"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

Sony very famously scheduled the PS2 launch in Japan to happen right after exams - so schools would finish for the year and exams are over and a shiny new PS2 for you the next day.

Thats a ...... weirdly.... responsible bit of corporate behavior. The Japanese are surprising people sometimes.

Eh.. not necessarily. Starfield was supposed to be a game of this scale, touted as another Skyrim or Fallout. And it went over like a lead balloon, and about a week later everyone shrugged and went back to Baldurs Gate. Though I'm not expecting this to fare as poorly, since Rockstar do not have the reputation for jank that Bethesda have

But more to the point, this is a console only release. I wont be playing it, cos its not on PC. I *will* be playing it when it releases for PC however.

Map of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.

(For a full-scale exchange...)

Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia's population distribution, alongside a reminder of Russia's nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.

There's also this myth that "if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war". Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They're effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today's front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia's estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they're hardly a dime a dozen either.

IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.

(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn't actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).

I look forward to the unplanned broadcast of Swan Lake.

We don't win wars in 3rd world because they out-Zen us, westerners have no fucking patience.

they are forced to rely on coal if they want a buffer from global disturbances, such as a Toddler Clown started a stupid war in the M.E.

And they are pulling ahead of us on renewables.

These moguls are swiping pages right out of the first chapter of sci-fi doom scripts.

Think of it as evolution in action.

To be clear: you can still totally argue about qualia, sentience, things of that nature. What is not up for debate is that they work through unimaginably-complex chains of logical reasoning on superpositions of conceptual states and engage in forward-planning and metacognition. These are just demonstrable facts.

There is no 'sentiment' in an LLM or internal state equivalent to 'thinking' anything.

Yes, there is.

Yes, because animations use animators ,not actors.

AI slop uses neither. No humans or art are involved. Hence why people who backed a crowd funded project to make art are pissed off that instead of art they got AI slop.

What actually is your point here?

Oh you'd be surprised. Back in my younger years I worked in the court technology group for the (west australian) DOJ and for a while I was detailed to the WA supreme court, and was a bit surprised to find that the Judges quarters had an absolutely epic collection of very expensive aged whiskeys and brandies, and those judges would be hitting that booze pretty hard between hearings. What was weird was , you'd have a judge with enough whiskey to kill an elephant in them, having a debate with a QC lawyer (queens court is, or was, the highest rank of lawyer in our legal system) over the finer point of some obscure metaphysics axiom in Kant's Prolegomena , or an arcane ruling in a 1500s court case in the UK or whatever and would usually utterly thrash the lawyer. If it was me I'd be slurring my words and demanding the lawyer meet me in the carpark for fisticuffs lol. Those old yodas are just wired differently.

This does seem to be a modern issue.

My folks where dirt poor, and while often dinner was just... scrambled eggs again... Mum was adamant we had to eat a balanced dinner with NO sugar or salt (back in the 1970s doctors where a bit more worried about salt than we are now. We largely think salt isn't the heart killer we thought it was back in the day, though added salt still isnt recomended for folks with high blood pressure), and junk food was very rare indeed.

With that said, we lived in rural Australia, so that might have been a very different upbringing to an urban American, even in the 1970s.

I will add one caveat regarding weight and elderly health.

While it IS true that nutrient restriction is correlated with longer lifespans (although you basically need to practically live a full starved life , cradle to grave, for this to be significant) , and of course in many metrics being a healthy weight is absolutely more healthier, in late life there is actually some value in being *slightly* overweight, because thin elders are more prone to hip injuries and other broken bones from falls , and a hip injury can be a death sentence if your old enough. Folks just .... don't recover well... So in geriatric cases having a bit of weight can actually be good for you. Not obese, just a little chonky padding to help cuishon falls. Beyond that, a bit of fat can actually be protective beyond about 70-75. But crucially, we dont actually know why. So one would presume that the key here is to stay thin until 70, at which point, it is useful then to put a few happy kilos on.

Mortality risk was lowest for overweight participants. The risk of death for overweight participants was 13% less than for normal-weight participants (hazard ratio (HR)=0.87, 95% CI=0.78â"0.94). The risk of death was similar for obese and normal-weight participants (HR=0.98, 95% CI=0.85â"1.11). Being sedentary doubled the mortality risk for women across all levels of BMI (HR=2.08, 95% CI=1.79â"2.41) but resulted in only a 28% greater risk for men (HR=1.28 (95% CI=1.14â"1.44).

There was a sample size of around 9000 participants, roughly 50/50 m/f

Reference:
Flicker, L., McCaul, K.A., Hankey, G.J., Jamrozik, K., Brown, W.J., Byles, J.E. and Almeida, O.P. (2010), Body Mass Index and Survival in Men and Women Aged 70 to 75. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 58: 234-241.
https://agsjournals.onlinelibr...