Zoraptor

Orville Ep3 I didn't like last week's episode as much as I should have, this one I probably liked more than I should OTOH SNW ep7 Yeah, this one didn't work for me, at all. I can't even be bothered putting anything spoilerish about it, I will just pretend it didn't exist and hope it isn't the start of the downward spiral. I suspect ignoring it isn't going to work out though, given the ending.

It isn't really an unreasonable approach in terms of expectations though. Part of the art of genuinely negotiating is seeing things from the perspective of the other side, and that is what they were doing (and expected in return). You also got the hints of what they wanted from them before they went all matey mcmatey impersonating Pike's style, and you could even infer it from them flying the flag of those they made agreements with. (If it had been a TNG S1 episode it would have been a Troi centric one, they'd probably have been made outright empaths and she'd have solved the problem in 5 times the time she should have taken. After a pep talk from Wesley gave her the vital clue...)

Yeah, the forecasts don't exactly fill you with confidence when the previous ones were out by a lot and consistently had to revised down significantly. The ultimate problem is how do you both control inflation yet avoid driving a significant number of people bankrupt with the interest rate rises you need to control the inflation; and hence tank the economy and risk the sort of bad debt storm there was in the GFC. The latter is particularly difficult after a sustained period of low interest rates inflated multiple bubbles fueled by the cheap credit. I don't think too many tears will be shed for the guy who mortgaged his house to buy NFTs at the peak of the market, but there are plenty of people who just wanted to own their own home rather than rent and suddenly find they're paying 4 times the amount of interest plus a lot more for fuel and groceries simultaneous with house prices dropping. End of the day one of the biggest responsibilities of central bankers is to maintain Confidence; indeed that's why they have a mandate to tackle inflation in the first place. You can't maintain Confidence while telling people the Titanic is sinking and someone didn't give it enough lifeboats, you keep the orchestra playing so people don't panic.

The body swap definitely wasn't for comedic effect. They pretty much broke the 4th wall outright saying that it wasn't ("that sounds too much like hijinks" or similar). Indeed, the episode was crafted masterfully to illustrate the central conflict between emotion and logic without pontificating about it, with the two logical humans trying to lighten up a bit, Spock between listening to a vulcan and a human to mirror his heritage, and the alien of the week using empathy in a non standard but logical way to get people to show they actually understand their reservations. Well ok, it wasn't masterful, but it's Trek, not Shakespeare (having said that, and in the spirit of the summary below: "haha imma drive my girlfriend to madness and suicide after murdering her father because I'm paranoid about my mother boffing my uncle after murdering my father; ps everyone except Horatio dies in finale which is a trope that gets drilled out of 10 year old writers"; days of out lives tier plotting there Will and you reused the 'everyone dies in contrived circumstances' ending multiple times too) Y'know, I'm pretty sure I can think of a dumber one. "Get frustrated at lack of progress, kidnap Pike and send him and their negotiator down to a hostile planet to fight an Invisible Enemy in the hope that Understanding Ensues and they don't end up at war when either the Enterprise tries to reclaim their captain or the negotiator, amazingly, dies fighting said Invisible Enemy and they think it's Picar^H^H^H Pike's fault". Which is, of course, the actual plot to a top 10 episode of TNG.

Everything is pretty simplified- so is saying that the US spent 100bn p/a on Afghanistan so they can spend 100bn on Ukraine when the vast majority of spending in Afghanistan wasn't actually on Afghanistan, it was on the US. Hence US military spending not reducing by 100bn on withdrawal (it's increased, of course). The average projected wage loss is 4%. Much as they'd like to they can't wave a hand and pretend it isn't, that's pure feel good sophistry. Median can be a better measure in some circumstances, it isn't here. Say that your example is correct and the 80% of people who live in cities aren't effected. Median then says everything is perfectly fine, there's actually positive effects. Even quartiles say everything is good. But, that practically means the rural 20% would see the small matter of a 20% decrease in wages to get the average back to 4%. Of course, they won't, because most rural workers are engaged directly or indirectly in agriculture, and... pass along costs to the people in cities. Either through increased prices, or increased CAP costs. Or they drop production/ go out of business. Either way, the people in the cities pay in increased prices, benefits etc; there may just be a lag. Try explaining this to an economist though and you'll get a puzzled look and instant proof of the old "there are one types of people who believe in [infinite growth in a finite system; typically]: idiots and economists" adage. Economists have a cheery faith in the financial system which challenges the guy sitting on the roof of his flooded house refusing rescue because "God will save me" (WELL I TRIED, BUT YOU IGNORED THE BOAT AND HELICOPTER I SENT...) Of course it's not going to be evenly distributed. I personally have the great advantage of having my income specifically pegged against inflation, and I have zero debt too so interest rates rising is a small advantage to me. I will get a 6% wage increase to match NZ's inflation rate, transport costs will be a bugger, but if anything I'm personally likely to do better than the last ten years despite that. But nothing is evenly distributed; everyone with debt is going to feel it in increased debt servicing costs and yes, the average person will be 4% worse off even if some aren't.

Yeah, but that's "the special military operation is going perfectly to plan!" type stuff. The EU/ ECB is not going to say "we're completely rogered, incoming financial apocalypse, buy shares in tinned beans makers they'll be the only thing left standing" because that's self fulfilling. They have to be upbeat about things. Just look at their difference between projected inflation and projected wage rises though. Everyone in the EU will have a practical average ~4% pay cut once inflation is taken into account. That's fine, if you're an ECB economist living in Frankfurt on a million Euros, not so much if you aren't.

Maybe with the exception of Mass Effect? I'd have said it had the absolute classic Bioware "I'm going to eat your liver, I will do it publicly, and I don't care if anyone knows it" type facial expressions. And I'm not even talking 'my face is tired' Andromeda either. Shepard_smile.jpg is perhaps the classic meme creepy game expression.

My best Stalker memory was doing the brain scorcher x lab for the first time. Atmospheric as anything, finished up with basically no ammo or medicine, but it would be fine since I'd killed everything behind me so could just stroll back out again. Good thing too, otherwise I'd be reduced to using harsh language. Turned the scorcher off, had a ten second feeling of Pride and Accomplishment that money can't buy then... hello, unholy hordes of Monolith. I must have killed about half of them with a silenced Makarov; never been so glad I'd played Thief previous.

I'm always amused by corruption measures that have New Zealand near the top. Guess we could be, but everywhere else would have to be terrible. Eh, that's super simplistic. And that rhetorical construct is abused all the time. "Don't be ridiculous. Palestine always has the option to just stop" <--> "Don't be ridiculous. Israel always has the option to just stop" The practicalities are that Russia has less to lose continuing than by stopping, no point wishing it hadn't happened. If you want them to stop then you need to reverse that calculus.

I should say as someone who was a bit down on Old World at first that I've largely come around to liking it after playing more. Probably not going to be an outright classic, but that is a pretty high bar. Its big weakness actually has nothing much to do with the game itself, it's being a game in the era where you don't have the 'big book' style manuals to read through any more. The number of times I've seen useful features mentioned in the loading screens that weren't mentioned in the tutorials and either weren't in or you didn't know to look for in the in game encyclopaedia is pretty high, and they reduce a lot of frustration while adding depth. I'm down to a couple of quibbles about gameplay/ documentation (eg 'trade luxuries via the manage luxuries button on the action panel'... uh, it's not there? Good thing you can mostly rely on people asking for trades anyway, but if you're asked to trade luxuries as a Goal it would be nice to proactively trade them) and a slightly more serious issue with the Goal system overall, though it doesn't really matter if you get given an ~impossible goal, it's just annoying.

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.