Zoraptor

What will be interesting to see if all the people who were recently shocked and appalled at Chinese ethnic cleansing, settlement and oppression in Xinjiang will be similarly upset at Israeli ethnic cleansing, settlement and oppression in Palestine. Somehow, I suspect not.

Technically SWIFT is European. Based in Belgium, iirc. Thoroughly compromised by the NSA though, and frankly, if they were the only ones I'd be extraordinarily surprised. So it going would be great since it's pretty useless and hopelessly insecure, if it weren't for the fact that a replacement would also be specced by the sort of people who think building backdoors into everything is a great idea. Russia and China have supposedly had an alternative ready to go for years.

Myanmar and Burma are the same word more or less. Effectively it's like the Marathi Bombay -> Mumbai or Bengali Calcutta -> Kolkata crossed with Holland/ Netherlands. Please follow the rules of the internet and mention Foundations of Geopolitics and how it explains everything about Russia when mentioning that name.

Nope, the original criticism was: .."one of their rockets is going to crash. Quality control and safety are not words that can be attributed to Chinese industry".. and that's a direct quote with only the emphasis added. If it were quality control only I might- probably couldn't have been bothered- have pointed out that (allegedly at least) the Chinese rocket is actually Working As Designed; so it isn't a QC problem but is a safety one, to whit, what it's designed to do is dangerous. None of the situations I listed except the SpaceX one were QC issues- unless the Chinese rocket failed its reiginition in which case it would be directly equivalent to the SpaceX situation where the Falcon failed its reignition. But the allegation at least is that it simply isn't able to reignite. Sure, but not in the same no fault way that, say, a shuttle being hit by a meteorite or untracked space debris would be. (Both disasters were caused by known issues and could have been avoided, in the case of Challenger really should have been avoided too. Neither were really quality control issues though, the prior night's temperature was known to be out of spec for the O rings on Challenger and the launch should have been delayed as a result, but wasn't. Definitely fair to call it a safety issue though. With Columbia both the booster foam and insulation tiles were within specification, the specs were just insufficient and known to be insufficient too so again, a safety problem. The only bad design aspect of Skylab was not having a mechanism for controlled descent as, for example, Mir had, but since it lacked that it was also fundamentally unsafe same as a reignition less Chinese rocket would be, but yeah, neither are QC issues)

HD was, as always, trolling and it's absolutely obvious if you have any background in the subject; there was no bait to take because his 'pro China' stance is entirely predicated on getting knee jerk responses for his own amusement. The beauty about it is that he also manages to troll in such a way that anyone who is actually pro China gets riled too- and probably ends up admitting to all sorts of crappy stuff that actually did happen while trying to correct the inaccuracies. That too is obvious, if you have any background in the subject. Kills the 'beauty' of it a bit to explain, but... it wasn't a Xinjiang uprising, 20 million didn't die (that's the estimate for those displaced), 20 million couldn't have died in a Xinjiang uprising in the 19th century because it's very cold and very arid and the population was almost entirely nomadic herders; its current pop is only 25 million after massive settlement programs. It also wasn't instigated by the British, who at the time were busy propping up the Qing against the aforementioned Heavenly Kingdom. Apart from the last, pretty basic stuff really if most people's knowledge of Xinjiang wasn't #stopkony2012 tier slacktivism; and even the last might beg the question of how the Brits were instigating anything several thousand km away from their bases, up against the Russian border. But if you explain how it's wrong you end up explaining that China actually 'only' murdered around 4 million muslims and depopulated two states (neither Xinjiang, and both predominantly Han Chinese; the Xinjiang depopulation actually came a century earlier) prior to what is currently happening in Xinjiang now. So on one hand you potentially catch a bunch of knee jerking sinophobe gwailos taking everything at face value, on the other you potentially get wumao admitting to China slaughtering millions previously to correct the erroneous 20 million claim. Win win.

Sigh. I mean, we could go back to Skylab crashing over Australia- at the risk of it being labeled 40 year old whataboutism, I guess- or bits of the Space Shuttle distributing itself over NM, AZ and TX, but we really don't need to. The same thing happened literally a month a go (OK, not literally literally a month ago, in happened in... March) to SpaceX. The reality is that space is hard and doesn't pick sides based on geopolitical prejudices. Not bad, not bad at all. Triggers those who know nothing about the subject, also triggers those who do know something about it. (For anyone wondering: Dungan Revolt. Bonus contemporaneous war that killed more than WW1 but you've never heard of: Taiping (Heavenly Kingdom) Rebellion)

For anyone who doesn't think Bruce is spouting rubbish, (1) the US still has an export ban* (2) it has an export ban on vaccines it hasn't even approved, eg Astra Zeneca (3) it has enough vaccines to vaccinate everyone eligible, already- the stockpile has only increased since January so has outstripped demand for 4 months even when demand was peak *which at least they're waiving for expiring stocks of vaccine- and less credibly, to try and stop people using Russian or Chinese vaccines (ie the at cost Pfizer delivery to Brazil) Which is eminently sensible in general, but it's also part of the reason why the US can support suspending patents, now. In contrast, the EU's home grown vaccines aren't online yet (except German BioNTech production, and labeling J&J as Janssen) so having their patents suspended would mean that they actively lose money on research etc. For anyone terrified for the bottom lines of Pfizer et alia consider that the EU is looking to buy 1.9 billion doses from them. At the lowest charging rate that's ~20 billion in profit that Pfizer would not have had. At the rate they charged Israel it would be ~40 billion in profit. My heart bleeds for them at least as badly as it does for some anonymous indian peasant in Bihar hacking their lungs out.

The guy in charge of Stadia also left Google/ Alphabet this week, which is step 4 on google's 'product about to be cancelled' checklist.

Yep, similar to the situation with the AstraZeneca/ Oxford vaccine where it was designed at Oxford but licensed to AstraZeneca to make, except BioNTech does have some production capacity of its own in Germany and there's no requirement for the vaccine to be sold as not-for-profit with their partner, which the AZO agreement has. So while AstraZeneca makes no money from it Pfizer manufactures something like 95% in their partnership, and it's almost entirely on a for profit basis. At cost is ~11USD per dose judging by what they charged Brazil, so they're marking up by 90%- at least- to others.

Won't someone think of the poor pharmaceutical companies and their bottom lines? Poor old Pfizer, having had their research paid for by the German government, their vaccine indemnified against side effects and selling their vaccine at a bargain basement 50 75USD per person to most of the rich world when without the pandemic they'd have still been trying to rely on their triangular grow it big pill for sales. How will their CEO afford his 3rd private Caribbean Island of the year if Biden and the WHO get their way? (Wanting to waive patents is nice, but it's no loss for US companies. Moderna and Pfizer's vaccines are fundamentally too expensive and the control on them is being able to buy the lipids and nucleotide base ingredients; and Pfizer in particular already has deals with everyone they can reasonably expect to sell to given their high price and exotic storage requirements. The only US vaccine effected would be J&J- or Janssen, in Eurospeak)

Most studios would give their left kidney for 16 million sales or whatever it was. All CDPR has to do to get the hype back is announce their next Witcher Colon Subtitle game. But what they've probably learnt from C2077- apart, hopefully, from some better project control- is that 7 years of hype building is dumb.

AMD's naming schemes are probably the stupidest thing about the company. To be fair, they're miles behind Intel's mobile naming scheme in terms of stupidity- so bad that Intel's own marketing department doesn't even know what the model numbers mean- but AMD's is still unnecessarily confusing. Zen 2 and Zen 3 are both 7nm too, so they aren't even gaining extra capacity with the naming, and using the same naming scheme for CPUs and GPUs is moronic. 3600X/T is a (ok, pretty pointless for the XT) CPU, 5600X is a CPU, but 5600XT is a GPU... why? It's so easy to avoid.

Funnily enough one of the big suggestions for fixing the declining maths standards here is grinding, ie going back to actually learning times tables etc at primary/ intermediate school level instead of jumping straight to a 'problem solving' approach for everything. Ironically (or not*) that approach was meant to help lift up poorer performing students who hated formulaic stuff like times tables etc, but has actually dropped average achievement down significantly instead. *problem solving is great in theory but not really sure how it was meant to work when you didn't have the basics down properly first. But then I'm not a highly paid consultant or Ministry of Education apparatchik so I don't really know how the justification for it went beyond a mess of corporate speak about paradigms and the like- and a large part of my income doesn't rely on the system being permanently broken so I can write another report on it in 3 years time...

It should be fine for sample size. IIRC 95% confidence with +/- 3% for a country size typical population requires only ~1000 people, so long as you're able to weight respondents properly. You can download the report if you want and have a look. Don't think they charge for it, but I haven't downloaded it myself to check. Certainly can't accuse the Alliance of Democracies of deliberately commissioning a survey to give the answers they wanted, they're an impeccably pro western lot founded by a former NATO secgen. Not really something that you can accuse Teh Grauniad of though: As an explanation for why the perceived threat of the US to democracy went up decently from last year that isn't exactly great, when the survey period started 3 months after Trump was voted out and a month after Biden was inaugurated. It would be more likely to be distrust of the thoroughly interventionist people surrounding Biden than that. (More realistically, and since by most of the other metric perception of the US improved, it may well be an out of confidence result, since for 95% confidence 1/20 responses will be 'wrong'. Still even if it is rogue it's still unlikely to be massively wrong, just outside the 3% or whatever)

The diseases are rare because the vaccine rates are high, so herd immunity is in play. When vaccine rates drop enough they'll come back, especially something ludicrously infectious like measles which will happily infect 20 new people per infection if it can. (The 'funny' thing is that when we had a measles outbreak here a couple of years ago lots of supposedly 'educated' antivaxxers were first in line to get their children vaccinated- their refusal wasn't based on anything other than it not being 'necessary' for little Jonny to get the jab because everyone else was immunised, and their immunisation was protecting li'l Jonny. Pure selfishness, both in terms of putting their children at risk and wanting everyone else to protect them from their stupidity. I've got a lot of sympathy for the people who didn't get it done because they fell through the cracks (mostly the poor and ill informed) but those others were just awful awful people)

DNA vaccines. Will definitely trigger antivaxxers. (Wikipedia article would usually be easier reading, but in this case has multiple mistakes in it such as claiming the J&J/ AZ vaccines are DNA vaccines which they aren't)

Yep. Albeit there are a lot of GOTY awards given out, so there are a lot more than one GOTY each Y. It was, by some. GOTY awards are very rarely popularity contests among people who play the games, generally they're popularity contests among those who review games, at the entity giving the awards. And there is often a large disconnect between what reviewers think and what gamers think. It also has to be said that (1) all too often game reviewers wish they were doing anything other than something as mundane, trivial and outright boring as reviewing games and (2) because of that reviewers are often desperate for games to be in some way Significant. Stuff with any semblance of that tends to get big ups, and treated as if it's the narrative and philosophical equivalent of Breaking Bad, even when it's closer to GoT S8 in both regards. Are they fringe opinions- or at least, are they fringe opinions more than those of reviewers are? Reviewers certainly have a bigger soap box to shout from, but that doesn't mean their opinion is right. Personally I have little to no doubt for a game like TLOU2 that the vast majority of people played it and either enjoyed it, or didn't, but they also never really thought about it much at all, never ventured an opinion anywhere public about it, and have now more or less forgotten it. Because to most people games are entirely disposable entertainment and they spend as much time thinking about it as I have for Paul Blart: Mall Cop*. As such the most common opinion is probably some form of indifference with those who care strongly about it either way being fringe. But, of course, you're a lot more likely to venture said opinion if you care about something than if you don't. Criticism is just human nature. *which I rather enjoyed but have spent approximately 15 seconds thinking about since it ended, almost all of them now.

Relevant to above, India has been holding a major Cricket tournament involving a lot of international players during the pandemic surge, and as should probably surprise no one its biobubble has now been well and truly pierced. Which leads to perhaps Australia's premier player being potentially stranded in India or facing a 5 year jail term for returning home. At least one commentator has fled the country for the Maldives to sit out the 2 weeks there. (There's at least one NZer effected too, though I know all our players have been vaccinated before leaving and they're off to England in a few weeks anyway rather than returning home. At least theoretically the Indian Cricket team is meant to be going to England too, but at the moment that has to be in question I would have thought)

Yes, I'd say that Bioshock is the case study because it gets most things right- and because the problem with its meta narrative is one of fundamentals rather than a design choice. You simply can't have a strong narrative and not also have linear goal setting where you follow instructions. The problem with forcing people to do something in a game, as part of a moral message, is ultimately that it isn't the player doing it if there's no alternative, it's the game designer. As such, doing something like nerve stapling completely anonymous, personality less and abstracted drones in Alpha Centauri is more of a moral dilemma because it's an actual choice. Even something as otherwise cliché and banal as CoD gets that right at times, since you don't have to, for example, actually shoot anyone in No Russian. Can't stop it either, but that again is the problem with linear plotting.

TLOU II has the same basic problem a lot of games have* with them trying to Say Something Significant and it being done stupidly. On one hand, it tells you to feel bad about seeking revenge and tries to say something about its futility/ circularity. On the other, there's only one way to actually play the game, and that involves... seeking revenge. The only way not to be lectured to about morality is to destroy the disk on youtube. And then you get lectured about a different kind of morality, I guess. *Case study being Bioshock, point out that the game is on rails plot wise and you're forced to obey the voice in your head- how meta, but potentially interesting- in order to progress; then once your programming is broken... you continue blithely following orders exactly the same as when Fontlas was 'would you kindly'ing you.

From that title I was expecting something Sir Mixalot based, not an original. (Also, fancy not knowing the difference between alkaloids (N containing complex organic compounds such as caffeine or morphine) and alkali (base compound in solution, ie lye). Sadly it seems like German scientific precision has deserted them as well)

That's utterly unsurprising. Very good money to be made in public projects, and when companies talk about loving the free market and wanting no government interference they mean no interference with their profits. They happily take subsidies for example, despite them distorting the free market, and big public sector projects are all too often subsidies writ very very large. CGT is mostly a tax on windfall profits, not actual investment. Raising it an attempt to claw back the massive disparity in practical effect of 'recovery aiding' policies like quantitative easing and super low interest rates. If you're poor you've seen a lot of your wages- and that's assuming you're still working- inflated away by quantitative easing and the main benefit you've had from low interest rates is maybe lower credit card costs, if the bank has passed them along and is not having to keep them high due to increased defaulting. Yeah, and I guess you had a couple of one off payments too, which probably cover your rent for a month or two. If you're rich though you borrow money at low interest rates against assets and get, what, 15% annual returns from real estate and 20% from shares? And a lot more if you're astute about it. Increased share prices may go to investment in the company, extra jobs and building etc in theory, but the profit goes back to the shareholders who are making the capital gains and the company will happily move its entire workforce offshore if practical, and pay its directors and executives massive bonuses while doing so. Raising CGT will not suddenly make investment a bad deal, it will simply make it less of a good deal. The Soroses of the world aren't going to be stuffing mattresses with their billions, they'll still be doing what makes them the most money- which will almost certainly still be investing rather than 0% interest from sticking it in the bank. They'll just make less ludicrous profits and pay a fairer, uh, share. To take the other extreme, no CGT is how you end up with houses costing ~15x your median wage, deposits scaling up faster than its possible to save and outright neofeudalism with serfs making sure the landed gentry never have to do a days work- and how you end up with economists scratching their heads about a non existent economic recovery despite apparently good fundamentals. Free hint guys: the serfs are paying most of their money to the modern equivalent of Jean de Warenne and can't spend it on the things that drive a healthy economy. That is current New Zealand, an economy attached to a housing bubble due in major part to no CGT.

They did a similar thing for Surviving Mars and have started supporting it again a month ago, after over a year of nothing. OTOH, I: R's progenitor, EU: Rome, lost its dev support very quickly and very permanently, and it definitely sounds like the non core Paradox team is having a terrible time at the moment with EUIV's latest dlc being literally the lowest rated product on Steam and seemingly everything except CK3 having issues too. Oh well, that's what appointing a CEO whose main experiences are gambling and free-to-play gets you I guess, and it isn't like it hasn't been Paradox's trajectory since the switch from proper expansions.

Same thing Gabe Newell* and a bunch of other rich foreigners have been doing, riding out the pandemic in New Zealand. To be fair to Cameron he actually owns a farm next to where Peter Jackson lives and has for over a decade at this point so he's a lot more committed than the average fly by nighter like Thiel. It's briefly mentioned in the article Raithe posted but he is definitely doing actual work on the Avatars now rather than just George Martining it as he seemed to be for years. They imported hundreds of people for filming which caused a bit of a scandal since they were allowed to circumvent normal quarantine rules due to it being a special project. *and if I find gamer hero worship or him to be utter cringe the sort of prostrate kowtowing to him from our media is even more embarrassing. He's not going to move Valve here guys, asking him for the billionth time won't get a different answer.

Going on recent history rightist and fiscally responsible are also sort of a contradiction in terms...