This is a deliberately obtuse take by the Telegraph. Central banks are literally empowered to create or destroy money; the profits and losses they themselves make are accounting fictions.
cyd
There's a saying in developmental economics. There are four kinds of economies in the world: developed, undeveloped, Japan, and Argentina.
It's really mind-boggling how Argentina's economic troubles never end, under socialist governments and neoliberal ones, with a pegged exchange rate and a floating one, under high global interest rates and low ones.
Taking a quick look, it seems that South Africa went for the Pfizer-BioNTech and J&J vaccines. If vaccine supply was the issue, they should have bought Indian and Chinese vaccines. Those vaccines were actually the best bang for the buck for the global South at the time: their marginally lower efficacy was more than compensated for by their far better availability. It seems like the problem for SA, ironically, is that it stuck too close to the West and did not think independently enough.
This episode was probably peak Dukat. Unfortunately, I don't think they stuck the landing for his character arc. His descent into insane mustache twirling villainy in the last season was not very interesting. By the finale, the Dukat part was by far the weakest of the simultaneous plot threads.
To avoid paying royalties, I imagine. Hollywood accounting is craaaaazy.
Measure of a Man was groundbreaking but feels pretty dated to watch. Back when it aired, the idea that sentient AIs should be treated as humans was far from the mainstream. Today, we've seen so many sympathetic robots in pop culture (including, of course, Data) that the situation is reversed: the arguments aired against Data in this episode seem shockingly bigoted.
Imagine if the plot contrived to make Riker get up in front of the court to argue for slavery -- even if he's clearly labelled as playing devil's advocate, it feels beyond the pale.
People are very understandably dubious because of the Stadia fiasco, but this is a lot more promising. IMO, this have been what they tried first. There's a huge market for casual games that people can play on their phones or tablets, and these often don't suffer from the strict input lag requirements that bedevil cloud gaming.
Knowing Google, though, chances are they'll fuck up the execution.
It's not so crazy. Sumeru had only one 5* waifu at launch (Nilou) and only a second one much later (Dehya). Their waifu production rate has decelerated greatly since Inazuma.
Prediction: it's not artifact presets. It's gonna be Star Rail's salvaging system.
I think Zhongli has a death flag. Narratively, he's got nothing else interesting going on, now he's retired. It's a natural plot point to have him go out in a blaze of glory protecting Liyue one last time (and also, as you said, redeeming the archons for what went down in Khaenriah).
I'm just surprised Elon Musk didn't find a way to inject himself into this story somehow, like he did with the Thai cave rescue.
Pull for scantily-clad farmhands.