Zoraptor

Yep, but that is precisely why you'd get the 'South East Asia Treaty Organisation' in response. Their leaderships' insularity makes China monumentally tone deaf when it comes to such things, and while a lot of countries in the region don't like each other much- Japan and ROKorea, for example- an aggressive China would drive them together pdq. Published in several Indian newspapers as their new 'official' map of China, I believe. It's all just passive aggression, but there are real pushes to rename the South and East China seas too which speak to the deep antipathy felt by China's neighbours. Yep. (Somewhere around 2011, buried in the depths of these forums, there is a post with me confidently predicting that the Arab Spring wouldn't come to Syria. May have got that prediction a bit off...)

No they're not. Your country wouldn't have got to the point where masks are needed, if you followed the rules to stop transmission. You didn't, so masks are needed now. But if you'd followed the rules they wouldn't be. The factors countries with successful responses all had in common simply do not include compulsory masks. The US is not in the state it is because people refused to wear masks, it's in the state it is because none of the necessary factors for control were consistently applied. Having to have compulsory mask wearing to minimise spread is a sign of and response to failure. Your argument is effectively that because the US didn't stop smoking and got lung cancer chemotherapy is necessary for anyone who wants functioning lungs. Nope, if you have a bit of self control and don't smoke then you don't generally need chemotherapy. And ironically, it's Trump HCQ prophylaxis argument in different clothes.

China and Russia already do transactions in their own currency when possible. The question is whether other countries will use Yuan or Roubles in future for 3rd party transactions as they do with USD today; which they won't. Yuan value is overly manipulated for Chinese benefit too much (USD is now too for US benefit, but it's already the reserve), Rouble ain't anywhere near powerful enough even for gas priocing. If the USD imploded the Euro would take its place as default, though there would be a lot lot more transactions in 3rd party currencies. Sure, but with all respect due to Iran, DPRK, Syria etc they are not overly important in the greater scheme of things, and the umbrella has gone over as a reaction/ response to US actions. Iran wouldn't be anywhere near so much in China's camp if Trump hadn't abrogated the JCPOA, indeed part of the point of the JCPOA was to get Iran integrated into the western (european mostly) economy and away from China/ extremism. China already gets a significant amount of oil from Iran. Saudi and Russia fight over oil quotas occasionally, but generally cooperate. The recent glut was a response to declining US influence as well though, with Saudi going after US shale oil every bit as much as it was going after Russia, which is why Trump got grumpy at them. Saudi under MbS is haemorraghing money way worse than Russia is, indeed Russia actually has more foreign currency reserves than it did in 2014, when some thought it was 6 months from bankruptcy, despite sanctions and lowered oil prices. But, both are big producers going through limited reserves pretty quickly. Turkey is mostly irrelevant for similar reasons to China, only even more extreme since they're smaller and have less economic clout. Turkey's neighbours hate it, and that is barely any exaggeration. They have good relations with the Azeris, some of Libya and Qatar. Greece, Armenia, Cyprus, Syria, Iraq and to an extent even Iran loathe Turkey. Everything else for Turkey is playing off Russia and US/ NATO against each other militarily and trying to gouge Europe while judging how far things can be pushed without making a final break with anyone. Turkey also has the bubbliest of bubble economies with the lid held down by funny money construction boom shenanigans from, iirc, Erdogan's utterly unqualified son in law finance minister. At the moment after the clashes in Ladakh, definitely yes. India has been cancelling Chinese deals and banning their software etc over the last month, and under Modi/ Trump the US focus has shifted from bolstering India's great enemy Pakistan towards India. The anti China sentiment in India has been stoked somewhat by distracting from Covid too, but it is very real. It hasn't really been de-escalated, it's more that China realised they'd shot themselves in the foot acting against an opponent that could and did effectively respond; China . Modi and the BJP are nationalists, they love having external enemies and while Pakistan is more convenient China works too. If the US 'disappeared' the biggest economic power would be Europe, and China would end up facing essentially an ASEAN type military alliance because they're so unpopular with their neighbours. I'd even suspect a military ASEAN would end up including Russia, since they're at best friends of convenience with China, and India.

China maybe, Russia doesn't have the clout and doesn't have a realistic route to get it back either even without the US as a factor. Russian international power is almost entirely oppositional, from offering an alternative to the US (and having a big nuclear arsenal/ UN veto/ hydrocarbons and other raw materials). China, well, they've been busy alienating every single one of their neighbours except Russia and even there the relationship is arms length except when it comes to opposing the US. Their foreign policy is exactly what you get when you come up through a regimented system where orthodoxy and obeying the rules designed to propagate The Party are paramount. The reality of world politics is that the vast majority of countries will happily take Chinese money while their views on the CCP vary from dislike to loathing- and that reality always triggers CCP members because they've grown up with that being near literally unthinkable and with a massive cultural chip on their shoulder when it comes to western nations. Even minor or imagined slights see toys ejected from cots, and that isn't conducive to long term international success. The world is naturally multipolar, if the US declines or collapses it will be China, the EU (assuming it didn't get dragged down by the US) and at some stage India with the big influences, with Russia retaining a role as a spoiler. It's doubtful even combined that they'll have the influence the US has had recently though.

Wearing masks wouldn't stop rest home deaths, unfortunately. Even proper medical masks w/filter only reduce exposure risk, by the nature of rest homes there's constant uncontrollable ongoing contact between residents and carers; even worse if there are a lot of already more vulnerable old people there. We had two outbreaks in specialist dementia rest homes which accounted for ~3/4 of our death toll, and most of the infections occurred after the oldies were out of the rest home and in proper hospitals (and that was also where most of our infected health workers came from too). You couldn't even reliably test most of those patients, trying to shove a swab up someone with dementia's nose or throat or take a blood sample is a non trivial undertaking. We also had panic about mask availability. Pretty sure that's just a consequence of having, well, media. If you listen to the media we would be simultaneously opening our borders while reducing quarantine times, and not letting anyone in; should have gone into lockdown earlier and simultaneously opened up earlier with fewer restrictions and more restrictions; behaved like Australia because their economy was less effected and not behaved like Australia. And yes, we were simultaneously using too many masks and not saving enough for a rainy day. No, it isn't. As always, stuff you agree with = data, stuff you don't agree with = anecdotes. If you follow the social distancing rules properly you don't need to wear masks, full stop. The problem is that people in places like the US won't follow the rules, the rules aren't consistent, people aren't informed properly or practice freedum or whatever. They won't wear masks, but they also won't do anything else. Stay 2m apart, wash your hands, don't go out if you're coughing or sneezing. If people had done that you wouldn't need masks. Much of the reason for masks being advocated is that Asian countries have had successful covid strategies. They weren't using masks as a mitigation factor though, they were countries that got a major scare with previous outbreaks like SARS, had proper plans in place and where mask use and basic prevention tactics was cultural. They had well communicated rules, a populace that understood the issues and was willing to take the steps necessary to deal with outbreaks (or in China's case, a military willing to make sure they did even if they didn't). Those are the factors common to all countries that have dealt successfully with the virus. Cultural level mask wearing was common to some successful countries, but by no means all.

The term you're looking for is 'chav'. Beefeaters are for those who like juniper flavoured alcoholic spirits. The refined gentleman would make a squad of Yeoman Warders.

They're not wacky- they're near exactly the view that got New Zealand to covid eradication. The position here is still that you are not encouraged to wear masks, despite the media constantly trying to drum up hysteria. If you do the other stuff properly you don't need masks. 'If', of course, being the operative word. The pro/ con balance has shifted in places with very extensive outbreaks and minimal other measures taken, but you certainly don't need masks for a successful response- and if I lived in the US or UK I'd be wearing a mask, if for no other reason than me not wanting to be a knob without good cause.

Same thing here as well, with lots of complaints about letting NZ citizens in from 'virus hotspots' like Pakistan and India. Of course, about 3/4 of those who have come home infected actually traveled from the UK and US, but that doesn't trigger the average facebook commentator quite as much because they can pretend they were all their nieces and nephews returning from their OE. Can't legally ban citizens from returning anyway, end of the day they have to be let in unless you're going to do the other stuff the stereotypical FB commentator wants like suspend habeas corpus and give the military (but not that commie Jacinta) power to put civilians into concentration camps- while simultaneously not letting anyone in and reopening the country to overseas travelers. There's definitely no proof of the source, but there is some pretty good evidence. It's also politically damaging to the Vic premier, so there's a bit of a scramble to spread the blame. (For those ouside A/NZ, the most widely circulated rumour is that the minimum wage security guards at Vic isolation facilities completely ignored all the rules, smuggled people in and out of quarantine and even slipped the odd guest the 3" saveloy on the sly; and at least one of the guests they were, to use that most charming ocker phrase, 'rooting', did indeed bring back more little virusy friends than H.simplex. The bonking part is not confirmed, but a very suspicious number of guards have got sick, early in the renewed outbreak, enough that them ignoring the rules and being the source of the renewed outbreak is the most plausible source so far.

I don't think anyone would hold up the xbone as a model of a successful console*. The hardware in the top model is the best, but it never quite got away from Ballmer's typically scatterbrained vision of an all things to all people but always online media device, with MS taking a cut of everything. They forgot that you have to focus on pushing the essentials like being a good console first and treat everything else as nice extras; which is what Sony and Nintendo did. Still, at least that resulted in a lot of funny Untergang and Bane memes. *To be honest I don't think you would hold up any MS console as a success. Even the 360 had the infamous RROD issues which are lethal financially when you're already selling the units at a loss, and was partly successful because PS3 was a relative stumble for Sony.

While no doubt the State of New Jersey would like to make a buck in these trying times it was the State of Rhode Island that ended up owning KoA. And they sold their interest to Nordic*, hence the remaster. *meh THQ/ Embracer/ DerpSilver or whichever legal entity for the same exact company is actually publishing it.

Pulled this off the 'What is to come thread' since it probably fits better here*... That situation is getting closer to confirmed now- consumer 3000 series very likely to be on Samsung '8nm', only pro and above level cards at TSMC. Ultimate source is kopite7kimi on twitter, who is usually reliable, and there are a fair few supporting articles out now as well (eg Igorslab). Power draws may be a near throwback to Thermi as a result, which I guess will at least give a good reason to buy 1000W+ PSUs again. *That first quoted sentence has more run ons than a rugby match in Dunedin during O week.

I'm sure there's a word- probably in some germanic language- to describe the slight feeling of satisfaction you get from finding out Bolsonaro has caught 'the little flu' after insisting it's anything from a hoax to nothing to worry about. Just a shame he'll no doubt get all the plasma transfusions etc he needs which the average native or favela dweller couldn't afford in a million years. Then again he'll probably die from the HCQ he's taking, to really double down on irony.

My friend, have you heard the good news about our Lord and Saviour Lisa Su AMD?

Meh, just buy some dexamethasone for 8 bucks instead, that even improves survival rate rather than just aiding recovery like remdesivir. Then again dexamethasone probably costs hundreds in the US as well despite being generic.

Syndicate, the Assassin's Creed where you were never quite sure if the next person you met would be some eldritch nightmare because the engine decided skin was a bit too difficult to render.

Lee certainly is difficult to judge fairly as a general. Fundamentally he was fighting for the side that ought to lose- and it's doubtful even a Subotai/ Hannibal/ Marlborough tier general would have 'won' in the end. He was pretty much always outnumbered significantly, and always outresourced. The war should have been lost for the confed early in the east, but was actually lost in the west where Lee wasn't. The Union generals he fought were mostly rubbish but still should have won against him multiple times when they had, at times, around double the troops Lee had available for a campaign. The main trouble Lee had was ultimately he had to win the war, which meant eventually he would have to take risks with an underresourced and smaller army while fighting on the enemy's territory rather than his own. He's mostly criticised for Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg but that was pretty much what Napoleon tried at Waterloo when he was in a similar strategic situation. That is also one of the situations where you have the reverse of the 'blame the subordinates' (blaming Stuart for disappearing for days at Gettysburg is perfectly fair though, the initial blunders were thanks to having almost zero scouting from Stuart) with people saying that Lee should have followed Longstreet's plan instead. Lee was clearly a decent general, in a war where most generals didn't even achieve that. Definitely not top tier though. I'd tend to compare him to Rommel in some ways, people tend to hold Rommel up as (relatively) honourable etc and play up his victories (like Lee mostly won with a large dollop of help from enemy incompetence but against larger and better resourced armies) yet he was a committed- though not extremist- nazi, lost every battle he had to win and for the last 30 months of his career won only one fairly minor battle full stop. Both are lionised beyond their objective abilities and achievements.

Of course they offer WIR free, it's a gateway drug for their fairly pricey War in the East. In terms of detail I don't think anything comes close to the old SPI Campaign for North Africa which tracked detail down to the water requirement for Italian units to boil their pasta rations in. And that was a late 70s boardgame...

Seems pretty unlikely to be SARS-CoV2. There's always the possibility that it's been floating around for a longer time and only recently became better adapted for human- human transmission though. A lot of respiratory infections are 'non specified viral infections' ('common cold' etc) and if its infection rate was fairly low with ~1% lethality it could easily have hidden for an extended period. But it's more likely to be a false positive from a random common cold coronavirus that has a complementary RNA sequence to the SARS-CoV2 primers.

Being irrational and unpredictable was one of his big appeals to a certain sort of voter. Also don't really need to be told that by that unrepentant war criminal and gobbet of sputum in the pissoir of society John Bolton, one of the people who would undoubtedly somehow manage to be worse than Trump if he were somehow elected.

It will inevitably be over zero though, and I say that as someone who is no fan of the police. Doesn't matter how careful people are mistakes happen and if you're police some of those mistakes will result in deaths, and some of those deaths will look very bad in retrospect. A wrongful death could be anything from someone dying in a police chase to someone shooting at police and a bystander being shot accidentally to someone having a heart attack from the stress and the police not recognising it or thinking that they're faking it. And of course the times police more or less deliberately kill people who don't need to die too, though you can minimise that with proper training/ police culture and rigorous independent oversight. But the only thing you can do is minimise the risk of those things happening.

I wouldn't be overly worried about a supereruption from Yellowstone. The hotspot is tracking under the Rockies (or tributary range) so it's less likely to erupt and if it does you wouldn't be worrying about it for long at least. OTOH if you were in Wellington there were twenty VEI 7+ including 4 VEI8 (super)eruptions in the last million or so years from the Taupo volcanic zone to worry about as well as the potential 7-8 MMS earthquake every couple of centuries. Though at least from a NH point of view most of the fallout from an eruption would be confined to the southern hemisphere. There's also Toba though, which is a lot closer to the equator. I'm just waiting for a new volcano in Auckland- last eruption just within Maori history/ legend, so due another one now- as some hot magma would massively improve the city...

When you've finished the game I'll have a follow up question about this. (I'm thoroughly spoiled because internet drama and not owning a PS4, so won't ask now)

As Keyrock mentioned it's more common than you might think- especially since AMD has open source Linux drivers. There are some things about those that the 'official' Windows drivers could really benefit from, like proper OpenGl support.

Pft, amateurs. We not only have GST on the GST on our fuel levy (revenue not ringfenced for transport, of course) but we also have an utterly regressive- burden borne way disproportionately by those least able to and those who get least benefit from the costs- regional fuel tax with GST on top of that which was sold as financing a bunch of safety and public transport improvements. Oddly enough, every one of those major public transport and safety projects has been delayed or canceled except... lowering speed limits and putting in more speed cameras. It's not the drug itself they alter. Insulin and the other well known and egregious example of adrenaline (/epinephrine: epipens) are way out of even the most restrictive of patent systems and cannot be incrementally 'improved'. Instead they alter either formulation or delivery system. Aided by the utterly incompetent USPTO*- "Basmati Rice was invented by RiceTec in the US"/ "Turmeric was invented in Mississippi, we're granting an exclusive right to sell in the US based on that" / "Yellow beans brought from Mexico are a novel US invention, feel free to go back to the market you bought them from and demand royalties- you can near perpetually alter formulations to extend patents there. It's that way because of little b bribery though- since that's what 'lobbying' amounts to most of the time. It's no accident that every time the US gets involved in trade deals you get a load of utterly reprehensible 'IP protection' designed to force other countries to subscribe to the broken US patent system and forgo generics; and the amount of lobbying involved to maintain and try to export that broken system is ridiculous. Which reminds me, must just about be due for yet another Disney lobbied extension to copyright to protect Steamboat Willy. *to be clear, people who work there are still, iirc, paid on the basis of number of patents approved, not on work done so it's the system framework that is broken.

General VAT goes into the Consolidated Fund or equivalent in- so far as I'm aware- every single country that charges it. Consolidated Fund = general spending, not ringfenced for a specific purpose. (Actually ringfenced spending is quite rare, despite the number of specific levies made by governments. Almost all of them go into general funding...) Sweden's health care system is ~11% of GDP (~5k USD /c). The US health care system is ~17% (~11k USD /c), so roughly 50% more expensive. [source: OECD] Multiple other reasons besides that too. Without a unified negotiating body purchasers such as individual hospitals have far less leverage when negotiating prices. Lots of low grade payola and influencing results in lots of unnecessary prescriptions, which drives overall costs up. Little downward price pressure on many drugs because if you need the medication your alternative is literally dying, in some cases. Awful regulation that allows gouging and an institutional dislike- sometimes due to what is essentially bribery- of using generics even when they're both legal and significantly cheaper. Some of those are still present with 'single payer' systems as well though of course.