Zoraptor

Partly, but I suspect there's other stuff at play in the US much as there is here- mostly the reciprocal to people not wanting to work for crap wages any more, ie companies not wanting to pay more when there's a labour shortage because they think they'll have to keep paying more when things go back to 'normal' instead of going back to the old wage depressing practises. (Here we've had an endless litany of complaints from Hospitality and Agriculture about not being able to bring in indentured servants- slaves- from overseas any more due to the pandemic. A lot of the people coming in were looking for 3 year residency visas and would literally pay a finders' fee to be given a job here, they'd then be paid below minimum wage while living in a hovel and being charged exorbitant rent by their agent or emplyer, with no complaints because 3 years residency was the aim and rocking the boat would see them lose their job and their work visa rescinded. Oddly, New Zealand citizens don't seem keen on accepting the same sort of restrictions. Mathematically, the cost of doubling wages for, say, apple picking would add a monumental 3c per apple to the cost, or about 20c/kg- and we had orchardists complaining about literal tons of fruit going to waste because they couldn't get staff to work at $20/hour 12 hours a day all weather for 6 weeks straight then out on your ear no benefits, all out in the boonies. You can bet they'd get a lot more takers if they were paying $40/hour, they'd probably be swamped with applicants even with it being short term. Absolutely hilarious watching the people who'd been spouting laissez faire rhetoric about paying the market rate and 'living wages' etc being communism a couple of years ago suddenly wanting government intervention when the same laissez faire market rates means they have to pay people more)

If Leonardo had no children then he can't have had actual descendants since you need children for that; and he is one of the more credible historical people to be labeled as homosexual*. OTOH, Temujin was notoriously heterosexual and had rather a lot of descendant; but then something like 99% of ethnic English people can trace their lineage back to at least one royal/ noble house because you double (meh, up to) the number of antecedents with every generation. *my personal favourites are Fredrick the Great and Richard the Lionheart, mostly because the kind of people who typically idolise them hate the thought they might have been gay.

Only if they're miners and the mine is part owned by Cyril Ramaphosa.

England scored early, so Italy had to make most of the play. Bit of Mourinho style turtling going on, followed by a late stage Mourinho style failure to turtle effectively enough. Not a great day overall for England, lost the football and they still have to put up with Richard Branson.

The Jorginho one was really blatant though- you could just about literally see him thinking "better make it look like I'm injured too" on the replay when he realised how bad his tackle was, in the hope of only getting a yellow. Then again, given what happened against Denmark any complaints about simulation adjacent acts from the English would ring a little hollow.

Funny thing is that'd pretty likely be a red card, in rugby. (I really wish they'd card people for faking injury after doing a bad foul too. Yellow card for the foul, yellow card for the fake injury. Oh well, even while I'm technically English them losing is great for the memes and means I can make interminable jokes about losing by boundary countback to all my relatives who were all 'rules are rules' over a certain Cricket result)

Man oh man do some English fans make me want their team to continue losing so very very badly.

Bronies and strip teases versus 24 28 trillion debt and millions dead in utterly pointless wars from the responsible side with their sensible establishment backers. Not an overly difficult choice to make.

I'd be a bit suspicious of New Zealanders' ability to be objective about ourselves, and being defensive of our reputation. It's an interesting report, but it is very much New Zealanders' attitudes to perceived misinformation rather than being an objective summary of actual misinformation. The root problem when saying how much misinformation there is here or anywhere really is that you can't really define 'misinformation' very precisely or objectively. There's a lot of spin and information massaging that may or may not be misinformation as well as stuff that's outright and definitely false, and you'll always get people who stubbornly stick to believing things that are false or who cannot bring themselves to believe they fell for misinformation- and they will do surveys every bit as much as anyone else. If you surveyed people about misinformation about, say, Gulf War 2 the results would be massively different depending on when you did it, and where. Most Americans in, say, February 2003 would think that the misinformation was coming from those who didn't want a war and that Saddam had WMDs, could fire them at London in 45 minutes, and supported Al Qaeda- and the reverse would be true in, say, France. Do the survey now and American attitudes would be a lot closer to those of France- but you'll still get people who insist there was no misinformation, because everything that was false was just a massive series of completely honest mistakes rather than a deliberate and organised attempt to deceive.

Same thing's happened here, and there have also been some very suspicious burglaries. We also had a Chinese MP who lied on his immigration papers and had been working in a espionage school in China teaching english to spies and who somehow managed to survive an electoral cycle despite that let alone have citizenship revoked. He and his Labour Party equivalent were coincidentally forced to resign last election. Though Labour has a replacement who is every bit as sketchy on the face of it, having been leader of one of those notorious on campus groups.

I don't think they miss it, or forget it. I'd say that almost all academics are/ were open to the possibility that aliens exist and even visit, but dismiss(ed) most of the evidence because it had literally no ability to be independently verified- and is thus useless as evidence. That's different to dismissing the possibility of aliens visiting completely. The more definitive 'no' position tends to come about if asked repeatedly about unverifiable evidence and theories, because any equivocation tends to encourage yet more questions and yet more shonky evidence being produced. It might be lazy, but in that situation it's understandable to take an absolutist position. For an example, it's certainly possible that aliens built the pyramids. It's also quite understandable that saying they did to Zawi Hawass does not get a very constructive or nuanced reply.

Be waiting a long time for them to make Radeon cards though, after what happened with XFX. Looks like there may be a 12nm GloFo Zen3/ RDNA2 APU produced. That would certainly be a good fit for low cost Athlon desktop/ cheap laptop and embedded solution. It also makes a cheap RDNA2 based Polaris replacement more likely, though there are still potential problems there the 5500 was just plain too expensive for its performance and 7nm prices have only risen for the unreleased '6500'.

That is, essentially, the Scientific Method applied to the problem though. If someone wants to prove that you can do 'impossible' 5000g acceleration with a 'man' made object then they do have to prove it, and in a testable way. Ancient Aliens style "you can't conclusively prove some grainy unverified footage wasn't aliens (with 5000g acceleration), ergo it was aliens (with 5000g acceleration)" doesn't really cut the mustard, and it's also a really antagonistic style of argument that begs for a highly negative and dismissive response. That's changed a bit with the new evidence, but you can only go on what there is available at the time. The question about the existence of aliens is slightly different, of course, in that we know that life has evolved at least once, and to a level that is capable of extremely slow and limited interstellar travel. Given the number of stars in the galaxy let alone the universe the idea that we are unique in that respect shows... extraordinary hubris, and isn't a position any scientist should be taking. The question as to why they'd bother visiting us especially in such a way as suggested is very much an open one though.

If we're talking about misinformation this report (pdf) may be of interest to some. It's the NZ Classification Office's report into misinformation and attitudes to it in New Zealand. Wouldn't bother reading the text, just have a look at the figures. And remember that, as always with this sort of thing, the questions are a bit... granular in some cases.

Can't wait for that abject hack Jose Chung to be forced to apologise. I always thought "From Outer Space" was a tissue of lies.

Wow, and I stopped paying attention at 3-1 with ~ten minutes to go.

Well yeah, hypersonic is certainly a bit of a buzz word currently. I don't think anyone would be that surprised about air to air hypersonic missiles being relatively old, since they potentially have to chase down supersonic targets rather than (relatively speaking) stationary ships or land targets. And of course rockets have been hypersonic since the V2. But, in this case there is a bit of a scale difference between the Khinzal and Phoenix in just about every respect, and not just due to the differing roles.

They also sent MiG 31s specifically armed with hypersonic anti ship missiles and Tu 22s to Syria as an announced 'training' deployment- coincidentally, within a day of the Defender's transit, and while the RN's new aircraft carrier is in the eastern Med. (The Tupolev's are definitely there to test the new runway extension at Hmeimem airbase, previously it was too short for them)

Washing your hands is fine, so long as you use soap and wash for 30s or more.

The main places that will be really concerned about it are places without endemic covid, like here. 'Reopening to the world' has largely been sold here on the basis of 95% effectiveness of the vaccine giving herd immunity, if it's 80% against a significantly more spreadable viral variant that 80% may not actually be enough for herd immunity.

Compare it with the flu vaccine, that's only ~40% effective at stopping infection, but it also reduces the incidence of severe infection even in the 60% that gets through, and that's enough to be worthwhile. You're still ~8x less likely to get covid when vaccinated than not going by the Israeli figures, and that isn't even taking lowered severity into account.

Can't see a MS account as being a massive issue by itself (though see below), the big issue would be a constant internet being required (which isn't). Then again, I already have a MS account so it literally isn't an issue for me, so easy to say that. The supported processor list actually starts at Intel 8000 series/ Zen+, not a 1 Ghz dual core listed due to the TPM requirement. Sure, there are workarounds, but the average user isn't going to muck about with their BIOS to enable an obscure option as they've never done anything in BIOS before and have no idea what those arcanely named options mean. They don't actually need TPM to be a requirement, unless they don't want to sell windows in Russia or China any more (since it's backdoored extensively by the NSA) and don't want adoption by corporates. Maybe another run at getting Secure Boot implemented, especially with the account requirement as well?

Something like 99.5% of those incidents don't involve actually going into territorial waters/ airspace, just through completely arbitrary self declared Air Defence Identification Zones and the like that have no basis in international law. Actual intrusions are very rare and mainly happen in a few areas such as the Kurils/ South China Sea (competing claims) or around the Baltic where Finnish/ Estonian/ Russian airspace is a mess. This was definitely more dangerous than the average because it was a deliberate intrusion into claimed Russian waters with a warship. Which is an aggressive act which could result in the ship justifiably being sunk, at least so far as Russia was concerned. Practically of course that risk was still pretty much non existent; and they'd picked a relatively 'safe' ship to send since the Defender is pretty aptly named since it has next to no offensive capability at all. It was not a very well judged exercise otherwise though, especially with having the press along, precisely because while it was still unlikely that anything really significant would happen it should have been blindingly obvious that there would be a response, and that the press would report on it in an uncontrollable way. Not a great look having the MoD have to wave their hands and shout about there being nothing to see here like they were auditioning for a Naked Gun remake when they had the BBC and Daily Fail correspondents both talking about warning shots, near collisions and being buzzed by 20 planes while on the cusp of World War 3 breaking out. It was still all posturing, they just didn't expect quite the buy in to the Russian posturing from their own journalists.

The last Argentine exocet also went to the wrong spot, due to a good bit of British disinformation, so it was never even in a position to be used. The latter ships sunk were all done by dumb bombs (all iirc from ancient, even then, A4 Skyhawks). Probably would have been fewer ships sunk if the BBC hadn't mentioned that the bombs' fusing was wonky, so the Argentines fixed it. You'd have thought the Royal Navy might have learnt from that not to have BBC journos on board in case they said something they didn't like but it seems not, given recent events in the Black Sea.

The ultimate irony would be if it turned out that the source for sarscov2 was European Horseshoe Bats and not Chinese ones, and some random Italian ended up bringing the infection to China instead of the reverse.