> More self checkouts have shown more theft. Which causes the stores to put in crazy amounts of gadgets and cameras to "stop" shoplifting. Stores that were profitable (Portland) are closed instead of simply reverting back to the profitable state. Probably all to avoid paying people a bit more.

We have mostly self-checkouts here too, but not the massive amounts of theft, nor the cameras, so our stores haven't closed.

Weird.

One, "fire in a crowded theater" is bad law from an overturned case.

Two, this is more like yelling "fire" in a burning theater. It had already been called out for being unable to produce depositor's cash months prior and the recent filing was sort of a tipping point because they had enough financially literate depositors such that they knew it was a race to get their money or else they might not be able to make payroll and would end up in a world of legal hurt, etc.

> The "failure" seems to be a combination of not factoring in interest rate changes well enough, and "internet panic" spreading faster than it has in the past.

They didn't have a CRO for 9 months and had a bunch of assets that aren't currently valuable enough to cover deposits, so once people realized this, what were they supposed to do? The bank had already effectively lost their money. I know that no CRO doesn't mean that nobody is sitting at the risk desk, but the fact that they were forced out in weird circumstances and not replaced can also be taken to say that they knew they were running in a risky way for a long time and nobody was willing to sit in the hot seat by signing off on that.

This comes up in every liquidity crisis, here's an article from 2022 describing how people like to blame the victims instead of the bank:

And the thing they say will be that your institution is undergoing stress, and that the first people to withdrawal their deposits will get 100% of their money, but that later depositors attempting to withdraw might not.

And then you end up with a bank run, the most dangerous auto-catalyzing part of bank failures, where your depositors race to get their money out.

In most cases, if you’re killed by a bank run, the damage was done long before. You earned your fate via years of diligent work making bad loans, and became insolvent. The bank run revealed the insolvency.

Failing bankers often don’t agree with this. They think e.g. the liquidity constraint caused by the bank run made them need to sell off assets at a discount to their true value. If they had realized the true value of the assets, if people had just been patient, they argue, the bank would have survived.

Source

The fact that their assets couldn't actually be sold to cover their liabilities is kind of an issue. People want money, not excuses about how they could get it if we calmly sell these assets for closer to their real value in the far future. If you disagree, feel free to buy some bitcoin now, I hear they're really worth $80k. Just gotta have diamond hands, bro. What do you mean you might need that money before it gets to $80k again?

I won't rewrite my reply to rsilvergun which you can read up thread, but I wanted to reply to you so you see it too. I think he's wrong and the bats in northern Laos are the closest wild population, which is roughly 1000 miles away.

This is my source on that, for reference.

And no it was not from a bad thousands of miles away. The sequence was found right nearby Wuhan.

Unless you have a closer sequence than BANAL-52, this is inaccurate. Because BANAL-52 was found in limestone caves northern Laos.

Here's a map that will give you some idea on the distance between Laos and Wuhan. I chose this map for convenience, not because that's exactly where the bats came from, so don't get too excited that it points to a random city in the southern part of Laos, when the bats were from up north. It's just there to give you a sense of the fact that the country of Laos isn't very close to the city of Wuhan. Even if you go up to Phongsali, Laos, which is at least up north, but which it won't let me have link to, that only gets you down to 972.65 miles. That is over 1500km for those who prefer more scientific units.

So given that we know that no bats or pangolins were sold at the wet market, due to comprehensive research on every species sold prior to the pandemic that I linked in the GP post, and that bats aren't eaten in that part of China so nobody is importing them for food, how did they get there? For that, I think we have to look at the one place that does import bats with Coronavirus and which was studying Coronavirus a little more seriously, because they replaced their ventilation systems, went under military rule and deleted a bunch of genetic sequences they had online right at the start of this all, which sure looks like a coverup.

And to the point I skipped, I do agree that the wet markets were always a problem. They trafficked in endangered species and that's why there were the studies on them before the outbreak. So I'll agree that it's good riddance to them.

> virologists have long since sequenced the virus' DNA and narrowed it down to transmission from pangolins who in turn got it from bats.

And this is a problem for those who theorize that an animal sold by the wet market triggered this because prior research on the animals sold at that particular wet market shows that neither bats nor pangolins are sold there.

Indeed, the closest match to the original Covid-19 sequence is a bat sample from about a thousand miles away from Wuhan ... which was studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The PDF here appears to contemplate releasing an aerosol into the upper atmosphere. We could both do this on a small scale at first and just stop doing it if it was bad:

While this document encompasses several SRM approaches (Annex 1), focus is on stratospheric aerosol injection
(SAI; Figures 1 and 3) because it has been the most studied and there is the largest amount of evidence relating to its
potential feasibility and effectiveness. Observations of global cooling after major volcanic eruptions provide strong
evidence that a deliberate injection of large amounts of reflective particles into the stratosphere would cool the Earth
rapidly (Figure 4). However, the extent to which SRM can reduce climate change hazards and alleviate ecological
damage and human suffering has not been robustly established. SRM deployment may also increase climate change
damage or introduce a range of new risks to people and ecosystems, including risks to human health and global
biodiversity. These benefits and risks may not be known fully without an actual SRM deployment. There is now only a
limited set of scientific assessments of the impacts of potential SRM deployments on human and natural systems.

It's kinda weird that we're okaky with the status quo of doing accidental climate change that nobody knows how to stop and yet terrified of doing anything engineered that we can just stop doing if it's not working out.

You're not wrong, most success was early on before public trust got burned away. At this point you can only really talk to people you personally know who also know you.

Somehow it's hard for people to understand that people don't take medical advice from people who hate and show contempt for them. Well, at least among those actually trying to give honest advice and not just trying to beat people over the head with a science book to make themselves feel better.

Yes, the early protection was good, but it's not very meaningful now and we lost the containment during the early testing fiasco with it hitting community spread long before we even had a test approved.

I agree that mRNA is a game-changer and this law is absurd, though. That's why I want to help people understand this stuff and the real, complicated picture so that they trust it enough to take them.

You say that but this kind of crap is why people don't trust you and because they don't trust you, they don't get vaccinated.

I got vaccinated and I'm on the record on here telling people to get vaccinated since the start, feel free to check my post history on that one. But I also push for reality, because memeing this into simple stories when the actual situation is complicated is harmful and I see the harm because I actually talk to the people you guys talk down to.

Part of the problem is that point (1) is some very dated and misleading information, because what people care about is whether they'll get infected with any variant of Covid, not just the OG Covid which is pretty much extinct last I heard. There are a few alphabets worth of variants of Covid and while it was true of the OG Covid, effectiveness against variants drops off as the virus evolves to escape it and thus the story gets a lot more complicated,. So boiling that all down to a single number from April 2021, shortly after the first vaccines were approved for general use, is more than a bit misleading compared to the far more complicated, but real picture.

The point you should be making is instead a much more nuanced point about the base rate fallacy, the places we do and do not see excess mortality (it's more among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated), and similar measures, rather than pretending that this stat from 2021 is still meaningful after several alphabets worth of variants, when even people who don't know stats are going to know that doesn't make any sense as to why Covid is still a problem worth worrying about.

When you pull out a dumb argument like that, people don't trust you guys and you're making it a lot harder for me to talk to people honestly and point out that getting vaccinated is in their best interests.

Meritocracy is non-binary, it's a spectrum. It's not something you either have or don't have, it's something you can be better or worse at. We measure imperfectly, but as long as it's directionaly correct and of sufficient magnitude, it makes things better.

The idea that we can just abandon any attempt at measuring and be better off is utterly laughable. You don't have to prove that meritocracy is imperfect, you have to prove that it's on average directionaly wrong.

And yet I bet you still believe scientists with degrees and go to doctors who are accredited and want lawyers who have passed the bar exam, so unless we see the people saying this proving it by action, we know that they don't actually believe what they're saying.

> People have been talking about "bringing an end to Nord Stream 2", all over the media, since before it was even built.

True, but an explosive-laden drone was found next to it as far back as 2015, so it's likely that there have been people thinking about destroying it for at least that long.

Of course Putin has only himself to thank for this since it was his choice to invade Ukraine...

The problem is with witness descriptions, which are badly unreliable in general and should be mistrusted unless the person was already somehow known to the victim, not really this tool.

But this is a tool for police to find people to investigate and then a jury can decide if it all adds up or not. So when you find the guy whose cell phone was in the area, whose likeness shows up in a video canvass of the area, whose DNA is at the scene, and who matches the sketch produced, the jury gets to decide if that's a huge coincidence or this guy is the murderer after hearing the defense describe all the ways each of these things could be wrong and how credible the person's denials are.

But honestly you find stuff like this with every investigative technique. It turns out nobody likes being investigated and most of the cases of things going horribly wrong are from 50 years ago when there were very few video recordings of anything, nobody was carrying a locating device in their pocket most of the time, and you had to go by what someone getting mugged thought they saw late at night in bad lighting after they picked some random guy who was known to the local PD as the kind of person who had been arrested a lot in the past from a police lineup, every part of which should raise some alarm bells in your head if you've read anything at all about police getting the wrong person.

We are talking about a multi player online game. There are no "publishers". You simply buy the game and play. Or not in the case of China.

Who do you think NetEase is, again? I mean, this is in the first line of the summary:

> licensing and publishing partner NetEase

Yes, China has special rules. For a game to let Chinese people play directly (i.e. not with some VPN to bypass the Great Firewall & such), they need a local Chinese company that keeps all the Chinese data in China, imposes Chinese censorship, and that actually takes the money from Chinese people. So the China version will censor random things like skeletons (it's disrespectful to ancestors or something?), while also giving the Chinese government more control over the firms.

Blizzard wants either a deal that keeps the source code to NetEase can't run off with it, or a new Chinese publisher. This was probably coordinated to leave them SOL, knowing China, but we'll see.