Hyperreality

Location data, when you’re home/not home, which room you’re likely in/not in. Data that costs almost nothing to produce, but can be sold for millions.

Bulbs tell them when you’re in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, etc. Relatively easy to combine it with smart tv, smart watch, security cam, and app/phone data to identify you exactly.

Combine it all and it’s likely they’d be able to identify you exactly and identify what you’re doing with a high degree of certainty, then micro-target you with ads or propaganda.

Honestly, there comes a point where you’d have more privacy shoving a camera up your ass. Less privacy than the DDR.

I’m sure Musk will ensure this never happens again. He’s a free speech warrior. /s

Why doesn’t North Korea count as a democracy? People vote and the votes get counted and decide who runs things. /s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China

The world is really lucky that China’s not doing that great at the moment. Not so long ago, China was winning the propaganda war internationally.

You don’t want authoritarianism to win the argument by out-performing democracies.

The fact that no one was hurt does not mean the case gets dismissed,” Engoron said

It’s also not a fact that he hurt no one. His lies hurt banks and lenders (small violin noise), consumers and tax payers.

That’s not fair. Systems like that can also shoot down civilian airliners.

I assume that’s the price Turkey paid for them when they bought a few from Russia - just NATO things - but I suspect that’s inflated.

Still very expensive though.

ACAB.

I worked in logistics for a while, so I should add one small caveat:

A lot of that will be stuff that comes from China and is then re-exported. IRC exports from China to Mexico increased something like 30% last year. I’m sure Mexico’s lovely, but I don’t think Mexicans are suddenly buying 30% more Chinese goods.

I saw this often. There’d be tariffs on Chinese products, then suddenly the exact same product would be made in Vietnam, Thailand, or wherever, a country which just happened to not be subject to tariffs. You can’t move a rice field over the border in half a month, so yeah.

Sometimes it was obvious fraud. Stickers over the original stickers.

Sometimes it’d be repackaged or ‘reprocessed’ so it was technically no longer a Chinese product.

Given climate change increases the likelihood and severity of similar extreme weather events, here’s a related article:

As the global climate crisis worsens, an increasing number of people are being forced to flee their homes due to natural disasters, droughts, and other weather events. These people are sometimes called “climate refugees”. … The Ecosystem Threat Register (ETR) released in September 2018 by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), an Australian international think tank, points out that at least 1.2 billion people could be displaced by these threats by 2050.

Twenty thousand years of this. Seven more to go.

This is a bit of a tangent, but the damage that bigotry has done to human progress is staggering. The scientist leading the team is apparently a black Zimbabwean woman. Not so long ago, it would have been impossible for someone like that to lead a team, and that immense talent would have gone entirely to waste.

Think of all the highly intelligent people who were unable to go to university or perform to the best of their abilities because some racist moron assumed they were too stupid. Think of all the women who are scared off pursuing a scientific career to sexist BS.

Think how (overeducated) morons still run entire countries or huge companies, thanks to privilege they don’t deserve, while at least one of the cleaners is twice as smart and a better human being than they’ll ever be.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nationalize

You thought you were smart to correct what you thought was a mistake. You were mistaken, because you’re less smart than you think you are, and not smart enough to know that you don’t know that much.

Rather than admit that you’re less smart than you think you are, you’ve doubled down and become rude about it.

Vanity, it’s the devil’s favourite sin.

Obviously, it’s pathetic. We’ve all been there, but you really should learn when to walk away rather than doubling down.

Same, but realistically once you start heading towards the 500 mods range, it’s almost impossible to get it working reliably.

At one point I had 200+ mods on skyrim, and the mod cycles and before/after conflicts on vortex looked like mandelas. I did enjoy ‘completing’ the vortex mod manager game. That’s when it’s 3AM, you’re fed up, you give up trying to figure what’s wrong, and just click randomly and uninstall/reinstall mods until vortex shuts up, and it somehow just works. Bit like winning the lottery.

Did that on skyrim.

Don’t know how much free time you have, but I couldn’t be bothered anymore for FO4 on nexus. I just downloaded one of the bigger/better collections and ignored/deactivated the creepier/boobier mods.

Already more than enough of a hassle to get that working, with vortex sometimes not installing stuff properly, pre-cleaning files, etc.

Wait a year for the modding community to finish it.

When I first played Fallout 4 years ago, it ran at 20fps in some parts of the map and on medium.

Playing it again now, modded to the max, ultra, higher res textures, 60fps everywhere.

Same pc.

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Vitamin D deficiency is incredibly common. I think it’s something like 1/3 or 1/4 depending on the season or where you live.

Of course, if you’re a member of the red haired master race, your body produces it for you so it’s less likely.

Azov was founded by nazis, western media and ukrainian reports that all the nazis have magically dissapeared are exagerated for obvious reasons.

This being said, there does seem to be some truth to them being less virulently fascist once they were integrated into the regular army, and maybe after so many of the original members died. The lack of anti-semitism for example, is telling. Ukrainian (orthodox) jews and members of Azov fight alongside each other.

I think the branding stuck because they were undisputably heroic and fighting Russia, and also as a fuck you to the Russians. Also, still plenty of nazis.

We have similar issues in Belgium, where flemish nationalists make excuses for collaborationists. During the first and second world war, the Germans exploited long held (and often legitimate) grievances held by Dutch speaking Belgians. So for example, they opened the first Dutch/Flemish speaking university in Belgium and offered Flanders a high degree of autonomy. During WW1 the Belgian army was also very francophone, which IRC caused some dutch speaking soldiers issues, this was exagerated by flemish nationalist and IRC german propaganda. The end result was that hardcore nationalists ended up collaborating with the Germans even during the second world war. After the war the flemish movement made excuses for them, suggesting they weren’t overwhelmingly true believers.

Something similar happened in Ireland. The blue shirts were a paramilitary organisation in the Irish free state which was opposed against the IRA. They provided physical protection to political groups which would go on to form Fine Gael, what is now a mainstream and moderate party. There’s also a debate about the blue shirts being fascists. What is true that many went on to fight alongside Franco in the Spanish Civil War and that they did the whole hand in the air thing. Their leader O’Duffy was also fascist, admired Mussolini, attended an international Fascist conference in 1934, but then perhaps crucially used the opportunity to argue against anti-semitism.

TLDR: it’s complicated.

I’m keeping my expectations low.

Being overly optimistic will only lead to dissapointment. It seems inevitable that this will continue to be a hard slog.

Do you?

This game will run fine on a 2080, by the time it’s been fully patched and optimised by the modding community. Honestly, can’t wait till 2025 when I’ll be able to play the finished game.