llama-lime said:

Strap in boys, the roller coaster continues:

Somebody needs to contact this "Fake News" because they are apparently the only people who know what's going on with tariffs.

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Navarro and Trump sure as shit don't.

Sypher the 297th said:

"Democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people. . .

. . .

but the people are retarded."

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A similar saying,

The people elect the government they deserve.

Which says much about the current electorate.

SomeOtherName said:

Two things, there are no wolves in the Two Rivers?

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No, even in the books Slayer had driven them off with his targeted hunting of them.

Constructor said:

Which is one of the weaknesses of the whole story and a bit of a lazy idea because it limits the agency of the characters.

That the show doesn't let that become too much of a problem is actually respectable.

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Thing is, it's not actually that simple in the books. The show just doesn't have the time for detail.

Perrin arrives, and immediately finds out his plan to sacrifice himself to save his family is moot, so he's bundled off to the old sickhouse to hide.
Where he finds out that other people are hiding, people more receptive to his idea to rescue the Two Rivers folk taken captive by the Whitecloaks, some because their family is captive, some because they're Aes Sedai and have great expectations for Perrin.
Along the way across the Two Rivers, he speaks to a few families, and opens their eyes, getting them to evacuate to the town for mutual defense. He also gathers a bunch of young men seeking what they imagine is glory and adventure.
At the Whitecloak camp, he stages a successful rescue, and he and the young men serve as a diversion for the Whitecloaks to chase while the rescuees disappear into the night.
Then he takes the boys hunting Trollocs, and they do pretty well until they walk into an ambush, and even then Perrin is able to rally them back together, keeping the Trollocs from simply picking them off one-by-one.
He returns to town, and finds out his reputation has gotten a bit out of control, and he becomes their de facto general.

Through the whole sequence, Perrin is revealed to more and more of the Two Rivers as actually pretty good at being a leader and general. This isn't just the Pattern at work turning the odds in his favor. It's probably putting its finger on the scale, opening people's eyes to arguments and possibilities they'd normally dismiss, lining up coincidences. But it's because Perrin is the right man for what's coming, and the Pattern needs him in the right place.

I don't think it's a lazy idea, because it takes something that would exist anyway, narrative convenience, and turns it into something the characters themselves can interact with and even try to fight or take advantage of.

snowcat-il said:

Some of the best Memes on Trump have come from Chineses social media, it has been brutal, and very telling of the CCP stance since there are allowing to run wild.

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He got the Chinese Government into the satire business. That is an impressive achievement. Maybe they'll start like Monday Night Live! I'd watch.

Tomcat From Mars said:

I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who said:

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Fair play, I searched for the Churchill quote and got two free.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/com...ions-electronics-temporary/story?id=120752319

Seriously, I've thrown up more intelligence after a bender.

Market turmoil will lead to its own collapse.

One off said:

While it is true that the wisdom of crowds is a misnomer - evidence, the internet. I offer some other quotes.

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I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who said:

You have reached the end of you free trial membership at BenjaminFranklinQuotes.com

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xoid said:

And interview after interview and poll after poll shows most of them didn't believe he would do everything he said he would.

They liked some of what he said, convinced themselves those were the only things he really meant, and voted for him.

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There's a bizarre doublethink among Trump supporters.

They like him because he "says it how it is", and doesn't mince words.

But when he makes a statement that is batshit crazy, it's not a problem, we're "not meant to take it literally".

These both can't be true. He's either a straight-talker or a bullshitter, you can't be both.

Strap in boys, the roller coaster continues:

U.S. levies on semiconductor chips, smartphones and laptops — which the White House exempted late Friday from a slew of “reciprocal” tariffs — are in fact still in the works, and will be determined in a month or two, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other top Trump administration officials asserted Sunday.

...

“These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket.’ The Fake News knows this, but refuses to report it,” Trump posted on Truth Social, adding: “We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations. What has been exposed is that we need to make products in the United States, and that we will not be held hostage by other Countries, especially hostile trading Nations like China.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/13/tariffs-chips-lutnick/

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Somebody needs to contact this "Fake News" because they are apparently the only people who know what's going on with tariffs.

siliconaddict said:

Actually from the standpoint of causing the most chaos it is brilliant.* By exempting some things and not others. By giving everyone but China a 90 day reprieve, but jacking up tariffs for China you've fragmented a possible unified front against his BS.
This has always been the Orange Shit Stain's plan. Cause chaos in a way that it seems like he's using a pair of 20 siders to figure out his next action. You can't defend against insanity or random actions.

That said the leaders of the world aren't dumb. Even with the 90 day stall on tariffs you can bet your ass everyone is talking with everyone else. No one with an ounce of sanity thinks that Trump is going to back down after 90 days. Well outside the morons on Wall Street. Socks when up when they have zero reason to.


*And when I say brilliant I mean in a totally random, totally unplanned sense for him. There is nothing brilliant about totally f'ing over the economy for your friends to get to pull a reverse Trump 'n Dump.

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President Xi of China is doing an unprecedented tour of Southeast Asia this week, probably to get support for a regional trading bloc and to get ideas on countering Trumpian tariffs. Usually he sends the no. 2 guy or the foreign minister to do this.

Major Southeast Asian exporters like Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore have had their large tariff figures postponed for 90 days but who knows what could happen next. Countries really hate uncertainty from their trading partners and most importantly, from the US dollar that they use as a large part of their foreign reserves.

Tricky Dick Nixon took pride in being a chaotic bastard to throw off his opponents. I think Trump is doing it because he's genuinely a complete dumbass.

SomeOtherName said:

Two things, there are no wolves in the Two Rivers? And killing Loial seems silly from the production angle because he is always on hand to act as the impartial narrator for drawn out histories and back stories that he has read in a book at some point.

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Kalshane said:

I'm really interested to see what they do with Perrin next season. He doesn't show up at all in the next book, so I have a feeling we might see some of his later plots brought forward and/or investigate the parts of his Wolf Brother nature that the show hasn't touched on yet.

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I think these tie together. In the books, there is a solid explanation for the lack of wolves in the Two Rivers, and there is at least the beginning of a resolution to this. Unfortunately, it also makes most of Perrin's story peak early and then stagnate until much later.

Splitting the wolfbrother plotline from the Two Rivers plotline makes a lot of sense both for pacing and balance. Jordan's work suffered the most when major characters had to do busywork while waiting for other characters to get to a certain point. Letting Perrin split his book four arc into another season learning more about the wolves will go a long way to balancing this out.


A small book spoiler was easily missed unless you turned on captions. After the first charge at the gates, there is a brief interlude to the Waygate where a runner was sent for reinforcements. The darkfriend waiting at the gate was named Shiaine. In the books, Mili Skane was a darkfriend who took on the persona of Lady Shiaine Avarhin and was involved in several plots through almost the length of the series. Seems like a small nod to book fans.

Bambu already has their quick-release hot end. I can see it being much less work for them to develop something like that. Wrap induction heating into the mix and their new extruder, and that would be one hell of a piece of kit.

Derecho Imminent said:

In all my years, I never heard it used in context of the cold war. Its always been a measure of how poor the conditions of a country. From googling I see the new accepted term is underdevoped. Ok. But underdeveloped seems like a greatly understated description of the actual conditions in countries like Ethiopia. Hell, 3/4 of the US is under-developed imo.

But whatever term you use the point stands that if you are a foreigner visiting Ethiopia you should not drink well water without boiling it. It’s just foolish.

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3rd world was a term devised to describe non nato aligned countries. It has long lost its original meaning.

Fasteddie42 said:

A return to the Moon is the most costly "been there, done that" in history.....and all NASA can muster to justify the program is to state the goal as "land the first woman and person of color on the Moon". That is horribly cynical on the part of NASA Manned Spaceflight.

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You might be right that unmanned exploration offers better bang for the buck (I don't know enough to hold an informed opinion). And the SLS is an absurd waste of taxpayer money. But you're mischaracterising the Artemis programme.

Across six landings, the Apollo programme managed about 12d 12h on the lunar surface, 3d 9h of surface EVA time, and returned 382kg of samples. The "extended" Lunar Modules used for the last three missions could each carry a scientific payload of about 450 kg, including the 210 kg lunar rover.

Currently, the plan is for Artemis III through VI to each spend a week on the lunar surface. Artemis III will take samples of water ice and other volatiles found in permanently-shadowed craters at the south pole. Sure, a few probes have managed a soft landing there, but none are capable of sample return AFAIK. I can't find anything about Starship HLS's max payload, but vanilla Starship is supposedly capable of carrying 100-150 tonnes to LEO, so I would assume it's more than the Apollo LM. And we can obviously fit far more powerful, varied instruments into a given mass and/or volume than was possible in the early '70s.

Perhaps I'm being unkind, but your position is like someone in the '80s and '90s arguing for the cancellation of Galileo and Cassini-Huygens. "Why are we wasting money on more probes to Jupiter and Saturn? The Voyager probes already did that, plus Uranus and Neptune to boot."

wildsman said:

Alternative headline:
Researchers show AI significantly boosts debugging effectiveness when given proper tools.

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Another possibile headline:
Caude 3.7 is drastically better than both o1 and o3 mini, despite all being released in just the last year.

Curious where Gemini 2.5 stacks up. And how last generation models did. As well as human coders.

Constructor said:

Fun fact: NATO members Greece and Turkey hate each other's guts and have been on the brink of open military conflict between each other for decades.

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I doubt either genuinely want it, not for the foreseeable. Aside from their cross border adventures in Syria, I suspect Turkey are more focused on the likely resurgence of the Russian empire and keeping as many allies as they can.

mikeschr said:

The people who voted for Trump weren't even a majority of people who voted, much less a majority of Americans.

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And interview after interview and poll after poll shows most of them didn't believe he would do everything he said he would.

They liked some of what he said, convinced themselves those were the only things he really meant, and voted for him.

Thus making this truly the stupidest timeline.

Megalodon said:

All of that is feasible for a uranium fuel cycle with harder neutron spectrum. The plutonium isotope balance takes care of itself if you run on longer fueling cycles, which civilian power wants to do anyway. The only civilian reactors with a real proliferation risk are CANDU. Natural uranium, online fueling, tritium as a byproduct, if you'd deliberately designed them for nuclear breakout capability I'm not sure you'd do anything differently.

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And CANDU can also run on Thorium...

I use chrome exactly once when I get a new phone. I use it to download the fdroid client, install fennec-fdroid, then disable chrome. It never gets seen again.

caramelpolice said:

The fundamental design of the US government sucks ass and always has. The most obvious flaw - the one that's really biting us in the ass right now - is that federal law enforcement agencies and the military are under the control of the executive branch. Congress can pass any laws it wants, the courts can rule however they want, and it's all meaningless if the president says he will not enforce it. There are no checks and balances on this.

America needs a ground-up rethinking of the structure of the federal government.

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Actually there is, impeachment. The real issue is that Congress is currently controlled by people who wouldn't impeach trump if he declared the US to be a territory of Russia.

Constructor said:

A slight majority of americans have indeed knowingly voted for exactly this! Trump has never during his campaign held back about which insane and criminal things he wanted to enact, and people voted to have exactly all that!

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The people who voted for Trump weren't even a majority of people who voted, much less a majority of Americans.

Constructor said:

And we sincerely wish he did! Doesn't anyone think of the children??

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I hear some Republican politicians think about them far too much.

graylshaped said:

utility boards, school boards, other commissions; non-federal judgeships may also be subject to election.

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this is the bit which is peculiar to this onlooker. Voting for a sheriff or a judge could lead to the candidates spending all their time on their constituency, like a university lecturer trying to maintain tenure and grants rather than doing research. The sheer size of the ballot paper must be time-consuming. This sort of thing lends itself to party vote.

Alfonse said:

There is no plan. At least, not from Trump.

Maybe he's having his ears whispered into, but the man has always been mercurial in the extreme. He doesn't know what he's doing, and he doesn't much care. He's now planning to undo the undo he just did. Maybe. He doesn't fucking know.

Accelerationism and fascism don't really go together. Fascism needs a functioning system through which to oppress the populace. Trump is not breaking the system because he believes it needs to be broken. He's doing it because he genuinely thinks this is fixing it.

Just... let that sink in.

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Sink in it has, oh God. Does this mean that Fox News is in charge and Trump just follows their lead as to what is popular and will fix things?