Zoraptor

Does he really need to? If you apply Leviticus or some of Saul's reactionary rubbish then homosexuality is an abomination and gays are going to hell. You could certainly label that as hate speech and ban the Bible, but then you're suppressing people's Religious beliefs instead and a large number of Christians effectively think Saul was a reactionary homophobic knobhead so you'd be lumping them all in together. And talking of what's good for the goose is good for the gander: "You dont have any right to discriminate against LGBT to the point where countries like Saudi Arabia made it illegal to be LGBT and members of these communities were murdered and arrested on the streets in Riyadh because of their sexual orientation", eh Bruce. [could also consider that if applied evenly and consistently if you banned the Bible for being anti LGBT you'd also be banning the Torah and Koran too, and thus be both an islamophobe and anti semite, so you'd have to then ban yourself for hate speech]

Companies can censor whatever they like. What they can't then turn around and do- without looking like massive hypocrites at very least- is claim that other entities censoring them is an awful crime against freeze peach and liberty. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. That's why Twitter got laughed at when complaining about getting banned in Uganda a few days ago as a crime against 'basic human rights'; (1) if you want to apply Jack Dorsey's standards don't be surprised if Uganda applies Museveni's standard's right back and (2) bans become matters of basic human rights, when you're the one getting the ban. It's ultimately completely self defeating to selectively apply free speech criteria based on an approved political slant as a social media outlet; if you have free speech applied impartially you can rightly complain about others censoring you, if on the other hand you're partial and selective in applying those measures you can hardly complain when someone does the same back- and be absolutely sure that it will be thrown back in your face by those you disagree with politically and who have the power to retaliate.

Don't be silly. Obviously the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine will turn you Republican as they contain RNA- 'Republican, North America'; it's in the name sheeple. OTOH the AZOxford and Sputnik vaccines contain DNA- that's why Soros/ Gates chose adenovirus, it's a DNA virus- and will make you vote Democrat.

I can see why some developers would want to use her. They can then use all the established characters of the series that a lot of people have grown attached to, have continuity with the previous games, plus it will be [future year] and it's CDPR so you know a set male protagonist is going to get extensive negative press; and under the canon there aren't female witchers until Ciri. Ciri as Witcher ending was pretty clear sequel bait too. Gameplay wise while in theory she should be ludicrously overpowered to take on nekkers or drowners you can just ignore that and give her whatever powers you want including more outright 'magic' than witcher signs, all with a lot more flexibility than a standard Witcher. Not really sure how much she was liked by most players, her gameplay sections are the most extensively criticised part of Witcher 3 by some way so far as I can tell and Geralt's tardiness in finding her the longest running joke except for Gwent obsession. The former is a bit of a running theme, considering how badly received the bits of Witcher 2 were where you played Roche/ Iorveth or that Kaedweni general. And I'd have to say, when it comes to characters being inexplicably liked I'd have to go with Yennefer; not sure how people think obsessive psychopathy make for likeability.

Just go with the theory that Moses ~ Akhenaten. Then we could have Trump be rediscovered 3000 years later, have a famous bust of Melania in a Berlin Museum, and extensive excavations of his palace at Amarna el Lago.

Liverpool would instantly become the most educated city in the UK if they did that.

Really didn't need to specify that that headline came from The Scum, you can spot their headlines a mile off. Colonial Anarchist SLAMS Headline Writing of Brave Spirit of Dunkirk Sun Reporter in Vile Online Rant!

Presumably vetting is extremely routine for Secret Service types, and it certainly ought to be done as a matter of course if outsiders have to be brought in for special occasions. I know there's probably a legal reason for it but National Guard fundamentally seems like a weird choice for extra security, from the outside.

After the Zumwalts anything would be an improvement, including the original Constellation. Got to say, reduced rcs warships are without exception really, really, ugly. Not exactly a massive practical consideration, of course...

Probably 90% of the stuff in that article had already been revealed. They'll be working pre development on WitcherTNG already much as C2077 had a lot of pre dev work done on it before entering full development in 2016... ...to be fair to Schreier though, while things like C2077 only entering full development in 2016 isn't a revelation, that fact was hidden away on an obscure site called, I think, 'wikipedia' (sp?) since like 2017, so it isn't surprising he thought it was news. He's also incorrect on a couple of matters of fact, eg since Raithe quoted it: there are car ambushes, just not many. End of the day almost every single thing written was either known previous andor is (in many cases sadly) standard industry practice. It's only news because it's CDPR doing it, in particular, the complaints about crunch could be leveled at a lot more developers including some that are journalistic darlings. Nope. They may well have not even made a final decision yet. (The rumours were that Ciri, younger 'Vesemir' or near-conjunction create-your-own were being considered. Ciri is a bad idea for various reasons such as requiring 'artificial' depowering but would allow use of popular known characters, 'Vesemir' would be a compromise using a known character somewhat connected to the prior games but set earlier with more flexibility than Ciri, and the last option has far and away the most flexibility but little to no connection to the previous games. Very outside chance: proper TV/ book series tie in)

It's weekly here too- and delayed, which is kind of weird considering how comparatively little TV they have to show with covid delaying so much stuff. Schedule is determined by whoever bought the show locally.

The weird laptop thing was a bit later, the gist is that Hunter Biden was stupid or greedy enough to take a position on the Board of a Ukrainian gas company (Burisma) which he had no qualifications to hold except for his father being VP. The prosecutor in charge of corruption investigations then got fired. Allegation is that Biden (sr) got that prosecutor fired to protect his son. There really isn't any evidence to support that, the prosecutor almost certainly got fired for being generally useless with the timing being coincidental. Hunter Biden taking that position was a really bad look though, with the absolutely best possible face put on it he was incredibly- unbelievably- naive. Then again, Trumpists can hardly throw about accusations of filial graft without appearing mildly hypocritical. Russiagate is the belief that 'Russia stole the election for Trump' was a big hoax embiggened by media as a way to deligitimise Trump. Effectively it's the reverse position from "Russia stole the election, Hillary would have won in a landslide without their interference". Neither position is exactly rooted in reality, just in political tribalism. Dunno about AOC, but I thought it was hilarious that her (analogue's) power in 'The Boys' was to cause people's heads to blow up, since that's her metaphorical power here as well.

We have a specific name for that sort of statement here, the 'Smashed Avocado fallacy': "if people just stopped buying smashed avocados for breakfast they'd soon save enough to buy a house" was a near literal quote from someone defending the housing crisis. ie, despite house price appreciation at twice the median wage annually, the problem is people buying luxuries- so if people just stopped paying a mythical $20 a day for a café breakfast they'd be able to afford their own slice of paradise. Complete fiction of course, that saving wouldn't even cover appreciation on the deposit, and would be, heh, eaten up as annual rent increases outstrip it too. It doesn't stand the most basic scrutiny, and is just victim blaming. To put it in perspective, my parents worked 40 years and the thing that made them 'millionaires' was not that work, but buying a house for $16000 in 1980 instead of renting. They got 40,000$ average return per year, untaxed, every year, from that decision. Not really something someone can do in 2021 though.

Go home forum software, you're drunk.

If there's an enormous crash the shareholders lose their value anyway. The idea would be to skip the step where everything goes bust seen in the Great Depression and go straight to the governmental programs that got countries out of that rut. Also, with a more balanced model you can do things like have national superannuation programs that don't rely on sharemarket speculation for their funding. That's pretty important because- much like housing speculation here- you're in a situation where continual unsustainable sharemarket appreciation is so fundamentally underpinning the economy that anything other than that growth is a massive problem, leading to even more artificial props holding it up. With that appreciation benefiting one very small group of people massively, a somewhat larger group somewhat, but for the majority it's of no benefit, at very best. For many it's a big net loss, like everyone here who ends up seeing houses appreciate 20%, rents appreciate 20%, and their wages so ability to get on the property ladder and pay their rents in the meantime appreciate... 2%. So the median person on ~70k is watching house prices rise by 2x their entire annual wage before tax, with the people doing the buying paying... 1% interest. And then, the government steps in to subsidise rents, giving the people buying the houses not just 20% government mediated capital appreciation, but 20% subsidised rent appreciation too, paid for by the guy making 70k a year. And, of course, those rent payments and the increased equity are then reinvested into... more housing subsidised housing purchases. Oddly enough, there are... not many (2) MPs who don't own property and thus don't benefit personally from the money merry go round. Same in the US, just different sectors and numbers. And there, I managed to work corruption in New Zealand in somewhat relevantly to a topic. Nationalisation is not an idea I agree with in most cases but it is also not without merit. The 2008 bail outs, after all, were effectively government(s) giving vast amounts of money to corporations to prop them up. In some cases getting equity in return, but in most it was the taxpayer propping them up with no direct return at all. Same with the current crop of covid related bail outs and programs. Those programs all benefited the shareholder class with massive disproportion, which is one of the reasons there's a lot of support for making nation wide pay outs this time. And there has been very little to no actual movement on the problem of 'too big to fail', except more and more entities joining that list and getting the benefits of privatised profits and nationalised liabilities.

Oh, it is. New Zealand has almost limitless capacity to decide that something that is corruption elsewhere isn't corruption, here, because we simply don't have corruption. That, and international reputation based on that self delusion is why we so consistently end up #1.

'Uncontrollable' might be slightly hyperbolic, but I was pressed for time. It's also, frankly, a bit off topic. What I get the shall we say barely controllable urge to do is point out that the concept of a perception index is deeply flawed, since what it's really measuring is (1) the amount to which a surveyed population deludes itself, and (2) what the international stereotype of that country is; not just how much corruption there actually is.

Every time I see this cited I get an uncontrollable urge to reply with obama_awards_obama.jpg

Biden's also (re)appointing a bunch of guys who quit over Turkey attacking the Kurds in Syria like Brett McGurk, and appeasers like Jim Jeffrey are gone or going. Wouldn't expect anything significant to change in practice though in terms of US-Turkey itself, just for Turkey to be less aggressive in general and there to be less events that run counter to US geopolitical goals sponsored by Turkey. Well, until Erdogan needs a distraction from an imploding economy or a popularity boost before an election.

It's not a totally stupid misconception. Good quality masks (N95/ FFP2) do protect the wearer, they're just not what the public is wearing. But back when everyone was talking about PPE being in short supply it would have been very easy to pick up the belief that all face masks were intended to protect the wearer, and the press in general has often been... casual when it comes to being accurate about details and differences.

Availability update: as of yesterday we have 19 (!) different models of RX6000 card in stock here, including reference 6900XT at MSRP + $35. Going by the continuing comments in the US and Europe we must be getting half the global supply of CPUs/ GPUs sent here for some reason.

It does come from a well regarded video reviewer though. Trouble with any news about 3080Ti is that none of it is verified including its practical existence, it's all leaks one way or the other.

We have had very few cases which makes finding a link relatively easy, and for a couple the only link to an infected person was a bus trip both took (example case, press report). IIRC in that case they weren't even on the bus at the same time, but about ten minutes apart which is why it took more time to find.

HoonDing == oby. Though oby would have somehow contrived to find an AK variant with a stars&stripe paintjob.

Despite having very few cases overall we've had a few here where the only link is public transport (buses specifically). Far more from other causes like being family members or workmates, but those are also a lot easier to contain. China's vaccine is fine, at least for efficiency. The Brazil study is being- probably deliberately- misinterpreted, often by those who should know better*. The issue is similar to one there was a brief discussion about a few pages ago about what the efficacy of a vaccine means, practically, and the difference between SARS-CoV2 and Covid19. Most vaccines aren't of the smallpox type eradication sort. Despite everyone talking about 'immunity' as a shorthand that's not what they're talking about when it comes to how well the vaccine works. In part because that isn't really how the human immune system works. The- pretty much fake news- headlines about China's vaccine having a ~50% effectiveness are an example. It's 50% effective, if you include asymptomatic and very mild infections. Sounds kind of bad, however, it's 100% effective against severe covid19. You can still be infected by SARS-CoV2 post vaccination, but you won't get severe covid19 from it, and your chances of getting covid19 at all are reduced ~80%. It's reduced the chances of getting infected, and the effects of the infection. To illustrate the point, the highly effective Pfizer vaccine's efficacy drops precipitously if you do the analysis the same way that was done to the sinapharm one, ie include everyone reporting mild symptoms and those with positive PCR but no symptoms. Indeed, it actually has a worse efficiency than sinapharm in that case. It's irrelevant in both cases, because an infection that causes minimal harm might as well not exist. 'Covid19' defines a set of symptoms caused by the SC2 virus, severe enough to kill. If you don't/ didn't have the symptoms you don't have the disease, what you have is another coronavirus contributing to the mix of various viruses that causes the 'common cold'. *I made fun previous of the BBC for their utterly partisan coverage of Sputnik vs AZOxford compared to how the results turned out and they're now repeating the 50% effective claim acritically as well. Useless coverage is part of the reason we end up with antivaxxers, and by and large the coverage has been a masterclass in Western Exceptionalism instead- indeed, as mentioned yesterday, the Chinese vaccine being indemnified is used to build suspicion without mentioning the context that the western vaccines are indemnified in the same way too.