Zoraptor

The oligarchs got stomped twenty years ago though. Pretty much literally the first thing Putin did (see Berezovksy and Khodokovsky for the most prominent examples). And, of course, Christmastime in Russia is still nearly two weeks away (January 8th) since they're Orthodox.

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The price difference here is now ~250USD (probably close to what it ought to be officially) and 7900XTs are selling under MSRP for AIBs already. XTXs are back in stock too, so it seems that AMDs claims of decent availability at least were right. At that price the XT is decent value, at least comparatively. Still not great value when you take the generational shift into account.

Tanks certainly still have a role to play. ATGMs were going to make the tank obsolete after Israel got most of their ones facing the Egyptians toasted by Saggers/ Malyutkas in 1973 as well. OTOH Bayraktars... lol. Certainly the worst hype to achievement ratio in the war, quite possibly the worst performing system outright; though there's a lot of competition for that title. Perhaps the most damning indictment is that they've been outperformed massively by diy quadcopters costing at very most 1% of a TB2. Even in Artsakh they needed ~100 An-2s to run interference for them against 1990s systems.

Mark Milley also used the 100k casualties figure 6 weeks ago for Ukraine. Doesn't really say much in terms of the accuracy of the figure itself since it's likely sourced recursively, ie the figure comes from the same estimate Milley made rather than being an independent source arriving at a similar figure.

Unlike Europe our prices aren't bad at all. Take off sales tax and do the currency conversion and the xtx is ~1100USD, and for a pretty decent AIB instead of a reference card (Powercolor Hellhound). For a small market with high transport costs that's about as good as it can get.

There's a $500 (300US) dollar difference here which is spot on the difference in MSRPs. ~1800 for the cheapest XT, ~2000 for the (only in stock) XTX, 2300 for the cheapest 4080. And of course, as is their wont, a handful of retailers trying to sell 6950s for 2300. You'd think AMD had bought out a bunch of random NZ (r)etailers to make the 7900XT look good value or something. Euro prices seem to be a bit weird since covid.

"But what about..." I mean I was going to let the whole thing drop but on the good for goose, good for gander principle per above; are you going to admit that your statement "That is absolute bull**** Russian propaganda. Russian language was never penalized." was instead a load of Ukrainian/ western propaganda? No? Then you're just making yourself look silly by carrying it on.

People who like Yennefer absolutely hated her betraying Ciri in S2, and that generated most of the drama and lead to a lot of 1s on metacritic and the like; and a lot of toys being ejected from cots across social media leaving to the impression that people hated it. Personally, I thought it was absolutely in character for her to betray someone who meant nothing to her, and at that point Ciri meant nothing to her. If nothing else Witcher S2E1 was the best fantasy tv episode since absolute prime GoT, and showed what the more episodic S1 should have been. I'd rate S2 as the 2nd best fantasy tv season in recent years, so I liked it a lot (more than that utter dross WoT). Also, S1 was poor enough that a viewership drop off was to be expected; a lot of people who didn't like S1 simply wouldn't watch S2. Cavill nearly quit pretty publicly after S2 wrapped, and a lot of his comments around the time of the recast announcement suggested pretty strongly that he was going, Superman or no, eg "It’s just about belief. If you believe what you’re doing then you’ll be able to keep on doing it. It’s also important to know that if you realize you’re doing the wrong thing, that’s when you stop doing the wrong thing. You don’t just keep on going just because. Because that leads down a dark path." The proposed Superman movie was literal years off anyway, there was no need to quit for it. Indeed, Cavill actually stated that a return to Superman could coexist with Witcher, previously.

Witcher S2 earns extra points for trolling Yennefer stans, a group that so very desperately needs trolling.

Two other guys are meant to be doing the actual writing/ creative side, and their resume looks pretty decent really. I'd usually tend to give people involved in Children of Men and The Expanse a chance at least. (Why they didn't make them the showrunners who knows, since they created The Expanse for TV. And that was a show that looked like it had WoT's budget most of the time despite, well, not having that budget. Maybe they didn't want to handle the money side but still, even ignoring the creative mess Rafe Judkins made WoT look like it had a tenth the budget it actually had. If that. Surely there must be someone better than that clown?)

Malc has pretty well covered the law part, guess that leaves... ..the law and penalties actually being applied. I doubt the fine levied by the "Commission for the Protection of the State Language" would be considered particularly egregious, but labeling use of Russian as "profane" is certainly indicative of where the commissar wants things to go.

Zelensky has banned opposition parties and proposed banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as well as bringing in penalties for speaking Russian (ah yes, I remember well when persecution of Russian speakers was 'Fake News' and would never happen, after Maidan...). He's not even relatively progressive. You can get away with an awful lot when you're western backed and the media won't report on anything negative.

That argument only works if one side actually kept to the agreement. If both sides ignored it you can't play the holier than thou card, because everyone's in the dirt. Nobody paid attention to the Budapest Memorandum, nobody paid attention to Minsk. If they had we wouldn't be where we are now, but that applies to everyone. Even if it was only one side in those cases there's a mutual history of breaking/ ignoring other treaties and agreements that fostered massive distrust. And not just on one side.

Yeah, going to change my mind after checking out the aggregate benchmark results. Big enough difference in performance that it needs a different model number. Also even worse value, somehow.

1) Not a treaty 2) Everyone broke it. Indeed, the US and UK are still breaking the Belarussian version of the Budapest Memorandum- which prohibits economic coercion. Georgia at least is a pretty poor example though. Ethnically cleansing Ossetians and Abkhaz in the early 90s- per HRW- and actually started the 2008 war by attacking Russian peacekeepers- per OSCE.

Trying to scalp a 7900XTX --> nice idiot detector since there isn't as much demand and a lot more supply. I don't think there's anything wrong with the naming of the 7900XT, but its pricing is certainly bad since price/ performance is nearly linear to the xtx. Maybe should have been the 7900 and 7900XT, but that's still just a couple of letters different. OTOH if it's anything like the 6800/XT vs 6900 it will end up almost discontinued once the manufacturing kinks have been worked out. (and unfortunately I'm now in the market for a card. Not, one suspects, a 7900XT/X though since 800NZD is about the most I'm willing to pay)

There's a decent amount they could do, in theory. Even the 96CU (will WGPs ever stick?) could be got around*. OTOH, there's plenty of scope for potential memory improvement without HBM- go from 6x16MB to 6x32MB, and/or bring in vCache. The latter surely has to happen for GPUs at some point, and you could draw a parallel with the vanilla cache 7000 CPUs being released first and 3d cache versions later. I don't think we've got anything even approaching semi official on cards above the 7900XTX even existing yet though, so it's all doubly in theory. *7990 was a dual GPU card last time and that approach fundamentally makes more sense if the design is 'proper' MCM. Likely... no, especially for Navi31. Outside, outside, possibility of 2x64 from Navi 32 though.

Kind of a weird release which makes me wonder if they've had something Go Wrong somewhere; at AMD/ radeon specifically, not the reviewers. From the hardware it ought to be close to half way between 4080 and 4090 (raster) performance wise, and it's a fair bit behind that. It is still better value than a 4080, but it is also a bit disappointing it isn't better value/ performance. Will be interesting to see if they can claw back that 'missing' performance with drivers or AIB cards, though in terms of marketing it would largely be irrelevant. Also interesting to see if the speculated 7970/90 eventuate.

Love Actually is the only Christmas movie I can actually recall watching (exc Die Hard, I guess) and... I didn't like it. Even as a kid I can't remember watching any though I surely must have. Watched plenty of TV specials and the like though. I think Christmas being in the middle of summer here really cuts down on movie watching- big difference it getting dark at 9pm instead of 4-5 and being warm.

Israel started the 6 day war when they bombed the Egyptian air force. The Israeli claim they were attacked by Jordan and Syria so seizing their territory is fine is rather like saying that France and Britain brutally attacked Germany in 1939- you have to ignore Germany attacking Poland first. Of course, Germany/ Israel only did that because Poland/ Egypt was planning on invading them... Even worse than Poland the Egyptians were so prepared for that imminent invasion that they lost in, well, 6 days hence the name of the war. Not really the same thing, since Palestinians 100% existed- and have essentially none of the freedoms Israeli Jews have. I'm not a great fan of BOTs or the British history of colonialism in general, but that comparison is not even close to like to like. Indeed, as you can tell from the names most of the islands that weren't terra nullius had the initial colonisation (and inevitable atrocities vs natives) carried out by France or Spain, not Britain. Gibraltar has been part of the UK/GB longer than it was part of Spain and by a pretty hefty amount too, about +50%/ one century. The troll option would be to give Gibraltar back to the Moroccans so the Spanish can complain about that (while, of course, they are still maintaining Ceuta and Melilla as exclaves in Africa, for maximum irony). Falklands is already held by its native population, as are all the other ones that were genuine terra nullius. No one to hand them back to, all you could do is give them to someone geographically close. Pitcairn etc would probably be fine going to us, I doubt St Helena would be keen on going to... Angola? though. And they're too small to be independent.

About half of those were genuine terra nullia and have no native population (Falklands, St Helena, Ascension, Pitcairn (and friends; natives died out before european discovery), South Georgia and South Sandwich). Most of them have devolved rule too, even Pitcairn and pals with its few dozen people. You can supplement that with Diego Garcia though, since the treatment of its native population- well within living memory- alone more than compensates for any claims of having left the colonial legacy behind. Even worse, they were depopulated specifically to benefit the US, not even the UK. Should also add that the 'some people' in the case of the Falklands amounts to literally three people out of near 2000 voters, according to the 2013 referendum.

Had no less than 4 half drunk bottles of vodka in the house* so made limoncello. Ants managed to get into the white sugar, so ended up making it with brown sugar instead. Wouldn't score highly in terms of looks, but still tastes great. *not a fan personally, but people know I'm not so bring a bottle themselves, and they accumulate. At least I noticed one was feijoa vodka before adding it.

Rodents may be the default lab animal for testing but they're intrinsically poor when it comes to aspartame- they actually lack the receptors that make it sweet to us, for example. I've always liked dioxin toxicity as the go to to show how big differences in effects can be; hamsters and guinea pigs have a 1000 fold difference in toxicity and that's despite both being rodents. (Aspartame is one of those chemicals where bad effects make a lot of sense in theory as it will dissociate to methanol, aspartic acid and phenyalanine all of which may have bad effects. Aspartic acid and phenylalanine are both essential amino acids though so will be present naturally, and the amounts of methanol you get from it... well, don't drink beer or spirits, or eat bread, if you're worried the levels of methanol you'd be exposed to from a typical dose of aspartame. Aspartic acid causes anxiety and that is where that effect comes from. Really though, who drinks 1.5-2L of diet soda per day anyway?)

'Reasonable' is completely subjective- I voted for decriminalisation here, so my personal opinion on punishment is obviously different from, say, Singapore's. Very difficult to argue that my personal opinion of what is reasonable trumps Singaporean (or Russian) law though, especially when they are well publicised. End of the day, if you're going into a country it's fundamentally expected and reasonable that you are bound by their law. If you don't like that don't go. You'd be surprised how little sympathy some people have for their compatriots. IIRC a plurality of Australians actually supported the execution of two of the Bali Nine (Australians busted for exporting drugs from Indonesia, in Indonesia; looks like it was 47% approval for their execution from wikipedia). The most realistic interpretation is that the 9 years was never going to be enforced anyway and she was always intended to be swapped. Indeed, there was pretty clearly some leverage applied too such as the reports she would be sent to a gulag which were probably designed solely so that there would be a 1:1 swap.