Skua @ Skua @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

They know the young won't vote for them anyway, so they're hoping this will do something to stem the tide with the rest of the population who would not have to do the service

Existential Comics' "The Machine" feels highly relevant here

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

I'm glad that for all our differences we can all at least share some common ground in laughing at the Libertarian party

Huh, not sure what's going on there. It looks fine on my instance obviously, but it seems fine on yours and the post's in the browser at least. Then again kbin seems to be particularly janky with links in particular. Thanks for making a version everyone can see

Use the other hand to count twelves! Each time you fill up one hand, add one to the other. That way you can get all the way to 156, which is probably more than you'd ever want to count one by one anyway

I find it useful if I'm counting only specific instances of something that meet some criteria. That way my brain can focus on picking out the right things and not have to worry about keeping the current count in mind. I use the method with your thumb on each segment of your fingers though, so you can get up to twelve with one hand and 156 with both

They're only struggling because the West is arming Ukraine. The Ukrainians fought hard from day one, but they'd have been overrun and at best operating a guerilla campaign without being given heaps of equipment. Look what has happened while America stopped sending stuff over, and's while Europe was still sending stuff. Europe's arms industry is substantial, pretty much on par with the US in terms of value exported, but it's lacking things like the ability to supply an artillery war like the one going on in Ukraine. Since the US doesn't seem to be very reliable, Europe is gonna have to cover that base itself if it wants to be able to deter actions like Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Actual explanation: these squid are transparent normally, but can turn on a dark pigmentation when that is a more effective camouflage. Being transparent works quite well most of the time, but if the predator has its own light source (as several deep-sea predators do) then their transparent state becomes a problem, because it's relatively reflective compared to the water around them. In this situation, turning on the dark pigment helps them blend in with the dark water better.

Source: Zylinski and Johnsen "Mesopelagic Cephalopods Switch between Transparency and Pigmentation to Optimize Camouflage in the Deep"

One thing that changes the dynamic substantially is that we don't have the same balance of power between the two houses of the legislature. Whatever the failings of our system, and there are many, the issue where the executive can't do anything without capitulating to a house of the legislature controlled by the opposition doesn't happen outside of unusual circumstances. As such we can probably expect Labour to at least generally follow through on opposing any Conservative policies that they currently oppose.

That does leave the issue of policies that they do agree with the Conservatives on. I'm certainly not expecting the UK to become some kind of utopia under Labour. We can probably at least expect things like the relentless demonisation of trans people and asylum seekers to reduce significantly, both of which are the subjects of recently-passed Conservative legislation. Whether or not they can improve the lives of the average person outside of those groups remains to be seen; the Tories have not left them with a good economic situation to work with, and I haven't seen any solid plans for anything that seems like it operates on a sufficiently large scale to make a big difference. I hope that they'll do some measure of re-integration with the EEA, which would help a great deal, but I'm filing that under "plausible hope" rather than "likely". We almost certainly won't see Labour withdraw us from the ECHR, which the Tories look more and more likely to do with each passing day.

So... yes and no. There are reasons to be pessimistic. There are also reasons to look forward to it. It's too reductionist to see it as a binary situation.

They're American

There is, unfortunately, a lot of space between Blair and where the Tories currently are

Some instances blocked ImgBB because it was being used to spread child porn a while back

Yes, I did forget those

For normal-sized fireworks, you've just got to be at least 18 years old to buy them and not set them off between the hours of 11pm and 7am. There are much tighter restrictions for anything bigger. There's typically a lot of them set off on the 5th of November, but otherwise it's rare to see them

Well you see, the UN's logo is actually a top-down view of Earth. Apparently. Because they can't keep a conspiracy secret without leaving some clues in the open for kicks.

Soon he's gonna go grab the sword from the Motherland Calls and take to the frontlines himself

The language used seems very Abrahamic for a Hindu nationalist. Like consistently referring to a singular God usually referred to only as God. Is this some translation weirdness, or is it just normal language that's surprising me because I'm not familiar with the context? I know that a lot of denominations of Hinduism hold one of the gods as being the primary one, but even that seems like it would be a fast way to alienate other denominations

The European NATO members did continue supplying Ukraine. However, the US had previously accounted for roughly half of the total arms supplied and Europe didn't do anything extra to make up for that sudden colossal shortfall.

The UK openly said Ukraine could use British-supplied weapons on Russian territory a few weeks ago. We're much closer to the Russian heartlands and have a much less scary military than America, but Russia hasn't done shit about it