leicsmac

It's a truly remarkable piece of deception that folks like him all over the world have managed to convince so many others that they have the interests of a lot of people at heart, rather than a very narrow wedge of a very single demographic.

Same with a lot of other goods and services over there. If you can pay a premium for the top 10%, it's world class. The other 90% is gutter quality.

Particularly when used for ridiculous and cheap attempts at political gotchas. See far too many of them around these days.

... because big corpos good and big government bad, apparently. Not sure what the distinction is in terms of power level and ability to abuse it, personally.

And while all of this is going on and the Russians are pouring lives and resources into their utter folly in Ukraine, the Chinese are, yet again, either aghast or pissing themselves laughing at being handed the keys to the future kingdom with next to no armed effort at all. (Even though their own economy is hardly doing great things right now.)

Could well be right, in that case here's hoping both the current US and Israeli administrations get taken to the cleaners at their respective ballot boxes.

Right - so a fine use of resources all round then, yes.

I guess we'll find out. It does look like in any case it looks like a truly needless waste of money and lives for pretty much all concerned, though.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but the current agreement in the Middle East will pretty much status quo ante bellum... only with hundreds of billions of dollars spent quite a few lives needlessly taken, and economic uncertainty redoubled. That seems like a fine use of taxpayer resources, right?

I'm going to be honest, the comments that I see from a fair few older people (shall we say) on social media beg to differ there. Do again agree with the magnitude of the problem, though.

I get where you're coming from here, but such arguments (well, the first and third ones anyway) could easily be leveled against people of any age, given what I've seen in terms of social media activity. Don't get me wrong, something has to be done, but this is just one piece of the puzzle and addressing how social media negatively affects everyone, not just kids, is a critical thing to address.

"Leftists sabotaged it", apparently.

No, it was overstatement borne out of exasperation towards entirely unnecessary nationalist idiocy, I'll happily admit that. FWIW I think you're right about the ethical concerns and I also think it simply won't be enforceable anyway, as per above, a lot of these kids are smart, and a lot of them communicate with others who are smarter.

Would have to be a different company now that Agent Orange#47 has made all Anthropic products verboten to "foreigners", I reckon.

Yeah, can't stop the signal, and almost all of these kids are either smarter than the restrictions or will know someone who is.

He's certainly a far cry from a high ranking government official claiming that every single person of colour in the US is "illegal", as one Greg Bovino did recently.

On the topic of how the natural works comes at you fast, a fun fact: Mosquito-borne disease has killed around half of the humans ever to inhabit this earth, from the beginning of recorded history to today.

Once they had momentum, Littler and Humphries looked like they meant business and when that's the case, there's not a lot that can stop them. Clearly wanted it after the disappointment last year. Congratulations to them.

Unfortunately, there are far too many nationalists (and others, come to that) who can't agree on that being the fact that it is. It's like our species wants to invent reasons to pick problems because for some reason we think the natural world isn't giving us enough.

Good question. I think some folks might have such a dim and tribal and dehumanising view of other human demographics that they disagree with this, but I think probably not - no human group is, imo, actually willing to die and let its entire group also die for the sake of an ideology, no matter what words they might utter about it. Of course, there are quite a few groups who would be quite willing (and able) to make sure everyone else dies, so long as their group survives. But that's a different matter, and (thankfully) for the moment, not possible with the principle of MAD standing.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8jde20v83o Four days of extreme rain and landslides in the Indonesian island of Sumatra have pushed the world's most endangered great apes even closer to extinction, says a study. Research suggests that 58 of less than 800 critically endangered Tapanuli orangutans, or around 7% of the total species, were killed as a result of the extreme weather event last November. Those are conservative figures, and do not take into account rain-induced canopy damage or reduced food availability, said the authors of the study, external published on Wednesday. Well, that's grim.

And to add to this, the Russians, while nasty, aren't insane and have their own protocol regarding nuclear weapons release, viz. only when attacked with nuclear weapons themselves, or when under conventional attack and the survival of the state is threatened. They could be lying about those conditions, but right now the situation satisfies neither of them, thankfully.

Of course, I was looking for a bit more meat on the bone (as it were) because it seems that so often arguments about "defending the realm" veer into sentimental arguments rather than logical ones.

Yep.

It's a difficult conundrum because such things always have to follow the geopolitical landscape which is constantly shifting. But it terms of actually defending the existence of the UK as a state, as an island nation existing nuclear weaponry for deterrent, naval options for addressing threats to "lifelines" and a modest ground contingent for overseas territories should be all that's needed in terms of overall manpower. Looking into digital options and UAV's appears to be important now, looking from the way the current conflicts are playing out. And I think it's also over-simplifying to say that at least some of those things are the UK's responsibility without explaining why beyond some sentiment based on "it's what we've always done and what we should do".