Random News not worthy of own thread

[felter]

I have no idea how accurate this is it's interesting to watch, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was accurate. Over the last couple f years, I have seen numerous videos that have shown Chinese major cities to be pretty much empty, though none of them were saying it was due to the lack of people, most were thinking it was people just didn't have the money to spend, but the lack of people sounds more realistic to be honest, I doubt that there population is as low as 300 million, but with the Chinese government you never know.

[mr.WHO]

I have no idea how accurate this is it's interesting to watch, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was accurate. Over the last couple f years, I have seen numerous videos that have shown Chinese major cities to be pretty much empty, though none of them were saying it was due to the lack of people, most were thinking it was people just didn't have the money to spend, but the lack of people sounds more realistic to be honest, I doubt that there population is as low as 300 million, but with the Chinese government you never know.

300 mil is just a clickbait in most of YT videos that cover this - in actuality 300 mil is only a tiny paragraph in cited research when even author say this is too low.

However, the truth might be close to the general spirit for those video.

Between hidden covid losses,
rapidly aging society (the fastest aging on the planet),
deteriorating environment,
huge pollution,
food deserts
and plain burecratic population overreporting (local budgets are subsided in relation to population size, so they have interest in inflating the numbers at every level)

I wouldn't be suprised, if the real population is somewhere between 800 and 900 mil.

That's entire continent (Europe is 500 mil) worth of discrepancy from official 1.4 bilion.

Before someone say even this is too much - around 2016 they had last population count and even then, they had dicrepancy where 150mil people were completely missing (report said it was due to overreporting, as that they never existed in the first place) - since then, they don't even try to do the official counting anymore.

Even worse, is that this discrepancy will be rising even further and faster - once the news spread to general public, this will have huge economic and investor impact (continent size consumer/market not existing) - they won't be able to hide it for too long as at some point simple sattelite data will show that cities and resource consumption are much smaller than official 1.4 bil.

[clakclak]

According to leaked Chinese police data from 2022 (which for obvious reasons can not be verified) the population was indeed quite a bit lower than 1.4 billion, but still stood at around 1.2 billion. I will say that given the response of the Chinese government to this leak, I find it far more reliable than many youtube videos.

Source: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Socie ... -questions

[mr.WHO]

Now this is the most random news of the month:

Man in Norway wakes to find huge container ship in garden
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8nk279ydyo

[chew-ie]

I'd say it's the mother of random news. That ship just did nothing but go forward until it touched ground. Good thing the guy wasn't hurt. His neighbours had to wake him ...

[chew-ie]

Okay, this one strikes me as ... odd: Haribo recalls sweets in the Netherlands after traces of cannabis found

The Netherlands of all places!

[Alerion_V.X3]

Oh, that's where my homemade one went. Haribo makes children happy and adults... anyway.

[Chips]

We never have enough Science related news, and while this is very premature given the number of years for it to even possibly come to fruition, we don't get enough "good news" tbh.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... verwhelmed

Breakthrough in search for HIV cure leaves researchers ‘overwhelmed’
Exclusive: Melbourne team demonstrates way to make the virus visible within white blood cells, paving the way to fully clear it from the body

To read the article -- if you are greeted with "accept all or subscribe" - the way to read without this has two options:
1) Hit "Reject all and Subscribe" - then when it loads the new page, hit the back button. Then read the article just fine.
2) Disable javascript before loading the page (or disable javascript and reload the page).

[mr.WHO]

Owlcat games will make Mass Effect style action RPG in The Expanse Universe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIQifuOTTe8

[felter]

The Witcher 4 will be using the UE5 Engine and not the red engine like the previous games, and they recently did a tech demo with Unreal at the Unreal festival and does it looks good, remember it is a tech demo so expect the game to not look anything like it when it is released, but still.

[chew-ie]

Owlcat games will make Mass Effect stype action RPG in The Expanse Universe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIQifuOTTe8

Hell yeah!

edit: wishlisted on GOG

[matthewfarmery]

Iran Launches Massive Drone Attack on Israel

Iran has launched more than 100 drones toward Israeli territory, CNN reports.

Said IDF spokesperson Effie Defrin: “This is a different event to what we’ve experienced thus far, and we’re expecting difficult hours.”

Will America jump into the fray? Things are getting closer to midnight.

[chew-ie]

So, next theater of war opening up soon? Trump regime is officially threatening Iran regime (as in "we are targeting your leader and might kill him").

Trump demands Iran’s ‘unconditional surrender’ and says US won’t kill supreme leader ‘for now’

What's up with all those guys threatening other countries leaders? What happened to countries deciding their own fate (as in their people).

[clakclak]

NATO countries agree to spend 5% of GDP on defense by 2035. Just to put this into perspective, if America was to spend 5% right now that would be $1.45 trillion. But even for the other countries 5% is a massive budget. If Germany were to spend 5% of its GDP on the military right now, that would mean we would have a military budget of 225 billion Euro ($259 billion) (according to ZDF heute) which would be 10 billion higher than China's official military budget for 2025.

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2025/06/22/7518246/

Slight correction: 5% for all NATO countries except for Spain which is exempt from the goal. I am going to make a prediction now and say that this will be used as a reason by other countries as to why they themselves will, in 10 years, not feel obliged to reach the stated goal.

[Alan Phipps]

Let's hope that double the budget on defence doesn't mean the defence industries going: 'Great, we can double our prices!'.

Yes, I am being cynical. How effectively you spend it matters as much if not more than how much you spend. (I remember the supplied 'military-grade' spanners that were twenty times the price of the same manufacturer identical ones available in the high-street supermarkets.)

[chew-ie]

Let's hope that double the budget on defence doesn't mean the defence industries going: 'Great, we can double our prices!'.

Yes, I am being cynical. How effectively you spend it matters as much if not more than how much you spend. (I remember the supplied 'military-grade' spanners that were twenty times the price of the same manufacturer identical ones available in the high-street supermarkets.)

World: "Yeah - we are safer now! "
Big DefenseTech: "Ehhrrr.. no..."

[burger1]

Canada will develop it's critical minerals to meet it's NATO spending target.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/ca ... l-minerals

[felter]

I don't know if you have either heard or been following the "stop killing game's saga". Anyway, just over a year ago Ross Scott launched a European citizens’ initiative petition objectives below

This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or related features and assets sold for videogames they operate) to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.

Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher.

The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.

The petition has two items that it requires to happen for it to continue, first it requires 1 Million signatures from EU citizens, and it also has to reach a certain threshold in 7 EU countries. Just over a week ago the petition was struggling at around 450 thousand signatures and just a month left till it closes, which with the way it was going it was unlikely to reach its targets. Ross does a video on the end of "stop killing games" and greatly blames an entity known as PirateSofware for the failure of the petition, now I don't know if you know or heard of PirateSoftware real name Jason Thor Hall, he is and can be a controversial character, He took to the internet and started an argument about with Ross, and it exploded online where Jason ended up arguing with the Internet which is never a good thing to do, us having an argument here is one thing as there is just a few of us here to do it with the world take sit to a totally other level.

Move on one week later, the European citizens’ initiative petition is heading towards reaching the required targets as typing this I just checked and the petition is sitting at 886,565 it has also passed the other threshold, and it's all thanks to PirateSoftware being PirateSoftware. If you're in the EU and haven't signed it, maybe consider doing so.

If you want to just get a better handle on the sage between Jason and Ross just go to YouTube and do a search for PirateSoftware a lot of YouTubers are doing some sort of coverage on it.

[PersonyPerson]

I don't know if you have either heard or been following the "stop killing game's saga". Anyway, just over a year ago Ross Scott launched a European citizens’ initiative petition objectives below

This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or related features and assets sold for videogames they operate) to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.

Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher.

The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.

The petition has two items that it requires to happen for it to continue, first it requires 1 Million signatures from EU citizens, and it also has to reach a certain threshold in 7 EU countries. Just over a week ago the petition was struggling at around 450 thousand signatures and just a month left till it closes, which with the way it was going it was unlikely to reach its targets. Ross does a video on the end of "stop killing games" and greatly blames an entity known as PirateSofware for the failure of the petition, now I don't know if you know or heard of PirateSoftware real name Jason Thor Hall, he is and can be a controversial character, He took to the internet and started an argument about with Ross, and it exploded online where Jason ended up arguing with the Internet which is never a good thing to do, us having an argument here is one thing as there is just a few of us here to do it with the world take sit to a totally other level.

Move on one week later, the European citizens’ initiative petition is heading towards reaching the required targets as typing this I just checked and the petition is sitting at 886,565 it has also passed the other threshold, and it's all thanks to PirateSoftware being PirateSoftware. If you're in the EU and haven't signed it, maybe consider doing so.

If you want to just get a better handle on the sage between Jason and Ross just go to YouTube and do a search for PirateSoftware a lot of YouTubers are doing some sort of coverage on it.

It's one of those weird occasions where I support the initiative (which just passed the 1 million mark for the EU petition), but I don't like the vast majority of those who support it. For any of these (mostly American) "Youtubers" to seriously think that a channel of another American with only 2 million subscribers would have an adverse impact on what was previous an already stagnated EU petition at the time are clutching at straws... The reason it stagnated was simply because people forgot about it after it's initial fanfare and nobody had any eyes on it. Nobody was making videos about it to bring it to attention again until recently where the spokesperson for the petition (another American afaik) was desperate and saw an opportunity to blame him, who was an already widely hated figure.

Not interested nor ever will be interested in PirateSoftware's content. The guy is boring and comes off as a narcissist. But I also don't want what is obviously an industrialised hate mob-motivated bandwagon of slop videos about him consistently popping up on my Youtube recommendations list... He's not that big of a deal... He's not the "Existential Threat" to better consumer protection laws people are making him out to be. He made his video 10 months ago. If these Youtubers really cared about the initiative rather than getting clicks for their own benefit, they would have made videos about him back then debunking his claims. It is fake outrage.

1 million signatures is A LOT for any petition. Before this, only 6 EU citizen initiatives so far got past the 1 million mark since it's inception. This is the 7th.

But if this is the only way to motivate people for signing much needed petitions, hate-mobs that exaggerate and misinform their way to get the required signatures, then we are all doomed. Not the kind of democratic process I want to be a part of. They should be angry at people's apathy, not some doofus that didn't understand the initiative who's likely to have a non-European majority viewerbase.

It's also yet another example of Americans getting mad at their own laws and inability to cause change, in where they try to use Europe and Europeans as a conduit to get better consumer protection laws for themselves... They keep doing this... Not an ounce of energy is expended on improving their own political/legal system, they instead prefer to use us to do their bidding. They might as well just move here at this point.

[clakclak]

I can only speak for myself, as someone who already signed the petition, but Felter‘s comment was the first time I heard the name PirateSoftware and I spend way to much time on the internet. I doubt that some of my friends, especially those that barely speak English but signed the petition, ever heard of him.