Forget programming. Sit down with him and make a few board and card games.

Too many game designers these days look at the technology and the graphics and the monetarization and all the other crap and forget that first and foremost, there needs to be a game.

When you limit yourself to the bare essentials, you see the game for what it is, and learn to make games by focussing on what makes a game.

Yes. But the cable doesn't connect to the street, that's just how we say it. It connects to that grey box on the corner, which means after the garden it runs underneath the street and/or sidewalk for typically a few hundred meters.

Can't say for other countries, in my country almost never.

Of course. If you disagree with someone, it must be that the someone is an idiot. It's not possible that maybe you are wrong.

There's no point having a discussion on this level. People who have arguments don't need to use personal insults.

So will a million other factors, most of which can't be foreseen or predicted. Would your Grandparents have foreseen the day that you could access the entirety of human knowledge on a device that fits into the palm of your hand?

The Earth and humanity have never been and never will be static entities. The climate has changed a great deal during the geologically insignificant amount of time that humans have been around. Most of those changes occurred before we started digging carbon out of the ground. Changes will continue long after we've moved past carbon based energy supplies. The notion that the climate was "ideal" during some specific period would be laughable if there wasn't a serious movement trying to use it to make public policy.

Sorry dude, but it's already been sold.

No, actually it's not. This is the kind of hyperbolic nonsense that makes it so hard to take the alarmist crowd seriously. It also gives ammunition to the deniers/skeptics/whatever-you-want-to-call-them. Project the worst case scenario for climate change and the human race survives. People in developing countries don't do so well and even the developed world takes a hit (higher food prices, greater frequency of natural disasters, and so on) but the human race isn't going anywhere. Homo sapiens quite probably survived a super-volcanic eruption, without the benefit of modern technology and scientific understanding. You think you can kill them off with melting ice caps, stronger hurricanes, and rising sea levels? Best of luck with that.

I'm in the crowd that believes the climate is changing and that homo sapiens are a contributory factor to that change. I get off the bus when the green crowd starts talking about pie in the sky solutions that sound great on paper but invariably result in a lower standard of living and greater Governmental control over our lives. Unless you're willing wholly embrace nuclear power (to their credit a few greens actually are) there's no way you can generate enough energy to maintain our current standard of living without sourcing some of that energy from carbon based sources.

That would quite probably be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause....

It started with FDR (*), the New Deal, and a little known SCOTUS case involving wheat....

Thanks Democrats!

(*) Actually the progressive philosophy really got started with Wilson but that asshat didn't have FDR's cojones. I guess FDR did save Western Civilization as we know it; that probably should count for something....

I hate to break it to you but THC is a drug by any definition.....

Mind you, so is caffeine, and I'm not passing judgment on you for using THC, been there done that. You just can't claim that you have stayed away from all drugs while simultaneously admitting that you use marijuana on a regular basis....

The yield doesn't have anything to do with how deliverable the weapon(s) are. You said that North Korea's nukes are WW2 sized in a comment about missile technology. I'm curious what you based on that assumption on? Or perhaps you were speaking about yield all along, rather than deliverablity, though in that instance I'd wonder why it came up in a discussion about missiles. In any case, a 7kt weapon is enough to kill tens of thousands of people in an urban area. Even a fizzle might manage to do that, via prompt radiation. North Korea's nukes can't be casually dismissed....

Do we actually have evidence of that or are you just making assumptions? North Korea is known to have exchanged nuclear technology with Pakistan and Pakistan does have warheads small enough to be mounted to missiles.

This has already happened, sadly.

I don't know all the details, but basically, yes.

The Deutsche Bahn was a state-owned monopolist for long-distance rail transport (both goods and people). During the privatization craze of the 90s or so, the government decided to turn it into Deutsche Bahn AG - a private company, listed at the stock exchange.

After a short transition, the C level started to think and act like C levels do, and - with a little help of big consulting companies - decided that public transport isn't all that interesting and profitable and that they would simply use it as leverage to become a huge, global, logistics company. You can already see where it all went wrong.

In order to raise capital, the government planned to sell its shares. But to make it interesting to buyers, the company first had to become profitable. So all that I've described happened. People in small towns suddenly found out that they were not using the train enough, so train service was discontinued and the station closed. Of course, now they had to use cars more which meant more traffic, roads maintainence costs increased, more roads had to be built - as a singular entity, the government before had included all those factors and decided that train service to this town was the right decision, even if the ticket sales by themselves didn't cover costs - but if you figure in the costs of not having a train service, suddenly it does make sense. As a private company, the Deutsche Bahn AG only considered the side of the equation it owned, and that didn't show a profit.
This happened to hundreds of train lines and stations.

Total damage to the german economy - unknown. Some estimates I've read are in the billions.

Get a clue before you enter a discussion. Many of the companies that were privatized were doing as good or even better than the private companies that replace them today. That doesn't always mean they are or were profitable - for some things such as public transport or universities or garbage collection maybe the benefit to society should be the important factor and not ROI and shareholder value.

You are repeating the ignorant blabbering of typical right-wing americans who think that anything that's not cut-throat capitalism is automatically communism. The thought that a world inbetween the extremes could exist has never crossed your mind, has it?

The strange truth is that the very america that had McCarthyism was very interested in and actively promoting the social market economy model of western europe, because they realized that if they had attempted to install the no-hold-barred brutality of pure US capitalism, most of post-WW2 europe would have become communist by free choice.

That economic model was the synthesis (to use philosophy terms) between the two equally wrong extremes. It gave us all the advantages of free markets, free choice of jobs, private companies and competition while at the same time protecting those areas where pure capitalism does more harm than good, like health care, public transportation or natural monopolies.

Sadly, the two competing extremes didn't fail at the same time to the same degree, so we've now been janked towards the "winner", and all the advantages are slowly evaporating in favor of higher stock prices and an economy based on bubbles and bullshit.

I'm not in favour of communism at all - had capitalism failed first, the same would have happened in the other direction and we'd be equally bad of. But on almost every metric you choose, western Europe was in a better condition 30 years ago.

I did, because that's what your ignorant argument would lead to.

Situation now, in almost all homes: There is one cable going to the nearest street node. This is the famous "last mile".

You want that cable owned by the ISP, which means for every home where the inhabitants are not customers of the current cable owner, either the new ISP needs to buy the cable, or put down a new one, since these are the only two ways in which he can be owner of the last mile.

If they switch ISP again, this repeats.

If a new ISP company wants to enter the market, suddenly the barriers to entry are much, much higher than they are now. Goodbye free market.

And let's talk about multi-story houses with a dozen or a hundred flats, and lots of different ISPs serving different flats...

Instead of admitting your argument was stupid, let's insult people around you who put you straight.

Not at all. The office building example is at the other end of the last mile. We're talking about the cable connecting the (office or whatever) building to the telco network in the street. Completely different things.