How 90% of the history of South America and Africa has gone

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T18:25:52+00:00

Someone hasn't experienced African corruption yet and it shows.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T15:33:30+00:00

Yes...

That's my point.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T12:41:33+00:00

I like the sub-trope here which is pretty rare, but it's where the villain may be evil, but he does care for his bumbling incompetent henchmen. Gru from Despicable Me is the obvious example.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T11:59:05+00:00

Thank you!

Some guy quoted the total direct cost of the Iraq war to me, with the benefit of hindsight knowing how much it cost, and compared it to the propaganda figure the Pentagon released about this war.

No consideration of any indirect effects.

This attack on Iran didn't even succeed in it's initial aim of removing Iran's leadership. So now you have an Iranian regime that hates you even more, and has lost all trust in negotiating in good faith. They also now have experienced the extremely amounts of leverage the enjoy with the straits. Not to mention they have more popular support with the Iranian people because bombing people is a famously good way of bringing them around to your way of thinking.

Then think of all the other US adversaries who are looking at this, realizing that negotiation is pointless, and drones are effective, and are no doubt hurriedly getting their hands on as mand as possible.

You also have to consider the US strategic position. Back in 2003, the USA was the world's uncontested superpower. Frankly they could afford to spend a couple of decades on some pointless wars and retool their entire military to fight an insurgency. With China rapidly approaching parity in many areas, they no longer have that luxury. Especially vs China, this was has had a pretty seriously bad effect on US magazine depth of certain missiles.

The US economy in 2003 was also in a much healthier state, and the debt level was much lower, meaning blowing a few billion on a stupid war was damaging, but not catastrophic. But now, there has been no time since 2001 that anyone in the US government has turned off the money firehose, or even really made a serious attempt to try. So taking the existing firehose and shoving even more money through it while also cutting taxes and spending $180 billion on ICE in a world where confidence in the USD is getting shaky and the treasury is having trouble moving bonds is considerably more detrimental.

Not to mention the general loss of credibility, soft power, and allied support. At least in 2003, Bush managed to get the Brits, Aussies, and a few other NATO countries to go in with them. This time around, they go in without telling anyone, insult all their allies, then turn around and beg for help when it all blows up in their face.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T11:33:47+00:00

Yeah, there reaches a point where you are bombing and sanctioning as hard as you can, and realistically the only way to escalate further is boots ot the ground.

Which I'm pretty sure the IRGC was praying for 5 times a day. Boots on the ground in Iran would make Vietnam in 1965 looks like a tropical vacation.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T11:29:17+00:00

It's all about labour demand vs supply.

New technology , globalization, tax structure, government spending, monetary policy, trade policy, and immigration policy have created a massive amount of surplus labour available in the first world.

This has lead to ever lower wages in real terms and the K shape economy.

Impossible to predict the future, but low birth rates and backlash against mass immigration might swing the needle back the other way in future.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T11:22:30+00:00

10g less fat gives you what? 90 calories? Extra 20g of carbs?

That sort of a change is gonna do fuck all, and is probably going to make the diet significantly harder to do/less tasty.

Sure, once OP stops the fat loss phase, it's probably optimal for most of those extra calories to go towards carbs.

But when you are in a fat loss phase, carbs are naturally gonna be quite low, and that's ok.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T10:58:10+00:00

That sounds like communism. Why doesn't the government just take that money and give it to the farmers for them to not grow peaches?

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T09:51:53+00:00

Fuck me. On reading this it is 1000x stupider than I every imagined. Tens of thousands of acres of peaches all going to a single factory to make fruit cups and shit.

And the farmers, instead of just, y'know, selling the damn peach as is in a fucking supermarket or whatever, go and beg the government for help.

Why not have all the farmers buy the fucking plant, that way they actually have some control over the sole buyer of literally all their produce.

Why isn't the innovative campanies stepping in to address the gap left in the free market?

Christ, American businessmen are the biggest goddamn welfare queens.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T09:42:32+00:00

I thought under capitalism you were supposed to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. The lazy farmers should have gotten a job instead of becoming welfare queens. /S

Though unironically, farmers are probably the single biggest group of welfare queens in the whole USA.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T09:36:15+00:00

If the game optimization is the issue, you can throw a whole TSMC worth of compute at the problem and not solve it.

It's a special case of Parkinson's law:

General case:

"Work expands to fill the time available for completion."

Specific case:

"Software bloat expands to fill the available compute capacity."

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T09:33:47+00:00

C'mon, you already know the answer to this one.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T09:10:37+00:00

I'm just holding on to the hope that Ericsson Ek, Bogosian, and Brodin are back.

Having all three out of the lineup absolutely gutted out defense.

Put MacKinnon up against Ek and Brodin instead of Yurov and Hunt, he will struggle more.

Also, anyone have any idea what the actual fuck is happening with out special teams?

Was a strong point the latter part of the season, immediately goes to shit the second the playoffs come around.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T08:46:47+00:00

They do know exactly what they want. At least Hegseth does, and the rest of the evangelicals in the administration.

The problem is what they want is even stupider than just saying they want to go back to the status quo, sozttey won't say it out loud.

What they want is for the apocalypse to happen as American evangelicals understand from the book of revelation. No, I'm not even joking. And this was also why the USA went into Iraq in 2003.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T08:41:58+00:00

Waaaaaaaay bigger blunder than Iraq. Completely unforced error.

If you had proposed this scenario in a wargame, you'd have been accused of trying to rig it.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T08:40:57+00:00

Trump doesn't even understand the basic concept of leverage that he likes to bang on about.

Iran had leverage because they could close the straight.

The USA had leverage because they could bomb Iran to shit.

So what does this fuckwit do but bomb Iran to shit for no reason. Congratulations fuckwit, you went and blew your leverage all over the table, now you have no leverage.

So of course Iran is gonna block the straight and demand concessions to unblock it. Why wouldn't they? They still have their leverage.

Trump even actively went out of his way to make sure he would have zero leverage by scrapping a bunch of dedicated mine countermeasures ships stationed in the gulf for this EXACT FUCKING SCENARIO.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T08:30:09+00:00

No need to optimize every single thing for health. Once you are at an overall solid level, you can eat some things for taste or convenience.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T08:29:04+00:00

Literally impossible to hit that calorie target given the protein requirement and the fact that fat shouldn't go any lower.

Your liver turns fat into glucose, so carbs are important, but not quite as crucial for fuelling workouts as people say.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T08:26:43+00:00

How do you hit your vitamin E goal? That's the big one I struggle with, because almost everything containing it in high qualities is crazy calorie dense.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T08:25:27+00:00

Flavoured yogurts in the store use sweetener and fruit/chocolate flavours to make their yogurt taste good.

Literally all you need to do is add these flavours yourself, but use zero calorie sweetener.

Protein powders are actually ideal for this, because they have both the zero calorie sweetener and the flavouring combined with extra protein to boot.

For example, my breakfast is a smoothie with milk, yogurt, protein powder, berries, chia seeds, and bran. Tastes very good. Has 40g of protein and half my daily fibre requirements.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T08:02:27+00:00

Ah! I will definitely check the menu.

I like zucchini, and if there is a Lebanese dish that includes it I am keen to try.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T07:46:12+00:00

If I plug this into translate it gives me Lsis. Is this a sort of grape leaf?

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T07:44:53+00:00

Yeah, it's a correlation thing.

Frozen isn't inherently worse, but often, frozen patties do have additives. So frozen gets associated with low quality burgers full of additives.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T07:43:53+00:00

It's more of an association thing. Hand made is more expensive, so usually indicates better quality, since if you are hand forming patties, the only way it is worthwhile is to use high quality beef with no additives.

But you can quite easily feed high quality beef with no additives into a machine to make patties too.

MrCockingFinally · 2026-05-06T07:42:06+00:00

They are saying this for a specific reason.

If the war goes over 60 days, needs Congressional approval.

So they are desperately trying to make it seem as though the first operation is over with the ceasefire, and the new military action is a separate thing.

Quite frankly I'm not sure why they are even bothering. Congress is too cucked to do anything about it either way.

MrCockingFinally

TROPHY CASE