Went back and checked: Walter was 50 at the start of the series. The series spanned two years of in-universe time, and he died at 52.

Anyway, the point stands. Cooking meth is a valid shared interest for an older man and a younger man to bond over.

This is basically the plot of Breaking Bad.

I think that’s just how the US signs off on every meeting with world leaders.

Russia was always Turkey’s number one geopolitical antagonist; even in the best of times, a dangerous frenemy. Now, Turkey is probably the number one beneficiary of Putin’s botched war. Its main antagonist is defanged, maybe permanently, and it’s become a geopolitically indispensible regional power that the US and Europe desperately need to keep onside. It can dick around with stuff like hosting Putin visits, just to flaunt its own importance. Everything is coming up Erdogan.

Shutting down polluting businesses, relocating others away from where people live, and traffic congestion control are all valid approaches to air pollution control, used not only in China but around the world. Not sure why you need to put scare quotes around the word “solved”.

Chrono Trigger. It’s basically the evolutionary peak of the NES-era console RPG. Every aspect, including the story, art, game mechanics, and music, are best-in-class, with no obvious room for improvement given the technical constraints of the time.

I know this upsets a lot of people, but the ruling isn’t without justification. $450B++ in government spending should not be accomplished through a legal loophole. (Quite aside from the fact that fiscal stimulus is the last thing the economy needs right now.)

for some fucking reason

The reason is that she expected Hillary to win and the satisfaction of the first female president appointing her replacement.

It’s a great example of how these justices aren’t as wise or smart as they seem to think they are.

If it was so irrelevant, the colleges would not have fought tooth and nail to maintain it. Anyway, the prior experience of individual states that have banned affirmative action indicates that the effects are not negligible – it’s responsible for double digit shifts in racial compositions of student bodies.

Things will depend on how the universities respond; one can imagine Harvard doubling down on ever-subtler ways to tag Asians as personality-free robots undeserving of consideration.

This is a deliberately obtuse take by the Telegraph. Central banks are literally empowered to create or destroy money; the profits and losses they themselves make are accounting fictions.

Ultima Underworld

It came out before Doom, had full isometric 3D environments including looking up and down, and contained immersive sim and RPG elements. All the ingredients of a modern first person action RPG… in 1992.

There’s a saying in developmental economics. There are four kinds of economies in the world: developed, undeveloped, Japan, and Argentina.

It’s really mind-boggling how Argentina’s economic troubles never end, under socialist governments and neoliberal ones, with a pegged exchange rate and a floating one, under high global interest rates and low ones.

Taking a quick look, it seems that South Africa went for the Pfizer-BioNTech and J&J vaccines. If vaccine supply was the issue, they should have bought Indian and Chinese vaccines. Those vaccines were actually the best bang for the buck for the global South at the time: their marginally lower efficacy was more than compensated for by their far better availability. It seems like the problem for SA, ironically, is that it stuck too close to the West and did not think independently enough.

I’m just surprised Elon Musk didn’t find a way to inject himself into this story somehow, like he did with the Thai cave rescue.

This isn’t true, though; politics is in the driver’s seat, and capital is at the mercy of government. We can see this even in the US where the Biden administration is pushing decoupling/deglobalization for geopolitical and domestic reasons, to the discomfort of US-based multinationals. On the other side of the aisle, the business-friendly cosmopolitan arm of the Republican party has lost ground to the Trumpian populist wing. You see a similar story elsewhere in the world. In the case of Russia, a lot of people thought that Putin was a tool of the oligarchs, so you can change his behavior by putting pressure on the oligarchs. Surprise, it turned out that the oligarchs have to do what Putin tells them, not the other way round.

Now they get to organize dives to view the wreckage of the Titan. Twice the business!

It’s a calculated insult and a challenge.

Occam’s Razor says that Biden, a famously gaffe-prone politician, simply made a gaffe.

International commentators can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that Modi’s BJP is having so much success because Indians, on the whole, like them and think they’re doing a pretty good job.

Americans in particular tend to think that if you don’t have two equally strong parties duking it out over 50/50 nailbiter elections, it’s not democracy. But plenty of postwar and postcolonial democracies end up with dominant parties, without falling into dictatorship. In Japan, for example, the LDP has held power for something like 95% of the time since WWII, and it’s a pretty healthy democracy.

Maybe he wanted to build Deepsea Challenger II, III, and IV simultaneously, and it took longer than expected.

It’s worth mentioning the Interactive Fiction Archive, a massive catalogue of hobbyist-created text games, many based on free text game engines like TADS.