Zoraptor

I'd have voted leave, but it would be very much in spite of Farage that I'd have done so, not because of. Indeed, it would have been very much in spite of pretty much every politician in support of leave and the only one it might not have been was Corbyn of all people, had he been 'leave'. My personal crackpot theory would be that it was a land grab. No, really, the Ukraine has a lot of really good farm land (Chernozem) that can - and is - now gobbled up by foreign investors. The food market seems like a really good investment. There are more and more people who need to be fed. *shrug* Big natural gas deposits. Under, er, Donetsk/ Lugansk and Crimea, coincidentally. It's probably not really that or agriculture though- the way to make most money there is to be a member of the EU for the CAP subsidies or in the US for its corporate welfare/ pork barelling subsidies- and just that they thought, much like Libya, they could do it and hurt Russia doing so with very little consideration of whether they should do it.

Theoretically at least, that is exactly what you have the civil service (especially, since they're supposed to be non party political) and parliamentary staff for though- preparing contingencies and plans. It's not really expected that individuals come up with plans themselves as they have no ability to cost or vet ideas (let alone implement them) and consultancy is expensive and time consuming enough that you could not expect even decently wealthy people to finance it for something of Brexit's scope from their own pocket. They're also MPs, not experts, themselves; it would probably be worse to have them throwing ludicrous contradictory ideas around rather than staying quiet. Only one party supported brexit and it was the least important one, so that also means minimal parliamentary resources were available. Really, it has to be Cameron's and HM's Government as an apparatus whose failure here is most egregious- Carney managed to have a plan for the BoE, the other civil servants should have had theirs too but seem not to have. At present it just looks like they've either deliberately or incompetently failed to plan anything coherent, and despite that being their actual job.

The 'funny' thing is that the remain press is complaining vociferously about the leave side having no plan for if they won- well, what's the point of them having a plan when they have zero chance to actually implement it themselves. There's simply no point asking Farage (who's a complete dong, but for this that is irrelevant) what his plan is when he cannot implement it anyway and will have very little power to get his way, and very little point asking even Gove/ Johnson when Cameron is going to be PM for the next four months. The people who should be preparing plans are the beaurocrats (albeit acting under instructions of the government) and about the only one of them who seemed to have any sort of plan is a Canadian who hasn't even been in the job very long. It's all very well to think that Leave winning is unthinkable, but there's plenty of such scenarios that get plans; there will be one for Russia nuking the UK etc which are equally unthinkable. Something something Hodgson doesn't take 4 months to resign something something Brexit 2.0, June 27 this is our independence day something something hopefully England doesn't turn into an Iceland like anarchy something something England leaves EUro 2016 in shock result, have to wait at airport for standby tickets as no one has planned for that eventuality etc etc.

In my opinion its because most of our spineless lapdog politicians were useful sock puppets for the USAs interests in Europe, a foothold in the door so to speak and an ally amongst what may be a future enemy. Plus supporting Brexit would antagonise the remainder of the EU- or at least their most powerful politicians- with very little to gain; and negotiating deals like TTIP without Britain is far harder too. Which is pretty much what WoD said really, but Britain has always been seen as a bit of a bulwark against some members' more protectionist instincts, especially France.

18-24 year old turn out was ~36% for the vote. Bit of a rum old do, blaming more senior people for actually turning up to vote when your group couldn't even be bothered to. That's quite all right, my man, it's only your first mistake. Any more though and your tea and biscuit, real ale or tweed jacket privileges may have to be reconsidered.

Fair enough. RUUUUULE BRITANNIA, RUUUULE THE WAAAVES; BRITONS NEVER WILLLL BE SLAAAAVES! amirite fellas? 'Fraid not. You've left out a second 'Brittania' after the comma and a couple of 'never's after the first one. And I'm fairly sure it's 'shall' rather than 'will' too.

I thought the number of characters in Dead Space was simply too many to care much about any of them- they ended up as ciphers or stereotypes with little character development. I'd prefer fewer NPCs; and though I'm pretty sure there won't be a sequel IIRC Brian Mitsoda said much the same thing about there being just too many NPCs to flesh out. I don't really know about AoD. It's like someone seeing corruption in the church and deciding that the solution is Scourging. Yeah, rpglites tend towards being vanilla cheese fests designed mostly to not offend or challenge morons but the solution is not hard core just for the sake of it, the hard core has to actually be good in and of itself. Having said that, while everyone pretty much is an arse in the game it's a setting where altruism doesn't make much sense since everything is in decline and the setting is fundamentally depressing and brutal; and the extreme specialisation is definitely a choice to aid replayability so justifiable in context/ theory though I'd certainly agree it's far too extreme in implementation. So in the end it's... dunno, really. 90% of the way to potential excellence, 10% of the way to pointless frustration. [disclaimer: I haven't finished it, so ideas are subject to change]

Heh, Cameron gone and Bliarites having another tilt at Corbyn, must be a day ending in y again for the latter. God forbid that Labour had a leader who actually talked sensibly to people instead of stridently 'yelling' his views at people like just about everyone else, and the Bliarites' sole connection to the disaffected Labour voters in the north who voted to leave is that they occasionally drive the A1(M)/ M1 in their Hybrids (double heh, most are probably so hypocritical they drive a ponce mobile like an X5) to swill chardonnay after their round of golf or visiting the holiday home in Scotland. Surely another leader lecturing people to vote one way because if they didn't there would be Exodusian plagues visited upon the land would have convinced people how to vote... There will be another financial crisis. They never really fixed the issues from the last one so you now have near identical situations with housing bubbles across multiple countries, too big to fail and the like. You even still have derivatives, you just don't have sub prime to trigger everything this time. The exit makes the British (well, London/ SE) housing bubble very likely to burst and once one goes the dominoes will fall. Not really the exit's fault though, it could be near literally anything to cause it, that is the nature of speculative bubbles. It will probably even be worse this time since interest rates have nowhere lower to go for stimulus and most places have barely recovered at this point. Most of the developed world is looking at a Japan in the 1990s situation of negative growth and deflation. And they don't want to reform and won't reform due to short term benefits from the status quo and not wanting to lose elections. I really don't know if the EU can reform at this point. The core power group has been so intransigent about always increasing integration that I'm not sure even this will cause actual introspection instead of just labelling England as chauvinistic jingoists who didn't know a good thing when they had it; and they have a pathological fear that any reasonable response would cause contagion in other countries. A reasonable response, earlier, would have seen Remain winning the referendum.

I'm getting a good chuckle out of all the "old people shouldn't be allowed to vote"/ "only thickos and racists who love Hitler andor Putin voted to leave" rhetoric on the internet. If remain hadn't run such a stupendously negative campaign they'd probably have won, their campaign gave no reason at all to vote to stay beyond negative ones and telling leave voters that they're ignorant racist morons was never going to be a winning strategy, just one that made the people saying it feel superior and might have kept leave voters home instead of changing their minds. For once the usual tactics of getting talked down to by bankers, (b)e(a)urocrats, politicians and businessmen/ lobbyist/ 'think groups' did not work, and thank [chosen deity] for that. It's probably going to hurt Britain a lot short term, but someone had to take one for the team so far as the EU was concerned. Will be interesting to see if the message is finally received or if they just keep sticking their head deeper in the hole in Brussels. And to see how much the EU decides to stick the knife in the back on the way out/ whether the brit politicians try some sort of run around of the result. Sinn Fein and SNP talk about leaving the UK/ joining Ireland on every day ending with a 'y'. It is their corest of core policies.

Visa free applied though. Having an EU passport was pretty useful, looks like I don't have one now. The area I could have voted in had leave +20% anyway. Interesting times are certainly ahead. I really didn't think when it came right down to it that enough people would be brave enough to vote leave. Will have some interesting ramifications for other countries too, it would make somewhere like Greece leaving a lot more likely; I'd suspect that they would have had this vote been a year or so earlier. Hard to be sympathetic with the EU though, too smug, too insular, too self satisfied, too imbalanced, too pretentious, too unwieldy and yes half of those mean much the same thing. Trying to force everyone into their vision of the project when those you're forcing are democracies was always a stupid approach. Bye bye Cameron, bye bye Osborne.

BBC results page for those wanting to follow the, uh, excitement in real time. Way too soon for any actual predictions yet, remain has a slight lead at present.

Countries have free trade agreements and even free movement without a supra national federalised government, we have both with Australia. The EU isn't as bad as it's made out to be the extreme rejectionsists but it has always been about bundling federalisation into unrelated matters- you don't need the Euro, or a central european bank or even executive functions beyond the ability to implement decisions related to trade/ economics; and, of course, the EU has been utterly hopeless at enforcing any economic rules even with that executive function. If they'd been in any way competent at that then I'd probably agree with you, but they simply haven't and they have asterisked entire countries up as a consequence. So, mostly the EU isn't as bad because it tends to get blamed for everything that goes wrong and works very well as an excuse for making or not making decisions that individual countries did/ didn't want to make anyway rather than having intrinsic positives. Reverse is true as well, EU fans love blaming any problems in the EU on insufficient integration. It hasn't even prevented wars, most of its members being in NATO and not spending much on defence has been far more important than the EU.

Personally, I'd be voting out if I were voting- but I fully expect stay to win. That their campaign has been so unremittingly negative says as much as needs saying about how rubbish the status quo is, but status quo is certainly the safe choice.

Epidemiology (basically medical population statistics) requires examination of gun data to do properly and gun injuries is also a health issue. CDC is responsible for both epidemiology and more general "health threats" (direct quote) than just 'disease', and despite its name. Theoretically at least good statistical analysis leads to unbiased information and hence informed decision making; theoretically. In most other countries that sort of public research would be done by the Ministry of Health or similar, which is more appropriately/ less narrowly named.

Massive counteroffensive with like 2 tanks and with both sides' forces numbering maybe a thousand. Not that the government wasn't embarrassing in their attempt to get Raqqa and that it wasn't a stupid idea on a fundamental level, but a few Russian helicopters would make a real mess of the ISIS counter attacks much as they did in Palmyra and by all reports not a single one has turned up.

No, they're not required to- official sales numbers are usually released as PR, if they are at all. They do have to publicly disclose certain information as public companies but it's usually aggregate info, specific details are considered commercially sensitive. You can actually download most of the big games companies' annual or quarterly reports to read and only a fraction of their games even get mentioned specifically let alone have any sales numbers.

There were a fair few articles when it was removed a few weeks ago, eg PC Gamer. The Steamspy notice should definitely say removed at the request of the publisher though. It's probably related to Paradox going public and not wanting their new shareholders to get unvetted independent information more than any 'inaccuracy' though. Steamspy is generally fairly accurate as their methodology is robust, there's no reason for Paradox games to be special snowflakes whose numbers are persistently wrong.

Bit weird how many Scandinavian entities there are in there- there are a fair few Norwegian ones as well as Swedish. The Gulf ones were pretty much as expected, having Norway's government in the same tier as Saudi, not so much. (Neither are quite as odd as Michael Schumacher contributing, let alone so much. Unless there's a different Michael Schumacher who is head of JP Morgan Chase or something)

Surely the pigs would vote out, since that way it would be Dave that is well and truly asterisked this time? (Suppose I could work in an allusion to 'Animal Farm' to counter 'Lord of the Flies', but lazy)

More DNC/ Hillary hax docs released. Pretty much zero doubt that it's genuine at this point, ain't nobody going to fake that number of documents, plus no one seems to be claiming that it's fake just that the hacker is 'Russian'.

eyyyy That seem bit failed study. Because data pointed towards Clinton winning over Sanders. Even I was able to predict Clinton most likely taking nomination based on poll and vote data in early March. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/85040-us-elections-2016/page-10?do=findComment&comment=1786341 But of course there is always possible that poll data from all polling sources was fraudulent. And that there was country wide conspiracy in Democratic primaries, with thousands of participants. Exit polls are generally reliable, at least in 'safely' democratic countries where you don't have the po-po's eavesdropping for wrongthink. Phone polls aren't necessarily- you can stuff up the weightings, oversample groups that end up not voting much (eg young people; which is what happened in the UK where the polls were miles off) not use or misuse cell phones so exclude many young people or sample people who won't vote, about every 20th poll is statistically rogue by definition etc etc. Exit polls though, unless someone turns up to basically troll you know that they don't merely say that they voted, you know that they have voted. There are still inaccuracies and potential biases, they could still lie because they're embarrassed about voting Hillary (though that would say something in itself) or refuse to answer questions etc but then they can lie or refuse to answer on the phone, too, so phone polling has the same biases, plus more. If you have a phone poll and an exit poll, and if both are properly conducted then the exit poll is fundamentally the more accurate of the two.

I think Dorne epitomises the TV show's problems. The equivalent part of the books was not well received and elements of it (Darkstar, he's of the night, r00fles) were pretty cringeworthy. Show has managed to make it look like the height of tight, believable plotting and characterisation. At least we got the 'fire and blood' speech and promise of better to come from Doran as pay off in the books, in the show the plot line was taken out behind the wood shed and dispatched summarily, excluding perhaps the single most ridiculed part of the show in the Sand Snakes. That may have been a good thing given how poorly executed (heh) the plot was but it looks clumsy at best given how much time was wasted in Dorne last season. I still think we'll get Manderly eventually for the same reasons I did previous- the Freys have to be dealt with and going full Mrs Lovett on them has shock attraction. Maybe Jon will send Davos to visit them and we'll get the 'full' Davos/ Manderly plotline, just delayed and with little logic since the Boltons aren't a factor any more. But it's the sort of thing that should be a slow burn and not randomly appear an episode or two before it becomes relevant- introduce Manderly, have Davos meet him, have some Freys visit. Doesn't take much preparation. And really, the battle would have made so much more sense if it had been Manderly, a (more or less) local guy who Ramsay was expecting to turn up with his army as an ally, instead of Petyr 'mass teleportation' Baelish who can apparently avoid Bolton scouts and supply his army etc despite not being local in any way. It would also have the added value of being how Ramsay won Winterfell in the first place, by stabbing someone who expected him as an ally (General Sideburns) in the back. You could even retain feeding him to the dogs if you wanted to.

Yep. I think India was the example I heard being suggested as a post brexit trade target that would be hard to impossible under the EU. It's also kind of telling who is supporting the stay side- basically all the status quo corporates who have been lobbying extensively for deals like TTIP in Brussels. The small business side is far more divided. Then again, I'd pretty much definitely be voting leave if I were still in the UK.

Well, that clears up the ISIS link, in that there isn't one and the fealty is entirely self declared. A true Caliphate follower would surely pledge to 'Caliph Ibrahim', not some 'Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi' bloke... Pretty moronic redacting the transcript in the first place though. It's not like anyone with two brain cells couldn't guess instantly what the redactions were, and that they'd get unredacted real quick.

I don't really like the Cannae comparisons. Sure, it's a shorthand reference but Cannae was genius because of the numerical imbalance, remove that and it's 'just' an encirclement/ double envelopment. Which is far, far more common since a larger army 'naturally' outflanks a smaller one by simple dint of being larger. Mainly though, a comparison to Jon or Ramsay would be insulting to L. Aemilius Paulus or G. Terentius Varro, let alone Hannibal. Both bastards were abject morons, at least Varro had a plan based on the little that worked at Trebia and Trasimene and was fighting one of the greatest of all time. Of all time!