Not just oil, also gold and other minerals! https://apnews.com/article/tre...

Trump can give a masterclass on how to abuse one's position to extract as much wealth as possible for himself and his cronies, and unlike Kim Jong-Un, he has access to a massive military machine to enforce colonialism as well.

If I understand correctly, you're saying we should have continuous dialogue and not build the walls between each other for having different views? If so, I do agree.

I don't know if the GP will respond to you, so I'll express myself since we're having a conversation in good faith. I don't care about people being socially shunned, at all, from either side. I can understand why some people don't want to engage "with the other side". While it's not something I want to do or think one should do (I view it as small-minded), I can accept that people do that for their self-protection. It's, again, a divergence of opinion of what should be done, but they're entitled to it because it concerns themselves.

What I care about is what the government does or doesn't do. I don't believe the US should refuse entry to people for having a meme about Vance or Trump. I also don't believe we should refuse entry to people that have a meme about Harris, the "call me MA'AM" person, or a comic about the prophet Muhammad, or whatever. The "social cancelling" will happen naturally, always has, always will, and we need to decouple social vs. governmental.

Someone rightfully responded to you and pointed out that government action vs. social rejection isn't the same, but I still feel compelled to ask... What do you think "cancel culture" is?

Because my understanding of cancel culture is people loudly saying "I will reject this socially", and there's enough of them that the media owners or whatever rethink their projects and go "hrm maybe I wont do this, because I don't want to be socially rejected" (in the case of companies, socially rejected = lose money). This happens from both sides. Some people have issues with LGBTQ representation, and will call shows "woke" loudly on the internet and say they'll refuse to watch it. Some people have issues with anti-abortionists, and won't engage with them or post in their own forums complaining about them. Some conservative views feel "cancelled" because there's many people that disagree with them, but... that's just social rejection.

There are some things on which I sit on the conservative side. Most of my friends are not. I don't need to loudly discuss these issues and lose my friends. In the grand scheme of things, that's acceptable to me. If that's what "being cancelled" is... that's life man. It's been like this for all of human's history.

Yeah that's weird. Like.. you need a license to drive. You should have some sort of official documentation to vote. It shouldn't even be a question. Trump is pushing a bunch of BS policies, fight those instead.

Quality paper is a medium that seems to work over centuries. Electronic records have existed for less than half a century, in general. Most people can't read electronic records from the 80s because the machines that did so broke down or are incredibly hard to get.

I know I'm being pedantic, and paper encyclopedias have a lot of disadvantages vs. a virtual copy (size, ability to search etc.), but given we don't really know how long a DVD can last, I'd say paper is the safer medium.

You're missing the /s right? I'm just being whooshed? Because the last thing I want is for AI to penalize minimum wage workers for casual language, and saying "no problem" instead of "you're welcome".

35% is the contribution of RAM to PC prices. i.e., in a $1000 PC, $350 is RAM. It used to be $150-180, that's a 100% increase.

My definition for "emotional resonance" is larger than yours I think. If the story appeals, and I care about the characters / world, I call that emotional resonance. Sure it wouldn't apply to some games, but even games like GTA can have resonance if you care about the characters, and a world that sucks you in definitely counts. Not everything needs to be sappy feelings to be feelings!

It feels like many hate her guts just because she's a woman.

Online competitive games (MOBA, FPS, strategy) tend to have very little story or "emotion", but most successful single player games do. All RPGs are built on emotional resonance (think of GOTY Clair Obscur). Even modern action / adventure games tend to have a gripping story (the Last of Us? shit even the first Assassin's Creed had that resonance).

Sure, the early generation of games (Space Invaders! Pacman!) had no story, but for the last 20 years at least emotional resonance and good storylines are what make games stand out. So let's give this Asha person a break. I know nothing about her, but I don't really care either, because she's not the scenarist or the creative director of the games that will come out, she's the business boss. If her only relevant comment was "I liked Firewatch, and I think games should have an emotional story", I don't understand the instinctive backlash.

Because of risk and greed.

Your #1 and 2 go hand in hand... Vendors sunset their support for "legacy" software after a few years, to monetize the new stuff. That means you need to maintain yourself if you don't want to pay through the nose. Unfortunately, there's fewer and fewer people that can maintain it, since COBOL developers are retiring. There's a risk of "what if it breaks" ("My IBM mainframe is physically dying and we need to migrate the software to a new machine, but we don't know how"), but also risk of "what if we suddenly need a new feature"? CEOs / Boards of Directors don't like risk, so they'll ask how to mitigate it... and it's never "maybe we should have a core group of developers that knows the software we need to operate, and we hire young blood and train them to keep our stack running", but always "let's modernize and outsource the support to someone else".

I wish software was like a fastener. Unfortunately software is not a fastener, it's the end product. If I build you a deck with pinewood and screws, the pine and screws are COBOL, and the deck is the software. There's no need to change the deck unless it rots, but if it does, you better hope you can buy materials to fix it. And if at that time no one knows how to use a screwdriver, or how the deck was built... well tough luck. What's happening now is your deck isn't rotten, but everyone tells you "please rebuild the whole deck with metal and rivets, we don't know how to use wood / screws AND WHAT IF THE WOOD BURNS"...

I think what's more accurate to say is that GDP is not a good measure of "productivity". It measures the spending we've made (purchases, investments, etc.), but that's the nominal value of things, which yes can be companies buying and selling paper wealth. It doesn't measure how that wealth is redistributed, but more importantly, wealth is not productivity. If I increase the price of my product by 50% and sell it, I've increased GDP, but I'm not more productive if I produce the same amount, despite what the GDP says.

Ukraine and Russia have historical ties but two different languages... that's a huge difference. What's happening there is not a civil war, it is one country wanting to enforce its might on the other.

Here we're talking a civil war (again). Same history, same language, same families with members interspersed across the territory... it'll be more like East and West Germany, or South and North Korea. And based on economic development... I have a hypothesis as to which states would be the North Korea equivalent.

That's exactly their point. We did get fucked. And we will get fucked by climate change, it will just play out over decades instead of a couple years.

Thanks, appreciate it, and interesting read.

Agree. There's plenty of fear-mongering about it, but there has never been anything _credible_. :)