This would have been much less of a clusterfuck if they hadn’t hidden that Biden’s state had already been declining for a long while now, or if he had been consequent with his declared intentions of being a one-term president from the very beginning, and there had been real primaries.

The very obvious good news is that whoever is chosen now will have much better momentum than Biden, even if only by virtue of being capable of reaching out to low information voters, while Trump’s less obvious cognitive decline is going to become far more evident now.

On that, I agree.

I’m roughly on the same boat. A format I’ve come to enjoy is streaming a pausable strategy game with a group of friends and taking decisions collectively (so if the game is Frostpunk, we’re basically the oligarchy that’s deciding how much is the working class going to slave away and how many deaths are acceptable), but it’s hard to find stable friend groups that like it.

This will be great for the workers, but I don’t think it will necessarily fix the issues in Bethesda’s organization when it comes to game development (and it won’t make them worse either).

Given what we know from Starfield, Bethesda is really lacking when it comes to planning: they aren’t doing a good job at establishing a compact vision for the final product which also results in having issues to establish an agile workflow to get from start to finish. In the best cases, this results in ludonarrative disonance where the story isn’t really supported by the mechanics of the game (example: Fallout 4’s story incentivizes the player to hurry up and look for their son, but they assign a lot of resources into making sandbox mechanics such as those related to base building); in the worst cases, this results in teams returning the ball to each other all the time because they aren’t properly coordinated to build things in the way other teams of the studio needs them, which loses a lot of time and becomes even more glaringly obvious the larger the project is.

The silver lining is: this problem isn’t so noticeable when the designers have the template of Oblivion in their minds and they’re making Skyrim, but it was going to be completely exposed when making the jump to a new IP (and thus a new universe), with a new engine, with some large design jumps such as ceding ground to dynamically created areas; so ES6 doesn’t have to be as much of a low point as it has been Starfield, as long as they’re conservative in their design choices. I’d vastly prefer the leadership of Bethesda to be completely reorganized, which would allow them to innovate by taking well measured risks, but I don’t have much hope for that scenario.

Does that mean that if enough of a minority of people use a neutral word with ill intent, other people should be careful of using that word? For instance, if a bunch of racists started using the word “black” venomously day and night for months, should everyone else start considering the word “black” to be a slur? What if it’s a term that’s otherwise used by scholars with ample consensus? And if there’s no other other to refer to it, and by avoiding it, you cannot refer to the concept at all?

He’s a non-binary boymoder. Lots of “traditionalist” friends and family, you see, so he’s taking his time to test the waters and hasn’t even changed pronouns yet. Please be patient with him 🙏

I see Israel is working hard to achieve that peace deal /s

And on top of that, people on the other side are claiming that the secret services intentionally left Trump exposed to a terrorist attack. Conspiracies are going to thrive on both sides, that will promote sectarianism, and things will get violent sooner.

If it is actually fake, wait for a while until there’s plenty of evidence about it. Rushing to make such declarations only makes it extremely likely that you fuck up somehow. You can just say that it seems suspicious to you in the meantime.

“Allowing the guy I’m beating up to kick me in the nuts is a dangerous escalation”

Ok.

It’s never too late for the plushie army to rise.

If “normal” means “needs to attack anything slightly strange to receive validation from the in-group”, I do very much like being weird as fuck, thank you very much.

Cuba (country right next to the US) aligned itself with the USSR after Castro’s revolution, and the US has attempted to coup them, invade them, murder their leaders, then sink them in isolation and starvation. I’ve always defended that Cuba had the right of self-determination for their own foreign and domestic policy, and that the US was in the wrong for retaliating against them.

It would be extremely hypocritical of me to defend that Ukraine has no right to self-determine whether they want to be in a defensive pact or not, and whether they want to join the EU or not, just because a third country would like them not to do so - just as it’s extremely hypocritical of tankies and campists to say that Cuba had the right to choose their own future but Ukraine doesn’t.

Besides, the mere fact of implementing those tax rates makes high end luxury homes less valuable, because rich people from abroad will have less incentives to want to move there. So, if rich French people want to move from a very expensive home in France to a very expensive home in Germany, the new one will have to be less luxurious, because they won’t be able to sell the old one for that much.

25º during summer nights either already was or is going to become normal around gigantic areas of the world. Getting all Indians to just live anywhere else is never going to be plausible.

The town hall intends to ban short term rentals in a few years. Definitely far too slow, but it has gotten to the point that even politicians who want to see their city’s coffers grow fat admit that it’s an economic activity that does more harm than good.

Anyone noticed how Milei is constantly seeking beef with other countries? It’s almost like he wants Argentinians to get lost on diplomacy theatrics so that they don’t discuss their own situation.

supposedly over witchcraft but really over land

Superstition is bad on a vacuum, but the most important reason why it should be opposed is because of the cynicals who promote unreason for their own personal gain.

The difference in the UK was far more ridiculous. Labour got roughly two thirds of the camera with one third of the votes.

Those working conditions aren’t even good for companies seeking long-term growth. If you want to produce 5 years long projects that are high quality enough to storm the market, you need people who stays healthy and doesn’t get burnt, which requires consistent long-term humane conditions, or else you’re destroying whatever talent you had in your hands and will end up with a mediocre product.

Capitalism already has enough problems on a vacuum, but its current dominant version of prioritizing profits in the next quarter over literally anything else is disastrous.