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f_d t1_jalaje2 wrote

He needed two separate surgeries and could have had his pick of reconstructive surgeons. The important functional parts of his face were spared, but he needed some skin grafts and reconstruction. So he looks considerably better than the scarring he would have if he had received more basic treatment just to prevent infection. Whatever the level of burn, it was a serious injury that he was lucky wasn't much worse.

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f_d t1_ja9yoid wrote

>It was the countries in Europe that colonized and exploited Africa.

That's what they meant by post-colonial.

>Russian and Chinese involvement in Africa (and the Global South in general) was a response to Western exploitation and colonization.

Russia and China don't "respond" to those things in other countries. They look for their own opportunities to take advantage and guarantee access to resources, like nearly every other country does in its own way. If nobody else was in the way, they would be doing more of it.

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f_d t1_j9vsttc wrote

After their merger with Discovery, Warner and its divisions retroactively canceled shows that had already finished airing, shows that were partway through airing, shows that had been officially renewed, and a decent-sized movie that was in postproduction. Also CNN+ barely after launching it. They even pulled down half their own Looney Tunes library. If they think they can wring more money out of it by not airing it, they will, no matter what it is.

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f_d t1_j9v4i2t wrote

It's how wars can develop when defenses are strong and there is no easy advantage for either side. When invading, the US spent a while bombing Iraq's front lines but advanced rapidly whenever they cleared a path. Russia pushed relentlessly to Georgia's capital with an overwhelming advantage. World War 2 unfolded as a series of crushing Axis victories followed by brutal but effective slogs to push them back again. Various wars against ISIS were punctuated with a lot of substantial gains and losses in both directions. But Ukraine and Russia are mired in almost the same kind of trench warfare that defined World War 1, just with drones and missiles adding to the heavy reliance on artillery and front-line cannon fodder for tiny incremental gains or losses.

As someone else pointed out, the defensive war isn't pointless for Ukraine, since allowing Russia through would put many more millions of people under a brutal dictatorship determined to wipe out their identity. The invasion is pointless but it wasn't up to Ukraine to decide that.

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f_d t1_j9v2p6s wrote

It would be interesting to see some additional level of information like how long each side has held each bit of territory for the duration of the war, frequency of casualties or total casualties in different places, civilian population shifts, that sort of thing. For the most part, the lines haven't shifted much since Russia's initial land grab and Ukraine's pushback in the north during the early weeks of the war, except for two big Ukrainian gains at the southwest and northeast edges of the existing front. But some areas have been subjected to heavy fighting and small gains or losses of territory throughout the war, while others have been relatively quiet.

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f_d t1_j9rxml4 wrote

They are, but I don't know how it compares with their long-term plans. Unlike Warner, they can afford to keep spending to overtake Netflix.

>Disney’s direct-to-consumer division, which also includes Hulu and ESPN+, on Tuesday reported an operating loss of nearly $1.5 billion, more than doubling its loss of $630 million during the same quarter a year earlier.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2022-11-08/disney-earnings-fourth-quarter-streaming-loses-1-5-billion-hulu-espn-chapek

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f_d t1_j9q20fa wrote

That isn't at all what was happening. AT&T wanted a giant streaming service that could appeal to everyone. HBO Max was built from the ground up with a more diverse set of executives and producers than HBO the cable channel. But when AT&T spun off Warner to Discovery, they also spun off over forty billion dollars of debt. Discovery management immediately started cutting across the board, including plenty of content that could have kept going if the new company's financials weren't in such dire shape. The cuts at HBO Max fell hardest on the culturally diverse side of the executives and the programming.

HBO Max's old mission was to be an all-audience first-rate streaming service similar to Disney/Hulu, Netflix, maybe Amazon Prime. They did very well at building that audience when they launched. The new mission is a lot less ambitious, a lot less diverse, and a lot more budget conscious than before. Whether or not it works out in the long run, they are likely to miss out on the opportunity to establish themselves as the undisputed leader of streaming services among today's competition.

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f_d t1_j9n1rrf wrote

>content that reaches audiences not typically targeted by HBO original programming

Except they got rid of most of their diversity executives during their big wave of firing after their merger. The headline is a bit sensational but the effects are the same whatever the intent was.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/laid-off-hbo-max-execs-reveal-warner-bros-discovery-is-killing-off-diversity-and-courting-middle-america

​

>Former HBO Max staffers say there are barely any non-white people left in the upper ranks of content, with one naming Joey Chavez, an executive vice president of drama, as one of the few people of color still there. Because HBO Max and the original HBO channel operate somewhat independently, one former executive conceded that “there may be one Black woman on the HBO side. Maybe.”
>
>The layoffs have “amplified the lack of diversity at HBO,” another former executive told The Daily Beast. “HBO is the most homogenous part of this umbrella. Instead of trying to figure out how to integrate some of the [Max] executives into HBO, they just made this sweeping cut of three divisions: kids, family, and international. A lot of Black and brown people lost their jobs.”

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f_d t1_j4jirnn wrote

Reply to comment by Manureofhistory in The multiverse by Manureofhistory

I'm not sure I follow you here at all. There doesn't have to be any problem with infinite. It's just something that goes on forever.

Things can also be infinite in one direction and finite in another. Our universe might have a finite start at its beginning leading into endless expansion into time and space.

Some infinities come to a virtual end without ever quite reaching it. Much of calculus depends on plugging in infinity to figure out the value an equation will eventually close in on.

Things that are infinite are not identical to each other. You can have a densely populated infinity or a sparsely populated infinity or an empty infinity. You can have a diverse infinity or a homogeneous one. You can have an infinity that is always larger or smaller than another infinity wherever you measure it.

The observable universe stretches equally in every direction without any sign it is approaching a boundary. It doesn't have universe-scale landmarks to set its regions apart from each other. On the largest scale, it meets all the requirements to be an infinitely large, infinitely growing environment with only superficial differences at smaller scales. So that's already one set of infinities in play before we introduce additional universes.

We don't know what rules apply outside our universe, so talking about what infinities are or are not possible with those rules doesn't mean anything either.

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f_d t1_j4egd0c wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in The multiverse by Manureofhistory

>For something to happen the same way an infinite number of times in itself is the most improbable of actions .

You are assuming the universe is not already set up so that everything repeats perfectly. There's nothing improbable about a predestined outcome.

>We do know a lot of galaxies are being sucked to a certain spot in the universe right now called the great attractor and we don’t know why.

All you need is gravity. It's on the other side of our galaxy, so we just can't get a good look at it.

>The problem with the heat death theory is we don’t have enough information to say that is even probable it is just a theory like everything else.

We know what happens to space and energy over time in this universe. We can predict what will happen far into the future based on this. It isn't guaranteed to happen, but it is by far the most likely outcome if nothing drastically changes about what is currently understood. Things like being a simulation that is suddenly turned off are so far outside our normal experience that there is no point trying to assign probability to them. We can predict based on the things we can experience, not outside intervention.

>We see a little picture and extrapolate a big picture and even though that is one of the most popular theory’s it is still as likely as we get to a certain point and it all sucks back and restarts.

You can't make useful predictions about likelihood based on that kind of supposition. You only can make useful predictions about likelihood if you begin from the currently understood behavior of the universe and build from there. And you certainly can't say that on the one hand, heat death is equally likely because anything can happen with equal probability, but on the other hand, an infinitely repeating universe is less likely than everything else. Either we stick to things we can actually predict with different amounts of likelihood based on current observations, or we make up whatever we want and call any of our made-up scenarios as likely as anything else.

An infinitely repeating sequence of events is completely possible as long as everything is lined up the right way at the start. And if there is somehow any kind of eternal repetition of the birth and death of the universe, an infinitely repeating cycle of events would be much more stable and likely to repeat itself than a different sequence each time. Existing in such a cycle would make the likelihood of that cycle existing one hundred percent, no matter how easy or hard it is to create the cycle in the first place.

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f_d t1_j4dxahc wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in The multiverse by Manureofhistory

Infinite time doesn't have to mean endless possibilities. Everything could all play out the exact same way an infinite number of times. Nothing has to change between instances of a repeating universe.

You can also have a finite starting point that expands endlessly to infinity, like a simple graph that keeps going up and up and up the farther you plot it. If the universe keeps expanding and entropy keeps increasing, eventually you get a cold universe where everything is too far apart and too depleted for anything new to happen. Even though many different things happened earlier in that universe, all of its future will be spent quietly in the dark with everything more or less uniform.

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f_d t1_j4dwbq8 wrote

>It seems like multiple universes would require a near infinite amount of energy to maintain itself

Time could be infinite, space could be infinite, our universe could keep expanding infinitely. Why would an infinite amount of energy to go along with that be a problem, as long as everything follows the usual rules at any particular location?

Once you step outside of our universe, time and space and energy might not mean the same things anyway. Imagine a giant twisty extra-dimensional sculpture containing every moment of our universe, with everything figuratively set in stone for any outside observers. Or an environment where everything can pop in or out of existence spontaneously. It's pointless to get too hung up on the rules and limitations inside our universe when speculating about what could exist outside of it.

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f_d t1_j4d6kpr wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in The multiverse by Manureofhistory

>If infinity exists literally anything is possible and if it doesn’t that is a different story.

Divide one by three. You'll get endless threes without ever finding any other digits.

Divide one by seven. You'll get six repeating digits without ever finding any of the others.

Infinity doesn't mean everything has to happen. It only means there is no end to whatever happens.

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f_d t1_j1gysd5 wrote

>This super rapid expansion explains why the cosmic background radiation is so nearly perfectly even - because at that time in the early universe, it was all in one point.

It wasn't necessarily in one point, it was just extremely dense and homogeneous. Space could have been infinite even when everything was packed together tightly.

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f_d t1_j1gwp98 wrote

>It’s also worth noting (and I’m not that up to date on this so someone correct me) that the Big Bang isn’t like everything just started expanding from a single point at the speed of light. It’s more like all of a sudden everything just was. Not instantaneously, but in a matter of seconds the early universe just was, and it was big (millions? Billions? of light years big). And from that point it began to rapidly span outwards.

The idea is that all the energy and space started out packed together densely, then rapidly expanded everywhere at once similar to how space is expanding everywhere at once today. Even when it was packed together densely, it could have been infinitely large. Just denser than it is now.

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f_d t1_iweiulc wrote

I can't give you specific answers, but past a certain point there are lots of scholars and teachers about whom you would be more likely to find secondhand accounts or references rather than original sources. It's also not uncommon to have only fragments of a person's teachings.

Like Laozi, some of the famous ancient scholars and teachers may have never existed. Like Socrates, the ones who did exist might not have existed in a form we would recognize. Keep in mind that even Shakespeare from less than 600 years ago is mostly a mystery to us, despite being the foundation of English literature and theater.

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f_d t1_iv7bp16 wrote

I am not an astronomer, but this particular black hole has a star orbiting it indicating the position of the hidden black hole. Measuring that star's movement should be straightforward enough. Knowing the location of the black hole but without the companion as a guide, they might also be able to watch for hints of it if it ever passes in front of more distant visible objects. Those hints could be compared over time to see if it was growing larger or smaller relative to us. I don't know what the relative movement of a black hole would do to the shifting of the light bending around it.

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