I use Poe.com, which gives me access to every model available for $20. When a new model comes out it is quickly added to the available list. So, I've been doing some comparison against Claude & GPT4. I still think GPT4 is better at following instructions and giving me the result I'm after.
In my opinion science should be about Truth, the rest should be left to people and their leaders. Truth being central to the process of science is what makes science unique and allows for societies to accumulate knowledge.
In the show, Norway had also designed a thorium reactor and were going to share the plans for free. They announced that and that they were shutting down the oil wells at the same time. Russia's main goal was to stop Norway from sharing the reactor design, because that would reduce Europe's dependence on Russia for energy.
What do you mean inspect possible futures through science fiction - none of that stuff is real! /s
Stories, when well done, explore interesting concepts and can teach us about how some actions may turn out - yes a lot of writing is lazy and stupid these days, but it's hardly justified to write off all of fiction because of that.
> yes a lot of writing is lazy and stupid these days
This is backwards; if you want to see characters taking entirely unmotivated actions, Grimm's Fairy Tales is a great place to look. Modern writing is a lot more concerned with justifying what the characters do than traditional stories are.
That said...
> Stories [...] can teach us about how some actions may turn out
True stories can. Fiction feels exactly the same, but it doesn't tell you how the action turns out - it tells you how the narrator decided the action should turn out. This is often unrelated to what would happen in reality.
I think the 'US did it for the oil' has always been just a pithy jab at the US more than the truth. Looking at what actually happened it looks like Ahmad Chalabi lied to enough people (even after being labelled as an unreliable source by the US intelligence agencies) to convince the US to get involved in his life long goal to get him and the Shiites back into power in Iraq after being forced out by Saddam's Baath party and the Shia faction it represented.
Oil, family business, getting strategic military bases oriented towards Iran, China, and Russia, wanting to really break America of "Vietnam Syndrome". It's all there!
Interesting, I didn't think the US trusted people like Chalabi to that degree. Since watching Game of Thrones it's looked to me like it was a personal feud between two oligarchical families that had a falling out.
He'd been working on it for decades in exile trying to convince the US to back rebellions in Iraq then trying to get the US to depose Saddam itself. Of course there's rarely a single reason anything involving a whole government decides to do something but I think it'd be ridiculous to not say Chalabi was one of the big factors leading to the US invasion of Iraq. Another potential is the fact that the Bush family might have felt like they had unfinished work there from the first invasion where the US stopped short of deposing Saddam over Kuwait.
It never worked out and it was only a rally cry for internet folk. We are not Russia.
> "Iraq's sector has remained state-owned and state-guided, and US companies have been forced to compete in open licensing rounds. Various efforts by US Administrations (including the current Trump Administration) to engineer bilateral negotiations and to promote US company interests have come to naught."
For the same reason the US occupied Afghanistan for two decades, destroyed Syria and toppled Libya. An attempt to strip Russia's influence out of the Middle East and wider region as a continuation of the eternal great powers conflict. The US has been conflicting with China across Asia, battling over influence, for decades in a similar way.
One of the highest ranking and most decorated generals in US history - four star general Wesley Clark - is on public record stating that this is the exact reason we did it, as told directly to him by his pals in the Pentagon as the plans were being put into action and before we wrecked Syria or Libya (both of which were on the list to come next).
Now the US is leaving Afghanistan and guess who is stepping into the regional great power void: Russia. And there's George W Bush now saying we shouldn't leave Afghanistan, he doesn't want the US to cede regional influence to Russia. Globalist warmongers are gonna be globalist warmongers.
Oil is a very distant consideration next to military dominion and regional influence/control. If the US wanted Iraqi oil, Saddam would have sold it to the US by the millions of barrels per day at any time the US wished it. Hell, Saddam would have sold it under the table at a steep discount. It was very obviously not about the oil. Oil is merely one of many strategic items on the board. Sometimes I think the warmongers in DC prefer the false "they did it for the oil" premise, it's preferable to the truth, that we smashed the US fiscally and got thousands of our soldiers killed, to spar with Russia over influence. But that's the same exact reason we invaded Vietnam, we weren't there for oil either, we were there for the influence/control over the region. We're also not all over Eastern Europe for the oil, either; again, it's the power conflict with Russia.
> guess who is stepping into the regional great power void: Russia
Russia is a spent force. It's population and military are aging, its resources are stretched; it's more a nuisance than a menace. (This is fine. Britain was, too, after WWII.)
China is the real threat in the region, and it's likely moving into the vacuum. (For reasonable reasons. The Taliban can help secure their western border.)
> Now the US is leaving Afghanistan and guess who is stepping into the regional great power void: Russia. And there's George W Bush now saying we shouldn't leave Afghanistan, he doesn't want the US to cede regional influence to Russia. Globalist warmongers are gonna be globalist warmongers.
Don't we also have an obligation to support our allies? I don't think we should have become involved in Afghanistan in the first place, but after we've been there for nearly 20 years, encouraging the Afghans to fight against the Taliban, I'm not happy that we're leaving our allies to die. (Just as we did in Vietnam.)
I think currently is all of them, until we figure it all out. The costs of obesity overweight benefits of convenience of above mentioned things. (You can argue about adenoviruses -- I've got two shots of the adenovirus based vaccine).
> Primates and rodents living in research colonies, feral rodents living in our cities, and domestic pets like dogs and cats are all steadily getting fatter and fatter.
All are fed with human produced food. Also as someone noted our food (raw food) is decreasingly nutritious when it comes to micronutrients and vitamins.
When I've tried to predict social unrest or market volatility from the news, I've found, than news actually trailing important events and are useless for any sorts of prediction.
> When I've tried to predict social unrest or market volatility from the news, I've found, than news actually trailing important events and are useless for any sorts of prediction.
It might be useful though to be able to distinguish actual social unrest from the astroturf variety.
