Zoraptor

There does seem to be a bit of a dichotomy developing between those who think there's a crash coming which should be mitigated and those who think a crash is inevitable and here, and want someone else to blame for it. The US and UK are certainly in the latter grouping; France and Germany more towards the former. Honestly though, I'd expect most companies that actually get earnings reports publicly reported on to keep doing pretty well, for much the same reason grain shortages won't mean you get people starving on the mean streets of Geneva. It will be the smaller players who cannot absorb/ pass on higher prices or literally cannot buy what they need* who will suffer, and while that will flow through to the big players eventually there will be a significant lag. Ukraine will get plenty of aid, so long as it's corporate welfare stuff or giving away systems that cost money to scrap. It's unlikely to get what it really needs though, which is peace and time to recover. *big one here being Gib board for building, though that's massively amplified by a moronic monopoly supplier whose monopoly plant spends more time broken down than working. But they sell every bit of gib they make, at inflated prices, it's the small builders on fixed cost contracts who get reamed when they literally cannot buy the stuff; and them who go out of business. Coincidentally, the company that makes the gib also has a building arm, Fletcher Building, which is highly upset at the loss of competition.

There was rather a lot of the usual US collateral damage though. Side note: I think it's perhaps the most Bruce thing ever to blame the African Union for a situation that occurred in 1992, the small matter of ten years before it was even founded.

$5bn required for 2022, 1.4bn actually raised (a lot of that likely pledged, so not actually supplied) and certainly not all of that from western countries. The broader issue with western aid is that it's always massively inflated in value. It averaged something around 7bn p/a (that excludes military aid and other costs of roughly 100bn) in Afghanistan, nominal, but was nowhere near that in terms of practicality as a large part of that went in corruption. And not just inside Afghanistan, aid programs were extensively used for corporate welfare. Yemen is probably a better example though, since it's more directly similar. You don't see Liz Truss talking about Britain running the Saudi blockade or Abe Linken complaining about the genocide there though*, strangely enough, just please sell more oil and buy more weapons. *though to be fair, prior to February Biden's Administration had been more critical of Saudi- though to be fair about that being fair, a very low bar to pass after Trump and Kushner- it just stopped as soon as they needed them for something.

lol. I mean, that is most definitely (one of) the publicly stated reasonings for raising prices before there's an actual shortage, I certainly wouldn't dispute that; but it's just such a load of old bollocks, for any developed country. Same basic reason as why 'competition' in health provision is stupid- what are you going to do, opt not to have a heart attack because it costs too much, or pause it so you can find the cheapest hospital? You're not going to stop eating, they'll sell the same amount of stuff, minus some luxuries, which grain most definitely isn't. You (generally sense) just might have to forgo the annual iPhone upgrade and quit your wine club though. Companies pretty much always make super profits during shortages and high prices, so long as their product is essential. Classic example which is pretty much directly equivalent: oil companies. Apart from making more profit the higher the price you also find there are some quite surprising dichotomies. Strangely enough bad news means prices have to go up immediately, but if there's good news- better exchange rates, lower crude prices- then unfortunately the oil was bought at the old higher prices and we can't drop the costs for at least two weeks. Amazing how they never bought oil at the old low price so they can hold off on increases for two weeks though, guess they're just really, really, really, really, really, really, really unlucky. Every single time. See also computer chip shortages. They were awful for AMD/ nVidia/ Intel, they suffered through massive profits and selling everything they could produce at whatever prices they wanted. I do hope the children of Yemen or Tigray have some consideration for the terrible time chipmakers had of it. Which may seem a bit of an overkill comparison, but we all know who is going to suffer from the shortages most, and we all know those super profits aren't going to go towards stopping people literally starving.

Upgraded my CPU form R7 1700 --> R7 5700X. Basically +50% in frequency under load and not that far off in IPC too. Managed to resist the temptation to go totally bonkers and get a 6900XT and new PSU at the same time. Good fun with the DRM too. New BIOS obviously has fTPM enabled by default, and it didn't like having a new CPU...

Strange New Worlds ep6. 2nd episode in a row I outright liked.

There are plenty of alternative articles that aren't paywalled (eg BBC). Or the OECD report itself, it's only one page. (TLDR is that everyone except Australia and Argentina have had their economic outlook downgraded, and the UK is expected to be the worst effected. The war in Ukraine and response to it is partly responsible)

Orville Episode 2 To be honest, not a favourite, or even close. Bit too formulaic and contrived for my tastes.

Their problem there wasn't really morale, especially since they'd brought in a lot of fresh troops from the Lisichansk side (but see also below). It's a lot more difficult to take urban area, even if you've just given it up. One of the foreign volunteers units had 40% casualties over the space of a day, and while there's no way to know how typical that was and it got reported because they were western volunteers suffering high casualties it was clearly not a lot of fun being there. Militarily, if they were going to lose Sverodonetsk it would potentially have left a bunch of other troops isolated on the wrong side of the river, so the counterattack seems to have been made with a lot of troops from Borivske as well in order that they could move north to escape. Otherwise they'd have to swim the river and abandon all their equipment. As it stands Borivske certainly appears to have been taken, as has the airport. To be honest the whole thing seems like a rehash of Mariupol's Ilyich plant, marketed as a great victory initially but after a few days just less of a catastrophe than it might have been. Their real problem is supply. Ultimately, everything from food and water to ammunition and equipment, plus reinforcements has to come along one road. Which is well within artillery range. You're going to lose a lot before it even gets in a position to be used, day in, day out. Then you have to pull the wrecked equipment off the road, under fire, or go cross country which is slow and still within artillery range.

Yep. And after something like 2 years of nothing. I'd have advised not buying at all without the dlc. In some ways the treatment has been a real shame, since the game has a lot of potential and the general idea and systems are good, but this is one time the 'base game as dlc delivery vehicle' strategy definitely blew up in Paradox's face. There just isn't enough base game to get people interested in the dlc.

The serious answer is probably the guy who lost to Boris in the leadership vote, whose name escapes me. He certainly seems to be positioning himself for it. Top three meme picks: Truss, Rees-Mogg, Evil Harry Potter

Surviving Mars is certainly peak Paradox sales strategy. Very bare bones base game, obviously meant to show potential but be fleshed out with dlc. In this case, didn't really show enough potential and got summarily abandoned after the content they promised, then picked up again later for a dlc that was not well received. I liked the game overall, but I also only ever played the '+season pass' version (latest dlc not included of course, lol) and I cannot imagine what a drag the middle and endgame must have been without them.

Our health minister was forced to resign for breaking covid rules- he drove too far from home to go mountain biking during a lockdown. Shouldn't really have been outright mountain biking either, since an accident --> emergency staff potentially being exposed needlessly. Which is a lot more trivial than getting sloshed at someone's birthday with dozens of other people as bojo did- and then lying about in Parliament, which is what most of the people who voted against him will be really annoyed about, and is a resignation tier event. Certainly doesn't help that the tories have the stereotype of being a bunch of overbred toffs many of whom would embarrass a twit of the year competition, and think rules don't apply to them but only to the plebs. And you can't get around that by calling yourself Boris instead of Alexander de Pfeffel.

Read the wikipedia article on the Siege of Mariupol, since it's likely to be where a lot of people get their information in the future- and because there was one very obvious piece of incorrect information last time I did and I wanted to see if they'd corrected it over the last 3 weeks. Needless to say, they hadn't. Also needless to say I'm not that disappointed they haven't, personally, as for anyone paying attention it reinforces how bad wikipedia inherently is as a source for anything recent (and politically controversial, though it's not directly related to that in this case). It's the classic 'trusted source' trap where someone found a cite for the number of Ukrainian defenders in a trusted source- 3500 total- and added that number. In retrospect that number was very, very clearly a big underestimate, but they still can't remove it. Ukraine had them losing more than 3500 POWs, alone, with KIA additional. Indeed, you get to 3500 POWs just from verified surrenders from Ilyich and Azovstal, let alone the Port or anywhere urban.

I've played a bit of Old World now, and it's good. I don't know how well it's going to last though, there's a sense that they've decided to aim for the best bits of Civilisation and Crusader Kings but (understandably) aren't as developed as either, so it's a lot less... gripping, I guess. I'm also fundamentally not a big fan of one unit per tile; doomstacks suck, but there are far better fixes to that. Someone also mentioned King's Bounty Dark Side- good game, but for me at least it regularly crashes my computer to an out and out hard reboot. Says something that I still played it for ~60 hours despite that. HoMM III is a very highly regarded game- it's GOG's out and out top seller for example- so for most people anything following it would have to be a decline.

I'm sure it would be one of the top picks from GOG's pov. Maybe they'll be bothered enough to relicense, or replace the licensed music with "Increase Volume Setting on Wireless" style muzak. Don't think there's much chance that Sega will be though.

Strange New Worlds Ep5 I may actually have genuinely liked this one. If you'd told me they would do a 'comedy' episode of nuTrek 6 weeks ago I would have given any odds against liking it, and would have expected to actively hate it. There is no doubt a decent dollop of liking it because everything else they've done in the other series has been massively overwrought grimdark serialised angst, but still. They even took the mickey out of themselves a bit, something I never expected to see from that set of writers/ showrunners. At this point the question has to be asked: if they were capable of writing a decent standalone episode based series why on earth did they waste so much time writing painfully mediocre- at best- serialised stuff?

Yeah, and the thing is, of course, that Israel, RoK, Spain etc won't starve. They'll pay inflated prices; they'll do so even if it means buying Russian grain. And they'll 100% do both even if it means Africans starve. The grain supply data shows just how pie in the sky the British 'plan' to get Egypt to run the blockade into Odessa for them of two weeks ago really was, even ignoring Montreux. Look up on wikipedia which African country gets most Ukrainian grain and find that it's Egypt, and hooray it also has the largest navy in Africa. Very promising so far. Don't check where it gets the vast majority of its grain from though. Anyone care to guess? Hint: It starts with an R and ends with ..ussia. So yeah, Egypt will risk war with the country it gets 80% of its grain from about the same time Russia hands Rostov and Voronezh back to Ukraine. Yet another Truss special. (1) Venezuela's oil infrastructure is shot. It isn't just a matter of turning on the spigot, it would take literal years to ramp up production. (2) Venezuela's oil is, mostly, crappy. It's got gigantic reserves, but it's got very little light/ sweet. Most of it's dark, heavy and hard to refine. (3) People have been saying that Venezuela- and Iran for that matter- would have sanctions lifted for, well, 100 days. There's no goodwill, no trust, and no desire to do the west any favours. The last could be worked around, but they'll make the US squeal for it, and publicly. So far that's far too bitter a pill politically for Biden. Hence him going off to Saudi to kiss MbS's ring, since that's more of a personal embarrassment having cold shouldered him over Trump/ Kushner/ bone sawing. The first two though, cannot be worked around.

Yeah, you're right. The actual finale was... something to do with time travel? or alternative universes? and had the old security officer back from Prodigal Son as a guest star. After 3 years you'd think they could have at least had the other two seasons streaming for catch up/ reminder purposes.

The contracts with Netflix weren't renewed due to Paramount+*, but they weren't all synchronised. So Discovery and TNG + OS? left a few months ago; DS9 and Voyager? are leaving soon. I'm not sure anyone cares enough about Enterprise to check its status. *don't know about elsewhere but all the legacy Treks are now back on Netflix in NZ at least. I'd suspect it would be the same for anywhere else that doesn't have P+, though they may have shopped them around to other streamers (eg Discovery isn't back on Netflix, it's on the local TV channel for broadcast and streaming same as SNW and The Orville since we don't have Hulu either).

No recap was a problem for The Orville, especially as it was only S3 available here and it's been three (!) years since S2. The battle was end of S2 though, that much I do remember. Exactly the sort of episode I'd think was overlong, overwrought and self indulgent if it was nuTrek, but carried off well enough I only really considered it so when looking for things to quibble about. I loled at the new cast member, though I probably shouldn't have. There's a certain uncanny resemblance there.

I always find people's more positive reactions to stuff I dislike pretty interesting. I didn't hate Picard up until the ending, but that ending just screamed "this is what it is, and it's not going to improve" at several million decibels. Which is impressive, for a logarithmic scale. The only thing with any emotional weight was Data, and that wouldn't have happened if Spiner hadn't insisted playing an ageless android as an old guy was stupid, so was something the writers were forced into. Said it before no doubt, but the ultimate issue with Picard and Discovery is that they want Epic Cinematic Moments without realising that what makes them epic is the build up to those moments. They're the sort of writers who'd have Picard become Locutus and yell at Jon Irenicus about lights in the same episode because they wanted those two iconic scenes and couldn't fit them in anywhere else.

2051 is 29 years away, so we've at least improved by a year on the 'in 30 years' estimates! This is the power of positive thinking at work.

I'm not clicking a Mirror link even for the lolz. Yes, but the plan is now to have them be escorted by the... Egyptian Navy, at last update. Surely that is enough protection? Indeed, one of the more amusing things in the last week has been the evolution of the Lithuanian 'plan' to run the blockade as it got picked up and run with by the British political Brains Trust (or Brains Truss, since she seems to be keen on zero preparation ad libs) on a quest to distract from Boris Johnson being caught being a massive hypocrite about lockdowns again. That's the negative of getting Turkey to declare things as a war; per Montreux you too cannot send ships through the Bosporus on war missions. Running a blockade is a war mission. They could have, if Ukraine were in NATO, but she isn't. They can't even send the Egyptian Navy in.

Personally I wouldn't describe anyone here as being a goof*, but plenty on the internet in general are of the opinion that anything 'anti Ukrainian' has to be fake news Russian psyops posted by shills from a bot farm- no matter what the evidence. They deserve at minimum some mild mocking for making it so difficult to get actual information. As would anyone who thinks everything is going perfectly to plan for Russia too, but there aren't really many of them except in the minds of the more rabidly pro Ukraine. Stories about Russian supply issues get a lot less traction because we've been hearing them for 3 months and how they're perpetually about to run out of everything. Pretty much all the stories about Ukraine have been about the massive supplies being sent by the west and how well they're doing; anything running counter to that therefore gets a lot of attention. *the only one I probably would have is not here any more, and was, well, pro Russian.