Bay 12 Games Forum

Your wording made me expect a shift to Oona, and now I'm disappointed.

Nobody's going to know much more than you do, because the Ukrainian military is being extremely heavy-handed with operational security. The only information getting out to civilian hands is tiny snippets of report, and it is likely that a fair number of said snippets are deliberate disinformation, because Russia reads the same newspapers as everybody else.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1441


A US Treasury department determined that British American Tobacco made $250 million in carefully laundered profit from doing business with North Korea between 2007 and 2017 in violation of sanctions. A fine of over $500 million has been levied in response.

China is so important to the global economy that heavy sanctions would be extremely painful for everybody that isn't China. It would take years to fully replace China's products from other sources (note, Biden and others are pushing hard to start doing that now, for this reason, which is one of the reasons there's so much investment into vital manufacturing sectors under the various economic policies), and probably cause a major recession if not an outright depression. So everybody that isn't China would like to avoid that if they can.

The global economy is so important to China that heavy sanctions would mean no more China. Despite their size, they aren't economically set up in a way that they can cruise fully internally for a while to tough things out, and the shock of suddenly losing all their major export customers would make Black Thursday look like a minor hiccup. China really wants to avoid that fate.  Note that this is also a disincentive for the rest of the world to avoid heavy sanctions, because a nation in those straits is all too likely to decide that a Short Victorious War is their only possible way out.

What this means is that sanctioning China would be akin to a duel of flamethrowers at ten paces, except one guy's got moderate protective gear and the other doesn't. It isn't a situation that the rest of the world is going to enter into unless they have literally no choice, such as China launching a Short Victorious War without the sanctions.

Russia is very good at exploiting Useful Idiots and sneaking their narratives into popular discourse. They're not nearly as good at direct propaganda, at least in places where people have the ability to call them on their bullshit.

I can only reproduce that issue by dropping resolution down to 1600x900, and that's not Windows's fault - the game itself (still) doesn't quite work properly at that resolution.

Unless you've got some strange scaling issue, it isn't a Windows problem.

Russia and China are very much at the forefront of organized social media misinformation campaigns. That doesn't necessarily mean they're the most dangerous vectors. Arguably, a much bigger problem is that a lot of misinformation is spread not by deliberate "push this narrative" decisions by anybody in power, but by the way social media algorithms operate to boost "engagement". Fringe crap and conspiracy theories tend to get a lot of views and a lot of reactions (largely negative... at first), which has made Facebook and Twitter and the like decide people want to see more content like that, which drives more engagement which gets more content pushed in an escalating spiral. And, over time, the garbage starts to look less and less crazy through sheer exposure - the first time you hear about Evil Pedo Tunnels it gets dismissed entirely because it is so obviously bullshit. But you keep seeing it, until you start reacting less with "what are these people smoking" and more "ah, this nonsense again". Then it gradually becomes less "ah, this nonsense again" and "You know, I've been hearing a lot about this, am I sure there's nothing to it?". Especially if you are also seeing a lot of other, crazier stories that have popped up and shifting your credulity window. This is not a conscious process, but rather a slow mental erosion that it is far too easy to sink into, especially if it aligns with your existing biases.

This is made worse by grifters, politicians, and foreign agents (circling back around, Russia's provably dumped a lot of garbage intended to appeal to every political faction (their alignment with the far right has been known for awhile, and a number of leftist personalities were just arrested as Russian agents) in the US into the datastream for the sole purpose of increasing partisanship) catching on and deliberately exploiting it, but the pure mechanical grind is really scary.