roystgnr
27d ago
I don't understand the lackadaisical attitude toward likely recidivism in any case, so maybe I'm way off base here, but how would "international" make anybody become harsher? "Good thing for our local criminal that he's in our custody where all we'd have to do to crack down is say the word, not halfway around the world where we'd have to declare war to get him properly punished, because a declaration of war we'd totally do!" If anything I'd expect the modern west to go easier on fargroup members while the "modern" North Korea would be happy to oblige.
roystgnr
27d ago
deliberately allowing North Koreans to remotely defrost French freezers is an act of war by North Korea against France
This would be true for "encouraging", and for some definitions of "allowing", but "allowing" has a lot of grey area. "We thought he deserved a fifth chance!" is a pretty good shield of plausible deniability in too much of the modern west, including France.
roystgnr
28d ago
There's fan fiction that makes Harry Potter more adult (well, as much as possible under the circumstances) for the purposes of drama, but now I want to see it as an adult comedy.
roystgnr
28d ago
It depends on the car (the difference in price used to be much greater than it is now) and the location of the commute (pure-ICE mileage has gotten pretty good outside of stop-and-go driving) and on the future of gas prices too. My daughter picked out a hybrid for environmentalist reasons but I was surprised to see (even pre-bombing-Iran) that, if gas prices don't drop, the break-even point would be under 50k miles in. That would actually have been a reasonable investment if not for the opportunity cost vs the stock market going wild during the past few years.
On the other hand, I have a friend with a hybrid who made the same calculation during a gas price peak pre-fracking. Gas prices did drop. For a long time.
There's also auto work to consider. On average hybrids now are a little cheaper to maintain thanks to less engine and brake wear, but more expensive repairs means that one bad accident or post-warranty breakdown could put her back in the red there.
roystgnr
28d ago
If you like analysis of storytelling, my favorites right now are Brandon McNulty and John Matthew Fox. Their video titles and thumbnails are godawful algorithm-optimized clickbait, but the video contents are actually quite thoughtful and interesting.
roystgnr
28d ago
I went to see how bad it was, so I could write an expanded version of my "why are humans making it so hard to come up with an AGI definition that AI doesn't yet meet but they all do" rant, with the appropriate "considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" reference and everything ... but I actually only saw a single "obliterating water" comment, and it seemed to be satirical rather than serious. I didn't scroll very far down, so I'm not questioning your credibility here, but even if there are a ton of dumb water takes I missed, I'm kind of amazed they didn't reach my screen. Does YouTube now actually have an algorithm (or even more incredibly, a user base) that successfully filters out the dumbest comments?
That makes sense in the Frenchman-attacking-allied-countries case; I just think there are a lot of other combinations of attacker and victim where the international nature of the crime will have the opposite effect.
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