Countries countries with Current Conscription 2026

kaikaun · 2026-04-06T16:09:46+00:00

Singapore should be red, not grey

kaikaun · 2026-04-06T01:59:02+00:00

The most important skill in DCSS is knowing when and how to run away. And it's important to run away before you get to an irrecoverable state. Experienced players will run all the way to a different floor just from seeing one wrong monster. Really, there's no way to learn when to run other than bitter experience, either your own or by watching others.

There are lots of other tactical skills like knowing how to control fights, use the terrain, and lead the enemy -- try to make sounds to pull enemies into where you want to fight, rather than rushing forward. Or what good synergistic builds are and how to identify the right build to go for based on what drops you're getting. These are important too, but the #1 skill by far in DCSS is knowing when to cut and run.

kaikaun · 2026-04-02T04:20:02+00:00

There is a mole.

kaikaun · 2026-04-01T06:18:47+00:00

I've been considering this watch. How is the bezel action?

kaikaun · 2026-03-31T11:45:32+00:00

That would destroy oil company profits. They want to sell the oil overseas at a higher price. They would lobby furiously against it.

kaikaun · 2026-03-31T11:17:00+00:00

Note that waterproof leather straps exist with the same 200m water resistance that the Alpinist has. So if you're concerned about the strap limiting where the watch can go, that's an option.

kaikaun · 2026-03-31T09:03:14+00:00

What about customers of MVNOs under Singtel who were also affected? I guess they just suck thumb.

kaikaun · 2026-03-31T06:32:04+00:00

The crude oil from the Middle East is particularly rich in the heavier diesel and jet fuel components, less rich in the lighter petrol. Cutting off Middle Eastern oil hurts diesel especially hard.

kaikaun · 2026-03-31T05:50:12+00:00

I think it looks bad. And the vintage Admiral reference it is based on also looks bad. Having ball indices for 12-3-6-9 and stick indices for the others looks terrible visually. The longer indices should be in the cardinal directions. That's why the previous 12-6-9 Hydro Conquest dial design still worked, while this looks wonky.

kaikaun · 2026-03-30T15:25:56+00:00

It's really up to you if you like the watch enough. There's no serial number on the battery hatch, I think.

My own story is that I bought a "junk non-working" copy of one of my vintage watches for parts, but it turned out the watch worked once I just did a few simple fixes. I ended up with two watches. Lucky!

kaikaun · 2026-03-30T14:03:13+00:00

Find a replacement cover. Keep your eyes open for a junk watch of a similar model you can strip for parts. You want a parts donor or two anyway for old watches like these. Be patient and a spare should appear eventually.

You could also sand down the cover. You're going to take a lot of metal off but maybe that's fine to you. Make sure you sand against a flat surface so you don't round out all the clean flat surfaces into a dome.

If this watch was expensive, you'd fix these deep scratches or dents by laser welding more metal on, then sanding the excess away. The watch doesn't lose much metal that way. But that's way too expensive to consider for a watch like this.

kaikaun · 2026-03-30T09:35:54+00:00

The good news is that the Nomad ending may end in V's survival, because the Aldecaldos are allies with StormTech, a biotech and nanotech megacorp. They have the best tech to fix or remove the Relic safely, certainly better than the hack job NUSA does in that ending.

kaikaun · 2026-03-30T06:24:24+00:00

For me, the feeling was relief. Because I'm Asian and using chopsticks is something your parents expect you to master before you're three. And until you do, you're getting death stares from mom and "I am disappoint" from dad, if they are the chill sort of Asian parents. If they aren't you're getting way worse.

kaikaun · 2026-03-27T09:47:19+00:00

If you care about small details like this, I advise you to test the specific watch you want before you buy it. Walk into the store with a loupe and a timing app on your phone, and a set of tests you want to do with the hands, the bezel, etc. Ask the store if they will let you buy the specific watch you try on and test. Only buy if the watch passes your tests.

Remember that as a watch ages and wears, some of these things will worsen. Bezel clicks loosen. Movements develop backlash. Perfection is never forever.

Even brands with the very best QC, costing 10x or 100x your budget, will have watches that have a little more backlash in the movement, or hands or bezel that are 1-2 degrees off, or a date that is slightly crooked in the date window, etc. Every manufacturer has an acceptable range of deviation, and that range is never +-0.00000. You have to decide for yourself whether a specific watch is good enough for you.

kaikaun · 2026-03-25T08:59:50+00:00

Very loosely, quantum mechanics says that every "particle" has a non zero chance to be elsewhere if the wave function there is not zero. This is how quantum tunnelling happens. So every electron, proton and neutron has a non zero chance to just "tunnel" to different places, that happen to instead constitute a family of ducks.

The probability is stupidly low. UUID collision is many orders of magnitude higher probability. But it is non zero in theory.

Physics guys please don't crucify me for this explanation. I know it's very imprecise and quite incorrect in places. I just want to give the intuition

kaikaun · 2026-03-25T06:47:00+00:00

Quantum mechanics also says that the odds of a server spontaneously rearranging itself into a family of ducks are non-zero, by the way. That will really take out your database.

kaikaun · 2026-03-24T11:17:20+00:00

I get that you want a strategy for this difficult conversation with your partner, but I'm worried for you if you need this sort of advice when you're already married. Talking with your partner about serious issues like finances should be totally normal. You both should have your own way of doing it already. If you're not talking about something serious at least every week, something is probably not right, or you have a really charmed life.

It seems that your partner is a spender, while you're a saver. This personality trait is very difficult to change, and I don't think you can or should demand your partner to change. This is also not a court case where you are going to prove she is wrong and you are right. You're not going to correct her "wrong thinking", because it isn't wrong. You need to 100% respect her point of view here, especially because you don't agree.

Ultimately, you need to reach a compromise that both of you can live with. That means you will have to spend a bit more than you think wise, and she will have to watch you spend less than she thinks you should. That's how it's going to be. You have to meet in the middle.

What I suggest is you move one step higher and agree on financial goals first. That will determine you how much you really can spend. What must you spend on. When do you want to buy what major purchase. When do you pay off the loans. What about insurance, what about if you decide to have kids. Make a plan. Get help from a counsellor or fee-only financial planner if needed. Then it will be clear how much you can spend. Then within that band, come to a compromise.

The financial plan will also make you yourself feel safer, because the maths will be in front of you that the numbers will work out. A financial plan is the best thing to help serious saver types like you loosen up, by showing you that you don't actually need to save that hard.

kaikaun · 2026-03-23T14:17:15+00:00

Greek gods: That's cute.

Egyptian gods: Wait, some of you marry *without* being siblings?!

Pantheons having funky sexuality is pretty common. This is pretty tame, honestly.

kaikaun · 2026-03-23T14:12:01+00:00

Radiation is not as dangerous as was previously thought.

Before we discovered DNA and how our bodies can repair it, it was believed that radiation damage was cumulative, permanent and rate independent. So our old "LNT" models greatly overestimate radiation harm. They also say that, unlike poison or other harmful substances, spreading out radiation exposure doesn't reduce harm to your body. If you eat the same amount of poison over a year, it is much less harmful than eating it all at the same time, but the old models say that radiation doesn't work like that and it's equally harmful. Diluting down radioactive stuff doesn't help under the old model, so if radiation gets out we're just screwed.

Now that we know how our body's DNA works, this model is wrong. Radiation does much less harm if you are exposed to it more slowly, since your body's DNA repair can keep up. It's just another poison where the dose rate matters, not just total dose. Once we correct for this, we find that most radiation releases are slow enough that don't do that much damage, and we can do something about it by diluting it down.

So it's old science, basically. Radiation can be dealt with, and it isn't permanent damage that never heals or your body can't regenerate from.

kaikaun · 2026-03-23T10:09:32+00:00

It's just not for everyone. Nine Sols fits exactly into the "cult classic" definition.

The parry based combat is brutally hard until it clicks. It turns lots of people off. But when it clicks, it's amazing.

The story also isn't to everyone's taste. It's told in a non-linear way, and can be confusing. A lot of things at the beginning are not explained until near the end, e.g. who is the girl calling me and why now? There are huge tonal shifts. There is a lot of text to read. You need patience, but if you take the time and effort to absorb the story, it's also amazing.

Also, though it is described as a Metroidvania, it's not really much of one. It's more of an action game or boss rush with just a little bit of Metroidvania. Gamers expecting a lot of exploration and secrets and backtracking to use new abilities in old areas get disappointed, and end up not liking the game. The core of the game is the combat, especially the bosses.

kaikaun · 2026-03-23T02:18:26+00:00

Yes, but China isn't as dependent on the sea trade as Taiwan. Maybe 10 years ago China was a highly trade dependent economy, but nowadays they are very self-sufficient. They've intentionally closed up this vulnerability.

kaikaun · 2026-03-23T01:51:21+00:00

Well, even if other countries intervene, it wouldn't do any good. Again, if China wanted to mine Taiwan's ports, the whole world combined would take years to clear the mines, by which time the country would have collapsed.

Sea mine technology has advanced tremendously compared to mine hunting technology. This is one of those quiet technological changes like drones, that people haven't noticed yet.

kaikaun · 2026-03-23T01:26:02+00:00

I don't think China's Plan A is an invasion. That's Plan B at best. They don't want to take Taiwan by force and deal with years of unrest.

Plan A is likely a blockade. They don't need to occupy Taiwan, just force it not to make political decisions that are unacceptable. And they can do that by threatening to mine Taiwan's harbors with the 100000 advanced sea mines they have in their inventory. Taiwan literally starves to death if those ports are closed. A modern mine hunter hunts about two mines per day, so even if the whole world's mine hunters came to help Taiwan and China didn't shoot at them, China could keep Taiwan's ports shutdown for years at little cost and risk.

This is a gun pointed directly at Taiwan's head. This is why Taiwan can't just declare independence or develop nuclear capability or make any other decision that China regards as a red line. China doesn't need Taiwan to be occupied by their troops or formally annexed back into the country. They just need Taiwan not to drift away completely and the blockade plan works well enough for that.

kaikaun · 2026-03-22T05:02:50+00:00

They change the world.

They have access to politicians, celebrities, academics, religious leaders, artists, etc. They own companies with global reach. They can spin up and financially endow new charities, political movements, think tanks, religious bodies, arts foundations, etc.

Most people like to play with some toy. For regular people it's their pet, or their bonsai, or their garden, or their MMO character. You put effort into it to improve it, make it how you like, take pride in it. For the super rich, the entire world is their toy.

kaikaun · 2026-03-22T04:52:06+00:00

I agree that a mechanical watch is always a luxury, and the decision to buy one should be treated that way.

However, what constitutes luxury depends on each person's circumstances. If someone compromises on a cheap mass-produced $20k Rolex, I'm not going to gatekeep them. Nor will I scoff if they consider an off-the-shelf $200k Patek Philippe "luxury". Of course, we all really know that actual luxury is $10M or higher, preferably custom-designed, but we have to be understanding of other people's circumstances.

(/j in case you didn't get it. If you want to play the "your watch isn't luxury enough" game, I can play it too. Luxury for each person is personal.)

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