For certain periods of time, not losing to inflation is a major win. The more people think that we're headed into such a period, the more they reach for gold.
> its because you are measuring stable Gold in volatile fiat
You're defining gold to be stable, and fiat to be volatile. Well, fiat is volatile, but that doesn't make gold stable.
Gold (measured in dollars) nearly doubled over the last year. Does that mean that the dollar is worth only half what it was a year ago? No, it doesn't. (There's been some inflation, but not nearly 100%.)
Gold is down 10% since January 28th. Does that mean that the dollar is worth 10% more than it was on January 28th? No, it doesn't.
They were in international waters. This was literally a war crime according to international law. Even the killing of the Supreme leader was against international law.
His daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren were civilians.
Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime.
Even if they were not targeted directly, an attack is illegal if:
it fails to minimize civilian harm, or
the civilian casualties are disproportionate to the military advantage
I don't believe you can minimize civilian damage more than that, if a target is always among civilians.
You can only push so much, like the pager attack was probably the most minimizing one, but obviously and unfortunately civilians still got caught.
For the international law part, interesting debate i think, where the state acts in self-defense if it has sustained an “armed attack” by its adversary;. Obviously this is very broad, but i think you can easily argue the last 40 year of fire exchanges as a continued armed attack.
Half the world chants that. Currently, probably more. Americans have managed even to alienate the ass-kissing politicians from europe. Even in US, the people are protesting against the current president, and no wonder... trump wants 200 billion more while people can't afford healthcare and education and some cities look like cities from apocalypse movies, with homeless camps everywhere.
Currently lot if people dislike/distrust america. Which is understandable and rational thing to do. Chanting “deato xyz” is very irrational and unproductive and just bad.
if I was disliked and distrusted by a lot of people I’d think long and hard about why that is vs. complaining about how that dislike/distrust is communicated
But the US, for all its militarism, and all its military adventures, has not used the draft since Vietnam.
So I would say that Germany sees the need to be in a position where it can respond quickly if they need it. Well, given current events in their neighborhood, I can see their point. In fact, I would say that they are probably at least three years late in doing this.
I mean, short term it's obvious what will happen. Europe's peace at all costs (or should I say: at NO cost) will fail and Russia will attack in a matter of years. Some states will be forced to defend and a number of European countries will respond as a coalition. Many other European states will refuse to help, a few very publicly. And obviously this coalition will either beat Russia back or at the very least stop Russia advancing much at all. So far the obvious part of the next few years.
Let's start with an easy one: Will Germany be ready (war is more than cheap bodies, after all, equipment, plans, ...)? No, they won't. They've never been ready before.
Will the US help? That was a given even just 1 year ago, but now is strongly in doubt.
What will Germany's reaction be to the European states that just don't help?
What will happen to world trade? The question is who will save it, because the historical answer was of course US.
I am a US citizen and I try to see the world as it is.
>Will the US help? That was a given even just 1 year ago, but now is strongly in doubt. With the current commander in chief, the US will do nothing except talk a lot of nonsense contradicting itself daily.
>What will happen to world trade?. World trade as we know it is done. National security interests will force strategic industries to be on-shored. New trade deals will only be made with a short list of trustworthy allies.
If Russia does attack, the US will take 1+ years to ramp up and we will take a long time before we reach Europe in large numbers. The rapid reaction forces we have are not prepared for the new way of fighting we see in Ukraine.
I don't know about that. When a human realizes that what they're saying is nonsense and decides to shut up, we might call that "self awareness". I'm not sure that it's the same as we mean by "self awareness" when we talk about consciousness, but it seems likely to be at least a part of it.
So if you can make an AI at least partly self aware (in the consciousness sense) by having it run an anomaly detector on its own output, that seems to me to be a fairly big deal. Not "agency", I suspect not even all the way to "self aware", but still a big step.
Big theoretically, and also big practically. If you can make an LLM shut up rather than hallucinate, that's a big step up in usability. "I don't know" is far more useful than confident errors. (At least silence doesn't have negative value.)
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