A NATO-Russia Hot War Could Be Coming? McDonald's AI-Driven Pricing.

SurvivalBlog presents another edition of The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods. This column is a collection of news bits and pieces that are relevant to the modern survivalist and prepper from JWR. Our goal is to educate our readers, to help them to recognize emerging threats, and to be better prepared for both disasters and negative societal trends. You can’t mitigate a risk if you haven’t first identified a risk. In today’s column, renewed war drums, in Europe.

A NATO-Russia Hot War Could Be Coming?

I found this Independent Sentinel article linked over at the Whatfinger.com news aggregation site: A NATO-Russia Hot War Could Be Coming?

Europe on the Brink of War?

From the center-right (anti-EU) Brussels Signal: On the brink of war? Europe’s leaders press on towards confrontation with Russia.

Are Britons Ready For Wartime?

BBC: War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?

“Escalation is Inevitable”, Experts Warn

And from Around Prague: “Escalation is inevitable”: experts warn Russia is already testing NATO. Here is a pericope:

“Michal Koudelka, head of the Czech Security Information Service (BIS), and other heads of European intelligence agencies have warned that Russia could test NATO’s resilience within months rather than years — potentially even through a limited invasion of one of the alliance’s member states. The warning comes from a fresh assessment by European intelligence officials, which American agencies have also joined.

According to American intelligence reports that surfaced in the media in August, Moscow could launch a “limited invasion” within months to test NATO’s resolve. But experts note that testing the alliance doesn’t necessarily mean a classic military attack — Russia is capable of acting through sabotage, cyberattacks, airspace violations and operations whose authorship cannot be immediately proven.”

McDonald’s Implements AI-Driven Pricing

Over at CNBC: Inside McDonald’s push to have AI price your Big Mac. The article begins:

“Walmart is aiming to assuage customers’ fears about its new pricing technology as it rolls out digital price labels at its stores.

In a statement posted on the company’s website, Walmart Inc.’s CEO John Furner vowed that the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer isn’t using personal information like income, shopping history or a customer’s willingness to pay to set prices, and it won’t be doing so in the future either.”

There is No Easy Fix for One of America’s Scariest Roads

A lengthy and quite interesting article about Colorado by the talented writer Peter Hessler, in The New Yorker: Why Doesn’t Anyone Want to Fix One of America’s Scariest Roads?

The Next Wave of Censorship Won’t Look Like Censorship

Another warning on emerging AI technology, over at the Sayer Ji substack: The Next Wave of Censorship Won’t Look Like Censorship. Here is an excerpt:

“Open your phone. Look at the last email you sent. Was any of it drafted by autocomplete? Autocomplete used to be five letters at the end of a word. Now, in Gmail, in Outlook, in iMessage, in every major writing app, it is entire sentences, entire paragraphs, entire replies — offered before you have finished thinking. You accept some and ignore others, but the ones you accept are now, in a real and measurable sense, not fully yours.

Open your browser. Type any question into the search bar. Google no longer returns ten blue links. It returns an “AI Overview” — a single confident paragraph, generated by Google’s model, that answers the question directly. Most people never scroll past it. The links are still there. Almost nobody looks at them.

Now imagine — because it is not imagination, it is what is being pilot-tested at every major tech company this year — the same layer inside your text messages, your therapy apps, your kid’s homework helper, your car’s voice assistant, your smart speaker, your video calls. Not autocomplete. Not search. Everywhere.”