cyd

Out of the loop. Why is Destiny 2 sinking? Didn't the game use to print money? Did the money not get reinvested back into the live service (like how FFXIV funds get vacuumed away to prop up the rest of Square Enix), or did Bungie make some bad artistic choices, or what?

Leafing through the latest issue, here's a random article:

The Biden administration pursued a mistaken policy on LNG exports.

This is not a leader, but in the news section. In the contents:

Despite her reassuring tone, this was a sharp-elbowed effort to place an obstacle in the way of the incoming Trump administration... Mr Biden bowed to election-year pressure from the subset of environmentalists hostile to LNG... As for the claim that increasing American lng would help China, it is politically clever, playing as it does on anti-China sentiment in Washington, dc, but energetically dumb...

Look, again, I'm not castigating The Economist here. They have a particular way to present news, and their readership knows it. But they definitely do not try to be "neutral" in the way other outlets do.

The Economist mixes snarky comments and snippets of opinion into their coverage to a much greater extent than other media outlets. Their "opinion" pieces (leaders) are sometimes just a truncated version of the longer "news" article later in the issue.

Not saying it's a bad thing; they're pretty open about it and that's how they've always been.

The Economist isn't neutral. Quite the opposite: they pride themselves on being opinionated. They might seem neutral only because those opinions regularly cross the traditional US left/right divide (e.g., they were one of the mainstream news outlets talking about Biden's diminishing faculties long before his meltdown).

The original quote is: "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." -- Henry Kissinger

Not much analysis in this poll, but I would not be surprised if the US support for recent Israel actions is a huge part of the story. Not only does it directly sow animosity to the US among the Malay Muslim population, but it also raises doubts about the US-led narrative on Muslim Uighurs in China. Kind of hard to sustain the "China is doing genocide in Xinjiang" narrative when you're doing everything you can to deny genocide in Gaza.

It's worth bearing in mind that opposite chirality is not inherently dangerous. Whether an individual mirror molecule poses a problem depends on the specific biochemical context. While there have been famous situations where a chiral enantiomer proved toxic, for every one of these there's been plenty more instances where biology shrugs and doesn't gaf.

Does this mean we shouldn't worry? Obviously not, but it just means we should do more to manage the general risks of molecular engineering for microbes. Chirality is only one of many, many routes through which risks can come, so there's no point fixating on that.

I mean, there's plenty of mediocre/bad IRL engineering too.

It's like the term "social scientist". People always like to quibble, but eh... whatever...

Assad should try declaring martial law. That's a good trick.

Agreed, though the software part is a bit mystifying to me. It's not like Europe doesn't have good software engineers, so the fact that so many of Europe's carmakers are having so many problems competing on software is jarring. It has to be some kind of institutional/cultural clash within these organizations.

For the vast majority of military applications, including missiles, you do not want to use bleeding edge chip tech. You use 50nm or higher, anything with smaller feature sizes is not robust enough for a military environment.