Legit multipolarization?

NATO, in particular, is highly coupled to the American/anti-Russian agenda. How much chance did Europe get to discuss the pros and cons of bankrolling a long-term conflict in Ukraine vs getting railroaded into it with the insinuations of being the next Chamberlain?

Even Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin don’t wake up every morning asking “how can I be evil today?” They may have a different agenda than the West, but it still comes from a place of caring for their country, legacy, and position. These are not wholesale foreign concepts. They can be understood and worked with. But I suspect the sort of organizations that would get the best out of them would require certain countries to acknowledge their place among equals and be willing to comptomise their sphere of influence.

My idea was a worm that just torrents random shit and dumps it on your desktop like a cat bringing you a dead bat with “I broughted you a pwesent ^w” energy.

You think Trump knew him as anything but “the face on the $20 note”?

If he had gotten office in 1914, he’d have put Grover Cleveland’s portrait up for the same reason.

Gacha can be moderately acceptable if the math is fully documented and enforced. If you know it will take <= 180 pulls to get Raiden Shogun, and each pull costs $3, then it’s just a $540 DLC with extra steps and the tease thst it might be cheaper if you’re lucky or have banked pulls.

But transparency is key-- the developer should be expected to offer a calculator or lookup table for any RNG item, especially if it’s some combination of multiple drop mechanics or hsrd-to-convert currencies that dissuades back-of-the-envelope estimates.

Even in Vegas, the slot machines are required to disclose their payout rate.

There’s also significant differences in the gacha appeal factor. If there are no leaderboards or PvP, and the game mechanics can be completed with F2P only, that is inherently less pressure to spend then on a game where you regularly get your ass handed to you by a someone with a Black Amex and all seven-star limited banner units.

As a (non-game) developer, AI isn’t even that great at reducing my burden.

The organization is enthusiastic about AI, so we set up the Gitlab Copilot plugin for our development tools.

Even as “spicy autocomplete” only about one time in 4 or so it makes a useful suggestion.

There’s so much hallucination, trying to guess the next thing I want and usually deciding on something that came out of its shiny metal ass. It actually undermines the tool’s non-AI features, which pre-index the code to reliably complete fields and function names that actually exist.

Can we get the politicians to shift from illegal aliens to Sasquatch? Build a wall across Washington state and make Canada pay for it?

Y’know thry always make a big media event about the polls opening at midnight in some podunk New England town that does a symbolic “first ballot of the nation”. Might be fun to make a similar scene for the ISS.

“The off-planet vote is breaking strongly for Harris despite RFK’s residence far outside Earth’s gravitational pull.”

Why not just subsidize the shit out of the USPS?

I buy a lot of AliExpress stuff, craft and hobby electronics stuff, and have run into situations where a domestic vendor will have what I want, sometimes even at a competitive price, but their shipping will be $5-10- maybe discounted if I spend $50, 100, or more, while the Chinese option is $2 postage, or even “free postage if I spend $10.”

If you could mail a 100 gram padded envelope for under $1, it would cloae the gap substantially.

I had no trouble because I was traveling at Random Tourist Hours, likely missing peak times.

I paid £20 extra for an a-la-carte first class upgrade on one trip (Swindon-Plymouth) because it was suggested by the family members I was visiting, and in retrospect, I’d rather have the money.

I bought a similar pass for foreign tourists back in 2019, but it was much cheaper (USD 333 ~ GBP 250 for 8 days).

I’m not sure if I broke even on it versus individual tickets, but the appeal for me was flexibility. Just stumble into the next outbound train in the direction I was going.

You might check if there are a cheaper version with narrower coverage if it suits your needs; I think it was significantly cheaper to leave Scotland and Wales off the tourist versuon.

I suspect the American left focused on LGBTQ+ issues because it was a “safe” mission.

Increasing official tolerance there was no threat to their donors or the wealthy in general. Nobody had to pay more in taxes or submit to meaningful government regulstion to enforce “don’t explicitly fire/assault/refuse to marry someone for being gay/trans”. Arguably those policies could have ecen come out of broader expectations for “stay out of people’s personal lives” rather than making special cutouts and declaring a marginal group.

Looks impressive, accomplishes very little. Pretty much sums up the Democratic party for the last 50 years.

Or that there’s a huge amount of legit demand for mature node chips and it makes sense to own the supply for it.

The 5000 microcontrollers you inyeract with each day, by and large, do not need 5nm processes.

We saw a few years ago how relatively cheap, commodity-grade, low-complexity chips suddenly become vital when you can’t get them and they have unfinished cars piling up at the assembly plant.

Them nerds will put a Raspberry Pi in anything these days.

On a less deranged take, there’s definitely potential to mend the Sino-Soviet split. Their interests and capabilities dovetail quite a bit, but I suspect unification is wildly impractical for any number of cultural and historic reasons. OTOH, if they presented a Warsaw Pact-style alliance, perhaps using the cudgel of mutually assured economic destruction instead of nuclear destruction, that’s a hell of an act for the West to try to follow.

I never realized the tattoos were photoshopped.

I assumed they used a random stock photo that had a convenient pose to add the shirt onto, that happened to have a tattoo.

Of course, I also figured using a photo with too much ink would 1) distract from the merchandise and 2) make the stock photo model too recognizable. (Oh, they clearly used Getty #8675309, “Fat White Guy With Mediocre Barbed Wire Tattoo”), but plenty of the pics are identifiable enough to use for a police report.

The mafia has infested law enforcement too.

I accidentally took the wrong streetcar when visiting San Francisco and ended up in the Castro.

They put a boot on my gender and had it towed. Apparently I have to pay $450 plus $85 per day storage to get it out of impound. I said “forget it” and they crushed it into a cube.

Needs a sheet of rub-on tattoos with vaguely “I didn’t serve in the military but really want to imply I did” to “outright white supremacist” themes.

My favourite is that “Three Percenter” design that effectively coopts the design of one of America’s least-successful coins. I sort of want to talk one of their ears off about numismatics and watch their brain smoulder.

Hyundai did it. Their rep was abysmal in the 80s/early 90s. Their ad slogan was literally “Hyundai. Yes, Hyundai.” because you’d have to say that to anyone who asked what steaming pile you spent $5999 on. But they doubled down on warranty long enough to become a credible choice.

BYD also has the advantage of being able to enter a fairly green-field market. There’s few to no cheap electric cars from established brands to conpete with.

It can also throw things against the wall with no concern for fitness-to=purpose. See “None pizza, left beef”.

I always figured a green streak had to run through vampire culture.

They know they don’t get to punch their ticket at 75/80/90 and miss the worst of climate collapse. They’ve likely learned an instinctive “we can’t overgrow our environment” relationship from experience (story premise: a vampire who oversires and creates social upheaval as his hunting ground goes barren and his childer starve).

And gosh, turning into a cloud of bats to travel is much less CO2-intensive than a private jet.