Zoraptor

Or latish Roman Republic: immense capite censi with low political engagement, lots of gerrymandering and back room deals, a political system that was designed well before the country got so big, huge vested interests that effectively controlled the Republic, colossal income disparities, massively disproportionate weight of military enlistment on a specific subgroup of the population and a lot more long term military engagement than was ever considered at the Republic's founding. Which probably makes Bernie Sanders Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus reborn, hopefully without the getting beaten to death by Mitch McConnell part.

Well why not, she only lost last time because of that evil misogynist Putin and not because of her moronic electoral strategy and lack of broad appeal.

Andromeda is very similar to Inquisition. Neither are bad though neither are good either. They're not low effort games, they've got a massive amount of content but would have been far better with less content that was more memorable as after a while both games got tired and dreary. I like some of the ideas behind them but overall they both feel a bit 'off' and too much like an offline (well, 'offline') MMO in single player mode.

I only have Netflix. But, as costs for 'premium' services go I could subscribe to Netflix, Amazon, Neon* and Lightbox* together for less than a monthly SkyTV sub which is the main premium alternative. No Hulu/ CBS/ DCTV etc here, and no 'native' Amazon either so its streaming is limited to their Originals, and comes via Japan (!) *The local Netflix alternatives are a bit lol, Lightbox started using Silverlight after MS announced its discontinuation and whatever Neon was using must have been licensed from Pixelon given its reliability and resolution

Fake news. Hess was already captured by 1944.

Welcome to Project Fear 2.0: this time all the bad stuff will happen for real, promise! Trade defaults to WTO standards in the event of a hard brexit, and plenty of countries trade on exactly that basis. For food, medicine etc imports it's in no one's interests- including the EU if they're exports from there to the UK- for them not to get in. Assuming some basic competence from the Brit authorities, which may not be in evidence practically, as the UK does trade with non EU countries and has inspections and paperwork for them applying that to EU imports should be easy enough. Exports from Britain to the EU are a lot more vulnerable, as at that point once all the attempts to end run the referendum have failed the EU will be looking to stick the boot in any way they can as a lesson to others who may look to leave. Good riddance to the war criminal worshiping Bliarite scum. Should have been purged a decade ago and Tony shipped off to the Hague where he belongs. The Tories are better off with a few less wobbly blancmanges as well. That none of them have resigned their seat to allow their constituents a choice illustrates perfectly what a bunch of utter unrestrained hypocrites they are even if trying to invalidate a binding referendum didn't, and the Tory defectors claiming May is further right than the Cameron/ Osborne austerity junta is laughable.

CDPR literally already tried something like that with Witcher Tales: Thronebreaker late last year too. It sold like **** even though it had the Witcher branding behind it. Yeah, nah. Thronebreaker is just behind Witcher 3 on GOG's all time best seller list, and that after only ~4 months. They may have had unrealistic expectations about its appeal andor expected GOG buyers to preorder and 1st day buy more- badly misjudging their own user base, the essence of the gog user is patience- but it's 100% sold fine by any objective measure and barely been out of the top sellers list since launch. Whereas on steam it sunk without trace beneath their shovelware tsunami.

There are good arguments for both with the 20 series being new releases, but unfortunately it also doesn't represent much of a price/ performance shift and there aren't enough raytraced games to be worth it for 1080p RTX gaming, so... The logic is that GPUs typically improve a lot in price/ performance and you're usually better off getting the monitor first then the GPU to go with it rather than the reverse. Despite price performance not shifting much over the past two years I think it's likely to shift a decent amount over the next year or so with Navi and a shift to 7nm, and the $200 saved getting a 580 instead of a 2070 class card will go a lot further in a year.

I'd basically recommend going similar to the medium build from Sarex's guru3d article. R5 2600- can go 2600x for the better cooler and automatic overclocking, probably not worth it tho B450 Tomahawk* 16GB DDR4 RAM (3000MHz+, any reputable brand on the QVL. Don't bother with B die, not worth the premium) RX 580** (fine for 1080p/60Hz, assuming 60Hz. Think they have a pretty good game bundle with them too at the moment) 550W or higher modular/ gold PSU (any decent quality unit like EVGA G series or recent Corsair CXM, check out a PSU tier list if in doubt) Crucial MX500 SSD That would be a fair bit under budget, I'd put any leftovers towards a monitor/ GPU upgrade later on. *X470 if you need the features, but a Tomahawk's specs are as good as or better than most cheap x470s. MSI has done an excellent job with their 400 series boards. **IMO the GPU market is pretty meh at the moment, so I'd tend to recommend a cheaper card rather than an overkill card especially since RTX is still at meme level adoption/ performance. nVidia's 1660 is also close to release and may be worth consideration. If a monitor upgrade is likely within a year a 2060/70/80 (or Vega 56/64 if you don't mind tinkering, they require a good quality 550W+ PSU though) should be considered, depending on resolution.

Anyway, I'm wondering, "everyone" always recommends what appears to be liquid cooling units for the i9-9900k. Does it really need that, if one isn't going to overclock? It will perform at its rated TDP (more or less) if you aren't overclocking and most decent conventional aftermarket coolers like the 212/ H7 will deal with a default 95W just fine. That will impact performance though, the 95W rating doesn't include the built in turbo so with poor cooling you may not (won't, practically) even hit the built in turbo speeds consistently. Pretty much all reviews are also done with high performance cooling even if they aren't doing an overclocking test and its strong benchmarking is predicated on hitting boost speeds. There isn't much point spending the premium on a 9900k and having it sit at 3.6 Ghz if you're doing something that takes more than 30s. IIRC under load it's a 200W chip at default settings on a 390 motherboard rather than a 95W chip, which gives an idea of the level of cooling needed to get full performance. Whether the 1300 includes budget for a monitor/ OS or not is a big consideration too.

Yeah, the maximum stress on a rope or bough would be at time of hanging, if it doesn't break then it will hold indefinitely. Guess 'God' could have done it, but if you use supernatural entities as an explanation you can explain anything. What happened to Judas afterwards is a product of the bible being written by men. Matthew's version is a good story that has the traitor dying in a proscribed manner by killing himself, compounding his 'badness' and even if he regretted the betrayal. Frankly, Luke's account implies revenge murder, "he fell down and randomly scattered his internal organs around the immediate vicinity." isn't exactly convincing compared to "someone was angry with his betrayal and killed him in a particularly unpleasant way, at the place he bought with his blood money as reinforcement". That isn't a great story to use as a foundation for christianity though.

Non spoiler: yeah, given that it seems likely they are a lot more recognisable.

Yeah, really not a fan of that episode at all. Yes, they did. When put into context with the rest of the Star Trek universe, no, not at all. Section 31 was Starfleet's Alpha Protocol back in Enterprise and it still is as of Deep Space Nine. It makes zero sense that it's an official part of Starfleet Intelligence ten years before TOS. Nor does it make any sense that the UFP would have an officially regonized and sanctioned Tal Shiar equivalent. It's not clear yet that its existence is generally known though is it? Spoilered it to be safe though I tried to be vagueish.

The ironic thing is that for most of the church's existence a Returning Jesus would have been labelled a dangerous heretic exactly as OG Jesus was labelled by the Jewish hierarchy of the time. It seems unlikely that a lot of the 'capitalist' stuff that the church did- selling indulgences, the fake artefact/ relic industry, huge accumulation of wealth and the various attempts and successes at gaining temporal power would have passed muster in exactly the same way Jews commercialising the temple in 32AD didn't pass muster. The message supplied by Jesus directly (well, 'directly' since it's not objectively provable what he said/ did and you just have to believe M/M/L/J as much as anything else) is overtly anti capitalist as it's against conspicuous consumption and wealth accumulation. Like just about everything else that message got massaged a bit by succeeding writers such as Saul to broaden appeal.

I actually don't remember if Pike knew about them. Pretty sure (but not certain) he recognised the name/ badge without prompting. As for whether it works, too soon to tell since they've only really had bits of C plot and B plot so far. Ep5 spoiler below, though it could easily be inferred from non spoiler info

Obama hadn't bombed anyone at all (yet) when he won, so there's precedent. Trump winning for North Korea would probably be more legit than Obama's win since Obama had done precisely nothing apart from not being GWBush at the time.

Obviously_this_comment_didn't_age_well.jpg That was... Threshhold level bad. The contrast against the last Orville episode could not have been more stark.

Discovery has the problem all shows have when they try and appeal to everyone and appeal to some retroactively by fixing 'mistakes'- they tend to become a bit amorphous and are focused on annoying as few as possible as opposed to pleasing as many as possible. Addressing criticism is great, but you have to accept that if you 'fix' something for one group of people you're likely to 'break' it for others and that if you get it wrong you will end up not pleasing either group; getting the balance right is tricky and you may just be better off deciding some people are just not your audience. Personally I'm not too worried about the more emo Burnham- she's still recognisably the same character, there are reasons for it, and it was a journey Spock, Data and every other stoic character went on to greater or lesser extents, but I can see how others wouldn't like it as it is too sudden and too extreme and how others wouldn't have liked her in S1. I think they're a bit too concerned with whether viewers like Burnham though, when being liked is not necessary for an effective protagonist. My concerns with S2 are mostly Tilly being Flanderised into... some sort of hybrid of all the worst aspects of Neelix and Wesley Crusher, and the increased use of outright treknobabble to solve problems- S1 had the treknobabble, but it was at least mostly isolated to dealing with the fungus subplot (the weakest aspect of the season); and treknobabble has been and always will be a crutch for bad writers to bail themselves out of the corners they've written themselves into with their bad writing. S1 may have been too dark for many, but it at least established the series as having stakes and some permanent consequences, so far S2 has ducked any real consequences and gone far too far in the fluffy bunny direction. Note: I haven't seen the latest episode yet, vaguely hoping that Tilly gets possessed by homicidal fungus and goes on a rampage to invalidate my complaints. Stewart is probably too old for outright action man stuff anyway, even with a stunt double and makeup, and I'd presume he'd be a flag officer of some sort rather than a captain going off on away missions. I'd like the odd 'Darmok' type episode where he does both, but I'm really expecting it to be others doing most of the action. Which is as it really ought to be, logically, both in universe and out. When I think of the best Picard eps Darmok is probably the only one with much in the way of conventional action, and that still has the talky/ story as focus.

Hitler_reacts_to_Bruno_Ganz's_death.mpg Had forgotten how much I like a good Untergang parody.

Thronebreaker was GOG exclusive for ~a month before being released on steam. And while not quite the same thing if you buy CDPR games anywhere other than steam you get a GOG key, not a steam one. OTOH I doubt Epic could offer CDPR enough money to make 2077 Epic Store exclusive, not really their style and it would involve far too many toys coming out of cots from the steam === PCgaming crowd. We aren't Bobby's target and never have been, shareholders are. And they love that sort of thing. Bobby has zero bonks to give for gamers, so long as he get their money.

While I get the implication of Trump being a buffoon with using Jar Jar, I think that's somewhat unfair to Senator Jar Jar as he appeared to have grown some as a character, even though we never saw that growth. Did you ever hear the theory of Darth Darth Binks? I thought not, it's not a theory Disney would tell you.

Raithe trigg'ring fools like a boss, but anyway... Trolls are frequently hilarious, just not to those who are targeted by them. Wow, British heroes are all... uh, fictional? Which would be the single most pathetic thing ever, if Britain were so bereft of heroes they have to resort to literal fiction to find any. Of course, actually write down a list of British heroes and you get a different, but problematic, set of results which is why you get a list here of made up idealised people, from fiction. To be fair, some on the British hero list would be like David; it was later King David, after all. Yep, whoever wrote this had no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion (OK, no evidence either way really), no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness (to quote the great philosopher Daniel Bryan: "Yes! Yes! Yes!"), no humility, no honour and no grace. ... Yes, the British Empire... happened... because... the British... hate... bullies... :roflcopters" ..."no self-awareness" And let's be honest here, any list of actually existed British heroes will have an awful number of objective bullies on it, that's just the nature of such things. lolwut? You can argue niceness vs politeness I guess, but even then, lolwut? Can't even keep the clichés straight. Gotta be frank, it reads like he has his head rammed up his fundamental alimentary egress port. And I don't even disagree with the gist of it, Trump's a prize knob much like all politicians and worse than most. That, however, is the sort of hypocritical diatribe which is squarely aimed at making the writer feel superior, it's basically masturbation in written form and the writer lacks even the most basic ability to self edit for consistency. Him accusing anyone else- even Trump- of having no self awareness is ludicrous. On the positive side, every British hero being fictional was pretty funny as was the British hating bullies, even if were utterly unintentionally funny. Kind of wish it were trolling, as it would work decently that way.

The problem is the deficit money was spent on social welfare for corporations and other stupidities, not that it was deficit money. If they'd spent it on sensible things- and yes, New Deal like infrastructure is a very good example- they'd have had an investment for the money, it would have been spread around instead of concentrated in the hands of a few already rich and the recovery would have been on more sound foundations than the blatant funny money/ share/ housing etc bubbles generated by Chinese pyramid schemes and US money printing that it's based on now while the people who make and buy actual stuff get comparatively poorer and poorer. Obama was crap economically, I 100% agree. He allowed privatised profits but socialised losses from the big companies when he should have been brave and kicked the vested interests who generated the 2008 crisis in the arse. His only excuse is that he genuinely did inherit an utterly borked economy from that even worse economic cretin GWB whose over spending in relatively good times was on even worse stupidities and who had far fewer excuses for his deficit spending. In the end they spent the money on reinforcing the same old mistakes so that the whole thing could repeat itself 10-20 years later just with the average person being far poorer and the top echelon far richer next time around.

Deficit spending during a recession is exactly what you should do, assuming the spending is on Sensible Things and to get money into circulation, at least*. What most governments have trouble with is the corollary of that: you should save (pay down debt) when you're in the boom segment of the cycle. Instead leftist governments tend to increase spending more then and rightists decide to cut taxes so you never get around to paying down the debt. Austerity as a response to a recession has been almost completely discredited. It made Britain's recession worse and they still haven't recovered from it and it made Europe's recession worse, only mitigated by Europe's ridiculous economic system which ensures the strongest economies eat the weaker ones making austerity appear to work for the top economies (plus cancerous tax havens). *which it wasn't in that case since it mostly amounted to corporate welfare and printing money for banks and billionaires while everyone else stagnated or worse; so Obama's economic management was crappy, it was just what he spend the deficit spending on which was the problem.

The Ockers never actually had a shut down then. It would theoretically have happened, at the end of November, but never actually did since the contentious Supply bill was passed in mid November (on the same day Whitlam was sacked and largely because... he forgot to tell his party's senators he'd been sacked and it was being passed for PM Fraser instead). Also Westminster System vs a US system which doesn't have the same concepts of Supply to anywhere near the same degree nor Confidence- at all effectively- and has an Executive President while the Governor General is decidedly non executive except in this sole case. Fact check status: Not factual let alone ultrafactual/ Pants On Fire/ Fakenews SAD!/ More war on truth from the alt left/ whatever other clichés I can't be bothered writing. (For US types the equivalent would be the House and Senate disagreeing on a budget; Guam and Puerto Rico being granted Senators which could give D a majority in the Senate; Pelosi is effective executive head of the government as the House trumps the Senate but the Senate can still block legislation; the President being appointed rather than elected and their only real power being the power to sack ministers and which has never been used; ministers are appointed by Pelosi who is herself a minister and can be sacked; and if Pelosi cannot pass Supply or Confidence measures then whoever the R minority leader is gets a crack at being executive head of the government and if he fails you get a full deck election of both houses. Pelosi cannot pass Supply measures, Supreme Court says she cannot appoint senators for Guam/ PR but there must an election by mid next year, President sacks Pelosi but Pelosi doesn't tell everyone, Senate passes Supply measure for new R Speaker with D senators thinking they'd won the standoff, R now run the government and decide to dissolve Congress, R win elections, President eventually resigns and leaves the country because D are butthurt, Pelosi eventually becomes well known for wanting to turn the US into a constitutional monarchy to avoid the situation repeating)