Zoraptor

Yep. Might be the first time it's been 'confirmed' though. All those Global Surveyor flights followed immediately by Ukrainian sea drone attacks were meant to be purely coincidental. And of course for the non US we have the Germans outing the French and Brits for doing the target programming for Storm Shadows/ SCALPs.

The problem with the wording is really, really obvious. Though to be fair it isn't just Bruce burying their head in the sand about it. That clause is part of the first step which is meant to be implemented- hostage release- and it is not crystal clear about what is required when it has to be absolutely clear. Hamas will obviously read its intent as requiring a withdrawal, Israel will obviously read it as not requiring a withdrawal; and both will be right/ wrong, because it says both. Yet you cannot do both. So from the get go one side or the other will view the other as breaking the agreement. The net effect- and one suspects it's by design- is telling Hamas to give up their leverage for nothing except maybe some prisoners. And Israel can always administratively detain, ie kidnap*, more people later. The wording might not be a problem if the sides had trust, or there was an enforcement mechanism for Israel but as it stands it's set up to fail at the first hurdle and ideally- for the west and Israel- immediately after Hamas releases the hostages. *83% civilian, by Israel's own leaked stats. This is basically the Iraqi Provisional Authority/ Afghan Interim Administration of Gaza, and they had no problem enriching themselves or their supporters. Massive fees, no bid contracts for overpriced infrastructure projects (completion, optional), large wadges of dosh disappearing off into the ether, huge payments to Erik Prince's mercenaries for security. Just replace mineral concessions with selling beach real estate so Don and Bibi can sunbathe there without the AI generation.

That's the aforementioned Jared Kushner- he is married to Ivanka Trump and his firm is Affinity Partners. Not to be confused with Elevation Partners which initially bought Bioware off its founders before on selling it to EA.

Yeah, and what happens when Israel decides to abrogate the agreement. No conditional, it will happen, you just have to look at the WB for that. If you're not willing to punish Israel for genocide you're not going to punish them for anything, and that makes any agreement with them that does not involve them also being Forced to abide by the terms utterly worthless. That also means it costs Netanyahu literally literally nothing to accept, since he will not be bound by it anyway. It's also hilariously badly written. Even for something that sprang (partly*) from the same mind as covfefe and injecting bleach to cure covid. To whit: So, are they withdrawing to the agreed upon line or are the battle lines frozen? Can't even stay consistent within the same point let alone between points. I wonder if the remains of orthopaedic surgeon Adnan al Bursh will be one of those dead Gazan remains released, more than a year after Israel said it would. One suspects, given that he was tortured to death, that his body has been 'accidentally' lost. *The Arab+Turkey statement is a lot more equivocal than presented in the press. Strip away the ego massage of Trump and there's very little to it. That's because you can very easily see which points they added, and which points are going to be systematically ignored by Israel with the tacit support of those pathetic western genocide apologists Starmer, Merz, Luxon and pals; and with the active support of Trump.

First Palestinian member of the committee has been announced: Vidkun al Quisling. May pair up nicely with Bezazel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu and Tony Blair. Only caveat is that he may be a bit too liberal and namby pamby.

I do sometimes wonder if the MBA types expect AI to end up buying the games as well as making them. Can't wait for the Saudis to buy Intel.

Eh, if you ignore every bit of negative information for Ukraine- and there's been a lot; those horribly lop sided exchanges of bodies, averaging around 50:1 against Ukraine, and the continuing press ganging including people who patently aren't suitable or should be excluded being probably the most obvious- then yes, it's all positive for them. If you ignore every bit of positive information for Russia then it's all negative for them. You got so much of that sort of garbage propaganda in Afghanistan where the Taleban constantly failed in their aims while everything right for them/ wrong for the coalition got swept under the carpet; right up to the point the Taleban won. And there are probably still people who think the Taleban actually lost because it took them too long? actually it was all Trump's/ Biden's fault so they lost? whatever? It's attritional, much like the western front in ww1 it'll be static with little movement and high losses on both sides, precisely until it isn't. That blog approach is like taking Zelensky's 'aim' of 1991 borders and saying that he failed spectacularly because he lost more ground.

Doubt it was lawyers. Disney would have been able to pay out contracts, if they had to, from their loose change. They may- very much the conditional may- have been obligated to pay for the show, they'd not have been obligated to show it same way a bunch of their MAGA aligned stations won't be showing it*. Far more likely it was the cascade of awful publicity and people threatening to cancel Disney+ and the like. Not all that often you're going to have Ted Cruz, Jon Stewart and Bill Maher agree on something let alone the parade of TV and movie types criticising it. *I particularly liked this line from their press release: "Sinclair also calls upon Mr. Kimmel to issue a direct apology to the Kirk family. Furthermore, we ask Mr. Kimmel to make a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA." Very Trumpian, demanding an apology and a bung.

Good game but hobbled initially by a bad case of Paradoxitis. Absolute content desert without the dlc, especially late game. And without the dlc you had very little reason to, well, want the dlc due to it being a very shallow game after the initial set up was done. And even with the dlc still had a fair bit of 'could have been better' about it in some aspects.

It very much depends on what the deal would actually entail. An entire country's worth of data for an AI vendor would be priceless, for example, and they'd no doubt seek to eventually monetise things in a somewhat, hmm, Googlesque way at some point. Which was of course a company that- along with Facebook- was notoriously unprofitable. Right up to the point it became notoriously profitable. Nothing like defaultism for establishing a monopoly, and nothing like a monopoly for generating profits.

27 years for Bolsonaro's coup attempt.

Not just the US, almost all the decidedly little letters 'outrage' from the collective west is performative. Except for Spain, I guess. As always the juxtaposition of having a news article about some unarmed drones toodling across Poland being The End of World Civilisation!!! vs Israel bombing yet another country- and killing its citizens- is pretty stark. Good thing we have double standards, or we wouldn't have any at all. The lack of any actual consequences makes it very very clear that our politicians are absolutely fine with genocide so long as it's their friends doing it. And if you're fine with genocide then... there really isn't anything that you're not fine with, including Perfidy and having one ally bomb another.

Simplest explanation is that the drones GPS (/glonass) got mucked around with. Similar situation to the Ukrainian drone that hit near Tartu a couple of weeks ago (with basically no fanfare). The Ukrainians certainly were able to muck around with glonass for a bit since that was why the number of glide bomb videos from the Russians dropped right off for a couple of months, and if there's anything that would still be using vulnerable transceivers it's junker gerans.

Another interesting example of how bad western media has got at regurgitating state propaganda: Ursula von der Leyen's plane hit by GPS incident. Plus dozens of other articles. Number of articles citing flightradar24's statement that it didn't happen: zero. Number of articles that had been corrected: zero. Fact checkers that had checked the facts: zero. Note that the plane's transponder includes GPS consistency values, so it indicates there was no spoofing as well as no appreciable interference. While there certainly is GPS interference close to the Russian border central Bulgaria isn't close to it by any stretch. The whole incident appears to have been quite literally made up then published without asking anyone who could refute it about it. Expectation that the record will ever be corrected: also zero.

We've got AI nowadays, why not ask one of them?

Cassandra Obsession Guy was all over multiple forums for a while. Nothing will beat the theoretical analysis of Tali's sweat as an 'interesting' Bioware fan obsession. Wonder what AI have to say on that subject... "Tali's sweat is a topic of discussion among fans of the Mass Effect series, with some humorously speculating about its taste and properties, such as it being sweet or having performance-enhancing qualities. This reflects the quirky nature of fan interactions and the creativity within the community." Not the worst certainly, but hardly worth buying Jensen another leather jacket for.

South Africa is a terrible example for illustrating the sanctity of flags. One day burning an orange white and blue flag was sacrilege and everyone should be singing Die Stem, the next burning a red white yellow black and green flag was sacrilege and everyone should be singing Nkosi Sikelel iAfrica.

While they have just started production of the 'ERAM'* it does have a pretty direct equivalent in the GBU-39, which is basically a JDAM kit with rocket assist; and Boeing has a Powered 500lb PJDAM already which is most likely to be the 'ERAM' in question. The only questionable bit there is the cost, since they claim they'll be cheaper than the gbu39 despite being heavier, but supposedly at least that is the cost of a PJDAM. Which makes no sense, since an unpowered JDAM kit is of similar cost, hence 'why would you make anything else', but that's the claim. *maybe, one WSJ article citing anonymous sources is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting. Even the acronym is wonky since up to a week ago ERAM was used for an anti air missile

Wunderwaffe_Counter++ We've had outlandish claims of accuracy and reliability before for every weapon system supplied. Now they're going to supply a jam proof long range rocketbomb accurate to 10m over 450km; at 30k a pop? That's... 3 per Excalibur, 3-17 per M3X ('HiMARS'), 2-3 per Switchblade (lol), 110 (one hundred and ten) per SS/ SCALP. Begs the question: why would you ever make anything else but these unjammable accurate 500lb bombs... well, because it's basically the ALMDB to the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb. Which has been utter rubbish.

Apartheid era South Africa did have nukes*, whatever NATO said. And for that at least it seems that the US/ west genuinely made an effort to stop them no matter how tepid the other anti apartheid measures were. *Most probably obtained in whole or part from a similarly minded apartheid state.

Three grocery companies have 90% market share? Absolutely jealous. And don't get me started on the number of NZ products- like cow juice, sold via a monopoly because obviously that's the best way to get competition per the free marketers in the government- that manage to toodle literally half way around the world to be sold cheaper than here. Two supermarket companies have 95% market share here. It's- apparently- an absolute mystery to NZ's politicians why there is not competition between those two and they make $1 million per day in excess profits. They talk a lot about breaking up the duopoly, but never do anything. They've quite literally talked about it and given their buddies high paid consulting jobs on panels for twenty years when the solution is trivial- demerge. And debundle distribution while you're at it. That latter because, aside from the monopoly cow juice supply, NZ supermarkets absolutely fleece suppliers as well as consumers, because your options are sell to them at the price they dictate- or watch your crops rot for nothing.

Ukraine could build deliverable dirty bombs in, basically, minutes given they do have nuclear reactors and long range drones, rockets, missiles etc. For all but the delivery system Fiji could build one in weeks as well. There's a lot of radioactive material around if you're a state player even without a reactor, eg in health care; even smoke alarms have some. They wouldn't be effective battlefield weapons of course, but that isn't their purpose. Their purpose is to terrorise civilians populations. For that you don't even really need them to be dangerous in reality, you just need them to be dangerous in perception; and the word radiation provides the heavy lifting for the perception of danger. Ukraine doesn't use/ build them because it would alienate everyone except the staunchest NAFOids. Indeed, 90% of the discourse about them has been about them being used as false flags by Russia or Ukraine for that very reason.

The country looks like an economic miracle, and to a large extent that is what is important*. Mostly because economics is a spectacularly non rigorous field of study/ expertise with more similarities to religion than science. Same reason house price inflation was massively encouraged here- it made the economics look good though it was utterly unproductive and a very real drain on the practical economy because it sucked up all the investment. Worse, the houses were made from over priced materials and didn't fill the actual need (ie were built to appeal to appeal specifically to 'investors'). Why start a business when you could buy a house at 5-10% return y/y + rental with the knowledge that the government would prop you up? When house prices started to stabilise because no one could afford them the government started importing massive numbers of people to create artificial demand to keep the bubble inflated. Because economists mostly look at GDP nominal the fact that GDP per capita was actually dropping got ignored and then people wondered why everyone felt poor. Also why politicians and economists try and tell us that $10 butter in a country which makes 20x the amount of butter it needs is great, and everyone should be happy about it- it makes the country look like it's doing well economically. It'd be true if we had 1-2 million people and a quarter of them were involved in selling unimproved cow juice products like in the 50s and 60s, but we don't. Doesn't do much to dispel the old saying that there's one type of person who believes in infinite expansion in a closed system: economists, politicians and idiots. *eg you can borrow a lot more money at better rates because typically lenders look at GDP nominal as to whether you can pay the money back. Much like religion a great deal of economics is getting people to believe in stuff.

Reminder: the only GDP that really matters is the Purchase Price Parity variety. And really, GDP (PPP) per capita since that tells you how well the people it's relevant to are actually doing- or at least, is the best general and handy measurement of it there is. China is 78th, there. GDP (nominal) is an awful measurement and it's use is responsible for a lot of extremely bad economic management.

There has been a certain amount of revisionism about Ukraine 'giving up her nukes'. It- and the offer to Belarus and Khazakstan too- was not really an offer. One way or another they were not going to have them. And that was policy not just of Russia but of everyone else too. People tend to forget the very real fears about nukes disappearing post soviet break up because it didn't end up happening, and one of the main reasons it didn't was them being consolidated.