If the Ukraine reacts by being less precise in its attacks they might make more progress demoralizing Russia since Russia has less capability of hiding civilian casualties than military ones.

But they should really focus on wooing China. China has never been as friendly with Russia as it appears and Europe might start ranking them over the US and Russia as the least distasteful if they play their hand well right now..

Historically bombing civilians has always galvanised the public against the enemy more than it 'demoralises' them.

For instance the bombing of England during WW2 didn't break their will to fight. The fire bombing of 95% of Japan's cities didn't diminish their will to fight either.

And let's not forget the vietnam war... didn't seem to be effective for the US...

Bombing civilians rarely achieves any war goals and may actually have the opposite affect.

China has never been as friendly with Russia as the US is now, but it was as friendly as it gets.

Its a total waste to try to quietly appease. If they want something out of the current administration they need to humiliate it and then barely give it enough to save face.

> Does this mean their nominal GDP grew by 15% in one month?

If they could keep selling in rubles without a fall in exports or prices then the month's contribution to GDP was 15% higher than the previous one. That doesn't seem very confusing.

Apologies to Mr Kurzweil, but I think the reality on the ground is that the cost of research into keeping an aging population alive is a raised risk of Armageddon. The political tendencies in older age demographics is bad, the politicians surviving so many decades after a first to leadership position is bad, the billionaires living long enough to find whacky ideas or even directly manipulate politics instead of gifting money to charities is catastrophic, etc.

It has always been true throughout history in every country that political engagement skews heavily toward the old and the rich. I don’t know how to fix it, but thankfully Kurzweil is a hack and was wrong about most things and deserves no apologies; life expectancy might have increased a little since 2001 but human longevity isn’t really budging at all, so there is very little increased risk of a geriatric Armageddon.

I have special beef with Kurzweil’s life expectancy BS because he misrepresents facts in his essays. His famous “Law of Accelerating Returns” essay has an incredible number of misleading plots and conflated arguments, but the life expectancy graph at the bottom is a pure lie, and Kurzweil knows it. It conflates life expectancy with longevity, and it left out data from before 1840 and from between 1940 and 2000 that he already had. If you include that known data and explain what longevity is, it ruins his plot and his argument, but he wanted to pretend there’s a trend that doesn’t exist so he intentionally left it out. https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/the-law-of-acceleratin...

Gifting money to charities is way more catastrophic.

It's popular to talk about unintended consequences, and site the most egregious, but everything has unintended consequences on top of its intended consequences. The world without all of the billionaire attempts to make a good legacy for themselves would in fact include a lot less interesting things.

Could you elaborate?

Actually I believe a not small part of what's happening now is boomer politicians who have been in power too long realizing their time is coming to an end one way or another, and they are refusing to give it up to the younger generations. Trump and Putin in particular have every reason to be as unreasonable as possible if they believe either way there is no future for them if they stop.

These people should not expect to be alive in 10 years so if a trick for getting a few more months at the top means their country is nuked in 10-30 years, whatever.

Counteract might be the wrong word.. The ongoing dysfunction doesn't fall from the sky, it is largely a consequence of people prioritizing the goals they are assigned for the betterment of their group, etc.

I think everything is marked by law, pretty much throughout Europe, but there should be a standardized 2 letter code logo. It can be tiresome to separate Spanish almonds, fruit and vegetables from things that traveled farther distances than necessary or are likely to be flavorless and from a green house.

It depends what you mean by secure. Vulnerabilities is a market and if GOS happens to secure the vulnerabilities that are convenient and work on all standard Android releases, most of the market doesn't support putting the research into setting up additional vulnerabilities against it as they will until another iOS vulnerability is found and weaponized.

Bottled water is highly profitable so if bottled water were safe we would know all about that. It has less safety regulation and is contaminated with micro plastics.

Carrot or stick might be all the same to TSMC, but Intel shouldn't have such a huge amount of its fab capacity within hotel tariff.

Without some research the current President would probably not be healthy enough to be in office, clearly we have to reduce the risk of that happening again.