Lochleg

The tragedy of 9/11 was cited as a failure of the intelligence community as a whole, primary the TLAs, to work together. They know they are responsible, and they know they have to justify their budget in those same terms. The CIA, for one, also meddles in foreign affairs heavily. Presumably, they use active measures to dismantle terror networks. Also, it's not appropriate to view 11/7 as an attack that was hard to predict. At least, the border incursion was an eventuality that they should have been able to repel.

I wasn't impressed. I do use them to vacuum and make frozen pizzas though.

It's a reasonable belief and fear that person will carry out the act. You are probably misinterpreting the reasonable part, especially when people mask their reaction to try to get away or out of shock / instinct. The person making the threats probably gets enjoyment from getting a rise out of random strangers. Also, returning to the original context, there are too many people on the street that have severe mental health crises going on and are freely roaming some cities. They don't necessarily need to go to be convicted of a crime as a solution.

Governments always have their own assault rifles and, usually, access to nukes or nuclear defense by proxy. By extension, they will have their own AI and we can only try to achieve some kind of parity with our own access to AI as citizens. Also, if there was a large personal incentive to own a nuclear bomb in a suitcase or something, wealthy people would probably hire personal security to carry one around. In the distant future, their spaceships will almost definitely have nukes or the equivalent. It seems like this all mirrors the weapons of war debate in some ways.

It's like the Matrix. The Machines won. The kids would rather be dead than singled out, and the adults have convinced themselves iPhone is the end all, be all even in this comments section. Meanwhile, I'm an exiled American eating scraps or whatever. I can tap into their world with a primitive interface like Discord, but I'm not exactly thrilled about it. If I'm in the real world, I should be able to manipulate their artificial construct, but it's actually a self-imposed walled garden. They don't want to leave, and they want to keep outsiders at bay. The Machines are perfect guard dogs.

Everyone is self-censoring these days, and you really need to operate within a limited persona if you have an online presence. If you aren't political, you don't really need to share controversial opinions online. That's just how it is. If you have a peculiar interest, you can still hide in the crowd and try not to use your main online identity on smaller forums. For example, various porn forums actually promote the idea of incest because it's an old and overdone taboo in the fiction they consume or something.

So, forests won't be worked on to prove a point or what? The idea is decades old from at least when railroad companies were dealing with Canadian forests, so it seems like apathy or complacency won and still rules the day. It must have been a pretty good joke if people are still laughing about it though.

EMDR therapy may help with something like that.

You can do the soleus pushup all day while sitting. Supposedly, it can fix your metabolism. Also, Supernatural or boxing like in Thrill of the Fight on a cheaper standalone VR headset may work for you. It's a surprisingly intense workout.

Your simplistic theory for silencing certain scientists falls apart when you need to examine Africa or other countries that had the virus but not the excess death you would expect. Also, there is new excess death data that is not explained by the virus.

Hillary Clinton did not take the loss well despite the appearance, and she still uses the word stolen. Stacey Abrams seems to have a similar story. Trump sounds like a broken record and a sore loser, but the main reason I don't take him seriously at this point is that there's not much work being done to secure the next election. I don't agree with ballot harvesting, last-minute voting rule changes, or the execution with poorly-designed election machines. No one was ever proactive about this when it would have mattered though.

Trump did get shafted on his Twitter ban, and even people that didn't seem to be supporters looked at the justification and were left perplexed. It was not a statement of facts, but there was reading between the lines and assuming the worse without gathering information. Despite any accounting of what went down that day, it does seem like the response is extremely biased and lopsided. People held on vague charges of obstruction because their cell phone data showed them outside the building are still being indefinitely detained. Whether it's Trump or his so-called co-conspirators, if there was a crime, you would think the gears of justice would turn a little faster because there's plenty of motivation.

It's the US government so it's safer to assume that only a $25 transaction went through. I am surprised the person didn't rethink things after the experiment went badly with $10K in limbo. It sounds like they should just mess around on a testnet the next time they feel like bucking the system.

I wasn't directly challenging your answer but the picture it painted. However, if scientists had to formally ask if SARS as a disease was eradicated or eliminated from the world, the answer would be no. I think the underlying question is whether China is on a fool's errand or not.

Officials helped SARS-1 along in doing what it may have done sooner or later without the (slight) intervention: disappear into the background then quickly become just another line that can't compete for hosts. This doesn't translate into a recipe for success. The end of SARS-1 was not necessarily an example where all the congratulations were warranted for defying the odds. The more relevant legacy is that epidemiologists acknowledged SARS already had an animal reservoir in bats, and the world was supposed to be preparing for its return to humans. That didn't amount to much of a guard at all, and governments were given carte blanche to get us out of the pandemic. As we now see in China, a government can always claim that its measures are necessary and they continue to save lives (and do no harm).

This line is expected to become endemic. China may have to stomach the current variants. It's not that relevant, but the coronavirus family is always going to reappear as it stands. I hope they recognize when it's no longer the same virus or same threat. Scientists proved that even in the perfect quarantine of Antarctica, coronavirus can reappear after months. This and many other lessons don't seem to get much attention. In any case, China is ruled by fear and its no surprise they are overconfident in their abilities. It does feel like even Western democracies paved the way for a country like this to stick to a single-minded approach when when its probably not called for.

In Golang, I've seen time.Sleep(2 * time.Second). That's pretty explicit, so, it seems someone carried the whole concept forward.

There are units that still require cooling. https://www.wired.com/story/the-situation-at-chernobyl-is-de...

Wired also had an old article about the long-term situation with radioactive contamination, which the surrounding environment has to absorb including wildlife that continues to mutate rapidly last I checked. So, I would say secure containment is paramount.

Nuclear energy can be safe, but we keep failing to recognize how short of foolproof the many fail-safes involved really are even in a high-tech society. Things going bad when you lose power or a single (water) pump are the prime examples.

With the abysmal reputation of DMVs, even if that were the primary business of government, people would still have a case for reforming government from the ground up.

White is a skin tone, but it also seems to be a catch-all for anyone that can be assigned historical guilt for benefitting in some way from imperialism. From there, the possibilities are endless. So, the present-day Russia has transgressed greatly and should be punished, according to this perspective. However, apparently, Ukrainians are benefitting as well as Caucasians, and that's why they would receive sympathy. If I could just forget about having heard of this ideology, I would.

I wasn't trying to explain the actual political situation. I don't know what "deal" they took exactly. It's just really easy for any side, including the actual Russian individual taking orders, to delude themselves about the enemy and who is really to blame. For example, it doesn't take much for an American soldier to waltz into the Middle East and purport to be focused on building schools, and they even demand respect from much of the populace while doing it.

That being said, the underlying viewpoint behind the convenient justification is not that controversial on its own because the West was trying to win over Ukraine through various means. This is seen as something akin to nation-building even by some American academics.

It would have to be very subtle trolling since mentioning a certain pipe in Canada would definitely have rustled some jimmies.

By that logic, Russia would be the one receiving nominal Western support since it carries out ethnic cleansings (with relative impunity) against Georgians and possibly now Ukrainians, who must be "less white" than Russians on most scales. Also, Ukraine was already gradually descending into chaos because superpowers were playing ridiculous games like they do in the Middle East despite lacking the usual justifications used for the War on Terror.

In my estimation, most of the activity done with people's inventory on Steam, especially skins in major games, involve one illicit scheme or another. I guess you can't or shouldn't stop people from using their skins on gambling sites. However, it doesn't seem like many of the metafeatures that the company started to build around Steam actually serve regular gamers just looking to enjoy themselves.

Russian troops could simply be operating under the premise that none of their actions would be necessary if the West hadn't meddled and created the Ukrainian crisis in the first place. It's that simple.

I knew exactly what "jargon" the IT worker was going to use, and I've never worked in an office like that. Of course, I assumed he was being pedantic at first. If a lawyer only needs to find a government office worker that has lost his mind to win a case, it's just not fair.

I never looked into it, but some scientists supposedly lent credence to the existence of lucid dreaming. That's a similar concept where you assume that, with training, some people have tapped into a wellspring of vivid imagination. Or, they just have more natural DMT in their system and start hallucinating in their mind's eye.

I can only get a taste of that experience when deeply engaged in reading books. I am hoping the prototypes for deep-dive VR will soon be better than dreaming (for some people that struggle with recollection and other mental exercises) so that we can build what were once only mental palaces and OOBEs.

Even when LED flashlights were first popularized (more than a decade ago), it was believable that batteries always seemed to be on their last legs, especially in the wilderness. It's probably not supposed to be a thing on Terminus unless there's a missing plot point that explains why they couldn't use or were preserving their pocket nuclear reactors / batteries that can power force fields among other things.

I am wondering if SyFy's The Expanse succeeded completely in their adaptation of novels that were written in contemporary times. Apple's Foundation is awkward at times and its writers seem to believe that they needed to correct and reinvigorate books that were outmoded, but, apparently, the production itself is said to lack real faults. It's really easy to kill a franchise these days because you want it to speak to your audience, but it is seen as much less aspirational with its mixed messages. Of course, that's just my general impression, and I could be talking about any franchise that starts with "Star".

A rescue dog is still often becoming a family pet, and you have to consider if it makes all that much sense, especially on a massive scale. Rescuing dogs is only a stopgap measure. Everyone is still cursed with guilt for letting the system persist.

If a working dog reached retirement age, you would think they deserved to be sent to a farm or another place where they had some freedom after a life of captivity. Granted, truly wild dogs would be considered a problem, and the enormous pressure humans exert on nature has completely suppressed biodiversity, so there's not ever going to be a place for the canine species to be left alone.

We domesticated dogs a relatively long time ago and they became symbiotes, but we didn't really consider what that meant. They definitely seem to live in servitude as emotional mirrors and, as the article tries to highlight, fake children. Responsible dog "stewardship" is somewhat laughable because even their disposition has been selectively bred to the extreme to serve human interests. They've essentially lost some of the spark the wild animals are seen to possess. Some people think they are humbling themselves by cleaning up after a dog, but it's not done in service to the dog. No human is lowering themselves in any substantial way, and many people wouldn't even consider doing that for a dog. Actually, you seem to end up a hypocrite if you refuse to view even the most intelligent humans as callous and careless creatures no matter how hard anyone tries to give a dog a better life. Humans are cursed by sentience, and we realize we are in charge of making decisions, so we can never live a simple existence side-by-side with dogs and follow our nature.

It's always going to be ethically questionable to keep dogs. If we "need" service dogs or want them to have a purpose while preventing their extinction, it seems like most dogs should live in the wild on preserved land. A limited population of dogs of various breeds can be kept if they will be highly respected as working dogs and actually get to experience the (human) world assuming that even makes sense. We should track their evolution to see how much we are really changing them from their more natural state. Some people would consider all this a massive waste of resources (for a chosen, land mammal that, for one, is never going to be sentient unless they get an incredible opportunity millions of years after humans somehow go extinct). I tend to agree, but it's so hard to comprehend the monstrosity of a system we already have with household pets.

I may be thinking about all the wrong questions with my awkward mindset, but I doubt that you can really know that you've made a significant leap by correcting bad assumptions about our relationship with subservient animals. From an observer's view, humans are bound to prove themselves pathetically predictable in some ways and indecipherably crazy in others when it comes to how we end up "looking after" other entities. For example, someone is probably desperate or foolish enough to wish they could talk to their animal. That's an incredibly scary proposition. If someone purported to have an AI that could tell us what a dog was thinking, it would better if it was just a trick that we could use to deceive ourselves.

I agree with you. The media mostly ran out of attacks for Sweden, but I guess people can always try out new ones. I was under the impression that they had to stop vilifying Sweden because it ranked 40th in COVID mortality rates (where being ranked 1st means you are the worst in the world). Of course, like in your Denmark example, you have to ensure comparisons are fair since even studies that adjust for age groups among a multitude of other factors are considered incomplete.

I guess it has to be said that it wasn't racist on its face for Tegnell to bring up immigration because it's obviously a factor that contributes to spread. Health authorities have to be aware that immigrants generally have health problems and may even come seeking treatment. At least, that's how it is at the US southern border. In any case, Tegnell won't be sent to a kangaroo court or any other in the foreseeable future. If he did, I suppose part of his defense might be reiterating that he lived in a democracy and, as a government official, he didn't have to power to force people to "do the right thing". It should also be said that he's had to admit where failures happened, such as not doing enough for the elderly and how they were cared for. If all countries have to compare themselves to exceptional countries such as Norway, there's a lot more explaining to do across the board.

Here he is defending himself on UnHerd and I guess (rightly or wrongly) vindicating Sweden's strategy: https://youtu.be/nZRR5zZ0I0s

QAnon exists for the same reason Alex Jones exists. Sensation sells. You can still be an (entirely rational) "prepper" if you want to be. Yet, it's routinely associated with right-wing extremism and delegitimized as a movement. By the same token, you can probably try to be an independent, investigative journalist even if you are bound to not survive scrutiny, especially if you let foundational research practices and sourcing slip.