Do not taunt (Happy Fun) Claude...

"...99 luftballoons...."

A real human will punch you in the mouth if you stray far enough out of your lane. The problem is self-correcting. It's why we don't really prosecute children for assault: the young'uns learn these lessons the hard way when they still bounce so they don't have to learn them the hard way by the time they don't.

No kidding. If the Ukrainians ever claw back the parts of the Donbas that seceded in 2014, the place is gonna make The Troubles look like a schoolyard fight and will give the Yugoslav wars a run for their money.

Unless they're secretly training on all your chats despite them saying they're not.

If these were highly remote locations and getting a human to them in time to fix a problem was going to be a challenge, then maybe remote controllability would be important. But this is a damn supermarket; there's going to be somewhere there or nearby constantly. Dear Lord.

There's no reason that there can't be a thermometer and controls built in, and only accessible from the back. Add on a clipboard with pages printed with lines for date, time, temperature, initials and you have a way to keep track of the temperature without outside access. Add on controls to adjust things and you've got everything you need.

Ukraine was ruled from Russia for centuries before WW1. Russian civilization traces its history to Kiev a millennium ago. The roots are deep and intertwined. Enough so, for enough people, that the resentment can be ignored.

Yes I know this website is known to the state of California to cause cancer. I don't care.

Just like I don't care about every other horseshit popup, tooltip, or banner that the IT-tards or their lawyers seem intent on placing in between me and my objective.

Software is built on the binary: it works flawlessly or else it's broken and it's *your* fault that it is.

They believed it because a lot of them remember when Russia and (Russophone) Ukraine were one and the same country; saw that Ukraine's government was just as crooked as theirs (but considerably more cash-strapped); and had a continuing suspicion that Ukrainian independence was as much a Western-imposed project as it was an actual grass-roots sentiment.

The cultural and linguistic blinders are real, man. I fucking spent the first seven years of my life in Kiev and the only Ukranian I ever remember hearing was from the occasional street vendor or school cafeteria worker. I honestly had no idea these people were there in any kinds of numbers, let alone that they thought of themselves as a distinct nation.

Now imagine living your whole childhood and most of your adult life in the imperial capital where Ukraine was just a borderland province, one of many, that obviously aspires to be a part of the slavic brotherhood. Of course it's unsuprising they thought the Ukrainians would fold like paper.

That was the only plausible avenue for success. Ukraine is clearly too big for the Russians to swallow. Unfortunately Russia is also too big for the Ukrainians to fight off.

Game consoles are a dead end anyway.

The game consoles started in an era before the PC, but when the PC became affordable they became dinosaurs and milk cows for people tgat believed in the ads.

Sure. Let's lose the last bit of heavy industry we have left to slave labor in Xinjiang. Totally worth it for that carbon footprint.

Fun fact. The iOS on my work phone upgraded itself and helpfully notified me it wouldn't charge the phone when I plugged it in. It would first check to see if the electricity in the area was sufficiently renewable before starting to charge. Because being green is more important than charging the phone when I fucking plug it in.

Sequels can be well-written. Original stories can be poorly written. Perhaps the flops are a sign of pervasive bad writing?

Last good film I saw was Kpop Demon Hunters. The last one before that? Would have to be maybe the 2015 Bond film, or mabe Passengers or Zootopia? Either way a decade plus gap.

Kinda explains the hype about the kpop cartoon. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't my first thought of what Great Cinema should be. The fact that it was just better than ok but developed a huge fanbase overnight says the drought was real. The people hungered for good movies for so long they glommed on to the first thing in a decade that wasn't bad.

And without those market distortions, EVs found their natural niche: rich man toys. Sometimes also the rich man's trophy wife is permitted to drive it.

In the presence of European market manipulation, it is not surprising EVs continue to be the less bad choise. European fuel taxes and lack of emissions standards mean the alternative to an EV is a cramped little econobox that belches diesel fumes like an old tractor.

I remember an episode of NCIS where McGee used a paint gun to cover the lenses of some surveillance cameras so that DiNozo could get into a junk yard and retrieve some evidence they needed.

Well...yes. And there are other difficulties.

Unlike everyone's favorite go-to analogy of space and the space economy as the next settlement of the New World...the settlers of the Virginia colony could disembark and start planting cash crops; they didn't need to bring their own water and oxygen.

Unless someone finds pure gold or platinum (or a similarly valuable equivalent) at most a few dozen feet below the lunar dust, space will never be economically self-sustaining. It will be a (much) more expensive version of a south pole research outpost. Manned by a rotating (or semi-permanent) crew of specialists doing stuff for a small number of government or philanthropic clients that could easily be called a vanity project.

Colonization it will not be.