Always 50/50 because two party system, FPTP and electoral college.

I would also add that isn’t empty talk like “Well he said it once, non biggie”. That statement by POTUS itself drove the national policy other countries. When POTUS says “other nations you are with us or are our enemies”, that matters.

That is a signal the reverberates around with “do we dare to anger USA on this one”. The Afghan war partisipants list is long and contains some not so obvious participants often doing rather small token participations. Which I think is exactly “Well we have to show we are with USA”.

For example here in Finland in the after action report of Finnish participation in Afghanistan tells the reason wasn’t building peace, it wasn’t even combat experience. It was “coalition and alliance building” aka showing USA “we are with them”.

In the after action study one of the interviewed decision makers literally directly quoted:

Yhdysvallat sanoi 9/11 jälkeen: olette joko meidän kanssa tai meitä vastaan.”

United States said after 9/11: You are either with us or against us.

Right above explaining how it was 20 year long very unpopular operation caused losses and achieved nothing in Afghanistan, but hey the Finnish NATO application will go through with flying colors.

The whole time the media blitz was about “Helping and building peace in Afghanistan”. When in reality we went in because USA publicly extorted pretty all of west to show colors.

This isn’t only in Finland in other European after action reports have shown similar “We went in, because Bush publicly demanded show of loyalty”.

Since he was an idiot and gave a no reservations or conditions bid for the company. At way overpriced at that. The existing biard and owners must have been fainting from shock and glee.

No one sane ever gives no reservations and conditions bid. That is insanely stupid thing to do.

Twitter didn’t make Elon buy Twitter. Elon did that to himself. Under normal bid, absolutely he could back out by arguing one of the conditions his lawyers would have put in.

Either his lawyers were highly incompetent, he didn’t use them or he ignored their advice that it would be highly unusual and monumentally stupid to issue such bid while waiving ones right to have terms and conditions included. Well negotiate in terms and conditions. Since obviously otherside might refuse to accept the buying contract, if they don’t like the terms and conditions.

In this case all the judge did was looked at the bid contract and went “Mister Musk, you signed bid to buy with no terms and conditions. So you have to honor the bid.”

Like the one recent CEO saying the quiet part aloud by saying government should promote higher unemployment, since in the high employment environment employees aren’t desperate and have more demands costing him money. That employees arent feeling enough pain and despair in economy.

Well PESCO did get created. Denmark dropped their opt out from CSDP. Stuff like this moves slowly, specially upon there not being single hegemonic leader saying “We do this” and everyone else answering “Yes boss”. EU is herding catch and it makes everything move slowly.

However I would note… France has rule about no crosses or cross wearing in schools. So it isn’t like Islam is being singled out. Well this specific rule is about them, but France has very wide rule of “no religious clothing, items or symbols” in school and they don’t much pick sides. Jewish kids… No kippas, Protestants and Catholics, no crosses, Muslims, no head scrafs, no face veils, no religious robes. Sikhs, no turbans.

So it isn’t xenophobic, since the local majority religion is also under rules of “no religious symbols wearing”.

What one can say is, that it is highly anti-religious. However that isn’t same thing as xenophobic or say specifically antisemitic or islamophobic. Islamophobic would be “Muslim girls aren’t allowed to wear scarfs, but it’s okay for catholic girls to wear crosses”.

French government “doesn’t like” the local traditional majority religion either.

One absolutely can argue about “is it too much restriction of religious liberty in general”, however one can’t argue “well but this is about jews or muslims”. It isn’t. This specific rule about abayas is mostly a technocratic decision based on wider political decision of “we have principle of no religious displays in school”. It was decided “oh yeah, we missed this one religious clothing wearing/display. Add it to the long list of specified banned religious displays of all kinds”.

I’m sure, if member of the church of the flying spaghetti monster tried to walk to French school with colander on their head, the courts would rule "no colander hats either, that is religious display also. You can go join the Jewish and Sikhs on the club house of “France banned our religious hat” club.

Depends how deep the lines are. They have breached the first line at some points. However as per ukrainians, after the first line is the second line and so on. Russia knows how to make deep defences and anywhere, where they lose one line, they will adjust and start added more lines to the rear to compensate for the lost line. First line lost, second line is now first line, third line is second and so on and add the new Nth line, since the old Nth is now Nth-1 line.

It will be a slow slug and battering ram fest, unless Russian army morale breaks/ supplies exhaust and they run.

I get the “but different states sales taxes thing”, for national advert. However even then, just make them present example price

Get the new Moborola Bazer, only 549 dollars*
* price example for Buffalo new York, including taxes and fees

Since if one is going with “well the final price you pay might not be what was advertised”, make it be more representative and real. Yeah the final price might be different sometimes even lower depending on your local taxes compared to the example prices calculation locations taxes.

Local advertising or on the shelf prices? There is no excuse, you are selling in that location. You know what the taxes and fees are just add them in. Any rare special discount and discrepancy cases, well the people eligible for those know to expect the difference.

You know a stale mate is a possible state of war. One side doesn’t always have to be winning and the other losing.

Well mostly the flaw is people assigning the test abilities it was never intended. Like testing intelligence. Turing outright as first thing in the paper presenting “imitation game” noted moving away from testing intelligence, since he didn’t know to do that. Even on the realm of “testing intelligent kind of behavior” well more like human like behavior and human being here proxy for intelligent, it was mostly an academic research idea. Not a concrete test meant to be some milestone.

If the meaning of the words ‘machine’ and ‘think’ are to be found by examining how they are commonly useit is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, ‘Can machines think?’ is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

Turing wanted a way to step away from stuff like “thinking” and “intelligence” directly and then proposed “imitation game” mostly to the rest of the academia as way to develop computer systemics more towards “intelligent behavior”. It was mostly like “hey we need some goal to have as a goal to have something to move towards with these intelligence things. This isn’t intelligence, but it might be usefull goal or tool for development work”. Since without some goal/project/aim to have project don’t advance. So it was “how about we try to develop a thing, that can beat this imitation game. Wouldn’t that be good stepping stone. Then we can move to the actual serious stuff. Just an idea”.

However since this academic “thinking out aloud spitballing ideas” was uttered by the Alan Turing, it became the Turing Test and everyone started taking it way too seriously. Specially outside academia. Who yes did play the imitation game with their programs as it was intended as research and development tool.

exemplified by for example this little exerpt of “not trying to do anything too complete and ground breaking here”:

In any case there is no intention to investigate here the theory of the game, and it will be assumed that the best strategy is to try to provide answers that would naturally be given by a man

It is pretty literally “I had a thought”. Turin makes no claims of machine beating the game having any significance other than “machine beat this game I came up with, neat”. There is no argument of if machine beats imitation game, then X or then it means Y is reached.

Rest of the paper is actually about objections to the core idea of “it could ever be possible for machine to think” and even as such said imitation game is kinda lead in or introduction to Turing’s treatise various objections of various “it would be impossible for machine to think” arguments. Starting with theological argument of “only human soul can think. Hence no animal or machine can think.” … since it was 1950’s.

Yeah. Unless he has evidence… Yeah, don’t go around spewing that kind of stuff. How about going with “looks like middle-aged man having midlife crisis and currently in the “gym rat” phase of it”… little dig in there, but you know more realistic. Yeah he is little funny with the shirtless sports posing, so throw some shade over it. However it in no way implies cheating on his wife. Don’t know if he is, don’t know if he isn’t, but getting the middle life crisis hobby of “jiu-jitsu” doesn’t tell anything about that.

As said I think him getting in shape, sports and posing is way more about just bulk standard mid-life crisis. “Oh I’m getting little old. When did that midsection and belly got so wide. I should start a sports hobby to get in shape and avoid cardiovascular disease”. Some people get a motorbike to catch the lost youth. Others become gym rats/sports nuts to try to catch back their lost youth body.

Again which really wouldn’t be that interesting except billionaire and also him apparently getting so hooked on it, that he started competing in tournaments.

Doesn’t also remove anything from his horrible record of business ethics. He has absolutely horrible business ethics as most of these silicon valley billionaires in the advertising/social media sphere. Comes with the territory. One doesn’t start a targeted advertising social media business, if one values the ethics of peoples right to privacy.

Well that is a good way for a diplomat to lose their job. Publicly criticizing the head diplomat of the country. Whether or not the criticism is valid is beside the point. One doesn’t go around publicly criticizing the head of state. Now absolutely behind closed doors tell him You should be little more careful, that last public statement might not have been in the best possible tone.

Like it is kinda funny how he got sacked criticizing head of state for what might be interpreted as alliance disunity. While showing national disunity by publicly criticizing his own head of state. Yeah. That gets you fired.

traditional grocery stores won’t put in any effort to provide it

At least where I live here in Finland, traditional retail chains are very much in the shopping delivery business. Exactly including using their vast retail stores network as their base of deliveries. However again their stores are actual stores.

The dark stores would have had choices. For example don’t run a purely dark store. Run it as combined delivery base and retail store. The walk in retail might be minority of the business, but then they could say “no, we also have walk in customers. We aren’t a dark store, the city mayor is free to walk in and come buy a bottle of cola from us.”

Well they didn’t ban the business model. They just ruled that a warehouse can’t be classed as a store. Which is atleast to me fair sounding. Since should customer not be able to walk into that establishment and buy stuff, it isn’t a store. It is delivery warehouse. Hence it shouldn’t be allowed on zonings and placings only meant for stores. You shouldn’t run commercial warehouse out of retail zoning. Since commercial warehousing is not a retail business. Retail implies customers are directly retail consumers, not other business partners.

Normal store could still partner with a delivery company. Issue is the delivery companies don’t want to partner with normal stores, since then the store wants their cut. They want to directly rent a space and turn it into warehouse. Since that costs less per item, than paying to partner with a store. You could still operate the store as supply point. Just can’t be just a delivery point.

It was companies own decision “we don’t think this makes sense, if we can’t pinch the last penny by running our own dark store. instead of say partnering with local retail chain”.

Nah. He is also known for instant turns, when he thinks he has bargained enough or when it happens to suit the image he wants to present.

For example say he decided “Vilnius is the moment I stop bargaining, but only at last minute. Lets see what concessions I can get out of them until then” or so on.

It is exactly on brand for Erdogan to suddenly turn his position and go “what problem, there is no problem. What I said last week there was a problem… no no no, I Erdogan The First have solved problem quickly in only few days. Yes we made a deal, I negotiated amazing deal, deal solves the problem. There is No problem anumore. It’s solved.”

What happened to solve the problem? Nothing, Erdogan just stopped insisting there was a problem in first place and well some flowery language on top to make it look like it was deal to end the problem and not a climb down to end the problem.

Nah. Sweden doesn’t seem to have given any firm commitments about security beyond “We work on it together”, which can mean exactly as little or as much it fancies Sweden after they are in NATO.

To me this is simply “Erdogan has decided he has seen this bargaining to completion and it would look really bad, if this thing wasn’t resolved by Vilnius. Pressure started to mount with This is starting to be embarrassing Recep from rest of NATO” and he simply called it good.

Nothing needs to have been changed on this exact moment, He just decided he has tried long enough and has exhausted the concessions and no point dragging it on. Instead of benefit, it started to be more hindrance in his calculation to keep this going.

He can now tan in the limelight in Vilnius as the leader who saved the situation at last minute. Mind you the problem was of his own creation, but hey those are the best kind of problems. You have exact control and can “solve the problem” at exactly the most suitable last minute moment. Actual problems are harder for “last minute saviour” credibility collection. You might actually fail to solve the problem and thats not good.

Yeah, but the part I don’t get is Ukraine choosing to litter it’s country side and eastern cities with un-exploded submunitions. It will be massive and nasty clean up operation after wards. everyone time cluster munitions have been used anywhere it leads to both friendly fire and civilian casualties from lingering UXO submunitions.

Like I absolutely get why USA is offering, what I don’t get is Ukraine accepting instead of demanding different kind of munitions. Hopefully they stuck them in “last resort reserve, if all else runs out” and then after war they just blow them up in big pile in some artillery range.

Teflon mark is just straight up quitting? Didn’t expect that one to happen.

Yeah. Hearing about to whole feinstein thing, that is pretty disqusting levels of political machining. Since anymore it isn’t even about Feinstein. Since as i understand it, she is way too out of it to even be considered for whether she retires herself or not. She is not of sound enough mind and body. Looking at couple previous interviews, she was way out of it. Like for example not remembering she had been absent for months. Insisting she had been voting all the time and so on. Which could be her lying, but more likely literally she has dementia son bad, that last thing she remembers clearly enough is “I was at senate voting, like I have been for decades” and missing the whole “you have been on deaths door for couple months and absent from Congress”. Her short term memory is shot and so on.

What she can blamed for is for not retiring way before this already, when her health started to go down in the first place. Then she was of sound mind, could have seen what was coming and retired in peace.

Issue isn’t Russia reaping them. It never is with cluster munitions. In fact given the battle field is Ukraine, it will be Ukrainian civilians repair the harvest on this. Problem isn’t “ohhhh cluster munitions are nasty to enemy soldiers”. No those are free target, we rip them, tear them. Huge 155 mm shrapnel HE shell will tear flesh just as nastily as a cluster sub munitions, if not worse even.

The issue is submunitions in effect ending up being anti-personnel mines, since not all of the submunitions detonate properly and then end up teetering on their fuse and then some civilian stumbles upon them later, knocks it and boom, there goes civilians hand/leg/life.

All munitions have a fault percent of not detonating (fuses fail, the safety self-destructs fail). Issue is cluster sub munitions are small and there is lot of them.

It is pretty obvious should there be 155 mm dud HE shell sticking from the field soil. sub munitions, not so much. It’s a small hand grenade sized thing.