ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
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13hr ago
How the AP decided to describe joint US–Israeli strikes on Iran, and Iran’s retaliation, as a war
The Associated Press is using the word “war” to refer to the joint U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran, and Iran’s retaliation. This reflects the scope and intensity of the fighting.
What does the AP consider?
The Merriam-Webster definition of war is quite broad: “A state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations,” or “a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism.”
Even though none of the countries have officially declared war, the attacks by the United States and Israel, combined with Iran’s retaliation, meet those criteria. The decision by the Trump administration and Israeli leaders to attack and the subsequent destruction and casualties are enough to call the actions, and Iran’s response, a war. Trump himself has used the word war to describe the conflict.
Why does it matter?
It’s important to use the correct language to describe military action between sovereign nations.
Sometimes a one-sided attack occurs without further action, or a conflict starts but doesn’t escalate. Using “war” to describe those situations could diminish the word’s importance. Then, when actual war breaks out, people might not understand its significance.
What are previous examples of conflicts where the AP issued guidance to use the word ‘war’?
The AP provided guidance on the attacks on Iran by Israel in June 2025, using the term “war” to describe the conflict in the days after the initial attacks and Iran’s retaliation. The war lasted 12 days, and Israeli and American strikes greatly weakened Iran’s air defenses, military leadership and nuclear program.
The AP also began using the term “war” to describe the conflicts between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas in the days and weeks after fighting began.
In those cases, editors considered the number of casualties, the intensity of fighting, the involvement of each party, and what each country was calling the conflict.
Could the guidance change?
Decisions on how AP uses the term “war” happen in real time. AP’s news leaders and standards editors will continue to monitor developments to see whether changes are necessary.
At this point, the level of fighting constitutes the countries being at war, no matter what happens next. If fighting were to end soon, AP would continue saying the countries had been at war.
More Americans supported Palestine than israel in a poll for the first time in the US.
Citation requested.
Forty-one percent of Americans now say they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East situation, while 36% sympathize more with the Israelis. The five-percentage-point difference is not statistically significant [the margin of error appears to be ±4%, but I'm not sure I'm reading the documentation properly], but it contrasts with a clear lead for the Israelis only a year ago (46% vs. 33%) and larger leads over the prior 24 years.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
YouTube's recommendation algorithm just informed me of the existence of The End Is Nigh, a pseudo-sequel to the infamously difficult platforming game Super Meat Boy. I'm not too interested in the game itself (currently on sale for four dollars). But the game's soundtrack is composed entirely of remixes of classical music—and it's currently on sale for just one dollar!
Other video-game soundtracks that I have purchased:
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Shantae: Risky's Revenge and Pirate's Curse
Note that all these soundtracks are DRM-free. (I've seen people complain that at least one soundtrack sold on Steam actually does have DRM, in that it's playable only through an executable file. I don't remember which game it was for.)
Some older Paradox Development Studio games also have soundtracks of classical music (licensed from Naxos), which you can copy out of the installed files.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
Fun pastime for lazy people: In your favorite Paradox game (Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria, etc.), go into "observe" mode (typically with a console command obtained from the game's wiki) and just watch a "hands-off" campaign progress at maximum speed. If you feel like it, you can temporarily exit observe mode to make minor nudges (e. g., forcing an otherwise-AI-controlled country to declare certain wars, annex certain subjects, or pass certain laws) without going to the trouble of actually playing the campaign yourself. You also can make your own mods and see how they affect events.
It's my understanding that some sports games (e. g., EA's NFL series) also allow the user to watch AI-only matches.
Premise: You can use numbers (1, 2, 3), letters (a, b, c), and symbols (asterisk *, dagger †, double dagger ‡) to denote footnotes. The footnote reference in the main text normally is superscript. The footnote heading typically also is superscript, but if you're a weirdo who wants to maintain consistency with main-text and list-item headings you'll make it full-size (1, 2, 3, a, b, c, *, †, ‡).
Problem: You're a weirdo, and one of these things is not like the others. The asterisk already is superscript by default—in order to make it full-size with formatting, you have to give special treatment to it.
Solution: Instead use the "low asterisk" ⁎ ⁎, which is not pre-superscripted! Consistency has been achieved.
Problem: Annoyingly, the HTML named character reference "lowast" is misnamed and actually refers to the separate "asterisk operator" ∗ ∗, whose Unicode category is not "Punctuation/Other" like the ASCII asterisk but "Symbol/Mathematics" like the multiplication symbol.
Solution: If you're using XHTML (without any of the public identifiers listed on the linked page), you can simply repurpose "lowast" as your own custom internal entity that points to the correct character. LOL! (If you're using normal HTML or that disgusting middleware called Markdown, you've got to look up the low asterisk's hexadecimal code, "204e".)
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Two chats (Telegram and Discord) are "recommended" in the sidebar of the front page (which is not visible if your browser window is too narrow, including mobile browsers).
ToaKraka
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4d ago
To be fair, it is a random piece of custom software, rather than something with actual tenure and documentation.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
It appears that @ZorbaTHut has been using an LLM for recent changes to this website's code. Perhaps that is the culprit. ;-)
There's a fun alternate-history series called Look to the West in which a British prince, disinherited and exiled to America as a viceroy in year 1727, overturns this norm in 1749 by having a team of rifle-armed Americans (winners of a shooting tournament organized by the prince) assassinate the rightful king (with a false-flag attack from a French-flagged fishing boat). This incident causes rifle-armed skirmishers/snipers to proliferate far earlier than historically.
ToaKraka
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6d ago
If I were less lazy/busy, I'd insert the usual OkCupid stats blogs/archives from before they were bought and cucked. They showed that female attractiveness peaked at 18, but that was their minimum age cutoff, so I suspect the actual figure is even lower at around 16. Men also showed tolerance to wider age gaps as they got older. 30-year-old and 35-year-old men showed roughly the same willingness to approach 25-year-old women.
I believe Gwern has a copy. Someone please do this in the comments, thanks, :-*
Link (doesn't quite match your assertion)
As you can see, men tend to focus on the youngest women in their already skewed preference pool, and, what's more, they spend a significant amount of energy pursuing women even younger than their stated minimum. No matter what he's telling himself on his setting page, a 30-year-old man spends as much time messaging 18- and 19-year-olds as he does women his own age. On the other hand, women only a few years older are largely neglected.
A woman's desirability peaks at 21, which ironically enough is the age that men just begin their "prime"—i. e., become more desirable than average. Following that dotted line out, you can see that a woman of 31 is already "past her prime", while a man doesn't become so until 36. As we mentioned above, after age 26, a man has more potential matches than his female counterparts, which is a drastic reversal of the proportion in young adulthood, when women are much more sought-after. Because men's dating preferences skew so young, and women's are age-equitable, men peak later, and have a longer plateau of desirability, than women.
ToaKraka
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6d ago
Recently I read that a well respected football coach—Bill Belichick—was denied admission to the Football Hall of Fame based on the fact that he is in a romantic relationship with a woman who is much younger than him.
I'm not a football fan, but it's my understanding that this is a gross oversimplification. News articles (1 2) indicate that the voters refrained from inducting Belichick for several reasons. One reason that stands out is the fact that, under the recently-updated voting system, some people are losing eligibility, so this is their last chance to be inducted (before they are relegated to a separate "senior" category, where induction is technically still possible but also harder). Another reason is his involvement in cheating scandals. Neither of the linked articles mentions anything about a scandalously young romantic partner.
ToaKraka
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7d ago
IIRC, in last year's non-book-review contest there was some controversy regarding whether it was permissible for people to say which reviews were theirs and beg for votes on social media, as such behavior was considered by some to be a violation of the spirit of the anonymous contest even though it was not explicitly prohibited in the official rules. So you may want to avoid stating what your final decision on this topic is.
ToaKraka
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8d ago
Who will keep track of the budget, or at very least the inflows and outflows of charity funds, such that the neighborhood charity isn't unable to provide funds to people in need as they've run out of donations for the month?
Charity organizations normally have treasurers and are required to publish annual financial statements. Outside of legal requirements, they can submit to the oversight of bigger charities.
How will this be more effective than the current system when you easily multiply by 1000 the number of "administrators"/people to coordinate this?
Citation needed.
What happens if this doesn't happen in a community? Say an impoverished trailer park. Or a condo tower without much by way of community. People will literally starve, are you okay with that?
As the kids say, yes_chad.webp.
Are you fine that a 3-year-old child of drug addicts could credibly die or be very affected by malnutrition if your "grassroots community support organized by someone" program doesn't work across 300 million people?
How about if that kid is 6 and severely malnourished, a teacher notices, and then the child needs to get hospitalized, a cost the hospital will inevitably eat because neither the child nor the parents will be paying for that. Are you okay with increased medical costs as a result of not giving people food?
I think the standard libertarian argument is to make adoption easier. If the teacher (or the school?) cares so much, he can adopt the child. Don't force the hospital to pay for it.
ToaKraka
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8d ago
Just embrace the status of 30-year-old boomer.
ToaKraka
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8d ago
Yes, the Kiwi Farms threads on these people generally indicate that they are quite cringe.
ToaKraka
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8d ago
This statement seems somewhat misleading.
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Your article states that, in year 2021, 38 million people lived below the official poverty line, and only 6.4 million (17 percent) of those were "working poor" (i. e., had spent at least 27 weeks either working or looking for work), leaving 83 percent of the poor as nonworking.
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However, that denominator of 38 million includes children and retirees. According to the original Census dataset, the better denominator of people below the official poverty line and between ages 18 and 64 is 21 million people, leading to a "working poor" proportion of 30 percent. This new proportion of 70 percent nonworkers among poor people who are neither children nor retirees still possibly counts as a "vast majority", but it isn't quite as high as the original proportion.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9d ago
Isn't Sekiro the closer match?
Sekiro is focused on timed parries. Nioh 1 has some parry skills (and IIRC Nioh 2 adds more such skills), but is much more focused on dodging and blocking. I don't use parry skills at all, but it's my understanding that they don't work on big yokai.
In performing some relaxing HTML copyright infringement, I found myself thinking about wording.
Quotes from the official Magic: The Gathering rules:
(107.1) The only numbers the Magic game uses are integers.
(107.1a) You can't choose a fractional number, deal fractional damage, gain fractional life, and so on. If a spell or ability could generate a fractional number, the spell or ability will tell you whether to round up or down.
(119.1) Each player begins the game with a starting life total of 20. Some variant games have different starting life totals.
(111.10b) A Food token is a colorless Food artifact token with "{2}, {T}, Sacrifice this token: You gain 3 life."
Obviously, life is not countable regardless of what these rules say, so when you sacrifice a Food token you actually gain not "3 life" but "3 points of life" or "3 life points". But space on cards is limited, so the authors of Magic have chosen to omit these extra words.
It's somewhat interesting to think about how the particular game with which I am toying (1 2) has a similar problem. Each player, in his capacity as a major country at the Paris Peace Conference, can be considered to start the game with 15 influence points, three military units, and happiness at level 20.
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Influence point: No problems here. It's just a point of influence. "You may deploy to any two issues any number of available influence points as long as you control both issues after the deployment."
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Military unit: "Military" is not a quantity. This is a unit that is military (e. g., a corps sent to prevent an issue from becoming unsettled), or maybe a unit of your military, but not a "unit of military". (It could be a unit of military power, but that would be too long-winded.) "You may deploy an available military unit to an empty position 5, 6, 7, or 8 in a region that does not already contain a military unit of yours."
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Happiness level: Doesn't calling happiness a quantity in this context—where it cannot be spent, but merely rises and falls based on outside factors—sound subtly wrong? It already is somewhat strained to think of diplomatic influence, with its complex one-off favors and threats, as a bucketful of interchangeable liquid that can be doled out and recouped at will by a negotiating government. But treating the happiness of a country's populace in such a manner feels even less appropriate. Rather, happiness is more like a level of temperature than a quantity of liquid. "Your happiness falls by two levels."
Action RPG Nioh 3 has just been released at a price of 110 dollars (including future DLC). As a result, its decade-old predecessor Nioh 1 has been discounted to literally 7.5 dollars (including DLC). Buy it!
- The central mechanic is melee combat with careful stamina management—like Dark Souls 1 and 2, but faster-paced and with a Gears of War–style timed button press to recover stamina more quickly. There are seven melee-weapon types: sword, pair of swords, odachi, spear (actually wielded more like a polearm, with lots of swings), axe, kusarigama, and pair of tonfa. These weapons must be used in conjunction with three different stances: medium (default), high (powerful but bad at blocking and dodging), and low (good at dodging but weak).
- Ranged weapons (bow, rifle, and hand cannon), ninja skills, and yin-yang magic also are available.
- There are several sequential difficulty levels (samurai, strong, demon, wise, and nioh). At higher difficulty levels, enemies are stronger and get new moves, and more are included in levels.
- Enemies include both normal humans (can be staggered with attacks, but can block) and big yokai (cannot be staggered but cannot block), plus small fodder yokai (can be staggered and cannot block).
Even after 700 hours in this game, I'm only okay at it (any boss fight with multiple big yokai always takes me a while to beat; the one with a raven tengu and a flying bolt deserves special mention), but it's great fun. I personally use the odachi most of the time, with some consideration given to the spear.
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