Last time I checked BBC wasn’t a Fox News cosplay

Correct with the caveat that the Polish truckers have to comply with the EU regulations (laws designed to make sure drivers aren’t forced to drive 12 hours straight and their trucks are not falling apart) while the Ukrainian ones don’t. Polish and Ukrainian govts are slowly getting to work on the issue but that’s just the beginning. When Poland and others accessed the EU the German truckers, farmers… were also quite dissatisfied. It’s a complicated matter and while I wholeheartedly support Ukraine and agree that all measures should be taken to make grain exports smoother I should also acknowledge, that this time the conflict is not just mere pettiness from the Polish side.

I’m not American, can someone explain why Biden does this when his “one job” for 2024 is to not look like a fash?

Azerbaijan gets a nod to host COP29

Ah yes, host the climate summit in an authoritarian fossil fuel exporting country, it has never caused problems.

Ohhh elections, so the plan is to get bogged down in a low-intensity border conflict and then say “oh no, we can’t do the voting in the middle of a war!”

Is that a ploy from Russians who are too cheap to bribe three juntas at the same time and want to consolidate assets?

Oh yes, as someone somewhere said:

“The safest border of Russia is the western one because NATO guards it”.

In Poland it’s “hybrid attack”. Devious, disgusting dehumanisation which makes even otherwise smart or kind people cheer for forces literally letting people freeze to death in forests. Rebrand helpless, misguided refugees as “Russia’s hybrid weapon” and you can get away with any atrocity.

Eh, 2022-3 wars are just as horrifying, they just happen on a smaller scale. Look up what was going on in the Bucha town, what are living conditions in Gaza, how many people were forced to leave homes in African and Asian civil wars… The scale of minefields in Ukraine, etc.

The technology of loan risk assessment? Yes, it exists worldwide, all banks are doing it. But there is a wide chasm between

“when I show up asking for a loan bank will xray all my previous financial history and craft its offer from that” in Europe (at least my country) and

“credit score is a houshold term, people employ lifehacks to improve it and you’re screwed if it’s bad because half of everything runs on credit”.

To add a bit more and a few clarifications:

At current rate it is not possible for Ukraine to actually, seriously lose the war. Even if UA was forced to start peace talks today they would remain a sovereign state, badly beaten and poor, but with immense will to ally themselves with the West, and the West won’t object (too much).

So for a Slovakian politician there is little to no risk in becoming a putin simp since there is no way Russia can credibly threaten him within the next 5 years. The very same mentality Orban is most likely having - Hungary is sheltered behind Carpathian mountains so there is no actual risk of russian boots on the ground. All the cash and dirty tricks from putin without much fear of his aggression, what’s not to like.

Fico must have gotten some sweet deals from the east and also there are all the suspicions around him that make him look like a plain mafia boss - and if there is one massive difference between russia and the EU it’s that russians don’t ask unpleasant questions and don’t bother too much with all this “rule of law” thingy.

It’s too early to call russia’s collapse and I would not underestimate the country’s resilience to isolation. “Best we can do” is a regime change, but there is zero viable political forces which would be willing to maintain long-term peace. At least in Central Europe the thinking is “russians lost this one, and badly, but round two is coming, if not in 5 years then in ten”.

I’d prefer them to converge from Baldur’s Gate 3 direction. Cast more or less established voice actors and give them the hype and marketing space usually found among movie/tv stars. “films and games converge” yea, when we treat a 200hour computer game the way we treat a long tv series and acknowledge the actors’ contribution on the same level.

Against a Dark Background from Banks is good too, much less space travel, a very adventurous plot and worldbuilding which is dense but doesn’t overtake the book.

Dungeons and Dunes 40000

I believe it was written in advance and already filming when S1 premiered.

Maybe not yet, but…

• Spez will turn Reddit into a bot farm and sell this as training data
• Musk turns Twitter into a bigoted cesspool and will sell this as training data, which will subsequently be flagged for low quality (also: a botfarm)
• Threads is a corporate ad dashboard (and we already know how easy it is to GPT copy) and Zuck will sell this as training data
• Facebook is either dead or only good for boomers and Poles
• blogs are dead
• Fediverse is out there waiting to be scraped but possibly too small to sustain a big model

We’te getting there, hopefully.