Germany if they had British island mentality

UN News has this nonsense:

Borderline revolt [ ]

Ukraine said it supported efforts to correct historical distortions affecting Africa and other parts of the Global South but objected to the way some maps using Equal Earth depict Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia.

Its representative warned that endorsing the projection without adequate safeguards could open a “Pandora’s box,” allowing maps to create ambiguity over disputed territories.

The European Union supported the resolution but addressed the same concern.

Speaking on behalf of the bloc, Ireland stressed that the measure applied only to the relative size of landmasses and had no bearing on sovereignty, territorial status or internationally recognized borders.

The bloc also said its support did not constitute an endorsement of the maps displayed on the Equal Earth website.

The “Pandora’ Box” in question:

There’s this “vertical map” sometimes used in China that I’m fascinated by, almost always in the left configuration but there exists a version that doesn’t cut off the Americas. It’s named the Hao projection after its inventor Hao Xiaoguang.

More commonly used in China is this, whose official name is checks notes “Latitudinally equal-differential polyconic projection”, what a mouthful…

Rudy Zhulyany Airport

If the Berlin Wall was in Hamburg

Aren’t a lot of Jews anti-Zionist?

In terms of percentages it’s around 10-20 percent of them outside Israel, on the higher end in the US and on the lower end in Europe. Not that many in relative terms - especially when accounting for Jewish institutions being near-universally Zionist - but still hundreds of thousands.

I see Zionism as more of an oppunistic imperialist offshoot

Herzl and his successors have gone door-knocking by the British, the Ottomans briefly, the British again, the communists briefly, former Nazi Germans, the Americans and now the far right in general. Usually these alliances have rested on using a Jewish state to inhibit enemies in the regions for the allied partners. If circumstances change and Zionist ambitions become an obstacle rather than an asset, support wanes.

Reminds me of this nonsense I saw recently. The context is the Mega Man devs saying they’re adding more variety to boss designs in the upcoming game (first one revealed is named “Twinkle Girl”) and that female heroes are common now:

Sephardic Jews as Europeans is bit of a stretch: the vast majority came from the MENA region where their families had lived for centuries and in Israel, secular leadership historically viewed them as arabised and too religioug; they have typically lived in worse conditions than Ashkenazi Jews. It’s like the “are Slavs white” question, the answer depends on the context.

But personally I think asking how many Israelis are European is a red herring, Ben-Gvir is a Mizrahi for example and non-Ashkenazi Jews have often been the base for extreme Zionist movements like Kach and Likud. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews are like gusanos in a way: their “whiteness” comes from their loyalty to Western hegemony.

At first glance I thought you were recommending the literal “Seoul Station”

From what I’ve read, despite its size it’s not that hard to find your way there, not like Shinjuku. Foreign tourists tend to compliment the new wayfinding in Seoul’s metro system.

From the Haaretz article

Hamahanot Haolim - a century-old ‘pioneering, socialist Zionist youth group’

Only grain of truth is that there was in fact a “landslide dam” that burst, caused by a melting glacier on the Nepali side. A lake formed behind it, then when the dam collapsed from too much pressure, all the gravitational potential and extra mass from the debris made the flood reach extreme speeds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAYqvBuP8aA

I think the nature of the letter and where it was published also matters. The Guardian isn’t a publication for left-wing academics to discuss theory, it’s a mainstream newspaper where most of the readership only reluctantly opposes the US-Israeli attacks on the “regime”, mainly because it failed. The letter further muddies the waters and readers will ask what the left is on that “respectable academics” felt the need to sign such a letter.

I was recommended TerraFirmGreg as it is a little less extreme with the tech trees and gives you a much more realistic overworld, with stone layers, ore deposits and latitude-based climate zones.

It also makes the Ad Astra planets finally worth exploring but I haven’t gotten that far

Something called Maven is the actual computing system that selects targets via standard machine learning, any LLM is used only for presenting its results:

The AI underneath the interface is not a language model, or at least the AI that counts is not. The systems that detect targets in satellite imagery, fuse data from radar and drone footage, and track objects across multiple intelligence sources are computer vision and sensor fusion. They predate large language models by years. Neither Claude nor any other LLMs detects targets, processes radar, fuses sensor data, or pairs weapons to targets. LLMs are late additions to Palantir’s ecosystem; they were added in late 2024, years after the core system was operational, “AIP” was added as a natural language layer that summarizes documents or constructs and answers queries. (emphasis added)

An article on the long history of the US’ obsession with speeding up decision making over who to kill: https://artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/kill-chain

I read it all the way

Reminds me of the Nintendo Wii game about hunting birds sponsored by a bird conservation organisation.

The Strait of Hormuz already gets its name from a small city in Iran nearby. The city once controlled both side of the strait as a vassal kingdom of Portugal, hence the name.