You're not missing something. Much like Disney's "Snow White" was called a "success" despite bombing both at the box office and on streaming, the corporate media stooges will blithely state the complete opposite in an attempt to hide abject failure. Ubisoft is no different.

AC fans waited years to get a game with samurai's based in feudal Japan. What they got is a "samurai" game with no actual Japanese samurai protagonist. Ubisoft's reason for this is painfully obvious to everyone. This is why Japanese consumers have largely rejected it and has a lot to do with why sales have tanked overall.

There's a saying for this that ends with "go broke." It's slipping my mind at the moment, but I'm sure it'll come to me eventually.

If more companies would not only put a monetary bounty on these crooks but also specify "dead or alive," perhaps it would start to put a dent in their activities. They're already operating from countries that either look the other way or actively assist them in their activities. Putting a death mark on them ups the stakes considerably and allows the use of...ahem...alternate actors...ahem...that can operate beyond the law to get actual results.

However, if you're a user in certain countries, like France or Canada, opening the app shows a collection of pirated movies, such as Venom: The Last Dance, Joker: Folie a Deux, and Terrifier 3.

So...nothing anyone wants to actually see then.

"Most" is pretty vague. Which ones don't overlap? Do you even know? Have you read both? In full? Project 2025 is 922 pages long. Somehow I doubt you've read it, instead relying on the media to tell you what to think and say and do.

What if "most" of the overlap are things that are relatively mainstream, non-controversial things? What if the only places they don't overlap just happen to be the Big Boogeyman Ideas you're so terrified of? Did you ever consider that enough to bother reviewing both proposals? Or did you simply hear "Trump = Project 2025 and Project 2025 = bad, therefore Trump = bad"?

The sheer lack of curiosity about the stances some people are willing to take is stunning sometimes. Presumably you have a prefrontal cortex. You may wish to use it from time to time to think on your own and come up with your own opinions.

And yet who will build, program, and maintain this AI-controlled fleet? Another AI-controlled facility? Who will build, program, and maintain that? Or is it turtles all the way down?

At some point humans have to be involved, and those humans will be gainfully employed and benefit from their labor. Those who adapt to this new economic reality will prosper. Those who do not, will not.

This is nothing new. When mass production put artisans out of work, the same hue and cry was raised. The human race as a whole is incalculably better off today than it was when that happened. Those who try to stand against the march of technology to maintain the status quo will always get steamrollered. And we should not weep for them, for we all benefit from the march of progress. If you truly believe in the betterment of humanity, you cannot allow the creation of a society where stagnation is rewarded.

Two things I think are frequently lost in these discussions:

1. When Fauci made his statement about people not needing to wear masks, people tend to forget the context of the situation. At the time, mask manufacturers were caught off-guard and there was a huge run on masks. They were extremely hard to find to buy. Hospitals were running out and having a very hard time procuring the masks that they needed to perform operations. They were actively trying to discourage people from hoarding masks so that medical providers could have "dibs" on acquiring them first.

Once the supply line caught up with demand and they were more easily obtainable, they changed their position—but not because the facts or evidence of their effectiveness changed.

It wasn't just masks to which this flawed logic was applied. When the COVID vaccines first became available, people who were over the age of 65 were given priority on getting them. A bunch of people willfully ignorantly took that to mean that people who were younger just plain didn't benefit from having the vaccine. Nothing could be further from the truth; it benefits them greatly. But with a highly limited supply, we necessarily had to prioritize who got the shots first.

2. When you wear a mask, it isn't particularly effective in protecting you from COVID. Its purpose is to protect everyone else if you have COVID, especially since in the initial stage of infection many people were asymptomatic. As mentioned in comments above, it prevents a 10-foot plume of aerosolized infected saliva from projecting forth from your sneezes, coughs, and even just breathing. The idea is that if everyone is wearing a mask to protect everyone else, then you'll have a much higher level of protection also.

Living in the South of the US, I can't count the number of times I heard chuckleheads explain to me how those masks still let particles through. They couldn't wrap their brains around the point being that those particles for the most part won't be there if everyone is wearing masks. And it's not just COVID that controlled by masks. Did anyone notice that cases of the flu dropped to a fraction of its normal rate of infection where people consistently masked up?

Because of huge sums of money involved if he can hit this hail mary. It sounds like he doesn't give a shit what Doctor Who fans think about him, so why not take the shot?

(Note that I'm not endorsing that mentality, it's asshattery. But I certainly understand why he's doing it, and why others in his position might also take a shot at it even if deep down they know it's not right.)

Why would your battery be drained? Leading up to an outage, you would be using utility power to run your heating and other stuff, not the battery. The battery would only need enough juice to stay charged at full. And because of the way modern battery packs work, that means that it would only charge up at periodic intervals, never letting the capacity get below maybe 80% to 85%. (But could be set arbitrarily high, depending on need given outage frequency and average length.) And that charging would happen during non-peak hours, so there's no extra load on the grid. I have an EV, and that's how I have my car set up today to charge; in the middle of the night when the grid is nowhere near peak load. This "problem" has been solved long ago.

The availability of solar or wind power has nothing to do with this conversation. We were talking about load distribution and how much the grid would be taxed with batteries at people's houses, not energy sources. But just to counter the FUD...

Wind turbines work fine during bad weather if they're properly maintained. Plenty of countries with more bad weather than we have generate plenty of wind and solar power, including places like Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Germany.

What you're likely thinking of is the problems that Texas had in 2021 due to a freak ice storm. A bunch of right-wing nitwits got all over television and the internet to decry how unreliable wind power is, when in fact, it was natural gas that took the heaviest hit in failing to supply enough power. Windmills actually worked much more reliably during that snowstorm. (Citation)

As for solar, it can be impacted, but it's rather unusual for it to be. It has to be really cold or a really heavy snowfall, because the surface of solar panels generally are warmer than the surrounding area, meaning that snow generally melts off of it quickly. Also, solar panels are typically mounted at an angle, which induces snow to slide off of them. And even panels that are partially obstructed generate decent amounts of power. (Citation) Again, in practical use, this is a non-issue.

The total demand, yes. But if everyone has on-premises batteries, the peak demand can be spread throughout all 24 hours of the day, making the load that the grid has to handle much less.

So the moral of the story is early buyers will pay full price while getting a buggy, unbalanced, unfinished product. Meanwhile, those who wait will generally get discounts, see fewer bugs, and more polished content.

This is why I almost never buy anything as soon as it's released.

Also not (necessarily) true. Dissolved CO2 can be consumed by algae and seagrasses in the ocean, converting it to biomass -- where carbon remains largely sequestered when the organism dies -- and oxygen.

Almost but not quite. You left out a few relevant factors.

Personal bias - despite attempts to eradicate it, it still exists. A scientist who has their reputation staked on a particular theory or outcome will tend to favor that outcome, disregard outcomes that don't agree with their position, or both. The recent LK-99 "room temp superconductor" is an example of this.

Funding bias - Scientists don't work for free, and even if they did, research itself is an expensive endeavor. This requires funding from external sources, usually government but sometimes major industries contribute as well. Both these patrons tend to fund research that confirms whatever policy or product they wish to push. Likewise, funding for other things either doesn't get funded or could disqualify you for future funding.

Community peer pressure - Despite the stereotype, contemporary science is largely that of conformity. Mavericks are generally frowned upon, laughed at, or ostracized. This has historical precedence. Major luminaries like Einstein, Bohr, etc. were regarded as crackpots when they first challenged the establishment before they were recognized as prophets of truth. Very few people have the courage to stand against such as this, hence conformity and groupthink are more normal than most people suspect or are willing to admit.

Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?

Go ahead and try such a mandate. It will accelerate the trend of businesses moving out of states requiring them.

So over the last decade our total generation has remained somewhat stagnant while demand is steadily increasing. That is the point I was making. Your figures back this up.

You gloss over why natural gas is the more economical option. Coal plants are burdened by expensive emissions controls and regulatory requirements that make them too expensive to operate. Minus these, they would still be competitive economically. I'm not arguing against such controls, merely saying emissions are the drivers of the economics.

I worked at TVA during the time frame in question. CCGT's are peak load assets but were being run constantly to make up for lost capacity when coal plants were shuttered. Maintenance cycles were being deferred. The net result was more unplanned shutdowns.

I did see the table. Did you? From 2011 to 2021, total coal generation dropped from 1,733,430KMWh to 897,885KMWh, a difference of 835,545KMWh. During that same time solar added 164,422KMWh, wind (aka "Renewable Sources Excluding Hydroelectric and Solar") added 256,261KMWh. That's a deficit of 414,862KMWh, not even factoring in the ~12KMWh loss in nuclear. Solar and wind are not making up the difference lost to coal shutdown. Natural gas.is making up the difference, and, as stated, these are not designed to be base load generation and hence unsustainable.

Government researchers have been tracking heat waves for more than 100 years. According to data from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the annual heat wave index for the contiguous 48 states was substantially higher in the 1930s than at any point in recent years. In some years in the 1930s, it was four times greater or even more. Additionally, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a large database of daily temperatures that goes back to 1948. NOAA used 1,066 weather stations located across the U.S. to collect this data.

According to NOAA, huge swaths of the U.S. have experienced a significant decrease in abnormally hot days recorded since 1948, especially in the Midwest and northern and eastern Texas. Although it’s true that some parts of the U.S. have seen the number of hotter-than-usual days increase over the past 70 years, most weather stations have shown no meaningful changes or even declines.

This maxim equally applies to your comments. My points stand and your own data does not refute it.

We're shutting down capacity faster than we're replacing it. Aging nuclear plants aren't being replaced. Coal is being shut down due to emissions. Even combined-cycle gas turbines running on natural gas are being shut down, nevermind that these are peak load assets, not base load assets and not designed to run 100% of the time anyway.

Solar capacity is going up, along with wind, but not nearly enough to replace what's going away. Meanwhile the government is doing all in its power to stop you from buying gas stoves, gas furnaces, gas water heaters, and pushing automakers towards all-electric.

Demand is going up. Efficiencies will not blunt that. Capacity is not going up and in many cases it is shrinking.

Is it just me or does this seem...stupid?