Skua

@Skua@kbin.social
Skua,

Seems like it was practically in Novorossiysk when it was hit anyway, which was going to be Russia's new Black Sea base until they invaded Crimea. I assume the lights visible behind the ship in the video are the city

Skua,

10% of the world is eight hundred million people, so it definitely can't all be private jets and yachts. That's the entire population of the EU and US added together. That's not to suggest that yachts or private planes should be off the hook, of course, as the previous chart does show that they're utterly awful. It just means that there's too many people included in "10% of the world" for it to be the only part

Skua,

Heads up friend, the UK also has FPTP. We've effectively got a two party system because we have the same way of voting as you do. Even where a third party actually has a seat (like the SNP in Scotland), it just becomes a two party race between them and whichever of the two big ones the third party didn't locally displace

Northern Ireland is basically the exception, as it has separate parties and its very specific history

Skua,

It's possible you heard about the Scottish or Welsh parliaments within the UK (like a state government in the US, although with somewhat more power I believe), which partially work like that. Or you've just gotten us mixed up with one of our European neighbours that does do it. Sweden and the Netherlands use a system like you described.

The UK's House of Commons, which I'll refer to as Westminster going forward, is our equivalent to the American House of Representatives. We've also got the House of Lords, which is our equivalent to the Senate, but it's unelected (largely chosen by each outgoing prime minister) and far, far less powerful than the US Senate. It can't make Westminster pass or not pass something. Anyway, Westminster is elected by first-past-the-post. 650 constituencies, each one is considered totally separately from the other, highest number of votes for a candidate in that constituency gets the seat. Whichever party has the most seats gets to try to form a government first, either with its own majority, in coalition with a minor party if it doesn't have one (happened recently with the Conservatives and the Northern Irish party the DUP), or just as a minority government if the opposition is unable to form a larger coalition.

Situations like you describe where A and B try to win the allegiance of C do happen, particularly when the Liberal Democrats were still a significant force as they typically sit somewhere between our A and B on a lot of matters. For whatever reason, smaller parties have persisted in some specific areas despite having no chance whatsoever of winning nationwide. The Northern Isles of Scotland are committed Liberal Democrat voters, for example, even though they've not been anywhere near winning nationally for a century. The C is now a pro-Scottish-independence party that is absolutely never going to agree on much with A, and which B is going to be hesitant to work with despite a number of similar policies because B doesn't want Scotland to leave either, so A and B are looking at the really small parties to work with when they need to.

The Scottish and Welsh parliaments use a mixed system. Two thirds of the seats are appointed with FPTP, but everyone makes two votes. Your first vote is for your constituency just like in Westminster or the US HoR, but you also have a second vote for your region, a collection of about eight constituencies which also gets multiple seats. The regional seats are weighted so that parties that parties that are proportionately overrepresented get less of them, so the regions loosely counteract the imbalances of the first round. In Scotland, for example, the SNP typically wins a lot of seats in both Scottish and British elections. In the British ones this results in the SNP having a huge majority of Scotland's seats (upwards of 90% some years) while only getting a little around 50% of Scotland's votes. In Scottish parliament elections, they other parties that lost to the SNP in the first round get boosted in the regional round and it comes a lot closer to being proportional, resulting in an SNP-Greens coalition government.

Again, Northern Ireland is entirely its own thing, and this comment is already getting very long

Skua,

Yes, although it's four Texases instead of one. Sea ice has an albedo about ten times that of sea water, so instead of about half the the light being reflected over this area we now have about a twentieth.

Skua,

The Russian occupation in Moldova is, as I understand it, limited to the area between the Dnister and the Moldova-Ukraine border. About a quarter of the length of the Moldova-Ukraine border, at the northwest end, is directly on the Dnister river instead of being slightly northeast of the river. This area is fully controlled by Moldova and Ukraine on the south and north banks respectively, no Russian Transnistria between them. The towns mentioned in the article as the site for the bridge (Yampil, Ukraine and Cosauti, Moldova) are on this part of the border

[Elon Musk] Flashing X sign - yet another example of a billionaire flouting the rules and doing whatever he wants (imgur.com)

Musk put a giant X sign on top of the building and it is incredibly brightly flashing, even nights. Hope it gets down, this is stupid. Imagine someone gets a seizure of it or crashes car because it blinded the person.

Skua,

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5ddGvleVe0A

See after the first cut, maybe 10 seconds in. It actually is flashing

Skua,

Funnily enough, "Antarctica" is literally "not bear land". "Arktos" is an old Greek word for bear. The constellation Ursa Major (itself meaning "great bear" in Latin) is in the northern part of the sky, so the Greeks named the north after it, the Arctic. Some Greek philosophers theorised that the north pole must have a counterpart in the south, and since the land around the north pole was the Arctic they named it the Anti-Arctic, or Antarctic. How correct they accidentally were would not be discovered for about 2,000 years.

Skua,

If you end up enjoying the Witness I wholeheartedly recommend the parody of it, the Looker. It's the kind of parody that can only have been made by someone who really loved the original, because it has genuinely good and clever versions of the mechanics, and it's also free

Skua,

Well each to their own, of course! I personally thought that the Looker managed to really effectively capture that same way of wordlessly teaching mechanics and encouraging you to push at the boundaries of those mechanics, which is what made the Witness great for me. It does poke a lot of fun at things in the Witness like the slow animations and the philosophical audiologs, but much of that poking fun only makes sense if you honestly engaged with at least a good chunk of the original stuff in the Witness in the first place. There's definitely not as much to the Looker as there is to the Witness, but, well, it's a parody. That's to be expected. I see it as a fun and more light-hearted expansion to be played afterwards, not a competitor or replacement.

Skua, (edited )

I'm ten minutes in and he has done literally nothing but read out Russia's press releases. Exactly what is left-leaning about this guy who is spreading the conspiracy that LGBT+ people are grooming kids and that they should therefore cease to be a movement and who is also on Alex Jones' and Nick Fuentes' cozy.tv?

Russia is a European colonial power that still has most of its empire. That this guy is so happy to frame Russia as anti-colonialist speaks volumes about his motivations

Skua,

I have to agree with all of these, although I've not played Stellaris so can't comment on that one. I think EU4 and HOI4 particularly become difficult thanks to the sheer number of mechanics added by DLC. I've been playing EU with a couple of friends recently and it took us until the mid 1700s to learn about the slacken recruitment standards mechanics (we're on 1.33, so before it got nerfed in 1.34 and changed completely in 1.35). To us it just seemed like the AI had unlimited manpower.

I think one of the important things about V2 is actually just knowing what you can ignore. Like you really don't need to look at the prices of individual goods 98% of the time unless you're doing some serious power gaming. It's okay to let your capitalists build crappy factories that will go bankrupt so long as it's not you paying for it.

Skua, (edited )

cant buy your resources in both places that sell uranium: russia and niger.

The world's two biggest uranium producers are Canada and Australia Close allies Canada and Australia are two of the world's biggest producers, not to mention many other countries like Namibia (see exchange with schroedingershat below)

i mean last summer they couldnt run their nuclear reactors because of the heat and no water. what did the french so? NOTHING. as always.

I don't understand what this has to do with Niger at all. What could France have possibly done in Niger that would have made the summer in France less hot?

France is taking a position in alignment with the African Union and ECOWAS here. Are you really saying that France should be financially supporting a military coup?

Skua,

I apologise, I was looking at reserves and not producers (although Kazakhstan looks to be ahead of Canada on that entry too, with Australia still easily having the largest reserves). I didn't say Niger wasn't a large supplier of it, just that there's more to the market than Niger and Russia as implied in the comment I replied to.

I'm not ultra pro-nuke either, it's just a tool that we should be using to cut down on carbon emissions but which has its significant drawbacks like very costly and expensive set up.

The point stands that France hasn't cut itself off from world uranium supplies, as some of the world's biggest producers (Australia, Canada) are close allies and it still has a relationship sufficient for buying from several other top producers

Skua,

This insistence that we believe the 20 year old lie that all uranium comes from Cigar Lake and Ranger is infantile and insulting.

I haven't said that at all, let alone insisted upon it. I said that the original comment's assertion that the only two places that sell uranium are Russia and Niger is wrong. I stuck with Australia and Canada as examples because they're well-known close allies of France and among the world's largest producers, not because I think they're the only sources. Stop putting words in my mouth, please.

Skua,

This is that same lie and now you are doubling down on it.

I do wish you'd have a conversation with me and not with whatever you've decided to be angry about.

The scale of France's uranium usage vs Australia and Canada's production is a fair refutation to what I said. It's also a refutation to Niger and Russia being the only markets to buy from as was said in the comment I originally brought up Canada and Australia to respond to, and they produce more than Niger and Russia. As you've brought up, Central Asia is the part making the difference here, and that requires looking in to who controls the mines in those countries. It looks like France is still buying uranium from Russian-controlled sources in Kazakhstan particularly.

None of what I said requires me to think that nuclear power is the magic bullet to solve all problems or that Canada and Australia are the only uranium producers in the world, and nor did I ever intend to imply either of those things. You just stuck them in between the lines of my comments somewhere.

Skua,

Considering what Poland's tank fleet is like, I don't think the rest of NATO would even have time to show up before Prigozhin got run over by a Leopard

Skua,

Apparently the name "Bridgestone" is just the founder's surname translated in to English, although the order of the words "bridge" and "stone" were reversed because he liked the sound better

Skua,

Hey that's not true! We've actually shot down a few spacecraft. Of course, they were all satellites launched from Earth by humans, but it's technically spacecraft being shot down!

Skua,

This feels a lot like Randall played some Outer Wilds

Skua,

This one from Al-Jazeera seems a little better

Skua,

Shout out to that time in 1998 when the world-leading astrophysicists at CSIRO solved the 17-year-old mystery of the signals they were picking up and couldn't explain. Turns out they were caused by the office microwave whenever it was opened before it was finished.

Skua,

aha, here's one I downloaded for one job that I do not remember and which I have to assume would be absolutely horrendous for dyslexic people

Skua,

They didn't defederate the instance for the content alone, but specifically for being on board with intentionally making content seem like CSAM. That's a long, long step beyond the subject of an image just looking less than 18.

Skua,

Ahh, I see what you're getting at. Thanks for clarifying

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