Leszek Karlik

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• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Far-future optimistic climate-fiction? That one seems difficult to pull of plausibly. :-)...
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  Ah damn it, SFP is still on hiatus. :-)...
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  Something*Positive (even longer running that QC), Questionable Content, Oglaf, XKCD and Existential Comics. (Oh, and I see that Book Eight of Strong Female Protagonist is now on, great)...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Generation War (a German version of Band of Brothers) I watched this youtube fragment you've linked and I have very strong ambivalent feelings about this, I mean a TV show with Wehrmacht protagonists at the Eastern Front is an ethical...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Bechdel Test is not intended for the assessment of individual films or books or whatever, its main use is to demonstrate the bias present in "films as such" or "books as such". You can have a very good book with...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  "I've never bought any plant burgers but this makes me wonder whether (given the much lower digestibility, etc. of plant proteins) standard food labeling for such products shows both the make-up of the plant nutrients as well as the dietary...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  As far as assertions of the form "it takes however-much money to have X" mean anything at all to begin with, we do actually have a tolerably close approach to an accurate answer, in the form of the "money wot...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  "IIRC, the argument was applied to ALL of the ongoing pomp & circumstance and ceremony around the royal family; not just ONE ceremony. The coronation is a once-in-a-lifetime event and may cost a bit more than the contemporaneous tourist revenue...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  "Looking on from the outside, I think that "£50M party and national holiday" may be a net money maker for the U.K. economy ... just from the U.S. tourist spending it generates." I've seen this argument many times but never...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  This. And also, billionaires are effectively another form of aristocracy: unelected cunts who used mechanisms beyond democratic control to seize significant decision-making capacity on a global scale. Both hereditary monarchies and oligarchs are moral and policy failures on a massive...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  In technical translation specialised machine learning engines have been used as part of workflow for a few years already, and they are quite good. Not good enough to be used without human supervision, just like driver assistance in state of...
• Commented on New guest blogger: qntm
  I've read about Lena in this blog's comment section, I've started reading it and had to immediately finish, great piece of work. Very nice to have a guest blogger of this calibre :-)...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  "there is a school of thought that worries that young girls who would previously have ended up identifying as gay are being encouraged to transition instead" Yeah, I think this school of thought is called "transphobia". For example, a recent...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  "I suspect they'd get the wind mills spinning (hoping there would be wind) once things warmed up a bit and use that power to get other needed things going." I really doubt that. Wind turbines are not used for primary...
• Commented on Upcoming blog outage
  "And don't forget that various people have tried pinning inflation on the cost of paying for all those more-expensive workers, which I think may be partially right." This time not really, labour unit costs are responsible for under 8% of...
• Commented on I can't even
  "That's actually a strong argument against democracy. Democracies are fundamentally incapable of multi-decade, let alone multi-generation, projects which will not bear fruit until long after the initiators are dead or retired." Democracies really aren't. They're more of plebiscite oligarchies, where...
• Commented on I can't even
  "I want to know why Germany (and other countries on that side of the pond) say that burning pellets from our trees is "green"?" Because they needed baseload that was "renewable" for areas that could not have hydro in order...
• Commented on London Bridge
  "In which case there will be a stage where human population is still in the billions, but they have little or no food.* " That's extremely unlikely. We can feed ourselves with much less area than we do now,...
• Commented on London Bridge
  In theory: yes, in practice no. The only place that has only ever been practiced is military settings (Camp Century, McMurdo) and in northern parts of USSR. As far as I have been able to find out, it is no...
• Commented on London Bridge
  "Have they form for such an act?" The queen's grandfather, George V was given an overdose of morphine and cocaine so that the news of his death would be in the morning edition of the Times, not in the more...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  OK, this is very interesting: it seems that UA artilllery has created themselves a distributed targeting platform that makes their artillery a much harder nut to crack for Russian counterfire (because Russian counterfire doctrine assumes the enemy is firing entire...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  "Just ask the poor bastard of a neurosurgeon who is on-call at the nearest emergency hospital how much more time they've spent with their family since the helmet laws came in." This is an excellent example of a base rate...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  "Question: We know that cruise missiles can be brought down, before they reach their targets. Why/how is this not happening in Ukraine?" This is happening. Latest statement by the Ukraine's armed forces says that they've shot down 87 cruise missiles....
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  The issue with billionaires and why we have to get rid of them is that they are unelected, unaccountable engineers of political discourse that for the last six decades have been engineering political discourse to boil the planet, just in...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Russian invasion of Ukraine makes a lot of sense if you actually understand Russians and their dreams of imperial grandeur, which a lot of Eastern Europeans do, and which most of Western Europeans don't. (And assuming that Russia aither have...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  The biggest killer of ethnic Russians in Ukraine is the Russian Army. It is Putin who "resolved the Russian question" for Ukraine. It is the East which was inhabited by the Russian minority and by many Russian speaking Ukrainians (as...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Yesterday, I finished Quantum of Nighmares (the 24th February Russian full-scale assault on Ukraine has shot my ability to read fiction to hell and I'm only now rebuilding it slowly), so I came to Charlies' blog to read the Quantum...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Some Czech engineers has a bright idea of using spent fuel rods for district heating by building, in effect, a low-temperature nuclear reactor ran on "high level nuclear waste" (that is, the slightly spent fuel rods from PWRs). Just google...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  "hope that their nuclear weapons are as badly maintained as their trucks" If Russian nukes are as badly maintained as their trucks, that could mean that out of, say, 6000 warheads half launch (3000 warheads). Even if only 10% detonate...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Tanks are not dead on the modern battlefield, we're just seeing a very distorted version of the Ukrainian battlefields that the Ukraine's psy-ops department wants us to see. There are conventional tank on tank battles between Ukraine and Russian armed...