Skua

The US military is currently directly involved in fighting in Yemen and Somalia. It’s relatively small-scale, but it is happening

This is actually a Lord of the Rings shitpost and it turns out that Bree, Eriador has a thriving cheesemaking industry

If you have fact-checked it, why not just say that wherever you did that is where you got the answer from? People are right to be skeptical of “ChatGPT says so”, and if you’ve used it as the start of your research rather than as your entire research then just saying “I asked ChatGPT” is no different to “I googled it”, and nobody would much like you saying that either. How you found the information is less important than where you found it.

It’s possible it’s for other reasons, though. Black Americans are generally poorer than other Americans, and success in sports is a ticket out of poverty that is accessible to people in that position. It could also be a cultural thing; I doubt Finns are genetically predisposed to be exceptional drivers, but they are still wildly over-represented at the top level of motorsports for such a small population

I’d probably also develop a short temper about spanners too if they were being shoved in my face by tech companies as hard as chat bots are

I’m pretty sure they are only talking about windfarms that would otherwise actually be built

Honestly I don’t think that is necessary to explain this. China is seeing the same issue as western countries with birth rates way below replacement, but it hardly has any of the immigration that mitigates it for (most of) Europe and North America. It’s not easy for an economy to support an ever-increasing proportion of its population being retirees

If it was just that, surely there’d be a rebound visible on the chart after 2016 (8-year-olds and younger)? Instead it falls off even harder

Assuming 0.125%, it’s very roughly 10% of the original total every three months for the first year

“Here’s an attempt to re-write the thing you’re going to read the original of anyway” seems like a waste of time too

Even without considering privacy, why would you want it to re-write incoming texts? It’s not like those are usually unreasonably long to read

Moldova just voted for European integration despite what seems to have been extensive Russian efforts to push it the other way

You quoted me doing exactly that, why are you acting like I didn’t?

Super layman’s explanation ahead, there is a high chance of me getting something wrong here:

Very broadly, inflation can be caused by there being more money to spend than there are goods to buy with it.

If there’s €10 in the system that is available to be spent and an amount of goods that was worth €5 yesterday, the goods are probably going to be worth €10 now.

When a bank gives a loan to someone, it effectively creates new money. This doesn’t need to involve actually making new money in the sense of a mint or even a central bank. If I possess €100 of actual physical cash and I give €50 loans to five people, that’s totally fine so long as I can rely on no more than two of them actually requiring hard cash at a time before they pay me back. So now I have essentially “created” €150 more than there was before. And so long as everyone trusts that I can actually show up with €50 on demand, they can act as if they have the €50.

The central bank’s interest rate is what the central bank will pay me if I keep my €100 deposited with them. If that’s 5%, I’ll have €105 next year. As such, I will only offer loans if I expect to make more than €5 off of them once they are all repaid.

So if the interest rate is 21%, you are gonna need a hell of a business plan to be able to beat what I’d get by just leaving my money with the central bank. I am now unlikely to lend any money unless someone can persuade me that they’ll beat 21%. As such, I’m no longer loaning money out to all of those five people. Only two of them have plans that are that good. Now, there is way less money available to spend than there was in the other scenario, because two people have €50 each instead of five. If the amount of goods to buy stays constant, then by the principal from the very start of this mess there is less inflation. Buyers don’t have more money to spend, and prices remain lower.

And your solution is to give it to the guy who did the exact same thing more actively and who is promising to do it harder? Right. Sure.

Strictly speaking there aren’t term limits for the UN Secretary General. By convention it’s five years per term, two terms max. Guterres is currently three years into his second term.

Honestly though I’m not sure that him attending the BRICS thing is a bad move. Surely his job is to try to foster discussion across hostile lines? I don’t know what his actual conduct at the conference was, but I can definitely imagine that an attempt to push for peace is within plausibility

Alright, look, I appreciate the back and forth but I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere here. We do both, at the very least, agree that minimising Palestinian deaths is the goal. I’m not persuaded by your analysis of much of this, and you’re not persuaded by mine. Hopefully things go the way that whichever one of us is right wants

I bake a lot of bread, including for my coeliac stepmother, so I’ve taken to labelling the loaves gluten-free and gluten-expensive

You don’t think a Trump administration would ditch America’s position in Europe if that was what was needed to do what he wanted to do? In light of how he acted throughout 2016-2020?

We’ve already seen in the Red Sea that America is quite capable of using its naval and aerial assets without shifting the budget. They aren’t magically crushing the Houthis because yeah, of course bombarding people from offshore doesn’t make them want to fight you less, but I sure as fuck don’t want to see what America is doing to Yemen also done to Palestine on top of what’s already being done to it. Especially since Palestine is far denser with civilians.

And, of course, they absolutely could just spend more. That would not be even slightly unprecedented. The budget is currently close to the smallest as a percentage of GDP that it has been since before 2001.

I’m quite comfortable saying that the ~$4 billion a month that the US sent to Ukraine in this summer would be enough to be meaningfully harmful if redirected towards Israel

If your theory that America is currently bombing Palestine in secret is wrong, then it can actually start. The navy parked offshore can start doing bombardments, they’re not doing a lot right now. America can decide to substantially increase military spending to increase production for Israel; as a proportion of GDP, spending hasn’t changed significantly despite the war in Ukraine and what Israel is doing. Fuck it, maybe it’s boots on the ground. Wouldn’t exactly be the first American adventure in western Asia. I do not for a second think that America’s ability to blow people up is currently stretched to breaking point.