Assuming the accounting system this thing links with both does not protect from SQL injection attacks (many don’t, despite it being easy to protect against) and also has a table named “Bills” with a field named “amount”; what this would do is go through every single Bills record and half the value in the amount field. This would completely fuck the system, particularly when it came to billing and tax filing as the numbers for accounts billing and receivable wouldn’t even come close to matching each other. The accounting department would have a hell of a time fixing the damage.

Since the health is a float, yeah, it can create issues. A health of 0.000000001 is greater than zero, but that would almost assuredly be displayed to the user as simply 0, causing player confusion. The easiest solution is to have health and damage always be integers. A less great solution is to use a non-floating point decimal format. If such doesn’t exist in your language, you can emulate one by having health and damage both always be integers, but move the decimal point over, say two points, when displaying to the user.

I’m still annoyed with how verbose Objective-C is. Just check out what one has to do to create and concatenate a string. Madness:

    NSString * test = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:@"This is a test string."];
    NSString * test2 = [test stringByAppendingString:@" This value is appended."];

And god forbid you want to concatenate two things to a string:

    NSString * test3 = [test1 stringByAppendingString:[test2 stringByAppendingString:@" Adding a third value."]];

For inflation rates over 4%? In the US, likely no more than another year or three. There were a ton of inflationary pressures between COVID handouts, the Russian invasion of Ukraine curtailing wheat and oil exports, and Yemen attacking global shipping. The first is over already, the second is being worked around, and the third is not going to last a huge amount of time.

For Turkey, good luck to them and their hyperinflation. They managed their economy like shit.

For Germany, probably going to be longer, they were too tied to Russian gas and they were forced to sign expensive long-term contracts to secure LNG. Though, they are buying increasing amounts of nuclear power from France, which is easing their LNG requirements.

For Russia, probably as long as the sanctions last. So as long as they continue their invasion of Ukraine.

For everyone else? No clue, I’m not familiar enough with their monetary and political processes.

Hamas will never give up all the civilian hostages they took until they are militarily forced to.

Good luck hitting them at 30,000 ft while they rain destruction on the assailants attacking civilian shipping.

U.S. military forces today conducted strikes on seven facilities, which included more than 85 targets in Iraq and Syria, that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated militias use to attack U.S. forces. This is the start of our response. The President has directed additional actions to hold the IRGC and affiliated militias accountable for their attacks on U.S. and Coalition Forces.

The finding out phase has begun.

Do you have an example of a country that did well long-term by not targeting low single-digit inflation as the large, successful countries do?

Naw, things are about to get very…proportional…around here.

Are we in a better position now?

Better than if countries in middle east were blowing up whatever they wanted? Absolutely.

Kuwait exists as a country because the west is in the Middle East. Global markets depend on the waterways around the middle east being clear and oil from the middle east pumping.

The location the three servicemen were killed is the the Tower 22 base in Rukban, Jordan. The ISW identifies it’s location in this post and The Warzone has a bunch of details collected about it here. There is a wiki article on the attack now, with various sources as well.

Two bases were hit. One in Jordan, one in Syria.

What is this source?

A highly detailed source and collator of sources. For defense/military news, they are one of the top their news sources as their writers actually understand the details of the machines they report on.

Iran has jumped the shark with their level of fucking around.

Turkey fucked themselves after years of what can best be described as intentionally choosing every single wrong answer in economics 101.

Russia wants to end the war since they have gotten themselves into a boondoggle. They don’t even control major cities they claim to have annexed. No, Russia’s quick victory is now a multi-year war of attrition and they want to stop now as they continue to see the devastating losses mount. Just in the last day Russia lost hundreds of men, dozens of tanks, dozens of APCs, and dozens of artillery units:

Good, pulls Russian troops away from invading Ukraine.

People were telling Germany for a decade that their over-reliance on Russian gas was a massive problem. Instead they publicly laughed at idea and doubled down. When the cheap gas faucet was abruptly turned off in 2022, suddenly Germans were paying piles of money for every loose scrap of gas available. Many factories ground to a halt or became uncompetitive.

He is referring to Ukraine sinking the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, the missile cruiser Moskva.