A heads-up to anyone running old laptops; buy genuine replacement batteries while they’re available!

I have an aging XPS 13 and of course, Dell have discontinued the battery line. Opened it up one day and every cell had puffed out. It took buying a couple of fakes before finally finding a decent reseller on eBay who stocked what I needed. The fake batteries were not recognised by Dell’s hardware detection system thing, I imagine lots of other manufacturers might implement the same feature.

It’s like the Fonz jumping the shark all over again.

woooosh

And with the decline in birth rates armies are going to have smaller pools of people to recruit from. Even the US army is experiencing a shortfall, and it’s not getting better any time soon. Perun did a great video of this just recently.

It makes sense that if militaries won’t be able to recruit the quantity and quality of troops that they would like to, they’d need to supplement those numbers with some kind of force multiplier.

https://piped.video/watch?v=Ga2PA-vEiFk

A strong neodymium magnet so you can stick your wallet to your fridge.

Replace ‘Trump’ with ‘Russia’.

They are both entangled in a fight for survival. Both of them need the support of the US people if they have any hope of making it. It’s imperative for either party that they win this and nothing is off the table when it comes to politics or influence.

There is an existential war at hand and none of the embattled parties give two shits about the aftermath.

Asking why is meaningless, it’s an artifact of how our brains are wired.

Our brains are evolved to try to understand the world around us in terms of reason; if this happens then that happens. It makes sense when looking at the chain of results that cascade out of the fireworks of creation; chemistry, biology and physics. The arrow of time points one way and we have evolved around that premise.

It doesn’t mean that our intuitions are correct or even vaguely headed down the right path. We’re a victim of that arrow of time, the path of the world we live in.

I can’t speak to the other countries on this list but South Africa had ample access to vaccines. The take-up was low. Reasons offered were doubts around the efficacy and conservative attitudes to modern medicine.