Zoraptor

I guess if there's one positive about Trump so far it's him managing to expose exactly how 'independent' a lot of 'independent media' are. While people with critical faculties engaged won't exactly be surprised it is nice to have irrefutable confirmation of just how Orwellian the phrase often was. Unfortunately genuinely independent media will be caught up in it too and tarnished by association, though one cannot discount that being seen as a positive side effect by those who were in charge of the policy. But at End of Day: if you're reliant on a foreign country for funding you are not by any definition 'independent'- that is, indeed, the literal definition of being dependent instead. Also doesn't do much to help with the 'every accusation is a confession' observation when it comes to claims about Russian/ Chinese/ Iranian influence operations nor with the generalised distrust of media- with the latter being a big positive for Trump and pals. (Despite that USAID was a net positive and by a decent amount. Certainly not worth getting rid of wholesale just so I get to have an inconsequential laugh)

No comment on their substantiveness (which will always be a bit subjective) but Obama actually issued fewer EOs than GWB did and the least of any two term president since... Grover Cleveland? If anyone wanted zero from Trump history suggests that they should have held his inauguration outside in the cold and got him to do a long speech.

This stuff, presumably? If so it's what those young chaps like to call copium. It got no media traction because it's essentially worthless. The drop off benefitting Trump and against Harris is exactly what you'd expect from a popular vs unpopular candidate. In MMP terms it's basically the equivalent of a popular MP being returned in a constituency where the party vote goes heavily against their party vs an unpopular one losing their seat despite the party vote in that electorate favouring their party. Trump's an idiot and was almost certainly referring to the vote analysis tool Musk wrote which by all accounts did a very good job, assuming it was the comment in that Newsweek article. Though there's also been a lot of actually fake fake news about stuff Trump didn't say too.

In the end, this is what the American people voted for. Not like anyone can say we aren't getting exactly what was expected from a Trump/ Republican clean sweep*. The first question is whether anything they're doing is illegal, or just against precedent. Seems at least some of it is, since stuff like deporting citizens has been blocked. But for stuff that isn't actually illegal there probably isn't any avenue for stopping it. *which means the media is rather stuck. At least last time they could burble on about the popular vote; this time it's clear cut, and was so after the experience of 2017-20.

Seems likely. Whether people will remember that Biden did exactly the same thing when Trump inevitably does it... Don't think Trump or Biden need to pardon themselves any more though, at least for official duty type stuff. (Very, very much late Roman Republic vibes. Everyone loved the Republic and were only acting to preserve it right down to, well, G. Iulius Caesar Octavianus. Nobody seemed to understand that them breaking the rules meant that the other side would too and that you were instead systematically demolishing the moral authority everything was built on)

I'm not sure that's a new thing though. While the energy price increase and switch to electrics is. At least outside of Europe Euro cars do not have and haven't had a good reputation for value for decades*; you tend to buy them to show off that you have the money to buy them and keep them running and that's a limited market. They've a perception that they've largely kept sales volume up by- frankly- making cars that fall apart after five years and have very low resale value, so you might as well just buy a new one. As opposed to Toyota that makes cars that never fall apart but may stop working, eventually, so have excellent resale value (and hence, relatively low 1st hand sales compared to how many are in the active vehicle fleet). Euro car manufacturing had always been the subject of significant trade protection as well which 'artificially' 'distort' the market. In places where there aren't protectionary measures they've never had great popularity (all Euro cars combined make up ~10% of total sales here; Toyota has almost 8x the sales of world #2 VW. Somewhat distorted by distance and Japan being closer, but then you have the Euro cheese counter examples). *ever? I do seem to remember 80s Mercs have a rep for being indestructible, but also unreliable monstrosities like the Austin Maxi my parents had.

The EU is built a bit differently from the US economically though. They've always had often quite massive tariffs and subsidies as social engineering (eg the Common Agricultural Policy which specifically targets maintaining lifestyle type things) and have the tax set up to handle that. Trump seems to think that he can tariff as a means to lower taxes and there won't be any ill effects if he does it all at once. In reality the US would probably have to go towards the EU model of subsidising stuff* and price controls at some point. It would be quite funny watching the Rs try and defend commie practices like price controls at least. The car issues are also rather more complicated than just China. It's a double whammy of China controlling most of the rare earths trade for electric vehicles while the EU wants to switch to them wholesale, certainly, and the massive increase in energy costs from the embargo against Russia. You can certainly make a moral stand that the average VW/ Fiat/ Renault worker should not be paying the price for something they cannot control and which is a consequence of a decision made by their leaders and that the failure of an entire sector would be worse economically than subsidies and worse geo/politically too. *not that the US doesn't already, but it's mostly corporate welfare and results in things like high fructose corn syrup going into every product under the sun. Which is not the case for the Euros; always amuses me that the cheapest blue cheese here in New Zealand is Danish. There's light and day between the agricultural efficiency of the two countries- in NZ's favour- but the Euro subsidy is so high that you can still buy Danublu 150g at $4 while the NZ version is $5. Same for Bulgarian Feta vs NZ Feta. Also kind of funny that the Bulgars call it Feta when the EU has that as a Greek monopoly.

The wars, by and large, haven't been terrible for the US though. If they were they'd stop having so many. They cost money that goes on the fantasy pay back pile, a lot of people make a lot of money from them and, by and large, those who suffer most are people who aren't important. Problem is that those jobs aren't going to move back to the US, certainly not long term. The economy is based on buying cheap pap from overseas, not expensive guff from the US; making the overseas pap expensive isn't magically going to turn Detroit back into a thriving industrial powerhouse, it will just make everything expensive. To believe the Trump response requires the parallel belief that every other US President has been a malign actor deliberately stiffing their own country for the benefit of those overseas. Someone working 16 hour days in a Bangladeshi sweat shop making shoes or T shirts probably isn't that happy about it, but you're never going to get an american able to make T shirts to sell at 5 bucks a piece. You can only get an american to compete selling them at maybe $15 bucks a piece. Which will have an awful effect on poorer people who need those cheap shirts and will find their clothing bill and food bills going up significantly to be the last straw. Contrastingly, it's also 'bad' if too many poorer people get jobs due to all the illegal immigrants getting biffed out since that drives wage inflation which further drives prices up... Don't get me wrong, the orthodox economic model is awful, but it's the way it is for a reason. And when it comes to heavy industry type stuff coming home, well, to put it in perspective: nearing 3 years of a supposed existential crisis and with something as simple to make as artillery shells and it's still too hard to, uh, hit the targets. As always, the proper troll option is to buy French nuclear subs.

Dunno really, countries have always loved to blame their problem on the outside and it's the same with the 'rise of the right wing'. Far easier to believe it's being done to us by Bad Actors than to accept that we haven't really progressed very far from Thog hitting Thag with a club for wearing sacred forbidden cow leather instead of sacred accepted sheep leather and using our spring instead of theirs. As always, the actual data on influence operations suggests that they are disproportionately- and considerably so- pro west and pro status quo politics. Indeed, one might almost believe that there being so much talk of pro Russian influence operations comes directly from pro west ones. Current example: the number of 'independent' media and other outlets complaining about Trump freezing the money that was keeping them running. You know if they were accepting money from Russia they'd be compromised and bereft of integrity and independence, but have USAID or some CIA slush fund pay them: independence totally maintained. Or the 'Russian' pro far right campaign in Romania that turned out to be paid for by, well, Romanians attempting to manipulate who'd make the runoffs.

Ironically that was one area where nVidia was far more consumer friendly than AMD- though of course they had the advantage of being the dominant vendor. Going right back to the 400/500 series AMD really ought to have had _70 top end number cards rather than _80. Though they've seemingly fixed it this gen as the 9070 supposedly has more CUs (/WGPs) than my 7800XT. (At least the 7800XT had ~mid tier pricing by the time I bought it)

A lot of South Africans would like Pretoria or Johannesburg renamed, they probably aren't keen on them being renamed Kagamea or Kagameburg though. Still, getting conquered by Rwanda would be one way to end up with competent economic leadership at least (maybe that's the idea?)

Prices for the 5090 start at $5500 here (about 3.5k USD, though it includes 15% GST). Three times what I paid for my entire computer back in 2017, to put it in perspective and roughly three times the cost for a near top of the line 1080Ti. 5080 starts at ~2800NZD or about 2x a baseline 1080Ti. absolute lolz.

That won't get the clicks though, unlike Sapkowski 'hating' the games. He likes it. (Coincidentally, Netflix pay him quite a lot of money)

Kind of funny that it's the AI bubble popping* after Trump's big 500bn AI announcement for sure. That's actually slightly less than the value of nVidia dropped in a day. Terrible news for kitchen supply and animal skin based clothing retailers everywhere. Though I guess Jensen can always ask his niece for a job at Team Red if things really go pear shaped. (I don't think anyone believes that Deepseek actually runs on $6m of hardware rather than a lot more but there's quite a lot of lols to be had watching people scramble over its performance. Also some rather off messaging about whether they 'really' have 50,000 A100 or 50,000 H100 running it- which probably shows how off guard they were caught if 'experts' are citing A/H100, and H800 as well- but even if it were true that's in the order of 0.1% of Trump's big funding announcement; and I'm not overly inclined to believe 50k of either without some actual evidence) *if only

It's only really remarkable because everyone knows it's an absolutely absolutely literally literal red line for Jordan and Egypt. Which are of course where Trump wants all the Palestinians to be ethnically cleansed to with no guarantee that they'll ever go home. Not like Biden/ Starmer/ Macron/ Scholz did anything practical to stop Israel making Gaza unliveable after all. Oh wait, Biden banned export of 3000lb bombs... Let's not pretend the Rules Based Order wouldn't be ecstatic if the entire population of Gaza dematerialised, so long as they could claim it wasn't their fault. They'd just never say it out loud, unlike Trump.

It's pretty amazing how consistent that 25-30% is. 25-30% more shaders, 25-30% more die space, 25-30% more wattage, 25-30% more performance. The only thing that is outside that is (as noted) the +70% theoretical on the memory. That very much looks like a near zero improvement on most like to like bases.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/europa_universalis_iv https://www.gog.com/en/promo/20221123_launch_europa_universalis_iv So far as I'm aware all 2.173x 10^25 pieces of DLC are there. Some mods might be more problematic thanks to Valve's attempt to garden wall modding but plenty are on nexus despite that- and personally I've found euiv is one paradox game that works pretty well without them.

Also the stuff the US buys from Russia, now, is all stuff that has significant net benefit to the US. Everything else is already restricted/ sanctioned. Trump also still believes that exporters pay tariffs, not importers, so tariffs will hurt Russia. (eg Trump's going to have a lot of fun controlling price of living while simultaneously banning/ tariffing fertiliser from Russia and getting rid of all the illegal alien crop pickers. Guess that the next cab on the rank can pick up the slack fertiliser wise though, not like he's picked a fight with... oh, Canada. Though it'd probably be a merry go round instead where Russia sells its fertiliser to India at roughly the same cost it gets from the US, and India sends its new surplus to the US; at a premium...)

They aren't even really Russian talking points. It's not like Russia is withdrawing after all. US dislike of the WHO is pretty much entirely on, well, the US. Exceptionalism, dislike of certain provisions around price gouging and generics with a big dose of "thou shalt not embarrass Israel!" added on. Elerond's figures are for voluntary contributions, not overall contributions. They all contribute on an assessed basis as well. (While clearly labelled as such you just knew as soon as you saw it that someone would quote them as if they were the overall contribution instead) Hitler wasn't even properly elected, he got ~33% of the vote- down from ~38 in the previous election. And was basically last cab off the rank even so far as arch nationalist Hindenburg was concerned. Should have made Paul von Lettow Vorbeck Chancellor instead.

Clearly Musk is a fan of the art of Jacques-Louis David, progenitor of the 'roman salute' in modern times, and noted French Revolutionary. So far from being a crypto fascist this would, in point of fact, make him a crypto jacobin.

24 hours was a metaphor. And there will be peace- metaphorically- within 24 hours of Trump taking office anyway.

Grand Strategic is an old tabletop wargaming term. It's definitely the correct technical term for something at the scale of Paradox's historical games, though personally I wouldn't apply it to classic 4x like Civilisation for example as that is one layer too much abstraction.

Just reduce the ludicrous default tesselation settings and you fix AMD performance. (This comment brought to you by the phrase plus ça change)

Not wanting to be swapped is a natural extension of either saying what you think your captor wants or certain other types of self preservation- like claiming to have been 'forced' or 'tricked' into fighting instead of being there voluntarily. So seemingly every Wagner POW was tricked into enlisting or was actually keen on visiting Mali and every Russian POW loves their fellow slavs; and every Ukrainian POW is a draftee who is now saved from being sent into combat again after two days training and was in a non combat role like cook or driver anyway; which means they weren't just shooting at you and aren't responsible for your friends getting killed and injured. Can't really take any of it at face value any more than you could take someone thanking Saddam Hussein for how well they were being treated at face value or exhorting the US to stop bombing Hanoi.

Hiro was one of those people who permanently had issues due to time travel being ridiculously over powered, if he could control it properly. So for most of the time he couldn't. Ando (his non powered sidekick) got super powers at some point with some sort of shenanigans like time travel [during season 3 according to their wiki, like a +1 buff to others rather than a 'proper' power though]. I'd well and truly stopped paying proper attention by then though.