Zoraptor

I'm not sure what is even the point of discussing up to 50-60 trillion of spending as if it would definitely be 50-60t is anyway. The article itself has M4A being more than half the 60t upper limit, and notes that the lower estimate for that policy's cost cost is, well, a far more manageable 31 billion instead of 34 trillion. There's no basis for real world discussion when the estimates vary by a factor of 100. The article title is basically clickbait, something that wouldn't cost that much unless you took the highest figures for everything. Having had a look at the report the 34t figure (over ten years, for those who didn't read the article) of extra cost is based on I'm... exceptionally skeptical. 3.4t per year is already the approximate existing total cost of both private and public healthcare combined in the US. Public spending is already about 40% of that figure, private expenditure is 60% or ~2t*. So they're essentially saying that that 2t if 'nationalised' is going to expand to a 3.4t average cost or around 70% increase to existing costs, and increase overall health spending to a cool 4.8t p/a, or about 16k p/c. Essentially, they're saying that the system used in multiple other countries will cost 3x as much in the US as there, 4x the OECD average and pretty much 2x the closest country (Switzerland), in p/c costs. If you're going to claim that you need pretty strong evidence as to why. *And of course that existing 2t private healthcare cost is currently being paid by someone- someone who wouldn't be paying that if it gets 'nationalised' even if their tax bill goes up.

It's extremely unlikely that anyone checked Iraqis for anything other than direct injuries anyway. Whether they'd prove anything either way is moot if the stats simply don't exist. No Iraqis died, there's never been any suggestion that they did. The main question for anyone skeptical of the number of TBIs or their presence at all would be why the US would make up the injuries and numbers. I've been highly skeptical of US claims in the past, but I can't come up with any reason why they'd lie in this case and plenty of reasons why they wouldn't- it's probably more in their interests to lie about there being no injuries if there were some. The Havana Ray, if it exists, almost certainly isn't Cuban. It just makes a nice place to test things because you know Cuba will be blamed. It's probably Chinese.

Funny thing being that 3 billion is by no means a big deal, even tiddly little NZ has spent nearly that much on US hardware this year. Nothing, nothing at all. Coincidentally I'm off to learn the words to our new national anthem: "Krishna Bharat and Modi"

Dunno about anywhere else, but that video is definitely unavailable here.

I can recommend John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segments on Modi. I'm not massively keen on Oliver's style most of the time but it's a lot more palatable when skewering someone I dislike. Might not be able to find the latest one though, BJP stans have been running around the internet trying to copyright strike or label it as objectionable for the last day.

Yeah, IIRC the US does have prefab 'bomb shelters' that can assembled in hours but won't use them if the available facilities are checked out as OK. I'd presume they decided that the Al Assad facilities were fine for the expected engagements and from what I saw that was not an unreasonable assumption given the expectations were for grads and mortars. If they wanted to build ballistic missile class shelters it would take weeks and cost a lot of money. They'd need major earth moving and a lot of concrete and reinforcing. And a direct hit would probably still make a mess of them.

Zimbabwe's fundamental problem was that they took well run and efficient large farms and split them up into thousands of inefficient small farms often farmed by people with zero experience. That was done because it was electorally popular and because the ZanuPF elite could seize most of the good land for themselves. It does have to be said that the land was 'stolen' in the first place by the British, but in terms of economics and food security the move was an easily predictable disaster. Except for the ZanuPF elites who had seized large farms and could sell their agriculture at inflated prices due to the shortage, of course. They'd have been far better off with a work to own or co-operative type approach including the existing farmers being properly compensated and sharing their expertise, but Mugabe needed a demon to fight against and a way to reward his most ardent and militant followers so good sense went out the window.

Knowing they were coming short term was irrelevant to how well the bunkers worked- it's like the question as to why there weren't Patriots at the base to protect it; they weren't there because a week previous no one expected a ballistic missile attack, they only expected the odd katyusha or mortar class round. The bunkers were built with the thought that the largest munition they'd have to defend against was maybe a few tens of kgs of explosive (like the typical grad's ~20kg warhead), not multiple hundreds of kgs like a typical ballistic missile carries, because the risk factor was insurgent attacks not a state actor attack. It's both difficult and expensive to build defences against 600kg of TNT equivalent even if it isn't traveling faster than the speed of sound. There's at least one video of the attack shot by US servicemen (or civilian contractors) and the shelters are basically medium walled but open air with a reinforced roof. TBIs came from the blast wave, not direct impact effects, and those bunkers provide pretty basic blast wave protection because a katyusha or mortar doesn't have much of a blast wave to protect from, their main problem is direct impact or semi direct effect (shrapnel). The shelters are fine for both of those, but not for an explosion 30x larger. You can also see that a lot of the people sheltering are, understandably but foolishly, watching the explosions instead of actually sheltering and that exposes their heads to the blastwave...

Yep, and while that isn't great it is still a pretty massive improvement over the colonial system. Not only is it an improvement in relative terms when considering the difference in population between now and under British rule, but it's an improvement in absolute terms too. The average annual deaths from starvation under British rule was more than that, despite there there being around 1/6th the population for most of British rule. The main point is that 'feeding themselves' is a bit of a red herring, those who cannot feed themselves generally aren't in a position to go to Europe whether they're in Africa or Asia. Peripherally, no, I wouldn't say that India is (necessarily*) doing well in absolute terms, though it does have impressive economic growth. It's just not a good/ fair comparison, to put it in perspective the entire African continent has slightly less population than India, spread across 54 countries. That huge population brings a lot of innate influence- negotiating, say, a trade agreement with India is far more attractive than with, say, Burkina Faso or CAR, and India is far more likely to get a favourable agreement too. As such you cannot easily compare their performance to each other, they're simply too different and you'd expect India to inherently perform better than an average African country. The fairer comparison would be to the smaller bits of the British Raj, Pakistan and Bangladesh, albeit even they'd still be the #1 and #2 most populated countries in Africa. There are a decent number of Pakistani refugees/ economic migrants, often claiming to be Afghans since that's better for claiming refugee status, and economically there are multiple African countries doing better than Pakistan or Bangladesh. *it's difficult to say one way or the other, you can only really compare them to China and while China's economic path is better than India's that has been at the cost of other factors like personal freedoms.

Most Indian emigration is not to continental Europe, certainly. It's mostly to anglophone countries, and is mostly legit. But, it's not really a fair comparison and the underlying reason given is basically plain wrong. India may not be massively rich and powerful on a per capita basis, but they have a truly monumental amount of capita. Also, India has a long and storied history of famines brought about by, well, British colonialism and them selling cash crops or exporting food while other areas in India starved. That's stopped since the Brits got kicked out because now agricultural excess in one region can be used to help out in drought or whatever, and India is big enough to resist most of the pressures that see similar things happen in Africa. That's hardly a great example of a country pulling itself up by its bootstraps after colonialism though; it's more an example of the evils of colonialism being corrected when you're powerful enough to tell your colonists to FOAD and mean it. Which the vast majority of Africa isn't, hence them growing cash crops mandated by the IMF and relying on imports of cheap subsidised Euro/ US staples. Most of the current refugees/ economic migrants are also not refugees because they are literally unable to feed themselves. If you're going to Europe from, say, Ghana or Congo or even Mali you'd typically have a multi thousand km trip involving long journeys by vehicle or ship, have to pay people smugglers or bribe border guards etc etc. You're not likely to do well making such a trip with no money and being hungry in the first place since walking you'd be looking at months of travel through impoverished or desert areas where you aren't going to get food. It's the same with war refugees, if you have the money you can simply bribe border guards or people smugglers to get you in to Europe. If you don't... welcome to a squalid camp in Jordan/ Turkey/ Lebanon/ Iraq/ Syria/ Pakistan/ Iran and good luck if you try to walk into Europe without paying someone something. Most refugees or economic migrants to Europe are not dirt poor, at least not for their countries of origin, they just about have to have money.

The capital letters Refugee Crisis was almost entirely from two countries that had been directly invaded by the US and a western protectorate- Iraq, Afghanistan and, which always makes me lol, Kosovo. The only one of the top four that hadn't been directly invaded was Syria where instead they merely armed nutbar jihadis- often directly, eg Timber Sycamore- and created the conditions for ISIS by invading Iraq. Which is hardly much better. But nowadays the refugee problem is largely Africans leaving countries that have been asterisked over by (neo)colonialism but that influx is at least theoretically sustainable and- economically at least- desirable/ essential due to there now not being a single EU country with above replacement level birthrate and, to be frank, most Euros considering themselves far too important to pick up the garbage or clean toilets or pick vegies for minimum wage. Probably the best anti refugee measure for the present issue would be to stop the IMF/ WB being all about 'economic development' and shift towards actual self sufficiency. Which ain't going to happen. And, for war refugees, to invest in the countries effected without it being directed solely at improving spreadsheet numbers or being verboten due to the 'wrong' side winning. Which also won't happen.

It does actually say it is 'pre alpha gameplay' at the end of the video, though I'd Presume that's only the last part, not the longer faux gopro section. That trailer looks like a 'next gen' game in the vein of the old Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliances; 'slay together'* and the Dark Alliance name pretty strongly imply co-op as a focus. I played BGDA on PS2 and it was a fun (but utterly brainless) action game far better played as co-op than SP. *if they want to use 'slay together' as a tagline they should have stumped up for a certain Roxy Music song license rather than using obnoxiously generic thrash metal. At least then it would be a bit more memorable.

Some more news (with limited specs) on the Xbox Series X. Not really anything there that hasn't been at least hinted at beforehand and most of it was at least strongly suspected. Assuming the TFLOPS are FP16 (which, well, it has to be) that makes the GPU in theory around 2x a desktop rx580 or ~65% of a 5700XT.

Red/ green colourblindness and the logo could look identical. Though r/g colourblindness is most prevalent in male whities rather than Han Chinese. I know the suggestion was not exactly serious but the coronavirus pretty much definitely isn't an escaped bioweapon. Disease crossing species are relatively common events (last forty years would include Variant Creuzfeld-Jakob from cows/ sheep, MERS (camels), SARS (civets/ bats), Ebola/ Marburg (primates) and longer term possibly syphilis and plague too)

No the reason was, as you were told at the time- 2014, when lest we forget you were claiming Russia would be bankrupt inside a year despite their 600 billion in reserves- that Norway has a trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund for 5 million people and they could literally go on a countrywide holiday for years on that, if they wanted to. Of course Norway is less effected than Russia by oil prices in exactly the same way someone with 200k in the bank is less effected by food prices or rent rises or wage changes or being fired than someone with 4k- they have $200k in the bank. The actual 'point' though was that US sanctions had near zero effect compared to the oil price on Russia's economy and currency, and by that point your internal logical inconsistencies had so thoroughly confused yourself that you posted something that supported rather than opposed that, as I pointed out. The counter argument that exposed your economic naivete, again, was Nigeria, but for some reason your recollections stop before that. All you did was just make the point for me. I think I even thanked you for it at the time. Sadly the problem isn't just that you're so often ignorant in economics, it's that you're ignorant and won't take basic instruction or correction from those more knowledgeable and insist on defending your position even six years later when you've been proved completely wrong, by history itself. Guess I should take small mercies, and be glad you're not still claiming that Richter is the only measure of earthquakes nine years later, or that New Zealand is exactly like Dakota, there are very few rabbits here and you can go hunting with a revolver that fires quicker than a semi automatic AK or AR15*, because you watched a youtube video or two. *and so we don't get your favourite tactic of deliberately misinterpreting what others say again, I know that AR15s aren't automatic; but some AK models are hence the disambiguation.

Unfortunately AlJ isn't a great source- the Turkish military base there was the only thing stopping Mr Bone Saw from literally invading Qatar so their media is (pretty understandably) very strongly pro Turkey. AlJ TV was still claiming that the attack got through to Saraqib a few hours ago when in reality it seems to have got half way into Nayrab, a small town on the front line kilometers away. Rebel attacks very often achieve 'break throughs' of some sort as the Syrian/ Russian doctrine is designed around not fighting hard for front line positions- due mostly to the prevalence of suicide vehicle based IEDs and their huge advantage in artillery. So they will generally withdraw to a prepared secondary line, the SVBIEDs explode at the now empty old front line or are destroyed when they have to slow down to negotiate corners or berms, any APCs or pickups being used to ferry up rebel troops get hit by artillery/ ATGMs/ aircraft and any who make it into their offensive objective get hit by artillery and counter attacked from the secondary defensive positions. The rebels would very often take a decent theoretical amount of land in attacks, but last time they held any new areas for more than a few weeks was, literally, early 2016. Last 4 years they've always ended up losing more than they took even when their offensives seem to be an initial success.

Couple more Turkish soldiers killed in Idlib, seems like they* had the bright idea to try shooting down a(nother) Russian Su-24 with a manpad during an assault on a small town and got bombed for their trouble. While Turkish sources are officially saying it was the Syrians doing the bombing and that they killed another 50 (mythical) Syrian soldiers in response it was definitely Russia. The assault itself was probably testing whether Russia would pack up and run in response to threats like the US did last year or respond and risk killing Turkish soldiers, if so they got their answer. Cue Turkey Erdogan really going all friendship ended with Russia, now US is (again) new best friend and asking for patriots, US air patrols and a mug of cocoa, pat on the head and being told everything will be OK. *they in the general sense, the dead were supposedly tank crew so were unlikely to be those firing the Igla/ Stinger.

So, was Bloomberg's debate performance as bad as everyone seems to be saying? And if so was the DNC decision to parachute him into the debates not really typical corporate kowtowing but actually Big Brain getting him to torpedo his own campaign early on? Also, should people who ask a series of semi rhetorical questions on internet forums have something mildly unpleasant happen to them, like maybe stepping on an overripe plum and having it squish up between their toes and over the top of their feet?

Alter that slightly and you get the perfect description of Obama's 'quantitative easing' policy: "Just print more money and hand it out to the rich". On the jobless rates etc, dropping that rate is what gets targeted even if it doesn't get people back into actual jobs but just removes them from the statistics instead. It's no accident how changes to how the rate is calculated drop the jobless rate pretty much every single time- perhaps the favourite method is to say that if you haven't found a job after [time period] then you clearly aren't really looking so you aren't part of the official unemployment rate any more. If you're in a country with multiple types of welfare maybe you get shifted to something that doesn't get officially counted as unemployed. The other trick used to make an economy look like it's doing better at the low end than it really is is to cite 'job creation' stats. Most people will not spend any time thinking about them and just decide that since the number is positive things must be great- except you need a decent sized positive number just to be standing still.

I too am playing Pathfinder Kingmaker, though I started playing it before it was cool before I even knew the kickstarter for the second game was upcoming. Challenging difficulty, aasimar sorcerer/ rogue. I'll save my in depth thoughts for when I'm finished (suspect I'm halfish way through) but so far I'd say it's very much Baldur's Gate 1 in both the good and bad ways. Single levels up make an enormous difference to what you can tackle, and the RNG makes a colossal difference too; I've had multiple battles where I'd get party wipes one time but next time will win with barely a scratch. General observation, really weird that the difficulties jump from normal to challenging without a 'core rules' difficulty, with normal being less difficult than core rules and challenging being set above it. It can be frustrating but I'll definitely be contributing to the kickstarter of the second based on the first game.

Triton is probably being visited because it's an (well, thought to be an) accessible captured Plutoid/ dwarf planet/ planetoid or whatever they're calling them today; most of which have weird orbits that make getting to them difficult, and are small which makes slowing a space craft down to get into orbit or even drop a payload (without the payload splattering on impact) very difficult too. Triton is relatively easy to get to via Neptune which has been visited before multiple times before. It's an odd choice if you're looking for life, but as it certainly isn't a 'typical' moon it is of fundamental interest.

Kanada (sic) is an ethnic group (and language) from SW India, while Canada is a North American country.

It's kind of weird how many idiomatic phrases still in use come from ye olde firearms and as such... I feel compelled- compelled I say- to point out that (a) firing line is different to (a) firing squad. The firing line was the front line of battle in a ranked system when using early firearms where you'd have a front rank (the 'firing line') and ranks behind it systematically reloading their brown besses or whatever. Since the firing line was at the front those behind were partially protected, and the firing line was particularly dangerous. Idiomatically firing line represents being at significant risk, whereas being in front of a firing squad represents an inevitability of death. Next, flash in the pan and going off half roostered, both of which might be quite valid idiomatically for current Star Trek.

We are scientifically speaking the products of inbreeding as well. Most healthy populations, genetically speaking, are the product of balanced inbreeding and outbreeding. Scientists tend to use terms like genetic bottlenecks when talking about humans, but scientifically there's both a mitochrondial Eve (the ultimate female progenitor of the current human species) and at least one other later woman from whom the entire current human species descends. While I haven't checked recently the theory was that humans got down to perhaps as low as a few hundred individuals at some point in the order of 100,000 years ago.

The UK supposedly had a full day of energy production only using renewables (I suspect misreported, actually no fossil fuel usage instead) last year. 100% a gimmick achievement on a low demand day, but they certainly aren't at 90% coal by a long long shot and probably haven't been since the 60s. Nuclear is far more than 3% too, unless something has changed radically in the past few years, though that correctly isn't classed as renewable since it isn't. According to official UK figures they were at ~25% renewable energy in 2016, and are at ~33% as of 2019(pdf, the ~25% comes from the 2016 edition of the same pub). The zero emission future is a myth- though it does have to be pointed out that all claims are for zero net emissions which would involve some use of non renewables. There will be a lot of talk about sequestration and planting trees to balance things out, but the whole thing is impractical unless you don't give an asterisk about economics. The great thing about making long term aspirational goals as a politician is of course that there's zero chance that you will be the one having to fulfill them. Last government here made it a goal to have New Zealand 'predator free' by 2050 which would mean killing every stoat/ weasel/ ferret/ rat (cat/ hedgehog/ etc) in an area greater than the British Isles. Utterly unrealistic, but it sounds good... Natural gas is a lot better environmentally than coal at least. And I'm glad to see at least one article on natural gas that isn't a thinly veiled 'Europe should buy expensive US LNG instead of Russian or ME, please'.