leicsmac

And yet thanks to some social media savvy and tapping into horrible prejudices and making them fashionable again, the guy is still about even money to win in November. Goodness only knows what any sentient aliens watching us must think.

... what is it with self-interested quasi-sociopathic leaders of nations and really shite haircuts/toupees?

The populist Internet nutjob movement starting around 2016 has a lot to answer for.

As of last year, can confirm they don't do it anymore and also that at least some cabbies over there are utterly mental. And then you have the tow truck drivers...

I think some people still need convincing as to the seriousness of it all, yes. But of course the path forward to make sure the world in general is better prepared next time is the most important thing. I say it so often but it bears repeating - acts of nature, even when directly caused by humans, can cause death and suffering on a scale that would make even the most psychotic dictators green with envy. There needs to be more attention placed on them and their consequences, especially when such things often produce more of the human-shaped boogeymen due to the pressure they exert anyway.

Judging by attitudes, I'm not entirely sure this is the case. Or if the jist was got, it was taken far more lightly than it needs to be.

Listening to those stories will give us a picture of just how unprepared things were, and how brutal things were in hospital ICU's as a result. That can be carried forward as a cautionary advisory for next time.

Oh, and a polite reminder. Next time, the act of nature might not "just" have a 1% death rate. Next time, it might come for someone you actually care about. Perhaps acting and preparing accordingly is a good idea.

230,000 odd people inside of a couple of years is an awful lot of people to watch die in pretty horrible fashion - whether they were more vulnerable to it shouldn't really come into it unless one wants to make the argument that they were somehow deserving of it - Just World Fallacy? I would hope that folks consider the testimony of those giving it right now pretty carefully and show at least some basic empathy for those who died, in numbers and in misery, and for those who tried to help them but couldn't and had to move onto the next body, again and again.

I'm sure there's a meme somewhere for this. Utterly absurd.

.... yeah, sometimes I have trouble knowing when something is a Poe and when it isn't.

Increasing global average temperature = more water evaporated into the air from bodies of water = more severe storms = more rain over less time. Extremes of weather rather than consistent temperate conditions (droughts and flooding as well as increased heat) that depend on location are part and parcel of increasing temperatures, along with other consequences. The issue isn't just one consequence - it's many, which is a big part of the problem.

The farmers have been doing their nut about the rain this year and how badly is affecting agriculture. Sign of things to come.

Absobloodylutely. My worry would be that issue placing such massive pressure in terms of resources on various places that they decide to take what they want at the end of a gun rather than asking, and weaponry finishes what that issue started.

Alexa, play "I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire" by The Ink Spots.

Petrov was the coolest of heads in the most difficult of situations, thankfully for the world. I do hope you're right, as does everyone sane - as above, it just has to be wrong once.

And that has held for more than 70 years now, through some more dangerous times than this, too. So it works. Thing is though, through ignorance, malice, insanity or simply pressure from natural consequences...it only has to be wrong once.

Responding to Putin's remarks, Zelensky's chief of staff Andriy Yermak said Russia "no longer has anything other than nuclear blackmail to intimidate the world". Tbf, that's a pretty big card still in the hand, given the consequences. The Cold War ran on that dynamic by all the bigger powers throughout, after all. Yeah, it's 99.99% likely a bluff. But what odds are acceptable for the destruction of civilisation?

Feel free to add to or change the subject matter as needed, then, I guess. NB. I'm pretty sure that nothing has been said about teachers here in the last page or so that isn't true.

Lots of the profession are, sadly.

Pretty much. There are several bumps in the road (digital media as a whole, increasing global average temperature, our brains not catching up with advances in tech etc), though.

To paraphrase: Whoever looks back at the "good old days" (subjective from person to person) and doesn't miss them has no heart. Whoever really wants them back has no brain. In terms of preventing and treating death and suffering, our species is doing better proportionally than it ever has done.

Yeah, agreed. On topic, drinking more water and cutting out the aforementioned processed foods is something I'm trying really hard with.

UPFs are a massive problem today. Still, perhaps such things are better than they were 50 years ago or before where a great many more diseases were basically considered a death sentence.

And I would agree with this, but I wouldn't put it down as unchallengeable fact in the way other things are. I tend to think of it as qualifying remarks rather than hedging, given in this day and age opinion is already stated far far too much as fact. WRT the last sentence, no doubt everyone on here is emotionally invested, but again people deal with that in a variety of ways and I think most of them are valid as long as they aren't genuinely harmful to the individual or others.