Zoraptor

Just do what Vancouver (?) did and slap a tax on unoccupied houses which makes it economic to have tenants instead of rely solely on house price inflation. Good lord, these impeachment speeches are interminable. Cicero these guys most definitely are not.

The big issue with Venezuela's oil industry is that its oil is heavy and sour and intrinsically lower value/ hard to process, and the US embargoed items essential for maintenance. Chavez sacking some workers makes a lovely narrative, since it was 'commie' Chavez sacking brave striking workers, but if that was the case it took a very long time and plummeting prices to have an effect. It's a very 90s Iraq dichotomy, if you argue that people are in poverty because of sanctions then the argument is that sanctions have no effect and it's all Saddam/ Maduro's/ their economic system's fault and if they just left everything would be rosy, like it is in Iraq, Honduras, Kosovo or Libya currently; OTOH if you're arguing that sanctions have no effect and the people implementing them are incompetent then suddenly all the economic troubles have their root in sanctions. They key thing is, of course, to switch between the two in the same interview and get Madeleine Albright to say for posterity that 500k dead kids from sanctions is perfectly acceptable on camera. Their main problem is that they can only produce oil very inefficiently because they cannot replace specialist parts, and customers at full price are hard to find because the US will sanction those dealing with them. Then, people wonder why Iran wants nuclear power...

True, and that's why the better options would be better, but there would also be less selective pressure for those mutations- and typically the selective pressure is against more severe symptoms as the aim of the virus is to spread, and the best way to spread is for its host to be walking around coughing rather than dead. IIRC while the SA variant is more likely to spread it appears to be somewhat less dangerous on a per case basis as it does so.

The overall infection rate doesn't matter too much though. Said it before, but if sars-cov-2 were reduced to causing 'common cold' like symptoms as its cousins do then no one would be worrying about it overly; and a 50-80% reduction in severe cases means 50-80% less hospitalisations and deaths which is the most important measure of its effect. You'd still want to use a better vaccine if it were available though, and AZ's vaccine was already relatively low efficiency.

South Africa has paused the rollout of its AstraZeneca vaccines due to low effectiveness against mild/ moderate covid. Most of the vaccines aren't as effective against mild covid, but have very good effectiveness at preventing severe cases, so it isn't necessarily as bad a finding as it looks.

No mention of SimpLord69? Not a well researched article. I think those guys just like the stock. $GME

Since there was some discussion about whether food prices had risen a week or so ago. The answer from the UN at least is that yes, they have been.

Almost all castles have a ditch or a moat, or are on top of a promontory/ hill. It's just about the most basic- and earliest- defensive measure there is; indeed one of the best ways to find sizeable early human settlements is to look for the ditches/ ramparts that were often built around them. Once you're getting to the level of city walls it becomes a bit more difficult due to scale*, but for forts and castles it would have been unusual not to have one. *kind of, Hadrian's Wall had 2 ditches and 2 ramparts (excluding the wall itself) for much of its ~120km length, but then it was also garrisoned by a lot of legionnaires who needed to be kept busy and would be paid anyway.

Miranda butt shots were utter cringe even back in ye olde times, and won't be missed. Retrospectively hilarious how inordinately proud they were of having body scanned Yvonne Strahovski given where Bioware is now- plus cutting the Jack romance for femshep because they were worried about Fox News of all people...

Not sure I agree with him on the trenches for the specific Game of Thrones situation shown, since by that point the ground would have been frozen absolutely solid. While Winterfell should have had extensive defences of that type already, if it didn't digging a ditch in the middle of winter is non trivial and require a lot of pickaxes and the like, would potentially be easy to walk over or around if incomplete, and would tire your army out when you want them fresh. In the scale of tactical dumb in GoT where forgetting your enemy has a fleet is a 11/10 on the dumb scale and ignoring the plan and charging the entire enemy army solo because Rickon can only run in straight lines is a 8/10 not digging ditches in frozen ground is probably about a 4/10, in the worst case scenario. Indeed, you could justify it wholesale if there's very shallow soil there. But then the rest of the Battle of Winterfell is entirely style over substance, so the overall rating is fine. As touched on briefly in the video, one of my 'favourite' things about Braveheart is how Mel Gibson managed to be so spectacularly racist... towards the Scots. They definitely had different tactics from the English historically and- to an extent- different arms (eg Schiltrons), but they were otherwise as developed as England was at the time, not some rag tag barely civilised mess that looks more like a Roman description of a Pictish raiding party. And William Wallace was minor nobility, he'd have looked like any other knight. Bit different for the Highlanders, but the big majority were lowlanders.

That article is a year old, and assumes a managed succession. A lot can change in a year, after all a few months ago Putin had Parkinson's and was going to resign in, uh, January 2021. There isn't a candidate that would be good for Russia and acceptable to the west, because fundamentally what the west wants is someone who will put western interests first, and those interests often run counter to what is best for Russia. Easy to forget, but Putin himself started off as acceptable to the west and only became a problem later.

Novichok definitely isn't uniquely Russian, it was just made there first, much as VX isn't uniquely American or BX uniquely British. It's more difficult to make than most nerve agents (most of which are trivial to make if you can get the precursors, literally mix in a bucket simple in some cases, but more difficult to stabilise) but any decent state agency from a mid range or above country could make it, though the USSR is the only one known to have made it. That's a point Boris Johnson (then Foreign Secretary) got publicly corrected on by Porton Down when he claimed Novichok was intrinsically Russian. The two questions are why they'd bother killing Navalny instead of, say, reinstating his suspended sentence on some pretext as they just did, and if they used Novichok why they'd let him go to Germany instead of keeping him in Russia. The latter in particular would require the monumental stupids to have afflicted someone, and if there's one thing Putin isn't it's monumentally stupid. There's nothing literally impossible about it though, which is better than some CW scenarios from the past few years.

Republicans won't do anything about Trump while there's a threat of a Trump Party forming, as it would cannabalise their support. Which is probably why there's talk of a Trump Party, most effective way to shore up support/ protection for Trump. On the broader question, there was never any chance for conviction in the Senate when only 10 Repubs voted for impeachment in the House. They may get a few more Senate votes than the 2 you'd expect proportionally going from 400+ to 100, but Trump not being in office and having had his term expire rather than resigning to avoid impeachment makes for a very easy out.

Embracer (Nordic THQ) has gone on a minor spree and bought Aspyr and Gearbox. The headline amount for Gearbox is more than a billion, but practically it's ~300 million in cash and shares, the rest is performance bonuses.

It went well beyond that. End of the day the Russians approving it early had zero effect on anyone else, much as the Brits approving their vaccine despite its statistical oddities- and ignoring its approved dose schedule- had no effect on anyone else. But no, such criticism was of critical importance to everyone else as was implying they'd stolen their own vaccine somehow and been faking the stats so they could... uh, be found out instantly when other peoples' experience deviated? They'd pretty much have had to deliberately break the vaccine for it not to work. There's a pretty obvious pattern of western vaccines getting a pass for their issues, which was not extended to those from Russia and China. Fact is that Sputnik has far and away the best balance of effectiveness and cost of available vaccines*, and was always likely to have that best balance. Those are the two absolute critical factors for anywhere that isn't US/ Canada/ western Europe/ Gulf/ Australia. The media and political response illustrates again exactly how far up their own arse the average western liberal is: they should have been applauding rather than barracking if they really cared about anyone outside their own high income bubble. As I said earlier, the mRNA vaccines may be wonders of modern technology, but you aren't going to get India paying USD40/ person for two doses, let alone distribute it at -70C; and the Astra Zeneca proven effectiveness is 'only' 62%, far less than Sputnik, though that's likely to be an underestimate due to their broken trial. *The only contender for that title is likely to be the J&J one, since it's a single dose which is a big advantage, but it's still in trials.

The serious answer is that they repurposed a MERS vaccine that they'd already developed, since the virus that causes it and covid are closely related. It's also why the concerns about it were far closer to the FUD side of things than the genuine worry one- it was based on proven, safe, technology. Nobody has done any serious industrial espionage on the matter as it's pretty pointless. The critical factor is the RNA sequence of the virus, all the approved or near approved vaccines were in a finished or near finished stage literally a few weeks after that sequence was released. It's the approval and production phases that take all the time, and that can't be stolen.

The scarcely concealed vaccine jingoism on show has been one of the less edifying aspects of the coronavirus response. 'Funny' thing being that leaders who really ought to know better have been indulging in such stupidities to cover their own shortcomings and for narrow political/ economic reasons. Ironically, given how he was spun, progressive dream banker wunderkind Macron has been barely better than Donald Trump, and when it comes to vaccine rollout considerably worse. France has low trust in vaccines, and slagging off Astra Zeneca pointlessly because it's a brit company, Boris was a big meanie and the UK left his pet project is completely counter productive. The EU also tries to have it both ways by ordering a massive number of 'best effort to supply' vaccines rather than a smaller number of guaranteed ones because they were late to the party and the big number sounded better- but, oddly enough, those with guaranteed contracts get theirs first because that's what guaranteed means. They also turned down an offer for additional vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer, as being too expensive, and stalled on licensing vaccines for production because they hoped domestic companies (eg Sanofi) would make their own. End result, the two top vaccinated countries in Europe aren't in the EU and, to quote the great philosopher Buzzfeed News, one of the two will shock you. The two most vaccinated countries in Europe are... the UK, and Serbia which doesn't even have domestic production facilities. When it comes to coronavirus response pretty much every single euroskeptic talking point about paralysing bureaucracy and out of touch Brussels/ Strasburg elites in the EU has been proven correct.

Google Stadia has shut down its internal game development studio. Not exactly a surprising development.

Yep, at this point definite coup. Dressed up a bit as being legitimate by the military man VP taking over as President and authorising it, but that's a very obvious fig leaf.

Snowden was in Hong Kong when his stuff was released, and the US stopped his passport- almost certainly as a calculated move- while he was transiting Moscow; that and him being allowed to stay in Russia are about the sum total of the 'evidence' he had any collusion at all with any international parties. Depending on who it was it was opinion stated as fact, or deliberate slander.

Aung San Suu Kyi has been arrested by the Myanmar military. Not clear yet whether it's an out and out coup or not. I remember this scene from Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Cut out the stupid and use allied Chechens (Kadyrov sr) against enemy Chechens was about the sum total of the 2nd Chechen War. Nothing quite like an internecine struggle for unpleasantness though, and Kadyrov wasn't shy about taking revenge on his enemies. Can't argue with the effectiveness, there are a few rebels hanging around in Georgia but not much else, and virtually the entire Chechen rebel leadership is dead.

US strategy in Syria was pretty consistent at least from 2015 onwards. Prior to that it was messy to say the least, with Pentagon and CIA backed groups literally fighting each other at times, and a bunch of CIA backed groups joining ISIS. But from 2015 when the CIA was permanently sidelined apparent inconsistency was mostly because the publicly stated strategy and actual strategy were different. There's no doubt the US could have beaten ISIS far far quicker had they wanted to, but politically backing Iran backed shia militia and anarchist Kurds was too hard. The stated aim was to destroy ISIS, their actual aim was to contain it, and funnel it towards government held areas. With a funnel strategy either ISIS would end up in Damascus, making a proper intervention both inevitable and publicly acceptable or the government and ISIS would dissipate each others strength against each other, allowing US backed forces to pick up the pieces. That was predicated on Turkish sensibilities towards the PYD and assurances that the Turkish backed rebels would be an effective anti ISIS force- which they weren't- and Erdogan being Erdogan he managed to alienate the US pretty effectively so making the Kurds politically palatable. Since it was then a choice between the Kurds or Assad it was easy for the US to choose. There were plenty of inconsistencies in the Russian approach too. Both the US and Russia claimed to be going after ISIS financing hard, but neither struck at the their extraordinarily obvious main revenue source- oil- significantly, until, the Turks shot down the Russian Su24. Then the Russians obliterated ISIS' tanker fleet in roughly two days. Why? Despite the statements both sides knew that Erdogan's son was facilitating the oil trade with ISIS, was getting a lot of money from it, and didn't want to rock that boat. Once Russia wanted a way to retaliate at Erdogan though his son's side earner was fair game. It helps that the Russians treat the Syrian deployment as training too, they're not worried about dropping lots of ordnance and doing lots of flight hours because they'd just be dropping the bombs and doing the flight time on ranges inside Russia if they weren't there and it comes out of the existing training budget.

He's not wrong, it's just hilarious watching rich people get upset when the tables are turned on them. Especially when they've been getting massive welfare almost uninterrupted since 2008 in the form of quantitative easing, bailouts and interest free loans which has seen their net worth soar while everyone else's has at best stagnated. "Won't someone spare a thought for the unfortunate billionaires of the world?" is not exactly a rallying cry for the ages, and the thought most people would spare is not exactly a sympathetic one.

Certainly doesn't require it, but the best strategy for maximising returns is to (artificially) inflate the price, then short it at the start of the dump phase. A coordinated sequence of bad news is a good way to make sure that happens.