Just pointing out that what Ukraine does not attack is civilians or in your nomeclature “civilian objects”, but unlike what might be understood from the post I was responding to (because it used “civilian” rather than “civilians”), it does attack civilian infrastructure (when it is a “military objective”, as you pointed out).

Personally I think the attacks on Russian refineries should already been happenning for a long time and I find it’s a disgrace the limitations most European countries and the US placed on Ukranian use of the weapons they provided inside Russia. Strategically it’s ridiculous that Ukraine has had to suffer its infrastructure and its Economy being destroyed whilst Russia needed not at all worry about having it’s productive and economic infrastructure degraded: since Putin doesn’t seem to care at all about human lives, until Ukraine finally made their own weapons with range enough to hit Russian Economic Targets and started targetting Russian refineries, this invasion of his had been almost risk-free.

Well they targetted civilian targets (the refineries) but have not targetted civilians (i.e. people).

I find it hilarious that a country with a voting system like the US is considered by these guys a “liberal democracy”.

Nowadays even the liberal part is under threat (*cough* criminalization of abortion *cough*) whilst the “democracy” part has always been smoke and mirrors, being mathematically rigged for power duopoly.

Then again, as somebody else pointed out, these guys consider Appartheid Israel a liberal democracy, so they’re consistently off.

Never, ever pre-order.

The only “advantage” is that you can play the game a few hours, maybe a day earlier, which makes no difference whatsoever in terms of the fun you get from the game, and to get that “benefit” you run a huge risk of not only wasting your money but also of getting to experience the actual feeling of having been scammed.

I can understand that most people lack the impulse control to wait 6 months or more (by then getting it cheaper and with most bugs fixed) and just “have to have it right now”, but in the digital download era pre-ordering might at best get the game in your hands a few hours earlier than just buying it when it comes out.

Guess we shall now see if human stupidity really is infinite…

Biden’s symbolic help was only ever meant to shore up support for himself in the US Elections whilst not really stopping Israel’s execution of their Final Solution.

Zionism is just a variant of Nazism and Biden has said he’s a Zionist.

One of the best mathematical stories from ancient times, IMHO,

By that definition you can turn any linear function a * x + b, “exponential” by making it e^ln(a*x +b) even though it’s actually linear (you can do it to anything, including sin() or even ln() itself, which would make per that definition the inverse of exponential “exponential”).

Essentially you’re just doing f(f^-1(g(x))) and then saying “f(m) is e^m so if I make m = ln(g(x)) then g(x) is exponential”

Also the correct formula in your example would be e^(ln(2)*X/3) since the original formula if X denotes months is 2^X/3

Good point and well spotted!

PS: Though it’s not actually called exponential (as it isn’t e^{nr-3-month-periods} but rather 2^{nr-3-month-periods} ) but has a different name which I can’t recall anymore.

PPS: Found it - it’s a “geometric progression”.

Neatly showing why when all you have is two data points you can’t just assume the best fit function for extrapolation is a linear one.

Mind you, a surprisingly large number of political comments is anchored in exactly that logic.

But, but, but …

Then the road would be much more narrow and drivers would find it harder to fit their ever larger penile-compensation vehicles in it, not to mention their egos!

I lived in London during a period when commuting by bicycle was becoming more popular and you can really notice that as drivers get more accustomed to cyclists it becomes safer to cycle (even when the actual infrastructure for it is a bit of a joke, such as all the “Boris cycling lanes” beyond zone 2 in London which were nothing more than tiny signs every 500m on the side of otherwise unchanged roads with a white on blue drawing of a bicyle) which in turn pools in more normal people to cycle (rather than the more hard-core, dressed like they’re in the Tour de France, crowd).

Granted, it’s a lot more effective with a real push for it as seems to have been done here, my point is that in my experience there is a networking effect of having more cyclists pulling in more people to cycle, bot directly (they see others do it and consider doing it themselves) and indirectly such as by cycling becoming more safe the more drivers get used to sharing the road with cyclists.

Yeah, but then were would the drivers park?

Why doesn’t anybody think of the poor drivers???! /s

Why not a normal bike then?

I’ve lived and worked in several large european cities, commuting in most of them by bicyle, and the most I ever spent on a commuting bicyle was €250 and generally it was more like €100 because I usually bought them used.

Finding a cheap bicycle was definitelly easier in The Netherlands, but I also got some nice cheap second-hand ones in London and Berlin.

Absolutelly, those things get stollen (which is why you get a lock, but even then, all it takes is a mistake and it’s likelly you’ll never see that bicycle again), which is why you don’t pony up for a brand new carbon fibre bicycle for commuting unless you’re planning on making a big involuntary charitable donation to a random bicycle thief.

I’m not even against you advice to walk - were I am it’s quite dangerous to cycle (here in Portugal drivers are some of the worst in Europe) plus I live in a small city nowadays, so unlike most people here I refuse to buy a car and mainly walk - it’s just that human-powered cycling is a more natural alternative to E-Bikes than walking in places were drivers aren’t quite as bad.

Credit cards are electronic payments, hence why they had magstrips and later smartchips. Also how long ago did they replace most cash transactions depends on the country - in plenty of even Western nations card payments were pretty rare even it the 90s.

Thwt said your point that fhe transation to said “modern” economy has been going on for longer than merely “since the 90s” does make sense.

I’m just wondering what an older sexy woman was doing with another woman in her jaws…

But, hey, who am I to judge, right?!

Well, the official Inflation is used in the calculation of the official GDP were it acts as a deflator (i.e. the more the inflation the less the GDP) to correct the Nominal GDP (which is in present day currency terms) to make the Real GDP (which is supposedly free of Inflation and hence comparable between years) aka the Official GDP.

If the official Inflation understates the real Inflation, what happens is that the increase is the Nominal GDP that comes merelly from inflation rather than from any actual growth in wealth, is not fully offset when the Real/Official GDP is calculated, so the resulting “real” GDP number is bigger than reality and proud government politicians can come out, compare it to last years’s GDP (which it should’ve been comparable with, if both were done properly) and claim that it was their steering of the Economy that made such a difference to last year’s GDP, i.e such high GDP Growth.

Hence the is massive political pressure to understate Inflation, i.e. to lie, so that ultimatelly larger GDP Growth figures can be posted and boasted about.

Digital transfers are now the dominat way for money to be exchanged in trades, replacing mainly cash, i.e. the coins and currency that can only be made by the Mint.

The less people use cash to pay, the less the cash withdrawls from the banks, the less the banks need to procure cash - in a world world were payments are almost all done via payment orders, typically digital, the banks only need to procure cash for periodic settlement of the differences in payments between them: for example, if person 1 does an electronic transfer of $1000 from their account in bank A to person 2’s account in bank B and person 3 does an electronic transfer of $900 from his account in bank B to person 4’s account in bank A, all that bank A has to procure to settle the difference is $100 and bank B nothing at all, even though $1900 changed hands between various otherwise unrelated parties. If they were cash transfers, bank A would have to get $1000 in notes and coins from the mint (to give to person 1) and bank B would have to get $900 (to give to person 3). Now imagine this times hundreds of thousands fold of transactions a day and you can see how much money can change hands without the banks having to get the actual coins and notes (or treasuries and so on: the stuff they can’t produce) that ultimatelly would come from the government.

This is also possible with cheques, but it was the widespread use of electronic transfers, namelly electronic payment methods, that really reduced the need for banks to procure actual money tokens that they can’t legally make themselves, such as cash.

It wasn’t the invention of electronic transfers that made this happen (as I said, cheques also enable a similar thing), it was its widespread use - replacing most cash transactions out there - that made this mechanism become dominant over the traditional one were banks needed to get cash in as deposits so that they could give cash out as withdrawals that then were used by people and businesses for payments and came back on the other side as deposits.

Without such a high need to provide cash to their customers, banks can have a much higher percentage of IOUs (in the form of mere numbers in computers) to cash than before only requiring cash (and ither such forms of money such a treasury certificates) for the periodic settlement of the pending differences between banks of inflows minus outflows, ad per my example above.

There’s a lot more to it than just that (such as, how do banks settle interbank transfers or even things like how the end of the gold standard paved the way for it) but I didn’t want to complicate the explanation with too much details, though the main difference is the widespread use of digital transfers, especially by consumers which actually dates back a bit further than the 90s but definitelly not all the way to the 50s.

If you really want to know it in depth, I recommend you read the paper I pointed which is here. (By the way, I got the name slightly wrong: it’s “Money creation in the modern economy”)

There will also be an intensification of the slightly stern looking, along with a tiny reduction of backstage winking and nodding.