Zoraptor

The closest you'd get was me laughing at the prediction of a definite Feb 16th invasion date. Which was, well, incorrect.

Everyone does that to a certain extent. Frankly, the first part is a good thing too, if there's one thing the forum software downgrade did it's mitigate tiresome wall of text/ line by line posting (and I freely admit, I did a fair bit of it myself). Ideally we'd all acknowledge when the other person has made a good point, but meh, humans gonna human. Again, I'd do a fair bit of that myself too. I'd generally be happy with, say, simply not getting "the EU never made the association agreement an us or Russia proposition" or "the association agreement was never a first step to EU accession" said again after providing the relevant quotes showing they actually did exactly that, I don't need people to publicly accept they were wrong*. I don't think Russia cares that much about Finland joining for precisely that reason; they're also already in the EU. Most of the Finnish border is very low infrastructure forest/ swamp/ marsh, seasonally, with blasted winter wasteland. There's a border with Norway too, Murmansk is actually closer to Norway than Finland iirc (and Archangelsk about the same distance). Same most definitely cannot be said for Ukraine and the south of Russia though, it moves a load of cities far, far closer to NATO and gives a second easy attack vector on Moscow if there were a conventional war. 11 million immigrants in Russia, 3rd most in the world. I'll be frank: I'd probably come across as a lot less pro Russian if people didn't continually post stuff which they want to be true- and feel like it's true- but simply isn't*. *I have a fair bit of sympathy because I know perfectly well that things like 'no one immigrates to Russia' or 'the EU never made it us or them' is a Well Known Fact that you can find in rather a lot of opinion pieces and articles and the like, and most people just presume it's true. They just happen to be well known facts that aren't actual facts. Or to quote Blake's 7 Vila: It's a well known fact! Avon: Actually it's a well known opinion Tarrant: As are most well known facts

Narrative having to be that way at least makes sense when it's time travel. In the end (or the beginning? :philosoraptor:) once you've got time travel involved you have the principle that things have to happen a certain way. Well, with a few caveats. On the specific issue, IIRC there is an implied reason for why she was convincing though I don't think it was ever stated explicitly. I don't think it's anything you've missed though, I think it's revealed later. Very much IIRC though, since I watched Dark in 2020.

At least according to the Turks it's the whole AANES, so SDF in general and all the political parties. Of course, that is Turkey labeling everything they don't like as PKK- but it's not like they haven't been doing that for decades at this point. NATO knows exactly what their position is, there is no ignorance involved. Strangely enough I've yet to see a single media article mentioning Erdogan's threats to invade Syria and the AANES in context of this news. Going to be... interesting to see how the invasion is handled in the press- by memory holing inconveniences, if prior behaviour is any indication. Certainly can't see it being the epic perfidious betrayal and end of US diplomatic credibility for a generation it was in the press when Trump did it. Going to be fun times when the Turks attack Ain al Arab too.. FTR: if it's a choice between Turkey and the Kurds, let alone in this situation where the Turks have increased leverage, it will always be Turkey picked. Doesn't matter that Biden hates Erdogan, same as it doesn't matter he hates MbS. Gotta be expedient. Still, there's going to be a sort of grim amusement watching all those principles the west says they espouse evaporate like ether when the moderate Turkish backed head choppers steal, rape, murder and ethnically cleanse their way across northern Syria with the active support and sponsorship of one of their allies. Though, of course, they've already been doing that for years in areas like Afrin at this point...

Since you were wondering... Though they have been saying the same all the way through the horse trading. Well, not exactly horse trading since the Finns and Swedes have bent over for daddy Erdogan on everything (well ok, they're not going to hand over a politician the Turks want; everything apart from that though). Only part of the cycle needed to complete it is the, heh, purely defensive invasion of another country from a NATO member- for Turkey the small matter of Cyprus, Syria and Iraq as examples. Might include Artsakh and Greece too, if one were being snarky. Ah well, I guess on the positive side I get another example of how the only actual principles the west actually has are the managers of their educational facilities. Better get cracking on that reconciliation agreement with Assad guys, though in this case it's not likely to help. Erdogan needs something nationalistic to deflect from the 50% inflation and pump those polls even if it means a literal war.

I'm not sure holding this argument with a Serb is going to work out well. NATO has never attacked Russia because they will literally get nuked doing so and that hasn't changed. NATO would have won a conventional war at any time since the break up of the USSR, and quite possibly before that. Ultimately what keeps both sides from attacking the other is that their words are backed by nuclear weapons. OTOH, in 1919, when Russia didn't have nukes and was in a similar psoition... NATO also cheerily ignored international law to invade nuke less Yugoslavia- and Libya, after Gaddafi gave up his wmds. Indeed, NATO has an interesting record of attacking Russian allies that lack nukes. NATO also has consistently abrogated agreements, and their main member has sequentially withdrawn from just about every arms control treaty at this point. Given that eminently provable record of bad faith any claims that NATO, say, won't base nukes in Ukraine is not worth the paper it would be written on*. The really funny thing though is the first line given how absolutely desperate people are to get the North Atlantic treaty organisation purely defensively involved in... the Pacific, where China has aggressively placed their country. Oddly enough, the Solomon Islands deciding to sign a defence agreement with China is not entirely their decision to be made as to who they wish to associate with, in that case it's another sign of wanton Chinese aggression. You might have aggressive Chinese warships 1500km away from Brisbane. NATO forces otoh would be barely 100km away from Smolensk or Rostov, but purely defensively... *take it as read that Russia is hardly squeaky clean either; but they also aren't trying to aggressively purely defensively incorporate Canada or Mexico into their alliance either. And whether or not that is objective truth, it's certainly the truth, as Russia sees it.

No they don't. They ask aircraft to identify themselves, even demand it. Military aircraft regularly ignore those demands for identification when flying through ADIZ, and nothing happens except... ..which is also, of course, exactly what happens if a military jet approaches national airspace when there isn't an ADIZ present. Nope, that's rare. Almost all reports about intrusions on airspace are actually about intrusions in ADIZ- or just plain old civilian air traffic control areas. Almost all actual intrusions are also short term and incidental. Actual intrusions tend to occur where the airspace is complicated or where one side claims territory another doesn't recognise. Not in their airspace. At normal cruising speed a Su24 would have been in Turkish airspace for- literally- a handful of seconds because the tongue of Turkish territory that goes into Syria is- literally- 4 km wide. They physically could not have hit it in Turkish airspace except with cannons- and that would have involved violating Syrian airspace themselves. It was well inside Syrian airspace when hit, even more so in the Turkish version. Of course the Turkish version has rather a lot of flaws- as also below. Indeed, it's rather difficult to reconcile the actual crash site with a missile not being fired before the intrusion took place. There are a few examples of planes being shot down in other countries' airspace though, such as when Syria shot down a Turkish F4 in 2012. Normally I'd link wiki, but the story there has been... massaged somewhat, shall we say. Even the US backed Syria's version that it was hit by AAA* in Syria's airspace and crashed into international waters, yet somehow the fantasy Turkish version ended up as the one wiki uses. I guess if we want to get snarky we could also cite Air Iran flight 655 being shot down by the Vincennes too, though the circumstances obviously aren't directly equivalent. *which is essentially proof absolute it was actively intruding, since AAA is far too short range to reach international waters.

They don't enforce them though and never have, which is why it's a bad comparison. Other countries' jets fly through ADIZ persistently and ignore their demands precisely because they have no legal basis. You can at least legally shoot down foreign military planes in your actual airspace, that's not at issue, you just don't generally because generally the consequences massively outweigh the infraction. Deliberately shooting down someone's planes in international airspace because they're ignoring your arbitrary demands though... And yes, I think at this point we're all well aware that the main criterion for being a legitimate breakaway 'country' in international law so far as the west is concerned is being a- unique and non precedent setting case- which is useful to the west. Doesn't change the fact that PRC 100% claims the airspace and territory of RoC as its own. Of course, if the Taiwanese decided to enforce their ADIZ (or territorial space, on the odd occasion China actually intrudes there rather than the ADIZ which extends over a multimillion population city) you'd fairly rapidly get a change in attitude from mainland China.

ADIZ are not airspace, they have as much basis in international law as me proclaiming myself Grand Duke of Finland and demanding a palace in Tampere, a herd of reindeer and a natty winter hat from the seaside market in Helsinki. And they're ignored the same as I would be if I made those demands too. China absolutely, 100%, believes in its territorial rights over Taiwan's airspace. So does everyone else bar a few countries, and they recognise Taiwan's airspace over China. They simply aren't willing to risk a war about it which is a completely different proposition. Same as Syria not trying to shoot down all those coalition jets toodling around its airspace looking for former moderate western backed rebels to bomb. No, it's an awful example for two reasons. (1) Israel does it because its neighbours have no reasonable ability to respond and (2) Israel does exactly the same thing, to them, far more frequently. The first doesn't hold for Russia, the second is something you don't really want to bring attention to considering how often it's the west ignoring the rules. If the only basis of being a good template for response is a hard response then, well, you can pick literally anyone who would give a harsh response and just ignore what an arse they were otherwise. The S-400 are just to defend Russia's bases. Russia gave Syria some S-300 which were used against Israel recently but hadn't been before. Though there is a massive difference between capabilities of systems designated S-300 (and even S-400 an an extent) so the names don't mean much. Ironically, there's a decent chance a F-35 was hit by an ancient S-200 a few years ago- a hit was claimed, the rebuttal was that while missiles were fired the F-35 hit a bird. In any case, it likely would have had radar reflectors fitted so it wouldn't have been materially different from when they shot down a F-16 a few years ago with one too.

Er lol. Israel is absolute worst example to bring up. Unless you mean its a shame Syria and Lebanon don't shoot down every Israeli jet flying illegally through their airspace, because especially for Lebanon that is pretty much constant and absolutely 100% deliberate. Not even mentioning the complete lack of western sanctions for the persistent mistreatment of Palestinians, nor for the illegal annexations. Indeed, the US blithely recognised those, while pontificating about the 'rules based order'. The only thing Israel illustrates is "Rules for thee, but not for me" and "Might makes Right". For that matter, do we really want the Chinese to decide to start enforcing their territorial rights- as recognised by pretty much everyone- around Taiwan? Maybe, say, prevent arms smuggling from enemy powers to rebels? Or maybe Syria to shoot down all those western jets flying through its airspace. And there is the small matter of the US drones that have spent the last 20 years wandering around countries' airspace blowing their citizens up randomly. I may on occasion harp on slightly about hypocrisy and no one knowing the extent of the west's suffering; that ain't even low hanging fruit- it's having a crate picked for you and left on your doorstep.

Wouldn't think it would need that much explaining. The guy who blew up the Death Star is going to be pretty famous, and Vader knows 'the force is strong in this one' in Star Wars itself. Not a huge leap to work out that the Tatooine native Luke Skywalker who lived with Shmi Skywalker's relatives and blew up the Death Star plus rescued Princess Leia (while accompanied by Obi Wan Kenobi) is the son of Anakin Skywalker. Legend of the Seeker Strange New Worlds S1Ep8

I'm not sure I'd expect Sony to proactively comment except now, after MS has. FSR is open source, so presumably it will ultimately be up to the devs whether it gets implemented or not as I couldn't see any circumstance in which Sony would block them using it. More interesting might be to ask Nintendo about it since they use nVidia hardware (sans Tensors, not that DLSS scales particularly with tensors anyway) and it works on nVidia PC systems. I'd suspect the archaic ARM part of Tegra would be the sticking point though. Also, Dear Tom's Hardware, the whole point of an upscaler is that it takes less GPU power to upscale than to just render at that resolution, that's true whatever the hardware is. xbox 1 support is only surprising because it's old and it needs to be enabled on a per game basis, not because hardware can't handle it. It'd probably work on an old 7000 series desktop/ laptop card too if AMD updated the drivers, they'd just scale up to their own limitations rather than a rx6900's. Bet CDPR wished it was around when C2077 launched, may have helped with some of the last gen issues they had.

Orville Ep4 I can't help but feel that they're trolling me with all the plot contrivances. 2/4 of the episodes would have been far better if they'd worked a bit more on making the set up not require acts of monumental stupidity.

WRC cars do have amazing safety engineering. It's pretty good marketing having a car you can go and buy (well, kind of) hurtling along a gravel road on a Cypriot cliff at 150kph and even if it does crash the drivers walk away unhurt.

The deal isn't finalised/ closed/ approved, yet. It will be the old board/ shareholders approving Kotick (and the investigation into sexual misconduct), not MS. Decent chance he goes when MS does close the deal, fairly sure it was stipulated at the time that him staying on was not a condition of the sale.

That number of fatalities is not that rare for the TT unfortunately, it's justifiably notorious for deaths. Been cancelled for covid the last couple years though I think, so it's a bit more headline grabbing. (eg the couple who bought my parents' house in Christchurch competed there regularly in the 90s, when half the years had 5 or more deaths)

It's just about the only historical example you can refer to, which is kind of the point given what I was initially replying to (below). Even if we take 'the front' to mean Stalingrad Front instead of more generally there were ~30 divisions (converting Brigades into divs) assigned there, excluding formations added for Uranus, not just an NKVD division. "My crane? But I don't own a crane" Not sure what the 2022 equivalent of asking about Ukraine immediately after a question about Ralph Nader is though. That's definitely why they're used. Same general reason why you had Golden Division and YPG fighting ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa rather than US regulars- nobody important cares if they get killed. Same reason the Russians were looking at bringing in Syrians too (as well as them being cheaper to pay). Supposedly Ukraine has withdrawn from Zolote and Hirske now, though given the situation how orderly it can have been is an open question.

1500 people is perfectly fine for sample size, that should be 95% confidence (ie 5% chance the figures fall outside the +/- range). If done properly (questionable, since it's double opt in from existing panels*) they'll also have done a proper age/ sex/ profession/ education etc distribution/ weighting. There's always a potential problem with using 'possible/ not sure' as one of the answers: it's certainly possible that Prince Phillip was driving the white Fiat that caused Dodi's car to crash having previously drugged the driver- though it isn't at all likely. You have to be quite careful with the wording to make sure you don't get people who are aware of the theory as opposed to taking it seriously. For 9/11 specifically 'Inside Job' would certainly include things like the US Government letting the attack happen to get more power; not just "Pentagon was attacked by a missile and jet fuel can't melt steel beams" type 'theories' that exclude AQ (and just for you Bruce, Saudi) involvement. *you'd expect conspiracy theorists to be more keen than the average person to be on such panels, so they'd have to be very careful to tackle bias.

Eh, problem is they've been saying that for three months now. Ukraine hasn't made any real progress after retaking some land around Kharkov (some of which they lost again over the last week, but it isn't strategically important either way), though they've had an excellent twitter offensive on Kherson for months. And yes, people have certainly been saying things like Severodonetsk is falling imminently too for ages, so it's not just one side doing it. It made sense under one single circumstance: you think you can force a political surrender rather than military victory, and you believe that the enemy won't fight. If they fight you've got nowhere near enough troops. If your primary goal is 'defeating Ukrainian forces' you do things completely differently and concentrate on, well, defeating their army. Which probably means you go up/down the east bank of the Dniepr to cut the country in two; since there are a very limited number of places to cross the Dniepr and most of the Ukrainian army was in the east. And on the list you made, really Bruce, most of those come from one guy who isn't even with us any more- and a couple I never saw here at all, though I did elsewhere. Might as well cite stuff from oby or LoF too.

The thing about casualty numbers are that they're generally based on (also generally, massively inflated) German figures. The soviet ones just weren't available. The classic example being Operation Bagration. 'Official' figures have the Soviets suffering twice the casualties despite it being just about the most lopsided land battle of the entire war- the German casualty rate was a staggering ~80% by most estimates, and some put it closer to 90%.

Depends how seriously you take Hitler really, as he was planning massive envelopments right up to April 1945. Kursk was the last time they had a semi realistic chance of doing it on the eastern front (and of course they also tried to repeat France 1940 in 1944 on the western front, though how realistic that plan was in late 1944 is... questionable, at best). If the soviets had kept up the 1941 tactics in 1942 they'd have bagged a lot of troops again though. Heh. Though fair enough too. Too much 'Enemy at the Gates' is shorthand for someone talking about well known 'facts' about the soviets in WW2, because that movie had rather a lot of them. It's not literal. There was a 'Not one step back' order, but it was very largely ignored practically- and rather ironically, it was based on a prior German order from Winter 41-2 which more or less worked for the Germans, but was a long term disaster for them since it convinced Hitler that they just had to stand and fight with enough vigour and everything would be OK (plus they supplied one pocket via air, which convinced Hitler Stalingrad could be supplied that way). But in mid 1942+, when the NOSB order was active the Soviets just kept retreating until they got to Stalingrad and to let the southern thrust outrun their supplies.

I don't really know why anyone would take those estimates seriously anyway. Russia was going to run out of stuff inside a week from the start of the war, estimates have been consistently inaccurate. Sigh. "Enemy at the Gates" is not a documentary. Much like, well, the Moscow Times it's intended to make westerners feel good about themselves. As a matter of actual historical fact the Germans achieved zero soviet pockets in six months (while still taking enormous amounts of land) under 'not one step back' because... the soviets continually withdrew, until they reached Stalingrad. Under the previous policy which was far closer to actual 'not one step back' they pocketed something ludicrous like 3 million soviet troops in 6 months. Last pocket the Germans took on the eastern front was, rather ironically, at Izyum in May 1942 during a soviet attack. Mostly ironic not because the current war is largely being fought around Izyum, but because sticking a great wad of troops in a salient with weakly defended sides is exactly what the dopes got roped into at Stalingrad. And if it wasn't for Manstein they'd probably have pocketed every single german strung out along 2000km of trans Don countryside waiting for supplies as well. If you want to play realpolitik, then do so. Preferably do so without the moral crusade and 5th grade propaganda though, and especially the blubbing about how and why the rest of the world just doesn't appreciate how very special and uniquely terrible crimes against the west are.

That issue is, so to speak, by design. First spoiler is more or less thematic and readily inferred, the nested spoiler is a bit more explicit. Non spoiler take home is mostly "don't sweat the details".

Dark ~~--> 12 Monkeys (TV), if it was German and aiming for something approaching a scandi noir aesthetic. Though that comparison relies on actually having seen 12 Monkeys which to be sure wasn't quite as popular as Stranger Things. Thoroughly recommend Dark by the way, though as might be guessed from its name let alone the first few episodes it isn't exactly the most bright and positive experience.

Yeah, so it's news for foreigners, not Russians. It also hasn't had physical distribution for 5 years now, and was already primarily web based multiple years before that. MT's entire business model is predicated on news that makes westerners feel good about themselves. We get exactly the same thing here with Chinese language stuff. Papers nominally written in NZ filled with pro CCP blather or for Epoch Times, pro Falun Gong anti CCP blather, distributed in Chinese orientated businesses.