arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Waterfox - Open source web browser The web browser that respects your privacy

Firefox uses browsing data for training now. That's why one needs to switch to Waterfox yesterday! (That and search with noai.duckduckgo.com )

Elbridge Gerry - Wikipedia

A remarkable historical note: out of the first five Presidents/Vice Presidents, the ONLY* abolitionists were John Adams...and the inventor of gerrymander.

*Aaron Burr introduced the original abolitionist amendment...but didn't manumit his wife's slaves.

www.aaronburrassociation.org/post/aaron-b...

California also means Asians. Was never a fan of Yang, but this profile was fairly interesting.

"And so, Yang finally opened up over lunch, the two of us chatting fluently to each other in the shorthand of Asian immigrant kids...we griped over people automatically assuming we were from California."

Yeah, I know. That was simply the first one that came to mind since they were seen (getting blown up) in Ukraine and I didn't want to devote another post to list all the rest. The question re. battlefield utility of those particular Caterpillar bulldozers still stands.

That is, trying to determine whether the benefits of 'fight vs. no-fight' are relative or absolute.

You misunderstood the question. I asked if, looking back in time*, one could identify a period when it was ever GOOD (for the Democrats*) to be 'no-fight' - or, perhaps, when they were 'fight' and it backfired.

*In their 'modern' iteration - counting Civil War's slaver Dems probably doesn't help.

So, following this logic (that this moment specifically calls for 'fight')...would you be able to identify periods in history when, in your view, it was GOOD to have a 'no-fight' President/caucus and/or when 'fight' did fare/would have fared worse than 'no-fight'?

(Due to space constraints, this leaves out the Black Hawks and the Oliver Hazard Perrys. Tbf, only those who remember the USS Stark tend to have a rough idea of what those were nowadays. And I guess those Polish/Spanish/Taiwanese who still see them in service.)

On the right track, but this rather discounts the role of decades of lead-up to said economic suicide. Decisions orders of magnitude above the "baseline" level of inefficiency one assumes from the USSR.

"most of its wheat was fed to animals — almost three-fifths in the late 1970s and early 1980s"

Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? This week we are taking a look at the latest winner of the ACOUP Senate poll, which posed the question “Why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?” To answer that,…

Literally the title of this post via @bretdevereaux.bsky.social (Although, the coal use thesis in this pappears to be more disputed than the theses of most other ACOUPs - i.e. see the paper linked.)

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Is this the knowledge you speak of? It's an indictment of Maine that out of 8 candidates, it came down to her, Blackwater - and two more people practically everyone appears to have given up on.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Un...

Back in the 2016 cycle:

"For a week in July, he experimented with fake news extolling Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,” he says. “They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.”"

Ukrainian fighters grease bullets against Chechens with pig fat Video shared by National Guard of Ukraine shows Azov fighters dipping bullets to be used on Chechen fighters in pig fat.

Would certainly be less offensive (and self-defeating) than the last time something like this happened.

www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/...

"New songs" is meaningless. SO many NEVER get listened to, that there was a service with a near-infinite list of such - TWELVE years ago!

And all those numbers are subsidized by effectively the entirety of venture capital, with no apparent way to profitability.

www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...

Tbf, action games are heavily incentivized for such settings, intentionally or not, because "enemies are gameplay and NPCs are filler if they don't trade or provide quests." Can you name one which depicts a future Earth that's better than 2010s? (Similar dynamics with post-Dark Souls fantasy.)

Iji - Further - (Ending theme) YouTube video by ステフ

IMO, you (and the OP!) would really, really appreciate Iji. One of the very few games I would describe as an out-and-out masterpiece - and it's free!

www.remargames.se/iji.php

P.S. Its description sounds so conventional: you would certainly never guess it would have this kind of an ending theme.

Napoleon literally REINSTATED slavery so, you know...

That, and lots of people forget how incredibly bloody his occupation of Spain was.

There were eight rounds of talks under Biden. However, all of them were aimed at pressuring Iran into accepting worse conditions than in 2015, which they were obviously not enthusiastic about. He and his inner circle obviously knew that too, hence...

" Pravda Beer Theatre — a Ukrainian brewery based in Lviv — is selling a “JohnsonUK” stout, themed around the former British prime minister who made a big impression on Ukraine during his time in office. The beer — spotted by eagle-eyed Telegraph journalist Joe Barnes — is sold for 66 Ukrainian hryvnias per bottle, equivalent to £1.43. The drink’s label features Johnson wearing a Ukrainian flag tie, flanked by the British fictional wizard Harry Potter — and a figure that appears to be Defense Secretary Ben Wallace emerging from a London telephone box. Johnson is joined by a portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II and his dog, Dilyn. The beer “goes well with dessert,” according to Pravda’s website. As an early advocate of deep Western support for Ukraine — and a staunch ally of Volodymyr Zelenskyy — Johnson became a popular figure in Kyiv."

That "just" has shades of "draw an owl".

Having said that: Boris Johnson did in fact get a street and a brand of beer named after him.

archive.md/MZ7lX

Perhaps. Then again, "Fort Trump" nearly happened over in Poland, though.

"One of the first things Bucaram did after taking office was to place his business associates in high government positions and fill the rest of the cabinet with his own family. He even put his 18-year-old son in charge of the Ecuadorian customs office. While head of state of an economically struggling Ecuador, Bucaram offered professional coach Diego Maradona $1 million to play one soccer game with him. In his later years, Jean Bedel Bokassa declared himself the 13th Apostle and claimed that he frequently met the Pope in secret. Bokassa crowned himself emperor of the Central African Empire (which he made up one day) in a ceremony that cost the country's annual GDP, where two-thirds of the population lived with less than a dollar per day. Ne Win consulted soothsayers on almost every aspect of his decision making in his nearly 3 decades as ruler of Burma. Being extremely superstitious, Burma's President Ne Win reportedly bathed in dolphin blood believing it restored his youth and vitality and would also cross bridges backwards to ward off evil. One shiny day, Ne Win, head of state of Burma, announced that he was going to change the currency into denominations of 15, 30, 45 and 90, so that he could live to be over 90 years old. This minor inconvenience effectively rendered the population's savings invalid. "

In fairness, A LOT of people who technically were world leaders did ABSOLUTELY DERANGED stunts - yet still presumably got treated semi-normally by the diplomats, the world press, etc., also.

(Stuff like this really shouldn't tucked away in a semi-obscure video game.)

tropico.fandom.com/wiki/Quotes

Did you ever get sufficiently invested into a game world to avoid killing even when the mechanics explicitly intend that? Besides the Jedi Academy, I once discovered it's possible to stealth past whole bandit hideouts in Dragon Age: Origins, but was never committed to a full playthrough of that.

LISA: The Pointless - Modern Day Ouroboros YouTube video by Edvinas Kandrotas

Logically, guns in post-post-apocalyptic settings could well be rare due to ammo shortages and poor maintenance. Ironically, the only one I could think of that was actually serious about it was...LISA: The Pointless - a fangame of what's basically a Children of Men/Fist of the North Star crossover.

And many, many others - like so many JRPGs, big and small.

(I did play an indie one recently which somehow had this problem (cities with supposed 100,000s or even millions of people are fed by a handful of small farms) AND its opposite - those same cities only levy a few JRPG-party sized squads.)

IMO, the quoted point is related. "Action games encourage players to consider criminality immutable & irredeemable" seems like a hypothesis worth genuine investigation. (Alongside "sci-fi action games need dystopias to justify killing, so their players are conditioned to imagine dystopian futures.")

A brief text game, Exeunt Omnes, is all about this dilemma - but you are playing AS the rival caught in this situation, and the whole point is that it's irrational for the "Hero" not to kill you also after she had already killed your allies. You NEED to persuade her to act irrational to be spared.

They still don't have viable stealth (that isn't about ambush kills), do they?

P.S. I'm reminded of the first Dragon Age's Leliana's quest. It all-but-screams at you killing her mentor is the right thing to do...and ignores her dozen of bodyguards then have to die also - even if you kill her first.

This obviously didn't work vs. the Dark Jedi, though (and a few other melee enemies like the guys on Tatooine). And you also had no way of obtaining keycards from key enemies other than looting one from their bodies.

Still, so funny how the way to be merciful was via a Dark Side power.

Haven't played it, but its sequel, Jedi Academy, unintentionally allowed you to spare most enemies! That is, you needed to Force Choke them until they dropped their gun, then pick it up, making it disappear. They would try to pick up weapons from lockers, etc. but would stay peaceful otherwise.