Months ago I would have said “yes, it’s possible”. Now, it’s become pretty clear LLMs are a dead end. They’re trained to simulate the internet and can’t do other things with any reliability.

It’s still possible with whatever the next approach is to making computers smarter, though. Natural intelligence exists, and we’re made out of the same stuff as everything else, so artificial intelligence must also be possible. And, without the limits of recent evolution, it could probably be made far better than us.

Don’t forget that pandemics used to be a goofy sci-fi trope, too.

Americans for the most part are only dimly aware there’s an outside world in the first place. The amount of covering up that needs to be done is minimal.

Yeah, he’s still in his 20’s apparently? That’s crazy, “young” in politics usually means ~40.

That show would have been way darker if Perry had ever employed the fact he’s a venomous mammal.

Actually, it was a missed opportunity not to go with a female Perry and have an egg-hatching subplot. Their version of the platypus really didn’t do much.

Weirdly specific question, OP.

I kind of feel like anything gets grosser as it ages. IIRC urine also start to break down and have more ammonia, which has a smell.

So will this actually help anything, Or will Bardella just pick up where she left off?

That feeling when you survive the apocalypse only to get stung by a platypus and regret that you survived.

I’d expect them to stay out of it at this point, actually. They want to expand into the pacific, and the US and East Asian democracies want to stop them. Meanwhile, Australia also has affinities with now-distinct Europe, isn’t directly in the way of any of that, and depends heavily on China for trade.

And, even if it did become involved, dealing with a Chinese occupation isn’t going to be as hard as a nuclear winter or the total breakdown of modern civilisation.

I did split the question in two.

I said 15 months or less to hyperinflation somewhere yesterday. In that case, they could theoretically start conscription and grind Ukraine down that way, or start selling big ticket things like territory in exchange for help, but political capacity to enforce that is a serious question.

They are not in NATO, actually. That requires proximity to the Atlantic. They’re Western though, that’s true. Being in a city could be a bit of a risk.

In South America or southern Africa you’re going to deal with waves of people trying to expand in from the north. No way of life escapes that unscathed. Not to mention, the projections for food scarcity on other continents aren’t nearly as rosy, if there’s soot in the upper atmosphere, maybe because of the higher population to start with.

And then there’s poverty as a whole separate dimension of things. Here or in Australia I’m pretty sure the capacity to build things like generators will continue. In the third world there’s absolutely no guarantee.

Or just literally any of the giant pile of dictators that were overthrown.

Lol, it’s on my socials so it’s real.

Two can play that game. Not to mention I’m not even British.

Where would you move to ride out a potential WWIII?

Australia. There really is no better place in the event of nuclear war. It’s a continent-island, meaning easy to defend, it grows and can build just about anything, and being in the southern hemisphere it should be safe from nuclear winter.

Specifically, a rural property somewhere agricultural. Maybe Queensland or Tasmania.

If you could move anywhere to minimize the impact on you of the worldwide rise of fascism…

That’s almost a different question, though. Whichever European country is the most securely democratic. There’s lots of non-war ways fascism can suck aggressively.

Yes. Back when analysts used to talk about a war with Russia pre-2022, something you heard pretty often was “they’re not as advanced, but they have so much stockpiled armour”.

This is like America running out of guns or Canada running out of syrup.

Nah, adjust for Russian standards in what “poor technical condition” even means. It’s not going to Ukraine if it can’t drive off the base.

the industry is not covering combat losses

Since it’s not clear from the headline, that’s the restoration industry. We’re not even talking about the production of new tanks (which was never that impressive at any point in the full-scale war).

Eh. Regardless of how careful he is, he’s still just a man. If it’s a coup from within the security he has means nothing, and they will also know where he is at a given time.

It’s still not on the BBC 12 hours on, and I don’t know the website, so this is fake, unfortunately.

I mean, Satoshi mined his ~1000000BTC, but from a functional perspective I don’t see how that’s different from just having it hardcoded in the genesis block (or equivalent in another system). It definitely doesn’t make Ripple BitConnect, or one of those janky “stablecoins”.

The problem with relying on “actual cryptography” for privacy is auditability, like I mentioned above. When there was a bug in Bitcoin that allowed someone to give himself a bazillion BTC, we were able to catch and revert it immediately. If there is a bug like that in Monero, we won’t know until after it’s circulated as much as the premined Bytecoins did.

It’s a problem, sure. If you want auditability at the expense of any guaranteed privacy, again, Ripple. It’s is totally transparent, assuming you keep a backup of all the old closed ledgers. And uses computing power more comparable to an old-fashioned bank account than to Bitcoin.

But thinking that cryptocurrencies are all p2p, and that Bitcoin dominates the market because they don’t know this one simple thing, are both telltale signs of a novice.

It’s never been my main squeeze, but I’ve dabbled since the early days. Do with that what you will.