Zoraptor

Wheel of Time released. Guess I probably ought to clarify WoT (1999), since there's meant to be a new game in (early) development. Far better than it had any right to be really, and one of the more interesting Quake/ Unreal clones of the ~2000 glut.

Eh, at the time of the Winter War Germany and the USSR were (technically, kind of if you squinted) allies under Molotov-Ribbentrop so Finland got zero help from Germany. Continuation War though, sure. (Churchill at least was very keen to declare war on the USSR in 1939, but in this case at least fortunately Chamberlain was still PM. Then again Churchill was also very keen to invade... Norway, at more or less the same time. Well, protectively occupy even if the occupants objected. Practically there wasn't anything France or Britain could do to help anyway, and if there had been a campaign Churchill would have been in charge- and while his speeches were great his military campaigns tended to be awful. Indeed, the actual Norway campaign run by him was an almost unmitigated disaster, the almost part being pretty much solely Warspite sinking half the Kreigsmarine's total of destroyers at Narvik. Churchill's plan for helping Finland was... Dardanelles 2.0, of course, just run a big fleet and invasion force through to the Baltic, what can go wrong? Not like Britain was also at war with Germany, and Germany could invade Denmark at any time bottling the British fleet up wholesale and forcing them to run a narrow strait dominated by the Luftwaffe. Then again, Churchill being Churchill, maybe he was going to invade Denmark too...)

Eh, Russia would 'lose' a normal war very quickly and always would. The Soviets might not have won a non nuclear war, and the Russians have less than half the power the soviet bloc had, with a fair bit of that lost half swapping sides outright. It's not even a debate. It just wouldn't be a 'normal' war. It's particularly funny when you get people talking about the 'lessons' to be learnt from the current war then proceeding to completely ignore them by saying that anyone and his dog could invade Russia- because, presumably, Russians aren't as patriotic as Ukrainians? Not as willing to sacrifice? Really just pining for some tough love from their western superiors? I mean, it's not like there's a recent example of a country being invaded with the aim of chopping it up where things went very badly when the people living there objected. It's not like there have been multiple examples in the past 20 years of things going very badly when someone isn't even trying to annex bits of a country. I guess it's different when they're Russians though, they just lack the spine and fortitude of the invading westerner with their superior values- is it genetic, is it cultural, who knows, but it's just self evident and the mere knowledge of westerness gives me a chub thinking of all the people I'm superior too- and will no doubt welcome the invaders with flowers and cheers. Or maybe not, but that would just be because they've been misinformed or are stupid, hate us for our freedoms; and irrelevant because what are they going to do against the serried and glorious undefeated legions of Senatus PopulesQue Americam. And no, to paraphrase the great philosopher Otto from 'A Fish Called Wanda', "They were all draws, and we weren't trying anyway". Really, it was just a stupid idea. It could (almost certainly would) have been executed flawlessly and failed. The entire invasion force was marginal for taking a city of 3.2mn people. The only way it makes some military sense is if they thought the Belarusians were going to invade alongside them since at least that guards their flank

Eh, it's pretty much the same pattern it always is: older, poorer, more conservative, and more rural --> more enthusiastic; and for the poorer less to lose anyway. Middle class and educated urban young people --> not. For enthusiasm, and susceptibility to propaganda, Goering is still relevant: “Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

New Blood is... mostly very good. Suppose I should post the Strange New Worlds Trailer, despite it being blocked in NZ (lol)

They can't build them but they do have some capacity to maintain/ upgrade them, and have for example exported T-72s to 3rd parties. Though that was a decade ago now and under Yanukovich when purchase of any required Russian parts would not have been so much of a problem. They inherited ~1000 from the soviets, though the vast majority were never mothballed properly so may as well be junk so far as use for replacements go. Their tank plant in Kharkov makes T-64s and T-80 variants, and since they can't be supplied by anyone else (well, except Russia for the T-80) that is pretty irrelevant. You'd also have to assume that it's not in the best shape at present. [if it's replacement tanks for Poland there's heaps of options. If nothing else the US has a load of older Abrams in reserve- and Poland is meant to be getting new Abrams this year(?) anyway so it wouldn't be a long term shortage]

It was pretty close to Blitzkrieg in the south for a week. Considering Ukraine had 8 years to fortify Crimea- which is naturally about as bottlenecked as you can get- the progress from there was extremely fast. They just didn't have anything to follow up that success with because it was all stuck pointlessly in a traffic jam, swamp and forest on the wrong side of the Dniepr north of Kiev. Whoever decided sending 50k troops along a single road that decamped straight into an extended urban area of 3+mn population was a good idea is an idiot (and as previous, I'd put a lot on that being Putin since it smacked of a political rather than military decision). Have those troops pretty much anywhere else and things would potentially be a lot different. Now the best they can do is send them all along the same single road back into Belarus.

Group E --> group of death. Spain, Germany, Japan and potentially a team that hasn't lost a WC finals match since 1982 (and no, that wasn't the last time they were in it)

lol. "Democracy is for civilised people, and they just aren't civilised" The reality was that Yeltsin followed the economic suggestions of the west pretty much wholesale and it resulted in two sovereign bankruptcies, the largest known drop in life expectancy in any country outside of wartime and an implosion of the standard of living- while the privatisation model resulted in the oligarchs we know and love today. Also, of course, what happened in their first actual Presidential election? Massive pro Yeltsin interference from the US, as well as massive (uncondemned) pro Yeltsin ballot stuffing. That is what changed things- the enthusiasm for democracy and the west ran into a rabid pro west pro democracy candidate who was bent as a paperclip, and ran the country into the ground using a western plan and while being feted in the west. Air superiority isn't air supremacy, I can quote the definitions again if needed. The estimate is that Ukraine is managing 'up to' 10 sorties per day, and flown at treetop level as that's under the height ceiling for most of the Russian air defences. Despite that they've lost 2 planes in the last few days (one of which was videoed and can be found, inevitably, 'as Russian Su35 shot down') Everything else is small drones.

Classic Raja Koduri over promising, nice to see he's brought that over from his time at AMD. Guess he's avoided an "Intel ARC will be called Intel ARC" moment at least. XeSS always seemed likely to be at least a bit of a marketing stunt to imply a full suite release comparable to the competitors- it probably had the wind taken out of its sales somewhat by FSR2.0's release as well.

That's really not a good example since the Russians made the Turks cry over that. Erdogan went from triumphantly ordering the shoot down personally to "sorry, it was all a scheme by Gulenists and I had nothing to do with it"- pretty close to a direct quote too- in a year. Actual breach of airspace is very uncommon, except in a few areas of dispute (eg Kurils) or where the airspace situation is complicated- for NATO, almost all actual airspace breaches involve Estonia, and the St Petes/ Kalinigrad route. What is usually labelled as intrusion in the press is either ignoring ADIZ or air traffic control areas. The Canadian ADIZ is regularly breached, but an ADIZ also has zero legal basis and is entirely self proclaimed- the go to example being Taiwan's which extends way over mainland China and over the entire city of Fuzhou (pop 4mn, so not a hamlet). Actual Canadian airspace otoh is very seldom breached. Any rebuttal involving the footage being faked can be dismissed out of hand. Even the BBC- whose coverage was belated and at best grudging- admitted that every expert they spoke to said the footage was not faked. And while they weaseled a lot on responsibility they were explicit that the footage showed people being genuinely shot. The claims for it being faked ultimately resolve to "but hollywood shows/ I'd expect something different" type stuff from non experts. Some of the injuries shown- but conveniently, not if you blur the images- are pretty much impossible to fake. I'd presume the Amnesty one is the "In the Dark" report. I don't think anyone (well, except Russia presumably) disputes that there's repression of the Crimean Tartars. I was just ridiculing the claim that every Tartar had been forced from Crimea and deported to Siberia.

Raytracing isn't really surprising- Exynos has it and they're for even lower wattage devices albeit on supposedly a far better node than Arc (w/ RDNA2). I'd suspect that despite RT cores being listed separately they're baked into the core design, ie they're intrinsic and you can't exclude them.

Eh, they could simply be, well, lying or functionally lying (ie releasing low confidence intelligence as if it was high). We've got plenty of rumours and statements that were obviously designed to foment distrust among the Russian leadership. Though they usually go the 'unnamed intelligence/ defence official' line for that. I mean, Shoigu has 'reliably' been fired, arrested as he was about to launch a coup, been fired and arrested (again) and had a heart attack and died/ been incapacitated all in the last month. That sort of statement is also, of course, meant to draw comparisons to Hitler and Stalin. (Now, if they said that Putin ordered Kiev to be a major immediate target of the invasion I'd believe that without equivocation, since that reeked of a political rather than military decision)

If their reactions are actually going to influence which faction you join you might want to read the spoiler below:

In that case at least it isn't really the faction being extreme though, it's just Nasty being herself. I've actually found the factions a bit less extreme than in E1, though that may partly be residual effect from the Berserkers constantly moaning every time you checked your map/ journal. However, the Clerics were kidnapping people and indoctrinating them in E1 for example...

My dad had (well, still has) aphasia, and it developed at a pretty similar age to Willis. If he'd been an actor he could have kept working a fair while, since it didn't really effect his ability to read and recite stuff for years, just his general conversations. He'd have got increasingly hard to work with though. But yeah, aphasia is also an indicator for really unpleasant things like fronto-temporal dementia. You'd actually kind of hope it's due to a stroke given some of the alternatives.

Meh. Not really worth the argument.

The latter rise is pretty close to definitely due to the gas buying as it coincides with the announcement, and the obvious result of forcing Europeans to buy a lot of roubles is their appreciation as it increases demand for them. First rise is likely to be a correction from the currency dropping too far. (Kind of amusing watching people say that charging in roubles would be a breach of contract and Russians have to accept payment in sanctioned currencies. Pretty sure Russia didn't agree to accept payments in the equivalent of Company Scrip, and that's what the sanctions make Euros and USD to Russia)

Yeah, modern airforce and air defences are exactly what they won't get for free as they're expensive. The proposed aircraft donations were for planes that were due for replacement- hence Poland wanting expedited delivery of F16s in exchange- or in Bulgaria's case, may not have even been genuinely airworthy in the first place. Hmm, nice to see that Shoigu has been paroled from his house arrest to make tv appearances. Part of that is that Putin himself was seen as broadly pro west in the early years. People tend to forget GWB looking into his soul etc- partly because there was a desperate desire to rehabilitate Bush jr post Trump, partly because there's a lot of other stuff to ridicule him about- and relations with the west only really went downhill with the Georgia/ Ukraine NATO accession decision. The other part is how badly Yeltsin's time is regarded in Russia, and him widely being regarded as a western puppet who ran the country into the ground under western direction. Western endorsement is not a net positive, except with people who cannot remember Yeltsin. Hence Navalny's support, such as it is, is among those who can't remember the 90s or did well in them.

Nah Bruce, it's just passive aggressive wikipedia notation. Wouldn't normally use it but I also know perfectly well I'm not going to get any proof, because the claim as written is... bollocks, so it's just wasting my time adding anything else. To be fair, I certainly could get a response that it's a typo for 1944 when that did more or less happen after the Germans were ejected. Though Stalin was of course Georgian, not Russian, and they were in large majority exiled to Uzbekistan, not Siberia; so it still wouldn't be that accurate. Crimean Tartar population did drop to almost nothing then though.

Citation Required.

China has a surprising number of unvaccinated old people. The figures for Hong Kong once covid got established were pretty grim mortality wise in that regard. Last thing the Chinese leadership want is a India w/ delta like situation of mass deaths, as that becomes almost impossible to keep a lid on.

They're a lot more likely to go for the Kramatorsk/ Slavyansk/ SveroDonetsk urban area first. It's already in a salient, and taking that area both rationalises the front line and allows Putin to say that he's 'liberated' all of Donetsk/ Lugansk as a war aim. That's the statement of the Presidential spokesman, and good on him for it. The official position of the Ukrainian Defence Forces is (well, was as of last time I checked) that the footage is faked (so there's nothing to investigate). Do I really need sourcing for the Iraqi numbers? (1) it's peripheral and (2) I'd presume you at least would know what one of them was from- Iraq Body Count. Whose methodology you can argue with, but you can most definitely argue that they underestimate by using only verified media accounts of deaths as well as overestimate. The lower figure was a hospital polling by the AP, iirc, and was consistent with a later estimate from a US think tank. The hospital polling is, iirc, the same measure the UN uses for casualties in Ukraine and is where their ~1200 deaths comes from. That is of course an underestimate, in some cases significantly so where the health system isn't functioning like Mariupol, but then the Iraqi health system wasn't really functioning in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion either as they quickly got swamped, and due to islamic custom a lot of people were buried ~immediately, in ~place, rather than being taken to hospital first.

It's probably the 'unrealised capital gains' part that is most significant. Is there any taxing in the US of things like share or house/ land/ art collection/ bitcoin/ other appreciation apart from at point of sale (or tax declaration for any capital gains taxes)? If not that would be a major departure. Though it would beg some questions like if your unrealised gains become unrealised losses over a tax year do you get a 20% refund instead? Would be a fun time for accountants.

Context like "No credible effort was ever made by those who were supposedly counting civilian deaths to verify whether a person in civilian clothing was in fact a civilian"? What do you want, a nuanced and detailed response to your- what else can you call it- unsupported and nuance free blanket assertion of bad faith or gross incompetence? It actively invites out of hand dismissal.