Gorth

This... so much this! Also, some of the companions in Jagged Alliance 2 with some of their personality quirks. Just deciding they don't like the company, packing up and leaving. Where is the professional pride of mercenaries??? Edit: Honorable mention to Kai Leng, even if as mentioned above he wasn't a companion, the entire concept just felt "stupid" (and yes, just like the Malak fight on board the Leviathan in Kotor, it feels stupid beating the **** out of your enemy and wiping the floor with their bloody carcass, just for the game suddenly deciding that you have been overruled and declared the loser of the fight after trashing Kai Leng/Malak)

Yes. Monsters of Rock 1991 in Moscow. Estimated 1.6 million people at the concert.

Scottish separatists better start hiding in The Highlands.... those English military drones will be out to get them!

I think Fallout after '76' is in the same boat as say Mass Effect after 'Andromeda'. It's going to be a very steep uphill battle to change public perception.

From a strange time when the world seemed to come apart at the seams and enemies were no longer the eternal evil and your "friends" weren't necessarily particularly friendly when not needing you anymore... but hey, the total nuclear annihilation with less than 30 minutes notice part was postponed a bit.

Sure about that? (edit wiki, so take with grain of salt) "Well before 1976, Venezuela had taken several steps in the direction of nationalization of its oil industry. In August 1971, under the presidency of Rafael Caldera, a law was passed that nationalized the country's natural gas industry. Also in 1971 the law of reversion was passed which stated that all the assets, plant, and equipment belonging to concessionaires within or outside the concession areas would revert to the nation without compensation upon the expiration of the concession.[6] The movement towards nationalism was experienced once again under decree 832. Decree 832 stipulated that all exploration, production, refining, and sales programs of the oil companies had to be approved in advance by the Ministry of Mines and Hydrocarbons. Nationalization become official when the presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez, whose economic plan, "La Gran Venezuela", called for the nationalization of the oil industry and diversification of the economy via import substitution. The country officially nationalized its oil industry on 1 January 1976 at the site of Zumaque oilwell 1 (Mene Grande), and along with it came the birth of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) which is the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company. All foreign oil companies that once did business in Venezuela were replaced by Venezuelan companies. Each of the former concessionaires was simply substituted by a new 'national' oil company, which maintained the structures and functions of its multi-national corporation (MNC)-predecessor."

This looks like the pertinent part... (correct me if I'm wrong) "So there are primarily two related causes that have resulted in the steep decline of Venezuela's oil production, despite the sharp increase in the country's proved reserves. The first is the removal of expertise required to develop the country's heavy oil. This started with the firing of PDVSA employees in 2003 and continued with pushing international expertise out of the country in 2007. Second, the Chávez government failed to appreciate the level of capital expenditures required to continue developing the country's oil. This was in no small part due to inexperience among the Chávez loyalists that were now running PDVSA, but it may not have mattered in any case. When oil prices were high, Chávez saw billions of dollars that could be siphoned to fund the country's social programs, and that's exactly what he did. But he failed to reinvest adequately in this capital-intensive industry." Tl;dr; Chavez purged the national oil company of expertise in 2003 and then invited foreign oil companies to participate (i.e. invest) and then changed the deal Darth Vader style, leading the expropriation of Exxon and ConocoPhilips assets (and generally alienating the outside world, which he would have been better off not inviting in the first place)

What exactly happened there in 2006/2007? I tried to look it up, but couldn't really find anything (edit: or rather, anything relevant to that got bumped too far down on google for me to keep looking, yeah, lazy. What I do know is Venezuela nationalized it's oil industry for good in 1976, but that was like 30 years before the time period you mention)

That un-gimped Tzar Bomba is a blast! ... Yeah, pun intended. Good thing it is too big to be practical.

Funny, that's exactly what Lukashenko says too. A kindred spirit of yours? Sometimes things wont get better until you fix the cause. You can shoot and kill the symptoms, heavy handed too, but the problem will persist until actually addressed.

Fascinating and scary at the same time... looks like the virus may have evolved at some point into first "drugging" it's victim to keep it calm and THEN whacking it over the head with a big. spiky club (after spreading to even more recipients)

Double post, rather than editing the previous one, I guess if there is a god, maybe he/she does have a sense of humour Hypothetical situation, if the covid kills Trump in say 3 weeks time, where would that leave the Republican party? Iirc, they didn't have anything like the process of voting for a candidate, appointing runners ups etc. Do they just take whoever he had designated his running mate as the new presidential candidate or what? Curious how that would work, because there would be very little time left.

Let's see if both parties even have live candidates when we get to November... US President Donald Trump has said he and First Lady Melania Trump have tested positive for coronavirus and are now in quarantine. The president, aged 74 and therefore in a high-risk group, announced the news in a tweet. "We will get through this together," he wrote. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54381848

The tl;dr version of current Australian economic policy...

Keep the food, bring on the Gautier Cognac (1762) and some nice company.

You saying Kotor 2 wasn't perfect at launch, despite having had an ocean of development time??? Honorable mention to two mods I also quite liked: Ja1.13 and "Dungeon be gone" to skip Irenicus' dungeon

A bit more from my favourite industrial band... made in Germany This is the case the song is based on: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case "The Fritzl case emerged in 2008, when a woman named Elisabeth Fritzl (born 6 April 1966) told police in the town of Amstetten, Austria, that she had been held captive for 24 years by her father, Josef Fritzl (born 9 April 1935). Fritzl had assaulted, sexually abused, and raped her numerous times during her imprisonment inside a concealed area in the basement of the family home.[1][2] The abuse by Elisabeth's father resulted in the birth of seven children:[3] three of them remained in captivity with their mother, one had died just days after birth at the hands of Josef Fritzl who disposed of his body in an incinerator,[4] and the other three were brought up by Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, having been reported as foundlings. "

"I have dual citizenship... with the United States and Florida" "let's just proceed as if this is going really well"

Back in nostalgia land... memories of the time at university. We were always late, always pulling one all-nighter after the other when (software) projects were due to be handed in. Somewhere in our beer fogged brains (because we could get beer on credit, but not food and we didn't have any money), we also got bombarded by the horribly distorted sounds from a little "ghetto blaster" playing old tapes at volumes it wasn't designed for. Mostly The Cult, Led Zeppelin and The B-52's. It was just awesome music to survive so many 24 hour work days on... Edit: and a second song

If my experiences with running around wearing gas masks during civil defense exercises are any guideline, that guy will be screwed once the weather turns cold. He can either set the fan to max ventilation (and catch a cold) or not being able to look out through the transparent parts

I'll answer your questions with a new question instead, how will you change a system that is rigged to the point where a group of men can forcefully enter an apartment, murder one of the inhabitants and not even get charged with anything at all related to the murder? Once you know the answer to that, you have answered your own two questions, because the complete lack of faith in the police and the "judicial system" (which seems to about as effective as the Catholic church's internal dealings with pedophile priests) will start to diminish.

Nice read. To quote the linked text: "The hardest part about detecting collapse lies not with the data – that is clear as a bell ringing on a still morning – but with the emotional difficulty of accepting it (and then acting on it)." In the meantime, cities will burn, riots will increase scale and society tear itself apart more and more. We're already at the stage where populist politicians are winning elections despite any and all warning from history.

...and justice fails miserably again. A bank just give a fine, which will most likely be passed along to the customers as extra fees. They (the managers and the execs) won't change their tune until they start seeing the inside of prisons. Pathetic Australia... just pathetic. Australia's Westpac bank has negotiated to pay a record A$1.3bn (£0.7bn; $0.9bn) fine for the nation's biggest breach of money laundering laws. Last year, Australia's financial crime watchdog said the bank had failed to adequately report over 19 million international transactions. Some payments were potentially linked to child exploitation, officials said. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54275165

When Bandidos and Hells Angels had a falling out in Denmark and Sweden a few decades ago, missile launchers, heavy machine guns, hand grenades, car bombs, just about everything was put to use. Edit: Despite loosening up recruiting requirements considerably, the bikies eventually made peace when they started dying faster than they could recruit. Edit2: The army depots the article refers to were a left over from the cold war that was still only a few years in the past. National guard units had depots all over the country to make mobilization of reserves faster in case of DDR and Polish troops invading. Cut and paste from Wiki (Great Nordic Biker war) Weaponry Between 1994 and 1997, there were at least thirty-six break-ins at Swedish and Danish Army installations; at least sixteen Bofors anti-tank missiles, ten machine guns, around three-hundred handguns, sixty-seven fully automatic rifles, two-hundred-and-five rifles of various calibres, hundreds of hand grenades and land mines, and seventeen kilograms of explosives plus detonators were stolen. Police believe the Bandidos or their support clubs were responsible for the majority of the thefts. The Hells Angels obtained Russian- and Yugoslavian-made rocket launchers as well as surplus machine guns and rifles from East European countries.[6] The conflict saw the use of the Swedish AT4 eight times, and the Russian RPG-22 three times. Hand grenades were used four times and a booby trap once. Car bombs were utilized three times, while other types of explosives were also used on three occasions. The bombs used scaled in size between one and five kilograms.[6]

Wow... that was bad. Quake II looks like infinitely more fun to replay than a game of *this*