FinishingDutch

It’s so silly. Those were made to be used ‘surgically’: to hit specific high value targets at extended range while minimising collateral damage. If you feel the need to use 850 of them, you’ve chosen the wrong weapon system: at that point, you should be flying B52’s over whatever you want to hit. Or turn Tehran into a glass parking lot.

Searched for ‘is Death Stranding 2 on Geforce Now’ (streaming games service).

Answer it gave ie ‘yes, absolutely’. With a link.

The link? An Nvidia post about GPU drivers that had been updated to work with the game since it just launched on PC. Basically, because there was SOME mention of the game on the Nvidia site, it just went ‘yep’ without actually understanding the question.

Basically, if I’d bought the game based on that answer, I wouldn’t be able to play it…

Well, I do imagine there’s some caveats as to the efficacy of welfare programs, but we’ll stick to this topic :D

There’s been hundreds of food programs over the decades, but there really isn’t a good way to do it. If you just sent aid to a government or group, it tends to either destabilise the local economy or empowers people you don’t want to empower, like armed groups who can just take that aid for themselves.

But if you send individual aid, there’s issues too. For example, let’s say you set up a ‘work for food’ program. Sounds great, right? But what that ends up doing is that the WFF option is more attractive than tending your own farm or doing work with future benefits. Basically, WFF pays now - a farm doesn’t.

The best way to help is to give people tools and knowledge. Teach a man to fish and all that. But when faced with kids starving now, that’s obviously a hard sell.

I work for a newspaper and actually spoke to a gentleman a couple days ago whose student group helped set up a school in Ghana 30 years ago. Kids who grew up in the literal gutter got free schooling there. And it works! The reason we spoke was because the school is now setting up a music program and they’re collecting used musical instruments. He told me that during his last visit, he met a girl who went to that school and was now graduating from university. Isn’t that amazing?

Problem is, that takes 20 years to do. And that’s a mighty difficult thing to accomplish in places that are actively in conflict like Sudan.

The article is not wrong. But the reality is, we’ve tried to help places like a Sudan a lot over the decades. I’d say we helped TOO MUCH.

We sent food aid which made them dependent on us. It didn’t incentivise them to fix their issues, it just made them reliant on outside help. Meanwhile, the population skyrocketed. There’s more mouths to feed, more famine, more conflict.

At some point, a country needs to fix whatever’s broken. And it won’t be pretty; it never is. But I don’t think interfering in an internal conflict like this will do any good to anyone. Can we as the west even reasonably figure out who the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ are in this conflict? Is there even a good or bad side to begin with?

Exactly. There’s a huge gap between ‘feeling cold’ and ‘being cold’. The human body is perfectly capable of operating for extended periods at temperatures that we deem ‘uncomfortable’. After all, our species survived to the present day, and proper clothing and central heating are relatively new inventions.

The human body itself produces a tremendous amount of heat. Go sit in a cold room with a few friends and it’ll soon get toasty.

I’ve spent a good amount of hours outdoors in cold and rainy weather. If you give in to ‘feeling cold’, the body doesn’t really learn to adapt to it. I know exactly when my body goes from ‘this feels cold’ to actually being cold and at risk of hypothermia.

“Mr President, there are aliens…”

“Yes, I know, that’s why we’re building the fence. It’s going to be fhe best, tallest fence anyone’s seen in the history of fences. And Mexico is going to pay for it!”

“… sigh…”

Same thing with the recent “””carmageddon””” game, that basically has fuck all to do with actual Carmageddon.

I guess it’s easier to get the naming rights to a beloved franchise and just hope for customers that way, instead of making an ACTUALLY GOOD GAME.

You cut them in half and count the rings.

Assume all contacts are hostile and practice good OPSEC.

Which distro would you recommend for gaming? I usually hear people like Mint for that.

God yes. Back in 1995, the web felt like a little village. You knew everyone in your particular digital neighbourhood so to speak. Lots of great forums, lots of little niche websites… nothing was really commercialised yet:

And frankly, I liked that it was a nerdy thing as well. Everyone shared at least some level of knowledge and understanding of what the web was. And we were all some level of nerd, whether it was Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, trains, flightsim, Sci-Fi or whatever niche interest you had.

We lost all that when we made the web too accessible to the general public. We should’ve kept it to ourselves.

Not exactly surprising, and certainly a broader trend than the UK. Lots of parents aren’t really parenting. There’s parents who just let kids do whatever and ‘they will tell you when they are ready’. That soft approach just doesn’t work for things like this.

There’s also plenty of parents who see school as glorified childcare, and that teaching them even basic life skills should be the school’s job, not the parents.

It’s certainly disconcerting. One would hope that parents who CHOOSE to have a child would actually want them to grow up well and properly prepared for life’s challenges. Instead, kids are more like Instagram fodder, something to be shown off but otherwise nog given much attention.

Very scary indeed.