None of those ch’s are guttural and you skipped an h;)

6-7.

6-7.

I don’t know about the origins of this meme but I know basketball and the NBA are insanely popular in China.

Try to bear with me anyway.

The delightful thing is that it works in reverse also: ask a native English speaker to pronounce “Eichhörnchen.”

A mixture of urbanization and climate change pushes bears into human habitats. At the same time, it’s a nation of retirees with 60-somethings hiking or farming plots in bear habitats, and thus becoming fodder themselves. And at the same time still they cannot come up with good legislation and a ranger service that can regulate the population of bears by shooting them if they have to without falling fowl of the strict gun laws. It’s a clusterfuck.

That depends on when it will break out. If it’s tomorrow, China and Russia will be buddies or at the very least will be in a non-aggression pact situation. Most of Europe will side against Russia but might be more mealy mouthed towards China (even if they decide to start it by going after Taiwan and that escalates from there). The US will, as it is tradition in a world war, not enter until much later or unless attacked first. And on whose side? Depends on one person’s bowel movement on that day an no longer on treaties and commitments. One of the many crucial areas to watch will be if the US honors the security alliance with Japan.

I say it depends on when because if we give it another 25-50 years, attitudes may shift. The US could try going for a more sane leadership and affirm its NATO membership. Sentiments towards Russia may shift in Europe, especially if the US is progressing further towards Idiocracy.

Best boss I ever had.

It’s an assumption that many people will be unemployed and unemployable in other functions. So far, every big change (like the Industrial Revolution or the advent of computers in the workplace) have lead to temporary displacements, and the longer ago it happened violent side effects. But in the big picture, we have found ways to put the human resource back into the machine. Accountants were supposed to go extinct with the arrival of Microsoft Excel. But their numbers have increased because they can do more useful things with their time than doing the math. The assumption may be more fear mongering. (And it’s too early to tell if you ask me.)

So I don’t think they will kill us off just yet because it isn’t entirely clear that we’re not needed. It’s also possible that so-called AI frees up people and resources that can be channeled into what are chronically underfunded professions today, like teaching or medical care. We have a tendency to think in Matrix or 1984 terms of the future when more positive outcomes exist.

From what I read, a lot of these character choices (with the exception of Japan/Korea, they might have chosen those themselves) were made with the dual considerations of being similar sounding to the country name and the hanzi’s meaning being flattering to the people of the country. And there are plenty of country names that are entirely phonetic (e.g. 意大利 for Italy or 澳大利亚 for Australia, Mexico, etc.).

Yes and no. If you order your “gold kit” off of an ad aimed at boomers worried about losing their houses, it is probably scammy.

If you’re very rich and worried, you could stash away a bit of bullion at your home. You’ll have other things of value you could trade on the black market of total societal collapse before you’d need to tap into that resource. If you’re not very rich, a gold bar is not going to do you much good because it’s a big chunk of change tied up in one item. You’re more likely to need smaller denominations, like coins or rings, to pay for stuff in the apocalypse. Or you need to learn to smelt metal. The scam of it all is that people with a financial interest will advertize gold as the safe resource in times of high perceived crisis when the price of gold is already high or rising. It makes much more sense financially to watch the market and buy when it’s down.

Gold is also something that needs the economy to come back before you ran out of other stuff to barter with. If our apocalyptical total collapse lasts a long time, gold will not be as valuable as drinking water, food, or shelter. Smokes (incl. vape juice) and booze might be more useful for a longer time.

I’m not rich and I’d sooner go down the prepper route than buying gold.

Like some of the other commenters here, I would not be surprised if that were so. Because racism.

However, I wonder if the premise of your question is true. Are there really no stories about Mexicans in fairy tale Europe? Or Japanese at the court of King Arthur? Or would they have you justify it more than a European in Wakanda? I’m sure Hollywood would care less about these stories but does that mean no one cares? I’m not sure. And since I’m not reading a lot of Mexican or Japanese authors I can only speculate.

The allure of stories like these is the unknown factor, the exotic, the strange. Thanks to centuries of colonization of the rest of the world, Europe is not exactly unknown or considered to be an exotic place in the rest of the world. This might contribute to a cultural bias.

You want the current laws applied. I say the current laws are not good enough to get anybody convicted, no matter how rich they are. And since I’d much prefer to live in a world where I’m wrong, let’s stop arguing.

In kennels in different houses 500 miles apart.

By physically separating them until they’re all done with puberty.

As an aside, not all siblings hate each other. Or what feels like hate growing up dissipates quickly when they reach adulthood.

Americans, as a general population, don’t give a shit about Myanmar, may not know it even exists.

I would say that’s irrelevant for the crimes committed. And not just Americans would struggle to find Myanmar on a map. Or really care what’s going on there unless it’s rooting out phishing farms using abducted foreigners.

I commend your view on the matter, that when it comes to their children they will do something. That may turn out to be true. However, that’s not going to be enough to get anyone at meta convicted under the current laws. They are running under a cover of diffuse authority and supervision internally and section 230 externally. Abhorent drug pusher comments are not admissions of guilt. They have good lawyers. We need new laws, more regulation, and fines that make Wall Street worried.

If these things were clean cut, they would have been dragged to court already many times over. For messing with teenage girls for a laugh 10 years ago. For tacitly approving genocide in Myanmar. For cheating on their video views during the highly successful pivot to video. A good lawyer will get them out of this one too with but a slap on the wrist. They exist in a gray zone where they can fuck up as much as they want to without having to fear great consequences. Vote for politicians who want to regulate these companies more.

If it bursts we’ll get a lot of data centers looking for something to do. And RAM prices will come down but … What’s causing the bottle neck right now is that your average RAM factory needs a couple of years from designed to built to working. So the supply is limited right now while the demand is high. While us end users can’t use the data center gear, in a pinch they could use ours. So the bottle neck gets tighter. So if the bubble collapses, supply will increase and that will bring prices down. If it bursts about two years from now, all the hastily built RAM factories will churn out cheap RAM. But none of this is guaranteed, not the busting and not the dead cheap prices. Because the demand for RAM will not drop off a cliff, it will most likely decrease slowly. All this processing power in post-burst idle data centers will find a way to be used - with what I do not know. There will still be a higher demand for RAM compared to pre-ChatGPT times. So RAM will not flood the market, we will just return to a relative equilibrium of the market.

Shit, I had hoped reaching out to his next of kin might be a good avenue to pursue. Causally chat with your neighbours, even the fully detached ones. Awkward, I know. But the guy is bound to have pissed them off on occasion as well. At the very least you’ll know you’re not alone in this. At best they could all call and complain on occasion. Naturally.

You are sure he’s mentally handicapped, right? I’m sure your council has been austeritied to the brink of non-functinality thanks to the delight that is UK politics of the last 20 years. I wonder if there is a charity organisation in your area that sort of stepped in, out of necessity. A mental health fire service/outreach of sorts. Even if they cannot help you with your case directly, they may know of more resources to deal with a person like that, seemingly self reliant but with episodes and delusions.

There are always cases that fall through the cracks. Not mad enough to be institutionalised, not well enough to live alone. He’s also too old to go to prison really and your best case scenario is to get him admitted somewhere.

Definitely have a chat with your mother about feeding the foxes. Try to sell it to her as a test. We’re going to test for x months if fewer animal noises lead to fewer weird shit coming from our neighbour.

Get him a ten pound Christmas gift and write him a card that’s 90 percent merry this and that and best wishes for the new year. And 10 percent if it’s possible please keep the volume of anything on a loudspeaker down, thank you for your cooperation. No threats, kill him with kindness. Leave it at his door. (Log that as well and keep a picture of text on the card.)

I imagine describing the mood between you and him as tense might be a bit of an understatement. Giving him fewer reasons to fear the family of werewolves next door might cause him to be less delusional? This is a last resort strategy but builds on the kill him with kindness idea. Get his bins in, offer to mow his lawn, that sort of thing. Slowly involve your brother.

I don’t think this is right-wing specific. You could probably draw similar conclusions coming from an Islamist angle. And this so-called AI is going to be next “frontier” is not all that clear to me yet. It’s a nebulous threat at this stage that starts with a lot of “imagine if” arguments. We don’t know yet. It’s worth paying attention. But we don’t know if HitLLMer chatbots are going to cause more damage than the concentration camp simulation games that preceded them.

There is a good 15% of people who are drank the koolaid right-wing believers. I don’t think that number has changed much in the last century. The number that changes is how many of the less extreme or undecided people in the middle they can convince they’re right.

The internet is only as regulated as the least regulating country on this planet. So all it takes is a tiny island nation or a principality left over in time to break the chain. It’s also conceivable (imagine if!) that a fine, upstanding citizen like Elon Musk uses the change he found in his couch cushions to circumvent any regulatory efforts anywhere to distribute otherwise regulated content via his private satellite network. The answer cannot be “let’s limit speech more.” The answer must be “fight back with truth and facts.” If asshole ideologists use all the digital tools available to spread their bullshit, we need to fund initiatives that counter that speech with the same tools.