Gorth

Tennis bowling!

Pretty much, yes. After all, the current CEO and Board of Directors (I.e. the president and congress) is running the ship into the ground full steam ahead and he has a long history of high profile bankruptcies behind him because he lacks business skills. A private company, yeah, sure, the shareholders and the employees suffers alright, but the CEO and board are usually free to start up a new project right away. But when the corporation is a sovereign state, who picks up the pieces?

What happens if/when a country goes bankrupt? I.e the moment they can no longer service their sovereign debt, what happens then? I remember Sri Lanka, but that one was in such a sorry state anyway that its unlikely anyone noticed and one African country being bailed out by the IMF within the last decade, but if the debt is beyond the means of any single institution, what would happen then?

Good news for those of us who likes the Frieren story. The manga just lefts its hiatus and picked up on the story where it left off (image is the end of chapter 140, chapter 141 has been released). The Foundation Arc, the Shadow Warriors planning to assassinate the head of The Continental Magic Association ("CMA") at a ball in the imperial capital. Back row from left to right is Sein, Stark and Falsch, next row is Fern, Frieren and Sense, all making up a bodyguard for the head of the group, Serie. Most powerful being known in existence (in the setting at least, if there had been such a thing as a scale, she is beyond an order of magnitude more powerful than Frieren) and also the designated target of the Shadow Warriors, an ancient clandestine imperial special forces unit specialized in fighting mages. Not on this image are the last two two people the CMA brought along, featuring at the end of chapter 141, Land and Ubel. The latter looking like the proverbial nuke ready to go off (Ubel is probably more dangerous than a nuke because a nuke follows the laws of physics and logic).

I watched Dandadan episode 4... Thought long and hard about how to summarize events in the episode in a meaningful way. In the end I was just giggling like a maniac going "screw this", it's just not possible Something about volcanoes, giant earthworms, crime families, martial arts priests who dreams of becoming social media stars, aliens, romance, the fastest known mannequin joining the fight, granny Seiko dishing out the hurt with a baseball bat... you name it.

Not so much a new scientific discovery as a particular new trend in use of existing technology, AI for movie generation at budgets that doesn't require Hollywood studio funding. I.e. "normal" people can do it too if interested enough to learn a bit about it. I myself dabbled a bit with AI pictures (Stable Diffusion and Flux). Looking into what is currently available in the genre of converting images into short video sequences. These people have spent a bit more time on it and create some hilarious videos. Same channel have videos like The Most German man, The Most Reddit Man etc. in the world, etc.

Hey, I'm sure the Russians said the same thing when the Germans deported Lenin and put him on a train to Russia

Dandadan episode 3... as wacky as ever. Momo and Okarun is stranded in a subterranean cave together with a century's worth of buildings. Looks very much like a giant sink hole. Trapped with the giant Mongolian Deathworm trying to force them into suicide and The Evil eye, still possessing Jiji's body. Okarun manages to catapult Momo (with a helping psychic hand from Mom) up to the surface. She lights the house above the cavern up and calls the fire department. Remembering something she learnt as a kid, worms don't like wet terrain. True enough, the worm surfaces and wrecks half the neighbourhood before dying from exposure to sunlight. At the bottom, Okarun tries to save Turbo-Granny from sticky orange good, just to end up stuck himself. Along the way, the dying worm regurgitates the "family" that has spent the last few centuries sacrificing victims to it. They promptly blame Momo for what is about to happen and... the volcano next to the town starts erupting, lava running everywhere... Makes sense, right? You sort of have to see it edit: before anyone points out that i missed something, disclaimer, I probably missed at least half of what happened in the tl;dr; above

All they need then, is a sign over the entrance to the city that ways "Arbeit macht Frei"

From our Finnish fellow Nordics...

I had so much to say about the subject and all of it in incredibly bad taste, so I might save it for 5 years and then revisit the thread (out of respect for those who died)

Yeah, but now the conversation looks odd after the ai bot is gone

A Scandinavian ballad...

Watched first episode of second season of Dandadan. Creepier than ever. Okarun and Momo almost ends up as worm food. Literally Also... looking forward to this, even if still half a year away (I had to watch the thumbnail three times before realizing the pun of the bum, literally showing the area beyond "the end")

@majestic be nice