213374U

Okay, I'm actually curious now. You see, I'm inclined not to assume malice when ignorance is to blame. In your case, your ignorance is clearly showing, such as when you mentioned "almost one million deaths" if the virus infected 100% of the population -- an impossibility if you know even the basics. So I'm guessing you simply didn't realize that me mentioning the Fulda Gap was a synecdoche for the dangers and challenges of the Cold War at large. This would explain your confusion and the fact that your wife lol'd. Because, again, the alternative is that you do know that but are simply being an obnoxious prat, your diplomat wife honestly believes that 'rona is worse than nuclear war, and her medical professional sister in law or whatever really thinks that 'rona would ever infect 100% of the population. I suppose that may actually be possible but it's a much stupider world than I'd like to believe.

Heh. Stick to the memes, you are clearly out of your depth.

So climate change is not a challenge we face now, no -- despite the fact that we're hearing about its dangers since the 1970's, and we've been failing to enact sufficient reforms to prevent it for decades. It'll be a challenge... later, after this one is over, right? Because Merkel said this one is the greatest, so logically we cannot have a bigger one concurrently. We're reasoning backwards from this conclusion we need to reach, so this is how we're contorting logic so as not to raise an eyebrow at Merkel's hyperbolic nonsense. The challenge was dodging the bullet that would have been the Cold War going hot, and without rolling over for the Soviets. The espionage, the arms and space races, the propaganda efforts and hysteria, the soft and hard power applications on a global scale by the two blocs. That it all went over your head (and Merkel's, apparently) is immaterial. Pretty sure that the hundreds of thousands who died in Cold War conflicts would disagree with your assessment that COVID is anywhere near the same league as that. It's through a combination of skillful politics and blind luck that Europe didn't directly see (much of) that. But it didn't happen in your backyard, so not only it wasn't a problem, it couldn't have been one! Sounds to me like that's a problem with the system itself rather than 'rona. It's coming apart at the seams, and we're in agreement on this. But Merkel wasn't referring to that -- she was specifically talking about 'rona, even if she made oblique references to the fragility of the EU. Forest/trees and all that. So where are the deep reforms that are needed to prevent the whole thing from crumbling when the next crisis hits? Presumably, they'll have to wait until this biggest challenge yet is over, much like the whole climate change thing. GOTO 10. If a 1% mortality rate disease represents a systemic risk, the crash is coming sooner rather than later, because when something really bad like an antibiotic-resistant bacteria comes knocking, this will look like a walk in the park. But going by the logic we're operating under, this hasn't happened so it can't happen so no sense worrying about it. Yeah. You can stop, um, clutching your pearls now. The infection rate wouldn't get to 100% in any case, and fatality rates tend to decrease as the disease spreads. Not that this is important because discussing how many casualties are "acceptable" is a minefield and not the point. The comment about elderly and vulnerable is about protecting those most at risk, which is easier to do if they are identifiable groups instead of indiscriminate blanket measures that, by your own admission, haven't been very successful at containing the spread while simultaneously causing unprecedented economic damage. So spare me your moral superiority. "Flattening the curve" was never about preventing every grandma from keeling over, it was about minimizing the risk of excess deaths from all causes due to a healthcare collapse, callous as it may sound. And yes, I live with people who are at risk, but the risk to them is going to be multiplied if the social protection network and the economy at large fails. That's the outlook. You've made it abundantly clear that prospects are of no concern to you until they materialize to hit you in the face, but it is what it is. Psychic much? Merkel said in June that more cooperation and solidarity was needed -- while simultaneously refusing to accept 'rona bonds. Deeds speak louder than words. After the economic damage of just nine months of intermittent lockdowns and restrictions became evident, a deal was reached in December to issue joint EU debt. So perhaps put that mind-reading skill to use instead of doing geopolitical analysis. You couldn't do much worse.

So 375k deaths over the course of a year in a region with 440M+ inhabitants, and that's the greatest challenge since WWII. Because the prospect of a few thousand Soviet tanks rolling up the Fulda Gap and nuclear war was a Sunday picnic. And let's not talk about the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change either, which threatens to be a cause for as many deaths as all infectious diseases combined by 2100... from heat alone. Nothing compared to a respiratory disease that has a ~1% mortality rate and which threatens overwhelmingly the elderly and vulnerable, apparently. And now you're coming here to double down on that, when not even Merkel has. After all, if something hasn't happened, it clearly couldn't happen, and it's not going to happen, right?

Hm. Worked fine when I tried it -- I used ctrl+a to select everything from the reply window, though. Is that what you did or did you select with the cursor? Is this on mobile? I imagine it would be harder there where you don't have access to keyboard shortcuts. One of the Globals could split off the conversation to the proper thread if the derailment is a problem.

Perhaps difficulty isn't fun, but learning can be. The process of getting better can be. Of course if you are along just for the narrative and don't care about the nuts and bolts then any difficulty is going to be a bother -- and that is fine. But some people lean more toward the pure "game" side of computer games than the visual novel side and to them a game that requires little learning to progress can feel unengaging. And then there's the epeen measuring and achievement hunting aspects. I'm not drawn to that myself, but different strokes and all that. Not sure why you're having difficulties (heh) with the quote function. Could you give some feedback that could be passed along to admin? Are you on desktop or mobile?

If you quit at the time, or shortly after, Temple of Sacrifice and Ravagers were released, they have made two new raids since: Valley of the Machine Gods and Nature of Progress. The former took them over a year and a half to fully release (because they thought it would be a good idea to drop it in an 'episodic' manner) and the latter re-uses a lot of assets that were already in the game. Don't get me wrong, both are really good gameplay wise and only a tiny fraction of the raiding community have cleared them in NiM. But the game still suffers from chronic underinvestment which results in a laughable content release rate compared to other MMOs.

I was under the impression that, from the way the Pfizer trial was designed, immunity isn't guaranteed (not what was tested). The 95% figure described the decreased chance of presenting symptoms -- i.e. "protection" as per their own wording rather than proper immunity that would effectively prevent infection and transmission. As far as I know, you cannot be a smallpox carrier if you've taken the shot.

So the takeaway is... Wasteland 3 is utterly forgettable, seeing how y'all are forgetting about it? I was hoping to pick it up to play through in co-op. But apparently it isn't working too well yet, even after all the patches. I'm not doing nearly as much gaming as I used to, but managed to get a few more NiM achievements in SWTOR.

It is a matter of numbers. It is exceedingly unlikely that unforeseen side effects could kill millions, even with an experimental vaccine. The latest estimate of rona IFR is 0.6-1.3%. If the required prevalence to reach herd immunity through exposure is ~70%, do the math on how many would kick the bucket. This rests on the premise that 100% of the population are susceptible to rona -- there are reasons to believe that's not the case, but assuming that a certain fraction of the population would present some sort of previous resistance and making decisions based on that is risky. We may learn in time that it was not the "best strategy" full stop. But there seems to be a broad consensus among scientists that it's the best strategy now based on our limited understanding of what's going on. And we can't very well afford to keep restrictions up, literally. I'd have to agree though, WHO amending definitions of scientific concepts to fit a narrative is dumb. But we live in a dumb world full of dumb people.

Yes. I know how the process works. I simply vehemently disagree with your opinion that it's "democratic" that if someone wins a national vote they automatically get representation and nomination powers at the Union level, with no recourse, as a substitute for an electoral mechanism of appointment. The way representative democracies work in general is that the person in charge of cabinet appointments has to be elected themselves -- the appointment freedom is a prerogative of the chairman. I am already not a fan of "representative" democracies such as our own where this step is already omitted and the president is proposed and voted by MPs rather than by electoral vote. But the EU takes it a step further where the chairman of the Commission is chosen by backroom dealing between heads of government who may or may not have been directly elected themselves (the same is true for the president of the ECB btw). This person in turn has free reign to distribute power as they see fit among the, again unelected, Commissioners. And the only check to this is the theoretical motion of censure mechanism that requires a laughable two-thirds majority. To no one's surprise, this has never happened, and will never happen. Hell, the EP has never even failed to sign off on the EU budget, despite consistent reports of material errors and inaccuracies by the Court of Auditors. It really is a great system -from the pols perspective- because they get to propose and pass unpopular legislation at the EU level and appoint thoroughly dislikable people who will do the dirty work (re: ECB), which then they can bemoan at home as evil EU oppression so as to save face. And to add insult to injury, in a classic exercise of deflection by people who refuse to be held accountable -and echoed by yourself- the shortcomings of the system get blamed on people's "lack of engagement". But sure, it's all perfectly legit and democratic, because someone, at some point, got elected to something. Beatings will continue until morale improves and so on. I am not changing any meanings. Politicians and political scientists just keep adding qualifiers that distort and dilute the meaning of the concept. But even if I were, your whole argument is an appeal to tradition fallacy.

Heh. No, it's not democratic if just because you won a vote for something else, you automatically get appointed to a different office or position at the Union level and the only way to prevent that is abstaining from the whole process or getting some other prat indirectly elected to that instead. It's not democratic because you were appointed by someone who won a vote, either. That's really stretching what "democratic" means. But hey in this day and age, words mean whatever, so sure. Discussions never failing to devolve into semantics arguments because apparently a ****ing triangle can have any number of angles now if we consider the eleventy billion dimensions postulated by the unproven string theory that are completely irrelevant to the matter at hand anyway is why I give politics a wide berth for the most part. You do you. Yes, that's more or less how it works here too, but being a commonly accepted practice doesn't stop it from being ****. Political parties are essentially legal mafias. Let me elect my MP directly. Of course, unelected apparatchiks might object and it's harder -and more expensive- to buy off individual candidates than a handful of party bosses who get to enforce voting discipline and decide who goes on which lists. So fat chance we'll ever see that without a complete system crash. After 2020 though, there may be hope yet (for the crash).

I figure they won't even bother to change their passwords. A tweet or two perhaps is the most you can expect. Remember that time when the NSA was caught tapping Merkel's phone? That was fun.

That's a fair question. "Indirectly" elected isn't the same as just plain elected and while perhaps technically correct, the devil is in the details. Neither commissioners nor the president have to be MEPs. Parliament doesn't actually propose a candidate for the presidency, that's up to the Council, which is itself not "directly" elected either, even though Parliament has to confirm the nomination. Parliament cannot veto individual commissioners, only threaten to vote out the whole Commission. Which would be a fine check to the legislative power if there was such a thing as EU presidential elections, but there aren't. It's all backroom dealing. So yeah, all in all, I think democracy is rather diluted in the workings of the EU, an issue further compounded by the issue you brought up about the weird way national parties sometimes align with EP formations. From the point of view of this anti-EU populist, the EU tries hard to sell the idea that it is democratic while being designed to be strongly insulated from the bedlam that is the European people's voting habits, political sensibilities and mood swings.

Perhaps the article links to the research it references, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't.

Yeah, I watched Suicide Squad about a week ago too. I rolled my eyes fairly hard at the whole "outcasts and pariahs coming together as family", but the upside was definitely the acting, especially Will Smith who obviously had fun playing Deadshot. A pity that neither he nor Jared Leto are signed on for the sequel. All in all a bit of good, silly fun.

I loved Event Horizon.

Honestly I don't mind the flood of CP2077 content. But what does piss me off is developers pushing back releases for no other reason than avoiding competing for exposure with it. I have about zero interest in playtesting this buggy mess of a game, but I might have checked out MechWarrior these holidays.

That's what I thought too. In the max readiness Extended Cut ending, it was strongly hinted that Shep somehow survived anyway. Lots of rubble but no snow. I'm sure they'll "creative integrity" it away somehow.

Of course. Just throw the Oxford-Astra (90% effective), Sputnik (91%) and Pfizer (95%) vaccines in a bucket, stir a bit, and shoot up the result for a whopping 276% effectiveness!!1

pharma bro did nothing wrong

Heh. If he were funding UC Berkeley research, sure. But I figure most people would rather not have more taxpayer money funneled into pharma -- only to insulate them from, er, "unexpected" mishaps down the line. Zoraptor mentioned this above, but I think it bears repeating: Pfizer given protection from legal action by UK government Similar deals will be undoubtedly made throughout Europe because the EC signed confidential liability clauses with the usual suspects back in September. Of course, it doesn't mean the vaccine is unsafe. But it is, yet again, an example of privatizing profits while socializing (potential) losses. Let's not forget that AstraZeneca's pledge to deliver the vaccine "at cost" is actually time-limited and they reserve the right to rack up the prices in as little as six months. A pandemic's just one big opportunity for profit, ain't it?

To me that felt like a belated "**** you" to critics. It focused on the complete and utter failure that was not accepting the RGB options. You die, everyone you know also dies, and fifty thousand years down the line someone will make the right decision anyway, meaning all of those deaths were for nothing. It made it abundantly clear that the story was ultimately the writers' and not the player's. Their vaunted "creative integrity" took precedence. A position which I'd otherwise defend if the result wasn't so... lackluster. I wasn't excessively bothered by the endings, pre- or post- Extended Cut. I thought the story was inadequately developed by that point and as a consequence the ending felt abrupt and unsatisfactory. But it didn't affect my overall enjoyment of the game, let alone the trilogy. The "reject" ending though -- that felt like writers doubling down on their inability to escape the narrative corner they had painted themselves into.