At some point, sound mixing just went to shit. My partner was in the industry working in post-production and agrees with me. The sfx are loud and the dialogue is not - thus all of the smart tvs and settop devices supporting features like “Dialogue Boost.”

I used to notice it a lot with poorly managed concerts - the singer’s mic would get drowned out by the instruments. I guess all the people who were responsible for that moved to LA.

But now I have a soundbar and two HomePods as speakers, and still turn on subs. And that might have something to do with the number of concerts.

I want to be clear. I do not blame Ghana’s people for these laws. I do not blame Africans for the many nations that have enacted similar laws.

Christian church organizations, acting under the rubric of evangelical outreach or even more offensively charitable giving have backed religious and political leaders with LGBT-phobic agendas up to and including execution for being gay. Of course they’re going to do it - they get power and money for doing so.

The US needs to extend the Logan Act to apply to these situations and make the crime a felony that can lead to the arrest of the people involved and the legal dissolution of the organizations.

Also, this is literally their job. The surprising bit would be if US intel services weren’t doing a thing about a Russian invasion of an independent European nation.

I mean, sure, if a Trumpist gets offended by it because they want the fascists to win, I get how they’d get in a bind, but other than electing Trump and making sure fascism becomes the rule of the day around the world, I’m not sure what they expect to expect.

Yeah, this was an easy one to call. It’s repeated in other countries as well.

One other factor that they don’t mention is that the surge in street opioids corresponded to a crackdown on doctors writing opioid prescriptions. I saw this coming when I was doing policy analysis and looking at unintended consequences in complex systems. I don’t remember much about what degree of a surge we saw in prescriptions, but I do remember all of those “pill mill” headlines. That always struck me as a pretty manufactured crisis - but even if not, the crackdown certainly didn’t improve the situation.

I clicked thinking it was an Elon Musk thing…

Not to minimize malnutrition - that’s an effect that we know will be carried epigenetically for at least two generations even if everything stopped now and we weren’t looking forward to a decade-plus of occupation - but the situation on the whole is physically rewriting the brains of both the adults and more especially the children.

I am an adult, and I chose, more or less, to put myself into the situations I ended up in. I still have PTSD to the point that I had a flashback and panic attack in a friend’s bathroom during lunar new year when they set off a brick of firecrackers and it sounded exactly like a half dozen automatic weapons firing from across the intersection. It took me about 15 minutes of breathing exercises and pushing everything back down before I could come back out. What I went through was absolutely zero compared to what these people, including children, are going through. You’re going to have everything from suicides to psychoses to radicalization and hair trigger political violence. And it’s baked in at this point. It’s done. It’s going to happen with all of the physical certainty of billiard balls hitting each other. All they can do is make it worse, which is what they’re doing every day.

There’s going to be decades of consequences, and Israel is going to find itself isolated far more than it has ever been.

I’m saying this as someone who has done this from both the military and three letter agency side, and as an academic researcher.

You do know that actions like this will only increase support for Hamas, right? Like, for at least the next 20 years - a full generation and probably some change. This kind of adversity - especially this over the top - drives people together in solidarity. This isn’t seen anywhere outside of Israel itself as a war on Hamas. It’s seen as the slaughter of unarmed Palestinian people - most especially by the Palestinian people. They’re going to have a generation of children growing up prepped for an ideology that will make ISIS look like the cast of Sesame Street.

“Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good goat trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

-John Lewis

Yeah - I mean, I can say an f-word like “fountain” without lowering my upper lip and (to my ears at least) it sounds almost the same if not identical, but I have to do it consciously and it feels unnatural.

Not if your lips just touch lightly in the middle and the air flows around the sides.

Maybe it’s a regional thing, but that’s also how I say that sound.

Deflation is much harder to fight than inflation. I think Japan struggled with it for a decade or more.

Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. Seriously. It’s an old joke, but it’s funny. I upvoted it, I was just playing off of it. Threaded humor is like jazz. We just have to play off of each other.

I’m afraid I can only give half marks for this one because that’s technically a molecular biology joke, not a chemistry joke. As a biologist, I’m very sympathetic. It’s just that DNA helicase isn’t going to be covered in the coursework of chemistry, much less in a freshman chemistry book.

On the other hand, a tasteful pun about bondage would have received full marks.

Probably not very much.

1. Unless I’m mistaken this is a Chinese company trading on the Chinese market. Unless someone was specifically looking to be in the Chinese real estate market (which was very hot about a decade ago iirc), they wouldn’t have a lot of exposure. I think the Chinese market has been in the shitter recently, so I’m not sure who’s holding them right now
2. Retirement funds (pension funds and 401k target date funds, which is where most of the money is these days I believe) skew very conservatively. They spread their money across markets (so like 5% tech, 8% utilities, 7% municipal bonds, whatever). They might have a chunk in a bucket of “foreign” markets, but even those would be spread across multiple industries. I’d be surprised if any of those funds had more than a fraction of a percent in a single company like this.
3. Target date funds get their name from the fact that they’re investing with the expectation that you’ll retire at 65, and the closer that date gets, the more conservative the investments become. People who are retiring soon will have even less exposure to this, and people who are retiring in 20 years will never know this happened.

The real question is whether there’s going to be a ripple effect but it’s not looking like that yet.

Uh-oh. They violated the EULA.

This is just the latest change in which an invention changes the nature of warfare. You saw it happen with crossbows, which allowed unskilled troops to shoot people far away, gunpowder weapons, which negated armor and castles, rifles, which removed much of the need for long lines of troops using volley fire, the machine gun, which made an infantry charge much less effective, air power, which changed the nature of naval warfare, and more than I care to list.

The problem is for the very impactful changes, you have two generations of military leadership who have learned tactics and strategy based around technologies that are becoming rapidly outmoded. WWI shocked people with the level of slaughter seen.

It’s easier to adapt to using a new weapons system than it is to figure out how to respond to it, because the uses were defined as the system was being developed and just need the actual applications to be refined and optimized, while the responders have a much larger search space.

I’ll always be the first to come down on the crappiness of the Russian military - I could go on for pages about what they do wrong - but to some extent this is something all armies are vulnerable to. Look how long it took for the US to adapt to IEDs, for example.

Did you leave Kahn and his followers out on purpose? They basically got transported. Maybe it’s an edge case, but I would consider being exiled to a planet and not being allowed to leave as a kind of incarnation.

It’s a genre called magical realism.

I never read the books, but this sounds like what they mean.

I have been more excited about this game coming out than any other one in recent memory. The first game, while not being a great technological achievement, captured the vibe of the ttrpg really well and it’s one of only a handful of games that I not only completed but did so multiple times. The haunted hotel to this day remains the scariest game component I’ve played, and I’m a regular player of horror games.

I was so disappointed when they bogged down and went into development hell. I finally wrote them off because I’ve seen that happen enough times that I figured they just would never ship.

I was excited by the news that another company was taking it over, but the game narrative changed so dramatically that it’s really turned me off. I’ll do a wait and see on it once the reviews start coming out, I suppose, but it’s not something I’m excited about anymore.

Turned out to be way more hype than loop.