports being held, but because the employers are 'small business owners', themselves mostly immigrants- NZ born people just exploit agricultural workers the same way- and the employees are mostly east/ south asians if you complain about it it ends up in a racism debate (and, of course, most Chinese/ Indian immigrants loathe the exploiters because it's their community being exploited and they cop the backlash when it's exposed). And you should hear the wails of despair from the agricultural sector about not being able to import indentured servants from the colonies (Samoa, Fiji, Tonga) to pick strawberries etc. My personal favourite was that 'islanders are strong and can work a full day', as if ~10% of our population isn't islander, double that if you count Maori as well. It's got nothing to do with strength and everything to do with you being able to completely asterisk imports over on pay and conditions without them being able to or knowing they can complain about it.

Yes, though that also has problems since a big cache takes up lots of extra on die space, though much like HBM it should also help a lot with raytracing. The trouble is that a lot of the leaks are mutually incompatible; even with a lot of SRAM 16GB on a 256 bit bus is... unbalanced. HBM would solve all their problems though, not on die, reduced wattage, increased bandwidth; and this sort of situation is what it was intended for. I'll freely admit I'm in a minority expecting it though.

HBM for a main sequence consumer card would be, though to be fair it isn't that expensive. But HBM gets rid of one major potential problem Biggest Navi has with GDDR6- memory bus constraints- while reducing wattage. 1TB bandwidth might be overkill for the RadeonVII, but may well be justified with raytracing added. The alternatives are a 512 bit GDDR6 bus (too hot, too large) 'crippled' 970/ console like VRAM configs andor adding a lot of S/EDRAM cache, which is also very expensive. If they can get a decent top end performance boost from HBM and competitive top end raytracing I think they'd go for it.

IIRC that accusation against MCA got debunked. That mainly left being creepy when drunk, which isn't great but also isn't exactly uncommon. Doesn't really matter if the comparison is to Polanski though, even the worst accusation wasn't in the same city let alone the same ballpark as what Polanski did. That sort of ludicrous comparison is exactly what gives social justice its bad name and exactly why genuine complaints get ignored. I'd never heard that MCA created Oblivion, learn something new every day.

Win95/98 era? Some of those had odd hardware access set ups and are notoriously hard to get working in modern windows, and iirc MGS' windows port wasn't renowned for its stability at the time either. They'd actually teased MGS coming to GOG a week or so ago. Now they just have to bring some of other games they've teased historically like the Rocksteady Batman games and CiV.

Don't know about a ton of money from the consoles since they make very little profit on a per unit basis there, though 20 million consoles would add up nicely. They certainly do get a lot of extra benefits from being the console supplier though, a lot of their research and development costs for RDNA is being paid for by MSony and it's no accident that the Terrascale -> GCN -> RDNA transitions happened around the console generation switches. And they can try to leverage their console standardisation into the windows sphere for things like generic DXR vs RTX. Per last page I'm expecting the 6900XT to land pretty close to the 3080 in raster performance as I cannot see any reason for the power/ performance balance of the 3080 otherwise. I've seen a lot of people claiming they'll only compete with the 3070 but even a 60CU last gen 5800XT card would do that unless the scaling was truly awful. AMD has certainly done a good job of keeping the lid on leaks though. (100CU Big Unit Gamma Cassiopeiae 6969XTX with 16 GB HBM2e and 400+W power draw... you heard it here first)

I can't see any way AMD will match RTX in raw raytracing performance, the approaches are too different. But the dedicated hardware that will give nVidia its performance advantage there also comes with its own costs and AMD's approach ought to be far more flexible. 3600NZD here for a Strix 3090 which is about 2200 USD- and our GST is lower than the UK's VAT too. It really needed a bit more performance lift over the 3080 if they were going to call it a 3090. Expectations for a mainstream (albeit top end) card's price/ performance and segmentation are different from the expectations for a prosumer one like the Titan. Even the extra VRAM isn't that much of a selling point if there really is a forthcoming 20GB 3080.

Let's be honest, the cops would get away with that just about anywhere. At least Taylor's family got 12 million, Halatau Naitoko's family got a princely 225k when some AOS goon who'd watched too much Hot Fuzz decided firing his M16 at a suspect while driving on the motorway (!) was a great idea. At least the 2nd random innocent guy he hit wasn't killed, unlike Halatau. IPCA verdict: perfectly legal and- I kid you not, this is an actual quote- "commendable" action by the officer involved despite the report admitting said officer couldn't control where he was shooting and took no notice of where his shots would go if they missed.

I know, but there isn't really a better term to use without making one up like 'effective electoral popularity'. It's a peculiarity of the US and similar systems that overall popularity with voters is not always the deciding factor, but sufficient popularity in certain areas is. Don't really agree there, though I'd suspect that's due to a perspective difference. I'd broadly regard the US system as being in need of reforms, and when the qualifications for office tend to include a lot of roles that requires you to have been part of that system you're unlikely to get said reform- because those insider roles are what the winner relied on to win. Most qualified always winning reinforces the status quo so is great if you think the status quo is great, not so much if you don't. (Having said that, I will freely admit that Donald J Trump is... not exactly the best advertisement for promoting the benefits of political outsiders/ the less qualified winning. Arguably, Barack Obama would be though, he was a lot less qualified than McCain albeit a lot more qualified than Trump)

You do get the 270 electoral votes by winning individual states' popular votes though, with the few exceptions where the EC votes are done proportionally. It isn't won by having been Secretary of State and a Senator for x years, it's won by mobilising your support in the places that matter. That's why I brought up the tennis match. Who wins isn't determined by who wins the most points, nor by who wins the most games- though typically the winner will have done both. It's determined by who wins the most sets. You can make an argument that Roger Federer is a better tennis player than Joe Bloggs based on his stellar record and qualifications, or him winning more points and games, but if you're looking at a one off match that Federer lost the only objective measure is that Federer lost. Similarly the ultimate measure of popularity is winning the election- elections are popularity contests, including the US one. The way the US determines the most popular candidate may be peculiar to you but the rules were known by both sides beforehand. Hillary getting more raw votes nationwide simply doesn't matter, because that isn't how that popularity contest is determined. It's probably true, similar stuff happens elsewhere though the SCMP is not a great source and they got at least one 'fact' wrong (the US spy plane involved in KAL007 never intruded into Soviet airspace as they imply in the article, KAL007 intruded on two different occasions). Israel spoofs US ID codes in Syria for example and hides their planes behind commercial airliners, and they're not alone in such things either. OTOH, it's kind of pointless if you're going to spoof a code of an aircraft that you've kept on the same altitude and heading and it's pretty simple (well, unless you're on the Vincennes) to look up commercial timetables. And they are spy planes, the expectations for their conduct are more relaxed than for others even if they aren't supposed to break the rules overtly. Buzzing Iranian passenger jets over Syria and setting off their tcas is definitely more egregious recent conduct.

By about three million votes. But as we're both aware, and as you'd have to presume Hillary was aware, raw vote count is not how you win the US Presidency and she could have literally won 100% of the Ca vote without it effecting the outcome at all. You can make an argument that a tennis player who loses a match 0-6 7-6 7-6 is a better player than the winner because they won more games, but end of the day that isn't how winning is determined. They aren't, but ultimately the only 'qualification' you have to have to be President (well ok, apart from age/ birth location etc) is enough popularity to beat your opponent. If you can't do that all the literal qualifications, experience, competency etc you bring to the table is for naught. That is certainly a reductionist approach to the matter, but that is because the fundamental aim of the whole process is to win.

The two least popular candidates in US history contested the 2016 election, and it was blade of grass stuff as to which was less popular. The main difference was that Trump was far better at galvanising support from the people he needed to win. As a pure candidate Hillary has to be worse than Trump since she lost to him; and even taking a somewhat less reductionist view the best you can say is that she was marginally better than another awful candidate. If you're drawing up a list of criteria for being an awful candidate being highly unpopular and losing to Trump are pretty big indicators. The sort of voter who hates The System was never going to vote for Hillary- whatever Bernie said- as she's the epitome of the system insider whose career was deliberately sculpted to aim at the presidency and whose campaign was certainly seen as using every insider trick available to win including suborning party machinery for her benefit before being confirmed. Hillary simply was not at all inspiring to the average Bernie supporter, and made little effort to be either. Bernie can tell his people to swallow a lemon and vote for her but it isn't a cult, he cannot force them to. I'd expect much the same if Bernie won the nomination, if Hillary endorsed him (and it was like pulling teeth getting her to endorse Obama) not all her supporters would have heeded her call.

Bit post facto, but her attitude to Bernie voters after the 2016 election and in 2020 suggests she was certainly... not in disagreement with the Bernie Bro stereotype even if she didn't personally and actively promote it. Promoting stuff she didn't want to say personally was, after all, what Correct the Record/ Shareblue et alia were for; also there was the rather ridiculous SM campaign they instituted against Pepe for being a 'racist symbol' so it isn't like they didn't have form. HRC was such an awful candidate and bad loser that it is certainly easy to associate every bad decision to her, but if her supporters were willing to tar Bernie with his overenthusiastic supporters then it's certainly fair for the reverse to happen too and she be tarred with her 'bad' supporters. There was certainly a lot of attempts to blame Bernie for the loss in 2016- "didn't campaign enough for Hillary" when he had more campaign rallies for Clinton once Hillary was confirmed than Hillary herself had- when they were desperately looking for someone other than the Democratic establishment to blame for the loss. On conservatism vs centrism, I would generally regard little c conservatists as being centrists in general. In part because what constitutes left and right shifts by country so the US Democratic Party in New Zealand would be solidly right wing, not left wing. But in both places the bulk of the two big parties are staunchly status quo when it comes to big ticket non social items and differ mostly on implementation and details. OTOH big C Conservatism is strongly embedded in right wing politics. I'd probably make the same observation about liberalism too for most countries, but the US definition of 'liberal' has diverged far too much from other countries' usage.

Centrism is basically maintenance of the overall status quo, so if the status quo is bad then centrism is a bad thing. There may, of course, be worse alternatives to it though. There certainly were some people who'd fit the Bernie Bro moniker, there are always such for all political movements. But the objection to the moniker in general would be twofold: Firstly, on the practical front, it was counterproductive since it didn't encourage people to vote for Clinton, rather the reverse. That ended up being a bit of a running theme with her campaign though, she took votes for granted when she wan't pointlessly alienating others. That, in the end, is how she contrived to lose to Trump. Secondly, and more relevant to why it's typical of the stereotype progressive 'left' it was used mostly to try and shut people up rather than because Bernie Bros actually existed. Having and expressing opinions that others disagree with is not being aggressive, and a lot of the identity politics stuff reduces, ultimately, to trying to get people who disagree with you to shut up by labeling them as being --ist (sexist, mostly for Bernie Bros) so that only your opinion gets expressed. Hillary stans might be disappointed that not everyone supported her acritically, but they shouldn't have been. Bernie Bro had exactly the same purpose and function as 'libcuck' had for Trump supporters; it was an easy way to dismiss those expressing certain views without addressing the view itself. And, of course and as typical with most such things, Bernie Bro is itself an --ist term; they might genuinely believe that no true woman could go against her X chromosome and prefer Bernie (or Trump for that matter) over Hillary, but that wasn't reality. Indeed, ironically, libcuck is actually less --ist than Bernie Bro.

The critical problem there is that all too often being overtly 'progressive' is the only leftist stuff those people actually do, because it's easy to complain on Twitter and there's a built in audience for it. If you were supporting Hillary over Bernie in 2016 you weren't a leftist no matter if you were voting for a woman because she was a woman, you're at best a centrist because all Hillary's important stuff was status quo centre right economic and aggressive foreign policy orthodoxy with a few minimal garnishes to appeal to people who wanted Bernie and a bunch of identity policy hand waving. Indeed, the whole 'Bernie Bro' thing could not have been better crafted to illustrate how moronic the pseudo left's approach was. Sure, label the people you want to vote for your candidate as a bunch of young aggressive white guys bullying and yelling at poor delicate Hillary supporters. What are they going to do, vote for Trump?