It literally either goes back to the consumer or back to the game developer.

False.

We can’t have nice things because corporations and the wealthy take an ever increasing share of a limited pool of resources and waste them on nonsense for themselves.

Also, if you design and build something and then the suicide rate increases, and then you remove that something and the suicide rate decreases, it throws entirely into question how much free will actually exists and whether the idea of “personal responsibility” even makes any sense.

And regardless, suicide is an inherently somewhat transient and impulsive choice. All the stats show that suicides are more likely to happen when you give someone easy opportunity (think guns), and just because someone attempts to kill themselves, doesn’t mean they will again. Yes there are natural high points in a landscape that people will be tempted to jump from (look at the cliffs of Dover for instance), but that doesn’t mean we need to build artificial ones in the middle of a depressing concrete jungle with millions of people.

Personally I really like the vessel and the architect behind it, and do wish I could have gone up it when I was there, but I also do think that in hindsight, it is an inherently problematic design that should not have been approved.

Valve has ripped off every single game purchase to the tune of billions and billions of dollars (taking an objective 15% more than they need to from the total cost of every single game), for the past 20 years.

But let’s thank them for that! Thanks Valve for making every single working class gamer poorer. We all love the fact that every single Valve employee is a multimillionaire, at the expense of literally every single game player and developer. What kind generosity! /S

Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they’re also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn’t get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they’re going to want to keep their customers happy. It’s good for them, and it’s not terrible for us. Everybody wins

No, they don’t. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.

And they don’t have to hire MBAs because gamers dick ride them like Gabe isnt a self serving billionaire and keep forking over an extra 15% and then thanking them for the opportunity to do so.

I don’t agree that they’re a monopoly, because they’ve done absolutely nothing to prevent competition. Other stores do it to themselves.

Yes they have. The steam friends network and the fact that you can’t transfer your purchases, friends data, or community data to other platforms is an inherent form of lock in. Just because you’re used to it because Facebook also does it, doesn’t mean it’s not.

So?

I’d like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve’s money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.

Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn’t make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.

Gabe Newell is a billionaire, Steam is a defacto monopoly that objectively charges more than they have to, and literally everyone who works at Valve is in the 1%. Let’s not fall over ourselves dick-riding them.

It’s a pretty clunky, but I don’t think you understood the post, as I don’t think it’s intended to be pro Russian.

1: Someone says we should support Russia and oppose western imperialism

2. Someone else asks what Russia is doing to oppose imperialism

3. Smash cut to Putin telling Ukraine (and presumably everyone else) that he will invade them as long as they’re not in NATO (showing that Russia is imperialistic)

4. Ukraine says ok and asks US for money and weapons

5. US says OK as long as Ukraine give the US their (Ukraine or Russia?) oil.

It’s a jumble of a bunch of memes, and the last one just feels inaccurate given that the war has cutoff Russian oil supplies (though with the knock on effect of driving up the price of US oil and enriching US oil companies). More importantly this war really does not seem to be about oil in the way that every middle east and African conflict has been. It really seems to be more a proxy war to try and stop Russian (and Chinese) military aggression. But the overall point that the US is giving Ukraine money to further their own interests is accurate, and I don’t think this was meant to be pro Russian given that it attacks Putin for being imperialistic.

More just meant to try and describe the current geopolitical situation through meme mushing.

Allow them and if Russia strikes the West then have NATO impose a no fly zone over Ukraine and see how far Russia gets.

Honestly, what is the alternative? Allow Russia to take any territory it wants? It’s fucking absurd to listen to their bluster. At this point it seems literally no different than attempts to appease Hitler.

I would generally agree with you about the main macro plot beats in Dishonored 1 and leading into 2, but I would still argue that the writing is quite good overall.

In Dishonoured 1, you still have Daud’s storyline which I found a bit more interesting on a macro level (both in the main game and both expansions), but then I would also argue that the Dishonored series has great micro writing which is a large part of the world building and the fun of exploration.

They both know how to write good little interesting world building hooks and stories, and how to pace them out and not overload you with junk documents and writing.

The Outer Wilds, Bioshock, Subnautica, Remedy Games (Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control, etc.), Obsidian (New Vegas, Outer Worlds, Grounded, etc.), are all masters of rewarding you with more story and world building.

Conversely studios like Bethesda (Starfield, Skyrim, etc.), and Ubisoft (all their RPGs), are pretty bad about trying to make the world seem realistic at the expense of having a ton of just hastily written uninteresting documents around that bore you as much reading real world documents at random would.

And while I would put games like Cyperbunk and the Witcher and even Deathloop, somewhere in-between, I would put all the Dishonoreds and Prey right up there at the top with the best.

In that vein, if anyone likes well written, story driven, stealth / action / immersive sim games, the Dishonored series & Prey (same devs, different universe) are incredibly worth going back for.

Made by former Bioshock / System shock developers, and they’re just some of my all time favourite games, and I only played them because of all the time I suddenly had with the COVID lockdown, but they hold up incredibly well. Dishonored 1 (2012) honestly feels and looks better than Dishonored 2 (2016) because of the Xbox’s auto HDR and auto FPS boost, but both are super fun and gorgeous games.

No, it’s focusing the conversation.

We’re talking about the relative pain of cutting off Chinese imports or getting into a trade war with them. In that context, the fact that we import far more from them then we produce domestically compared with decades ago means that it will be more painful to do so now than it would have been decades ago.

The reality is that while there is a tiny ‘buy American’ push from some people, the vast majority of the American economy and regulations are setup to allow private capital to trade freely abroad and import at will. And it was done intentionally so that rich people could benefit from cheap overseas labour, furthering wealth inequality when middle class factory workers lost their jobs to increase corporate profits with cheaper overseas factories.

The series of free trade agreements the US negotiated with everyone they could would say otherwise.

If you’re producing less per capita, and consuming more per capita, you’re producing less overall for the purposes of the discussion around relative pain of cutting off Chinese imports.

You’re not wrong about timeline, but it is net positive in the lab: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/physicists-achieve-fusion-net-energy-gain-for-second-time/

The sun is basically just so big that the gravity of all of its outer stuff compresses its inner stuff so much that the atoms of its inner stuff fuse together. When they do, they release an enormous of amount of energy, which is what we experience as the flaming hot sun. This type of reaction, where the nucleuses of two atoms fuse together, is called a nuclear fusion reaction.

In that scene, with Doc Ock, he’s talking about building a nuclear fusion reactor, a device that can create that kind of atomic fusing here on earth and collect the power from it. That device would be mimicking the sun by doing one of the things that otherwise only the sun does in our solar system, fuse atoms together.

If we can develop and build fusion reactors, it’s long been seen as a holy grail of energy production. The reaction releases a ridiculous amount of energy with basically no byproducts and doesn’t require any kind of nuclear or unsafe fuel (and requires 4x less mass of fuel compared to traditional nuclear, and 4 million times less than oil or coal).

That being said, it is extremely challenging to recreate the pressures and temperatures that are inside the sun and necessary for fusion. Right now there is a giant reactor being built in Europe that uses insanely powerful magnetic fields (ITER), and in the US there’s a facility that is using lasers to do it (NIF).

Both are promising first steps, but both are decades away from being able to build an actual practical reactor that we could connect to our grid and rely on.

The tunnel will have to be waterproof no matter where we build it, and there are lots of tunnels in the world directly under rivers / lakes, it’s one of the main reasons to build a tunnel.

It has not been started in any serious way. There is basically no incentive to manufacture most goods in the US.

So fucking stupid.

First of all, if you’re going to bury a highway, bury the Gardiner, and built a high capacity subway alongside it running the entire length of the lake. It would connect Union, the Ontario Line’s ex station, and provide robust public transit along a major East West route that doesn’t have it, both out to the beaches and to south Etobicoke.

You could then sell literally all the land that the Gardiner is on for development to pay for it.

Why would you stack another highway, under our existing highway? And why would you potentially build an East West train literally next to the Eglinton LRT?

You literally can, it’s called construction.