theinspectorst

The homicide rate in the US is about 6-7 times that in the UK per 100,000 population. I’d take our situation any day of the week.

Last time I looked into this properly, knife crime in the US was actually roughly the same frequency as that in the UK. The difference is that knife-based murders stand out in the UK, whereas in the US nobody pays attention because the problem is dwarfed by the much greater problem of rampant gun crime.

The UK is a society where violent crime is pretty uncommon. The homicide rate in the UK was 1.0 per 100,000 population in 2023. That has been broadly trending downwards in recent decades, after rising during the late 20th century and hitting a peak at c1.8 per 100,000 in 2003. The US is a much more violent society: their homicide rate is around 6.4 per 100,000 population.

Killers are always going to find weapons - if you ban guns they’ll find knives, if you ban knives they’ll kill with something else. One difference is that a killer on a knife rampage is going to kill a lot fewer people before they’re stopped than a killer with a gun. I guess killing with a knife is a more ‘involved’ act than just pointing a gun and clicking the trigger, so the bar for someone stabbing with a knife is probably a bit higher than killing from several metres away with a gun.

But part of it is a societal thing - my hunch is that (in relative terms) society in the UK and most other rich Western liberal democracies just instills in people an instinctively higher value on human life. You see it in US exceptionalism in use of the death penalty, the frequency of police killings, etc. I don’t want to exaggerate the difference - the US still has far fewer murders than Colombia or South Africa or Brazil - but there are other Western countries like Canada or Finland where guns are still pretty widely owned (albeit not quite to the extent of the US) that don’t have the same problem of violence as the US.

Forth, and fear no darkness.

I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.

Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.

A better analogy would be that if you had thrust your head so far up Putin’s arse that you could taste the pirozhki, then you too would probably find your mouth constantly full of his shit.

Orban is scum.

Businesses buy out other businesses across borders all the time. This is normal behaviour.

As for whether it’s a good idea: in short, competitive markets tend to be a lot more efficient than protected markets - which ultimately leads to lower prices for consumers. Nippon Steel thinks it can operate US Steel more efficiently than the current owners and managers of US Steel, hence Nippon Steel thinking it is profitable for them to buy it at a price that is higher than what the current owners value it at (as reflected in US Steel’s share price).

The fact that more efficient companies can buy out less efficient companies is an important part of what keeps market-based economies successful and dynamic. If you want to know what it looks like when economies don’t allow this, take a look at the economic malaise in somewhere like Britain in the 1970s after several decades of protectionism and state support for failing industries (or if you take protectionism to a logical extreme, North Korea…)

There’s potentially a line of argument about monopoly risk (monopolies are economically inefficient) but that seems limited here - US Steel is only the 24th largest steel producer and the combination of Nippon and US Steel will still be smaller than the biggest players in the steel market like Baowu and ArcelorMittal.

No, I get that, and that might explain if the US changed its policy on the two-state solution. But it hasn’t - Biden has spoken publicly on two-state being the only viable outcome even within the last few weeks.

The two-state solution is - and has long been - UK official policy under governments of all three parties. So it’s unsurprising the UK would vote in favour.

The weird thing is that this is also US policy. Why the hell would the US vote against this?

Addressing the Middle East, the Assembly took up the report “Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources” (document A/78/467), adopting the eponymous resolution by a recorded vote of 158 in favour to 6 against (Canada, Federated States of Micronesia, Israel, Nauru, Palau, United States), with 13 abstentions.

Why would the US vote against this? The two-state solution is US government policy!

New Nokia, who dis?

Mate, even if it was the mayor of Upton Snodsbury in Worcestershire who had made this comment, I would be glad to see the Auschwitz Museum had responded to them. The fact it was a mayor in the country in question makes it even more relevant.

Never again means never again. It means challenging genocide and ethnic cleansing every time, at every step along the road that leads to these outcomes - not just waiting until the trains are already on their way to the death camps before your raise your voice.

None. They got a minority of the vote. They got a majority of the seats. It’s FPTP.

The Tories got a minority of the vote at the last election. Most people voted non-Tory. Most people voted for a second referendum.

Won’t make it through the Lords (and it wasn’t in the Tory manifesto so they can’t Parliament Act it) and even if does it might still fail its third reading in the Commons when the feral wing of the Tories start making more insane demands.

First past the post - the party with the most votes ‘wins’. It’s in contrast to a range of other systems that rely on proportionality or preferential voting to ensure that the party or parties with majority support wins.

For example, imagine a scenario where there are 10 constituencies electing a representative by FPTP. In each of those 10 constituencies, the result is identical as follows:

• Nazi - 40%
• Liberal - 30%
• Socialist - 20%
• Conservative - 10%

Under FPTP, the Nazi would be the top candidate in every constituency, and so win 10 out of 10 seats and have total control of the legislature, even though 60% of people voted anti-Nazi. This is the system in the UK and US.

Under a proportional system, you would allocate the seats in proportion to the votes cast - so 4 for the Nazis, 3 for the Liberals, 2 for the Socialists and 1 for the Conservatives. The non-Nazis would then have a legislative majority (6 out of 10 seats) that reflects how people actually voted, and could form an anti-Nazi coalition government. This is the system in the Netherlands or Germany for example.

Under a preferential system, you still elect seats on a constituency basis, but you make sure that the winning candidate is preferred by a majority of voters in the constituency - either by having multi-round elections or by having voters rank candidates instead of just voting for one. In a simplified system, you could rule out all but the top two candidates (in this case, Nazi and Liberal), and then have a second round of votes two weeks later for voters to decide between those two candidates to represent their seat. This tends to favour more moderate candidates so it’s likely under such a system that the Liberal would generally defeat the Nazi in the second round in most seats. This is the system in France.

There are also hybrid systems like Single Transferrable Vote, which simultaneously achieve proportionality and preferential voting - this is used in Ireland.

Geert Wilder wins Dutch election

35 of the 150 seats in parliament

Let’s please stop using FPTP language to describe very non-FPTP systems and outcomes.

Yeah, Spanish. That’s the point. There were penguins, then was French, it was Spanish, it was British. It was never Argentinian. There were never civilians there.

The only civilians who have lived there are the Falkland Islanders, who identify as British. Argentina’s claim is based on the Spanish once having a very limited military presence there, on which basis they want to assert some sort of imperialist sovereignty over a bunch of civilians whose ancestors have been there for hundreds of years and who have only ever considered themselves British.

‘Get them back’. What does ‘back’ even mean in this statement? Of all the countries that have ever legitimately ruled the Falklands, Argentina was never one of them.

The penguins have a better claim to the Falklands than Argentina…

The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that’s an obvious reason for the management to go.

American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that’s trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that’s something that should be applauded.

Historically yes, although I don’t think there’s been one as bad as Suella before, and certainly not one who is now among the betting market favourites to be the next Tory leader once they’re in opposition.

I see her more as a symptom of the nihilism that has overtaken British conservatism since the 2016 referendum. They’ve become obsessed with fighting meaningless symbols and vibes, and fixated on pulling down their opponents rather than building something up themselves. Nothing positive matters to them, it’s all about destruction.

In the 1980s, Thatcher’s Tories sold the British lower middle-class on a vision of home-owning, share-owning popular capitalist democracy, in which entrepreneurs and small-business owners would guide us all into a prosperous future. What positive vision like that do Tories have to offer to voters today? Single-sex toilets and criminalising the homeless? Suella literally has said that her ‘dream’ in politics is to deport refugees to Rwanda. They have nothing positive to offer and Suella’s rise is a symptom of that.