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”.

The people in charge of TNG by that point were creatively bankrupt. It would have been a fiasco.

Also, the idea just doesn’t fit Star Trek. It isn’t a comic book franchise, where fan-pleasing callbacks and crossovers are baked into the formula. In Star Trek media, callbacks and crossovers have tended to be some of the worst stories.

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.

Let’s all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.

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.

This episode was probably peak Dukat. Unfortunately, I don’t think they stuck the landing for his character arc. His descent into insane mustache twirling villainy in the last season was not very interesting. By the finale, the Dukat part was by far the weakest of the simultaneous plot threads.

To avoid paying royalties, I imagine. Hollywood accounting is craaaaazy.

Measure of a Man was groundbreaking but feels pretty dated to watch. Back when it aired, the idea that sentient AIs should be treated as humans was far from the mainstream. Today, we’ve seen so many sympathetic robots in pop culture (including, of course, Data) that the situation is reversed: the arguments aired against Data in this episode seem shockingly bigoted.

Imagine if the plot contrived to make Riker get up in front of the court to argue for slavery – even if he’s clearly labelled as playing devil’s advocate, it feels beyond the pale.

Given TikTok’s precarious situation, it’s no surprise they’re going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.

Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It’s not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.