Ran

Sorry about that. We have had no functional mail for that time, and only finally solved the problem! Welcome.

They premiered season 2 in June, and the screening he referred to was episode 7. So, I would not leap to conclusions.

It's not quibbling. If they aren't producing sculptures, they aren't actually infringing on his work. For that matter, I am doubtful the later examples of "person next to wooden statue" are in fact based on his work rather than just generic prompts, since he's hardly the only artist in the world who uses a chainshaw to carve sculptures, or even sculptures of animals (there was a big woodshop that specialized in this in Monterey, at least when I was a kid, and you could watch them carve bears, dogs, owls, and other critters out of big logs.) The only thing I'd consider infringing was the image that someone flipped and then lightly generated an image from for some obscure reason, because it's clear they just took the image. But his work is not photography. It is sculpture. ETA: Via ChatGPT, and a simple prompt. No reference to that artist is needed. Also, I looked at the segment again, and they give the date for his original photo and when the lightly AIed flipped version showed up in that same group, and it's October... but the fully generated AI image of the guy squatting next to the sculpture is from mid-September? Seems to support the idea that those other images were random generations. (Also, it's really weird that both the original image and the lightly doctored AI version have the exact same views, likes, and comments... Think someone on the show got sloppy.)

Is that the sculptor? Seems like there's no infringment because generated images of a sculptor with a sculpted dog are not the same thing as what his art entails, which is producing sculptures, not photos of sculptures. There's definitely fraudulent claims in the posts where people claim to have made the carvings, but otherwise, I'm not sure what monetary loss he is facing. Indeed he made money thanks to the commission from the show.

I'm not sure if this was discussed before, but the way Ukraine has "gamified" the way of creating targetting incentives and letting the units that succeed get priority in ordering up the top-line equipment is pretty interesting. Saw discussions of this back in April, but the news here is that the point system appears to have been adjusted to greatly incentive direct action against Russian drone operators and soldiers, valuing them as higher-value targets than tanks and MLRS.

I agree that Larys was the one who carried out the escape and disposition, but yes, it seems we're to take it that Alicent gave the initial order. It makes perfect sense that if she believed she'd be captured, that she shouldn't know where they went, so they couldn't torture that information out of her.

You can start here and read about all the targets Israel struck in its essentially-unchallenged attacks on Iranian military bases, installations, and infrastructure. Among the targets were a number of energy infrastructure sites -- natural gas fields, oil refineries, depots, and so on. It was a lot. It all costs money to repair or replace.

So very sorry for your loss, Poobah.

Agree with others. Make a trip of it for yourself. Go to a museum exhibition, go to the Tollwood Summer Festival, and just enjoy Munich. Seeing her is a bonus, not necessarily the whole thing.

Yes, the first season is by far the best of them. Was a real thing watching it week to week when it premiered.

Welcome, Adeptus.

This short conflict has cost Iran many billions, substantially more than it has cost Israel. It's a very bad trade off for them, if you want to look at it purely in dollar figures. Yes, missile and drone defense is now more expensive than missile/drone offense (at least until Iron Beam and similar projects roll out), but that's only a small part of the equation -- you have to factor in the stuff that actually gets hit and destroyed by both sides, and it was very lopsided.

I feel like most of the sources you've linked, HoI, are ideologically fairly slanted, and some of the arguments (such as McBride's at the IEA site) are tenuous -- she basically calls into question counterfactuals, even though they are standard in economics research. Furthermore, trying to contest with data from the OECD showing that the UK has been lagging the rest of the EU in various economic indicators ever since Brexit is a pretty hard row to how -- the collected data is not slanted any which way, GDP and so on is all measured the same across the board. Is it as bad as the doomers said? No. Is it bad? Yes. Even McBride's piece has a long litany of warnings suggesting that even she wasn't all that blasé of the future impact of Brexit...

So, yes, the most hysterical visions tend to just be hysteria. But to say almost nothing is changed is not correct -- the UK is manifestly poorer than it would have been without Brexit. A 2016 paper on the possible impacts of Brexit by John van Reenen is pretty spot on nearly a decade later. (As a side note, Gemini is bloody amazing at infographics based on its Deep Research output. Fed it Van Reenen's paper and asked it to check where things stood, took five minutes for a long report with citations that checked out, and then I saw you could make stuff with it like quizzes, web pages, or infographics... and the infographic it spit out is a surprisingly good summation of the findings.)

Now Trump proudly claiming a ceasefire has been agreed to by all parties and will come into effect shortly. I'll believe it when I see it. If it happens, good, hope it holds.

I don't think they will in fact touch "most" people even indirectly. It's a very big country of over 340 million people, the vast majority of which are not immigrants. This doesn't change that it's bad. I have cousins recently arrived from Cuba who aren't too certain about their immigration status at the moment given the inconsistent and sometimes mean-spirited nature of how ICE has been doing things (or thuggish, if you will) all to satisfy Stephen Miller's insane quotas.

The majority of people in the country, regardless of class, are not going to personally experience any of the stuff we're talking about. But the stuff we're talking about is indeed happening to some people, yes, which I thought I'd said but am happy to say again. Its impact is obviously more deleterious for some than others. And on the immigration front, being upper-middle class white immigrants doesn't particularly help, there's been Danes and Germans and Swedes and Aussies ordered to leave, detained and sent back, questioned for hours, etc. It is, as I said, bad for civil society. And we won't even get into the effect that his attacks on student visas are having on the future potential talent in the US.

Please stop accusations against people. If you don't think this is a discussion worth having because you believe it's in bad faith or trolling, just don't participate. I do think life in the US a year from now will be more or less like life in the US today, but there's a constant niggling corrosive effect from up top that trickles down and wears away at civil liberties (primarily for immigrants), civil independence (Trump's wars with Harvard and other universities), and so on. Civil society will be the poorer for it.

The problem is this "attempting his Art of the Deal" has been a drag on the economy in multiple ways, with no signs of any serious achievements to counterbalance that. It's basically a flop. And furthermore, I think it's pretty clear that he did turn tail on this policy, rather than this being planned all along. He had convinced himself, somehow, that tariffs are the solution to everything, and expected a Smoot-Hawley-like initial bump with higher employment, more manufacturing, etc. Instead, he got a panic in the bond market, and he chickened out. Part of the reason much of what he says I don't pay real attention to and don't think others should pay attention to as much as they do is because he's wildly mendacious and presents, at best, a tenuous grasp of what truth and lies are. So I don't panic, personally, when he says some wild bullshit, which is most of the time. Better to wait and see the evolving reality.

They've announced that they're missing the date, explaining that they want as much scope to it as the 2.2 update:

Those who believed Trump was speaking honestly and was absolutely committed to his excessive use of tariffs were right that that would have been economically catastrophic, the proof being that Trump blinked and backed off while blustering. However, they were wrong to believe Trump had an overriding conviction that would drive him to hold his course even as the global economy reacted to the shock of the tariff explosion. Those who believed Trump was not going to go through with much of what he said, but would still negatively impact the economy, were also right, of course. I feel like the issue you're having is that you feel like you should critique yourself for being one of the former group, and not the latter, but that's not really saying too much about a bubble and more about whatever your own issues are.

I have certainly never agreed with the notion that Musk isn't a genius at something. You aren't foundational to not one (X.com, aka PayPal), not two (Tesla; and yes, yes, before someone complains about the "real" founders, what are they doing now?), but three (SpaceX, 100% his idea) major innovative businesses without being capable in some way, in his case I think a combination of bold vision married to strong team-building to achieve those visions. To the degree he has completely fried his brain with ketamine and other drugs, and social media, things may be different now. But he's definitely one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history. I do think DOGE and Musk's dabbling in politics has manifestly hurt his finances and his reputation. None of this changes that Trump has negatively impacted the global economy. The only reason it's not worse is due to "TACO".

There were definitely people who argued that there would be a "imminent collapse of the economy", because hysterical people always exist, and if Trump stuck to his guns on all of his most awful threats and ideas, maybe it could have done that. As it is, he has significantly pulled back in a lot of ways, while not admitting it, which is part of why business investment is being dragged downward becaues no one knows what the fuck he will in fact do whenever one of his arbitrary deadlines or promises of 300% tariffs will cause problems.

I didn't buy into the hysterics, but it should be said that all the worst ideas Trump put forward and which he has constantly toyed with would indeed have been terrible the economy, rather than just "somewhat" bad. As it is, consumer prices are up, the growth rate has slowed, the uncertainty is a drag on businesses, and there's little sign of any major trade deals worth their name that will mitigate the costs. It's sheer stupidity.

We were in Denmark over the weekend for a dog show, so during down time Linda and I started and caught up on Murderbot. I like it well enough, but it seems to have fairly low ambitions despite the obvious expenses spent in realizing it, and is more a "chuckle here and there" than a laugh riot of a show.