ShadowPouncer

Well... No. It's complicated, but there are several ways in which Russia's invasion of Ukraine have both directly and indirectly increased gas prices. Some of them most definitely are part of 'simply because they can', but the invasion has given people more handles to do that as well.

If there is a significant drop in available supply, prices go up. There are not that many suppliers in the world who can do this all on their own without causing themselves very significant financial harm.

This is why OPEC, when it has it's act together enough for everyone to go along with it, has been such a thing, and holds so much power. If almost every supplier is part of OPEC, and OPEC decides to decrease supply, well, prices go up, and none of the suppliers take a hit.

In a very similar manner, if people think or expect that supply will decrease, you get a very similar effect, despite there being just as much supply as there was 5 minutes before the news or rumor went out.

And, of course, it is perfectly possible for suppliers to sell their product outside of the global commodity markets. It's rare, because it's almost always going to be selling it for less than the current market prices, but today we have some good examples of this.

Russia was a huge supplier of various petroleum products, and even though the oil you use to make gas and natural gas are rather different products, to a limited extent they are just barely interchangeable enough on the usage end that a significant shortfall in natural gas can be partially made up by increasing usage of gas, at least in some places.

(See Europe going through an exceptionally cold winter while not having enough of a natural gas supply to be confident in even normal usage.)

At the moment, you have Russia almost entirely excluded from the global commodity markets. Russia choosing to sell outside of those markets at a significant discount, to evade sanctions. Which gives other oil producers just a hair more leverage in continued price control.

All of this is the backdrop for the international companies that do most of the oil prospecting, drilling, etc, who have all decided to almost entirely stop bothering to continue investments in opening up new oil deposits. These most definitely impact pricing as well, though on a longer time scale.

It's a complex mess, with quite a lot of gambling, and actors who have a vested interest in screwing with the system, and entities with enough control to not only gamble, but to tilt the result to avoid losing those gambles if they really need to.

And given that everyone involved wants to make as much money as possible, only the fact that it is a global market keeps prices even remotely sane. Any excuse to hike prices will be taken.

Every now and then, I try to browser without an ad blocker.

That generally lasts until I encounter something that's bad enough that I don't really have a choice, and then I turn it back on.

The page needs to actually function. It needs to be possible to click on something and actually be clicking on the thing that you're intending to.

And it can not have stuff that blinks in a manner that causes a segment of the population (which includes me at times, but not 100% of the time) significant neurological problems.

That last one has been the driving force behind stuff getting reenabled a fair bit.

Oh, and if it's ads on video content, they need to be at least vaguely reasonable in regards to interruptions and length. Youtube is way past that at this point.

To be real clear, the only thing this does is screw over the hourly employees trying to survive on tips.

It does absolutely nothing to the business, they don't care, at all. It doesn't impact them in the slightest.

Yes, by law, if someone makes so little in tips that they would be getting paid below minimum wage the business is supposed to make up the difference.

Assuming that happens for the entire shift.

In practice, by all accounts... That pretty much never happens.

That is very species dependent.

Some cold adapted species use various mechanisms to ensure that they can survive being frozen without that occurring.

One common answer is a form of natural antifreeze, preventing the crystallization from occurring where it would cause that kind of damage.

On the contrary, Russia using nuclear weapons would do a great deal.

It would ensure that every sane nation on the planet start working to remove the very real threat of Russia using nuclear weapons in other settings.

Depending on exactly how it was taken, that could pretty easily mean almost anything from a long range, decade long effort by most of the world to slowly strangle Russia with sanctions, without any exceptions, to an immediate set of strikes on every single known Russian location with nuclear weapons.

And make no mistake, 'known location' is going to include a lot of places that are only 'known' at whatever the equivalent is for various countries of top secret, code word classified material, known only to a very small select few.

It would definitely include every single Russian nuclear submarine that any country on earth has a lock on.

It's pretty much impossible to say how likely that immediate strike would be under those conditions, in large part because the world at large has no idea how much of Russia's nuclear arsenal has been located with enough precision to carry out such an attack, let alone how much is believed to be known with such precision.

I really, really hope that we don't go there, because that would be the kickoff for World War 3, without any question.

The only question would be how many Russian nuclear weapons would get launched before their launch platforms were eliminated.

Practically speaking, I sure as hell wouldn't bet on the number being 0. But others very well might.

I definitely wouldn't bet on it being anywhere close to the number of weapons that Russia claims to have ready to launch. Intelligence and strike capabilities are far better than that. Even assuming that every single launch platform actually works the way it's supposed to.

But Russia doing something that even had the potential to lead to a world wide nuclear exchange would most definitely result in actions far greater than anything we have seen so far.

Alright, now, who wants to come up with a 'good enough' generative AI tool to generate fake irises on a smartphone screen, and what do you think would be necessary (if anything) to convince the orb-shaped device that it's a real iris?

That is the goal of this project, right?

I would argue that we are, as a planetary civilization, almost past the point where a war of that sort is even possible.

On the other hand, if China were to ever shun NK, I would bet that their government would likely collapse in less than a decade.

Sadly, China has a ton of reasons to want to prevent that, one of the bigger ones being the border with NK where many, many refugees would try to cross into China.

I could however see, someday, China agreeing to a massive backroom deal on a scale that would be unprecedented:

China abruptly works to ensure a complete collapse of the NK government, without any NK nuclear weapons either coming into play or any NK nuclear weapons going missing (except to China itself, if it wants them).

And SK along with a good chunk of the Western world agrees to immediately conduct one of the largest humanitarian missions in history, to ensure that nobody is fleeing NK into China unless they have tons of assets and they want to avoid repercussions for their actions.

There are, sadly, a lot of reasons why China wouldn't want the western powers capable of pulling that off to have control of territory that close to China though.

SK would be their safest bet, but SK doesn't have the resources to pull of that kind of a humanitarian effort.

And the chances that someone like the US wouldn't take the chance to plop a military base in what is currently NK seems awfully slim.

Yep.

The only big complication with doing stuff that way is that if you get enough attention, abruptly people start looking at your stuff a lot harder.

And then you get shredded, and lose all credibility for the rest of your career.

Claiming to have discovered something absolutely ground breaking, that everyone in the field would want to replicate almost immediately, is exactly the kind of thing that would sink someone doing this.

But then again, people are idiots sometimes.

From the comments, I think that the general answer is: We all recognize it, because a lot of different places used a logo sorta like this in the 90s.

And we can't pin it down exactly, because a lot of different places used a logo sorta like this in the 90s.

And being the 90s, a lot of that was never on the internet in the first place.

It rings very strong bells for me, and I don't think the reason is one that (at the time of this comment) has already been posted... But I can't for the life of me remember what it was for.

Yes and no.

I suspect that Reddit is going to lose a fair number of chargebacks, because the credit card association rules are often a bit more strict.

Because they are unilaterally removing benefits that people have already paid for, and are explicitly stating that they will provide no refunds.

If you paid for a year of premium, a good chunk of the benefit has been the coins to buy awards.

After they get rid of both coins and awards, well, you have still paid for premium in advance, but it is now worth a fair bit less to some people.

Also bad, but more arguably in regards to the law, they are choosing to remove all past awards on posts and comments.

Which means that people who have bought coins (or premium to get coins) are having all of that undone, again, without any possibility of refund.

Arguably, this is much more problematic for people who had purchased coins, but who had not used them all before the announcement. Because that's taking the money, and then simply choosing not to provide the service that was paid for, while simultaneously stating that there will be no refunds.

You could try to argue that, well, they can use those coins up until they turn buying awards off... Except, well, one of the nice things about awards is that they last as long as the post or comment does.

This is... Problematic.

Extremely problematic.

And the Supreme Court is supposed to be a court of law.

Sadly, as they have decided to move away from that, the least the executive can do is ensure that the law is being correctly applied in cases where it favors the people.