UN decided couldn’t possibly be a problem in the future

Less that, and more that the existence of the Security Council with permanent seats and veto powers was a requirement to get the major powers to actually want to join.

Otherwise it’d have been the post-WW1 League of Nations, which pretty quickly fell apart. The US never even joined the League if I recall, they couldn’t get it through Congress despite it being President Woodrow Wilson’s own pet project.

Ultimately it’s easy to get a small power to join an org that basically serves to limit the options of individual countries by applying international law to them. It’s hard to get a large, powerful country to sign up for that same thing. The smaller country gains from joining, but the strong country actually weakens itself by joining.

Yeah, that’s fair, an investigation is a little silly. Political points to be gained I suppose.

Honestly this isn’t super newsworthy. The crowd wasn’t all that bad, and most of the cops handled it fine.

Here’s the most complete recording of the event that I found:

https://youtu.be/AixdGwZ7TFE

For space/astronomy news, I recommend Doctor Becky https://youtube.com/@drbecky and Fraser Cain. https://youtube.com/@frasercain

Becky handles mostly astronomy news, Fraser handles mostly space flight news. Both are pretty decent at staying more objective.

What counts and what doesn’t is pretty fuzzy. I’m just including everything that could reasonably fit, just to keep it simple.

Depends if I can get my phone unlocked and call an ambulance or not. Unassisted I’m probably bleeding out, but if I can get to a hospital then I can probably make it. I do wonder how much skin I’ll even have left at this point, considering the sheer number of cuts, scrapes and burns I’ve had, but blood loss should be the only potentially fatal problem needing to be dealt with immediately.

Big if, though, my hands would be a busted up mess. Operating a touchscreen would be a pretty big ask, and I probably don’t have a lot of time fully conscious. I’d also have several broken bones preventing me from going anywhere to find help.

It’s a pros and cons thing. The pros in this case are our upright posture with narrower hips that let us cover long distances more efficiently than most of the rest of the animal kingdom. We can even do things like carry food to eat while walking, which something like an antelope would struggle with. Then a second pro is the whole big brain thing. These two factors did let us take over most of the planet over the course thousands of years, pretty quick work, really.

Then the cons are high mortality in birth, and taking something like 10 years after that risky birth to become even semi-functional at a practical level.

Riding your bike is exercise, so I’ll give that one a pass as a healthier hobby. Reading just depends on what you’re reading I suppose. Going to restaurants is generally looked at as a bad habit in my experience. Waste of money basically.

Regarding what makes video games special, I will say that they can develop bad personal habits a little easier than a lot of other hobbies. I think they have greater addiction potential than say, reading or bike riding. More on par with sex or gambling. They also create a temptation to oversimplify/misunderstand things about real life in the same way tv/movies do.

But yeah, overall I don’t think its a particularly bad hobby if you don’t go overboard with them.

They’re headed in that direction, but not yet. Their pop is 143 mil roughly, and the Ukrainian estimates are a little over 1 mil Russian casualties last I heard.

They could roll in with tanks, if enough pro-Russian parties came into power in the EU. The Baltic countries are not very big. Creating a situation where an Article 5 is called by a small country, but not answered, would be the ideal result.

Let’s also not forget that Putin has only done a very limited amount of mobilization so far.

This is basically what various nonprofit orgs that people can join amount to.

Like, if you join the NRA your subscription cost is going to lobbying politicians on gun issues, among other stuff like keeping the org running and paying for nice things for the head of the org.

Good lord, that’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it… Ugh.

I wouldn’t. Have to remember that a core component of trolling is making things up, so you should not take for granted that any mental illness is actually present. Imagine the troll as a 13 year old, smirking or giggling to themselves while they type. That’s the spirit these things are done in.

Anyway, bringing mental illness into it just insults people with actual mental illness, who generally behave much more maturely.

If you want to actually engage in any sort of positive way with a troll, you need to stoop to their level and draw out more engagement from them, without making it fun. We used to call this counter-trolling. Trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls … ad infinitum. This eats up some of their energy without giving them anything in return, as the time they spend engaging with you is time they can’t spend trolling other people, who might feed them more.

Or save yourself the time and just block and move on. That’s definitely the most mature thing to do.

The worst thing you can do is a short engagement that results in you acting like you’ve gotten upset and then disengaging. This is feeding them more things to giggle about. If you engage, you need to be willing to stay in it for as long as it takes to deprive them of that satisfaction. This can go for multiple days. I don’t really recommend it unless you also find the bantering process amusing.

When the Generative Agents system was evaluated for how “believably human” the agents acted, researchers found the AI versions scored higher than actual human actors.

That’s a neat finding. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack there around how our expectations are formed.

… does he think that will make more Brazilians have good feelings about Bolsonaro?

Minor quibble, but Rafale does not make a cutting-edge fighter. The US, Russia and China all make 5th gen fighters. France does not yet, they mostly make 4.5. Before long here, the 5’s won’t be cutting edge anymore and we’ll all be on to 6th gen.

You know … at a certain level, I respect the dedication. Go big or go home I suppose.

Thinking about hammering in a screw puts a very serious frown on my face…

Upvote for creativity though.

Modern war planners mostly know better than to count on everything going well.

To add to this, N Korea also has a huge conventional army, and is a very mountainous country. Lots of soldiers+mountains=very bloody to invade.

This is also why Iran is fairly safe from ground invasion. It’s like a gigantic Switzerland, which if you’re familiar with WW2 history, even Hitler left Switzerland alone despite kinda wanting to occupy the place. The cost was just too high compared to the benefits, so, y’know, may as well skip it and invade the USSR instead.