Skua

I love how four of the six countries we can see names for are literally next to each other as well

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.

They’re American

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

They got to announce that inflation is more or less back down to normal levels, so this is about as good as the polling is likely to be. A there was one a few months back that actually showed the Conservatives getting fewer seats than the SNP. To be clear it was only one poll and I do not think it will happen, but for readers that don’t already know this, the SNP only even contest less than 10% of the total seats. The fact that that was ever even close to the bounds of possibility is wild.

If your PC’s region is set to an EEA country, you actually do get additional options to turn stuff off or uninstall things. Uninstallation of Edge and Copilot is apparently coming soon… for the EEA. But you can just tell your PC you’re in an EEA country.

She’s a Star by James. The only part I could remember was the “star” part of the chorus, which is not exactly an easy lyric to decipher when you hear it on a supermarket radio. Eventually I found it by buying a James CD and running into that track by chance

As the article correctly points out, 3 C warming is still really fucking bad. Just because it can technically be worse and we won’t all die does not mean it’ll be nice to live through. Bringing about the extinction of 29% of all species is madness. To quote the article:

“The most comprehensive and authoritative assessment of risk across all sectors — health, food, water, conflict, poverty, and the natural ecosystem — by the IPCC in 2018 basically concluded that we don’t want to warm the planet beyond 1.5°C (2.7°F), and we really don’t want to warm it beyond 2°C (3.6°F). And if we do happen to overshoot those targets, we want to keep the duration of overshoot to a minimum.”

If someone could convincingly scientifically back up their belief that climate change isn’t going to be a big deal, they’d be swimming in oil company money to promote their work. There’s definitely an incentive to research it if you think the other way.

It feels weird to frame this as an EU objection considering that Greece has also put the same kind of ban in place. It’s specifically France objecting.

But for other Brexiteers, the policies help illustrate the flexibility the U.K. has outside the EU on matters which would have previously been subject to lengthy negotiation under the Commons Fisheries Policy — and which Brussels and member states are outright hostile to for their own reasons.

Brexit benefits! We could never have done this as EU members without a whole load of negotiations, please ignore that we’re still dealing with a whole load of negotiations over it and also that EU member Greece did it on a larger scale than us!

They didn’t always go as planned! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Pyramid

That’s not true at all

We now deport those people to Rwanda

Fuck it, buy extra Taurus systems with frozen Russian assets. We can have both.

The Ukrainian government clearly reckons that famous people getting special treatment is worse

Why would Olympic athletes not be drafted?

A UN mission that China has actively voted for repeatedly, no less. Every UNSC resolution against North Korea going back to 2006 has been unanimous.

Isn’t it generally used to mean the opposite of that? “Despite what I just said, I hold or will present the following apparently contrary position,” more or less. Like if you spent a couple of paragraphs talking about the excellent cinematography of a film and then followed it with “That said, I didn’t actually enjoy it. I found the protagonist insufferable.”

Both the flat ones and the long ones have been around for over 200 years, it would honestly be weirder if regional differences in the names had never developed. After all, why would someone in York, UK and someone in Boston, USA in the 1820s know or care what the other called their fried slices of potato? “Chips” is a pretty reasonable name for both of them, so maybe the flat ones got popular in America first but the long ones got popular in Britan first, so then each had to find another name for the other sort. I’m guessing here, but I don’t think it’s in any way strange that it happened, however it did happen.

British English using “fries” for thinner chips (chips in the British sense) actually is because of American influence, though. In the same way that Americans call their long fried potato “French fries” because they are fried in the French way, Brits call those thinner ones “fries” because they’re fried the American way. You wouldn’t usually say “American fries” here because “fries” by itself alreadyy means that, but if you did people would immediately understand that you mean the thinner sort that you get at McDonald’s, not the thicker sort you get at a fish & chip shop.

Absolutely nobody is checking the god damn patents for the name of either variety of chip

That said, in British English, chips and fries are different things. McDonald’s don’t sell chips. Those are the thick-cut ones. Fries are the skinny ones.