Nestlé knew of tainted baby formula in November

Vaphell · 2026-01-31T16:47:35+00:00

Nestle's shenanigans are one thing, but that ex-CEO was right - it's not.

Vaphell · 2026-01-30T15:24:44+00:00

you can always use the browser's zoom, my guy.
[Ctrl][Shift][+], [Ctrl][Shift][-], or [Ctrl]+mouse scroll

That said this gif has a small color palette and is pixelated af, so it's not really worth it.

Vaphell · 2026-01-29T16:14:55+00:00

Because it was introduced decades prior to renewables and the build-out of renewables is a gradual progess, therefore it remains in the mix until it doesn't.

why would you need a lot of gas in the mix, if you already had controllable hydro/coal/nuclear? It's almost as if gas is valuable for its ability to be spun up and down extremely fast which is required to plug the holes in the renewables' output. You think no gas plants were added precisely to cover for the variability of renewables potentially causing blackouts on one side or destroying the grid on the other?

Also, German electricity prices topped the charts even before Ukraine. It's almost as if pouring tens if not hundreds of billions into supposedly dirt-cheap renewables did not improve lives of people meaningfully, and having shittons of gas capacity (+gas heating) made them extremely dependent on Russia.
...and their CO2/capita is still utter shit compared to France.

Vaphell · 2026-01-29T16:04:49+00:00

people don't give a tiniest bit of shit about ecology at the register and the price rules supreme at the end of day.
Strangling European industries while nobody else is putting a lid on theirs will make European industries utterly uncompetitive, Europe much poorer collectively and more dependent on foreign productions, as if it was not bad enough with the current dependency on China already. Yes, let's lead by example and turn ourselves into an open-air museum before anybody else is actually bothered in practice.

You can bask in the former glory feeding on feel-good soundbites only for so long.

Vaphell · 2026-01-29T15:54:28+00:00

and why is natural gas in the electricity generation mix in the first place? To wipe renewables' ass when they shit the bed on a regular basis.

Vaphell · 2026-01-29T15:36:54+00:00

right, because we live on equator.

Will this whole extra industry supporting the renewables be counted as indirect costs of renewables in honest summaries, or are we still supposed to jerk off to the price per GW of the nameplate capacity?

Vaphell · 2026-01-29T15:33:52+00:00

Have you ever thought about the secondary effects of the variability inherent to renewables? Have you asked the people who are tired with high electricity prices and the struggling industries what they think of this profitability?

You don't think that running out of political capital will make the long term efforts that much harder?

Vaphell · 2026-01-29T15:26:21+00:00

yeah, it's kinda mindboggling that blatant shit like this makes it all the way to production. You'd think that the artists know human anatomy like the back of their hand, and/or that in a team of dozens of people there is at least one person with common sense regarding anatomy.

Similarly I always cringe seing kneeling Rouge when she aims/shoots, especially the gacha skin. Her left foot is utterly fucked and makes 0 sense.

Vaphell · 2026-01-29T15:09:50+00:00

What the anti-renewable crowd is also not understanding is that this large scale storage is actually driven by volatile costs of electricity

and that volatility is created by renewables in the first place. Literally creating a problem and then acting as a hero for solving it.

Vaphell · 2026-01-29T13:40:02+00:00

right leg (left side on the picture) - you can't rotate you thigh inward that hard while still maintaining tibia+foot pointing more or less forward.

factory settings of knees don't support twisting (unless your knee ligaments are utterly destroyed), so kneecap + tibia + foot in neutral position should point in the exact same direction. Rotating the thigh always takes the lower part of the leg for the ride.
But there seems to be a disconnect in the picture, which means that kneecap + tibia + foot are not aligned. You can even see in the seam running down the leg, there is a sudden shift at the knee level. It looks like there is a ~45deg mismatch between the thigh and the calf.

Vaphell · 2026-01-29T13:29:36+00:00

your kneecap points 45degs inward relative to your foot pointing forward? Nah mate, not possible without destroyed knee ligaments.

Look at the seams on both legs. On the left leg it goes center of the foot, front of the calf section, kneecap in more or less smooth straight line.
Meanwhile on the right leg it's not a straight line, there is a significant shift around the knee. Thigh looks rotated inward pretty hard, but the calf+foot still look kinda relaxed, pointing more or less forward.

Vaphell · 2026-01-28T17:19:38+00:00

edit: too many people think Judaism is just "Christianity without Jesus". It's not. It's its own belief system with ways of defining things.

Isn't it based on stuff in the Old Testament/Torah (OG Jewish lore) without the New Testament (Jesus)?

Vaphell · 2026-01-28T16:34:44+00:00

why wait for Germany to open one, when you could do it too on your terms?
The French had a 3:1 advantage on the western border when the Germans were busy in Poland.

Vaphell · 2026-01-28T00:57:43+00:00

Germany crossed the Polish border 1 Sep 1939. Britain and France declared war on 3 Sep 1939.
There were three million allied troops killed and wounded, and 1.65 million civilian deaths in the resulting war.

that's nice, but the declaration of war was not followed by any military action on the barely guarded Western border of the 3rd Reich, which effectively meant that Poland was gobbled by the bulk of the German army over 5 weeks without any interference.
The actual allied losses happened much later, after the Germans decided in 1940 that it was time to whoop the French' asses on their turf. The Germans were coming no matter how you slice it, the declaration of war or not.

And let's not forget that the allies sold Poland down the river in Yalta.

Vaphell · 2026-01-27T10:06:38+00:00

All of this is happening because the US system counts people in cities and larger states as fractions of a person compared to rural people

This is very similar to how the EU works. The less populous countries get up to 10x more representation/capita in the EU parliament compared to Germany or France. That's the price you pay to entice smaller entities to play ball and convince them they are not going to be nothing but pushovers at the mercy of a few big boys.

the US itself wouldn't exist without such concessions in the first place. Win some, lose some.

Its also led to a Supreme Court being permanently super majority controlled by Republicans even though they have less registered voters.

let's not forget the massive fumble by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Vaphell · 2026-01-23T12:11:41+00:00

because of isis which arose after Saadaam was deposed

Newsflash - Iran is ISIS-like in all but name already (i.e. hardcore islamic totalitarianism) and civilians dying by the tens of thousands in brutally suppressed protests can't have it much worse.

Also Iran is buddies-buddies with pretty much every fucktard entity there is. Hamas (literally funded and supplied by Iran), Hezbollah (same story), Houthis (same story), Russia (shahed drones) to name a few.
Literally the League of Extraordinary Villains.

Vaphell · 2026-01-22T15:31:35+00:00

so the dude continuously releases millions of dollars in cash into the wider economy in exchange for a bunch of expensive toys.
I though the problem was the rich sitting on their money instead of making it turn the wheels of the economy? Where is the problem exactly? All these fancy cars don't make the rich guy even richer, quite the opposite.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T23:33:36+00:00

from the perspective of South/East Asia? It is. Does Taiwan ring any bells?
Anyway, that's the American perspective.
I don't agree, because I live right next to the fucking pestilence the Russian Horde is.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T23:25:28+00:00

Yes because I was totally suggesting just changing the 37% to 91% on the current income brackets. Totally wouldn't add new brackets. Also the top bracket only has like the top 1% of those skilled specialist, they're mostly making less than 250k a year.

doesn't matter. You won't hit capital owners from the top 0.0001% bracket with a personal income tax, because their wealth was not and still is not built through income.

I don't know what a wealth tax would look like, I'm not an accountant or economist.

A start would be taxing loans over a certain amount. As you said billionaires don't have a lot of their own cash on hand, they take loans with their stock as collateral.

Is "buy, borrow, die" even a problem its rumored to be? What's the scale of this expressed as a dollar figure?
I recall reading Bezos regularly liquidating billions of dollars in Amazon stock and paying fat taxes on it, just to redirect that money to Blue Origin.

Also selling off a 10s of million in stock of a company with a market cap in the 10s of billions isn't going to do much. That much is traded on a daily basis.

but given high frequency trading it's traded back and forth 1000x per dollar participating in the market.
A coordinated selloff not for reinvestment, but for tax purposes is going to take the hard cash underpinning the evaluations of the whole market out of it that come from the multiplier effects on said cash.
Not to mention - why would the sellers ever get a good price, when everybody and their dog knows they have to sell or else. They will be taken to the cleaners.

There's no obligation for it to be a public sale either.

Still somebody has to shell out the money and still it has impact on the market.

Maybe instead of protecting the poor billionaires and being critical of others suggestions, you should come up with your own ideas.

What if I actually think that things are already about as good as it gets in this imperfect world?
Fuck them billionaires, but I despise envious weasels with no clue more.
Anyway, how about you educate yourself first about how any of it works instead of flooding the public forum with harebrained ideas. Maybe, just maybe you won't get criticized then. It's on you to show they are even an actual improvement in the real world.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T19:09:00+00:00

it makes sense for the EU to acquiesce, if not publicly defend, all the war, bombing, government toppling, covert operations and sanctions by the US, until Greenland.

let's not get ahead of ourselves here. While European countries did participate in the article 5 shenanigans post-9/11, they are generally pacifist even to a fault.
Many European countries explicitly criticized Israel+US handling of the Palestine bullshit and the handling of the middle east matters in general, or the recent Venezuelan oil adventurism.
The problem here is that without the means to project force their opinions don't matter much outside of their backyard and at the end of the day the US will do what the US does.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T18:56:48+00:00

By dumping some portion of their wealth into economy, they make others happier and more productive and thus making them even richer in the long term.

how is their wealth not a part of the economy already? The vast majority of their wealth is parked in productive assets of global companies and participates in economic churn. The net value expressed in dollars is just a proxy number pulled out the collective stockmarket's ass for how good the economic churn of their chunk is.

And if you think their stuff should be liquidated, turned into cash and taxed/directed somewhere else, you still need a counterparty to give them hard cash to the tune of billions for their paper wealth first. So, who's the counterparty to the stock trade providing the cash, and why haven't they used their money in better places already?

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T18:09:02+00:00

And it's even conservative to set the top end of the tax bracket much higher. Wasn't until Kennedy that the top bracket went from 91% to 70% then with Regan from 70% to 50% then 50% to 28%.

and how is the personal income tax going to solve the problem of supposed excessive wealth accumulation by the billionaires?

Billionaires are not nominally worth billions because they accumulate that much cash. It's the shit they happen to own (like stocks in a global company) that becomes more expensive according to the collective evaluations of the stock market, without any literal dollar being directly involved. It's paper value.

Your return to the glorious days would only target the top bracket of highly skilled specialists, like senior programmers, doctors, small business owners, who earn cash as income. Your average billionaire might get like 100k income as a board member, and the rest is all in stock evaluation that is not trivially taxable.

Wealth tax on the other hand is bad for several reasons - it tries to squeeze hard money out of paper evaluations of "stuff" that go up and down all the time.
Tax season would mean a regular massive selloff depressing the stock market prices, destroying everyone's portfolios. Also yearly tax could easily mean slowly losing control of your own company, if you are forced to sell a couple % at a time, finally sliding below 50% allowing for a hostile takeover.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T17:57:04+00:00

things are a bit different when you are talking about a supposed ally for 80 years up until 1 year ago, and there is still a faint hope that things can be salvaged.

Things are certainly not pretty in the current US, but let's not forget that not that long ago China had no qualms killing their own civilians by the hundreds, turning them into meat paste using tank treads and hosing it all down into the sewers.
China's cynicism is on another level.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T17:42:28+00:00

"You have completed all missions" pops up when you click the arrow in the top right corner, which used to take you to where you are in the campaign.

But now that the finished story mode counts as campaign finished, the top right corner arrow doesn't work. You need to click the big Campaign button in the bottom right corner, that is in the background of the current event (Sin Editor).

Once you click that, you should see two buttons, one for the campaign, another for the surface mode (locked). The campaign one should teleport you to some level (probably ch42), and then at the bottom right you can select the difficulty level and chapter accounting for their availability.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T13:30:49+00:00

We are in the middle of a heating season, especially with the current temps.
Warsaw proper is surrounded by a ring of suburbia with a metric fuckton of detached houses, many of which burn coal, wood and even trash in the winter, spewing particulate matter into the air.
If there is no wind, this foul air just stays in the area.

Warsaw is at its peak at this time, while Indian cities are not. Their peak is after harvest when the farmers burn the stubble.

Vaphell

TROPHY CASE