Hey if I could sell a million copies of a game for just a dollar each as my cut of a bundle, well I’d be a millionaire!

The question is: did Disney commission the Percy Jackson series or did Rick Riordan shop around for publishers like a traditional book author and happen to get picked up by Disney?

It’s the Texas sharpshooter fallacy writ large. You can always pick the winners after the games are written. The hard part is picking a winner of a game beforehand.

Those are books published by Disney written by established individual authors. They’re not gang-writing books the way they make movies.

You have to include the risk of not succeeding. Without high graphical fidelity to differentiate yourself, you’re forced to compete on gameplay alone. Large companies like Nintendo do not know how to make hits reliably. That’s why Nintendo keeps recycling old franchises.

Look at all of the indie games that no one plays. There are thousands and thousands of developers out there making games. The vast majority of them never succeed. It’s just like trying to become a New York Times best selling author. Notice how Disney hasn’t cracked the novel as a medium. That’s why they spend all their money on big budget Star Wars and Marvel movies and TV shows.

Right but having a group chat of size 0 isn’t very useful.

Not really. Suppose he invaded China. Do you think he’d get away with that?

There was nothing he could have done. It’s a mistake thinking the US changed so dramatically almost overnight in the past few months. In reality, the cracks in the dam have been growing slowly over the decades. There just comes a point where you can’t paper them over anymore.

All the suggestions here about moves Biden could have made to the Supreme Court or with other laws are forgetting about January 6th. There’s a huge number of people who voted for and actually want what is happening right now. Blocking them or delaying them is only delaying the inevitable. Politics is war by other means.

Russia’s economy is roughly comparable in size to the Netherlands. Putin has destroyed so much of it. He’s caused enormous brain drain by driving young men with any means and intelligence out of the country. He’s devastated his own industrial base and now he’s on the brink of losing to Ukraine, a country far smaller than Russia.

He’s very, very, very far from owning the planet.

Curing (removing moisture from food by means of salt) is a distinct process from smoking (adding smoke to food as well as removing moisture via heat). Curing with nitrite and nitrate based salts (sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite) is what’s been implicated in cancer.

Smoking meat is much more complicated from a chemistry perspective. Different types of wood, different temperatures, moisture content, salt content, and cooking durations can all affect the concentrations of carcinogenic compounds in the food. For example, softwoods (such as pine) tend to produce a lot of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a known class of carcinogens, but thankfully softwood is undesirable as a smoke wood anyway so is rarely used.

Smoking technique can also dramatically affect the result. Poor smoking technique allows the wood to smoulder at a lower temperature, producing a harsher smoke with more carcinogenic, toxic, and bitter compounds. Expert smoking technique uses a smaller, hotter fire which produces a much cleaner smoke that also results in better flavour.

No one is untouchable. No one is invincible. No one has unlimited resources.

One day Putin will seem untouchable. The next day he gets pulled out of a ditch like Gaddafi.

Wouldn’t that only be true if the third party was running a brand new slate of candidates? If the Republicans and Democrats are in secret talks to form a third party, it’s likely that a whole bunch of incumbents plan to break off from their parties to join the third party. They don’t need to win an election to do that, they could do it right now.

Of course their old parties would try to defeat them in the next election, but if these incumbents have been getting elected for many years then they’d still be hard to unseat even in a different party. Especially so if these members’ electorates are already disgruntled with the existing parties.

The thing I wasn’t prepared for was not the lack of time, it was the lack of desire to play games.

That’s the only definitional difference. In practice there are other differences. My modern cold climate heat pump has a variable speed compressor whereas my previous traditional AC did not. The variable speed allows the system to ramp up and down on both heating and cooling, letting the system run all the time even at a very low level when the demand is low.

The traditional AC’s single speed compressor ended up doing a lot of short cycling when cooling demand was low and shutting down completely when cooling demand was too high (to prevent overheating and compressor damage). The variable speed compressor of the modern heat pump is designed for continuous operation over many hours, even when the temperature outside is extremely high, without overheating. I believe it’s able to back off the compressor speed when the cooling demand exceeds capacity though I have yet to see the system be unable to keep up, despite the unit itself being a lot smaller than the old AC.

The lie was that only Palestinians have lived there for thousands of years.

Not according to the state of Israel

Correction: the government of Israel, with a ruling party (Likud, led by Bibi) which has 32/120 seats in the Knesset. That’s less than 27% of the seats. This is what you get with proportional representation and coalition government.

Israelis and Palestinians have lived in the area for centuries and centuries. They’re ethnically the same, brothers and sisters. They differ by culture and the old problem (familiarity breeds contempt). I have maintained all along that both have a right to exist and to self-determination.

But there are people here that now deny these rights to Israelis simply because Israel has a lot of military and political power right now. It’s like for them it’s not enough for Palestine to be free, they must also see Israel destroyed. And in the process they overlook the atrocities committed by Hamas (not to mention what the PLO did in Jordan decades ago).

If you’re just going to lie then you’re not even worth talking to.

A small number did. Vastly more were part of the diaspora.

That’s not true. Only 26% (and shrinking) of Israeli Jews have European ancestry. A plurality, 44% (and the fastest growing) have native Israeli ancestry. The remainder come from North Africa and Asian ancestry but all groups besides Israeli background are shrinking.

Nazis during the Holocaust might have wanted Jews deported to Israel but today’s Nazis want Israel wiped off the map and all Jews destroyed.

You can’t draw a clean ethnic or cultural boundary around Israel that’s separate from their arabic brothers and sisters

Not an ethnic boundary but definitely a cultural one. Judaism is very different from Islam. Palestinian culture is very different from Israeli culture.

That’s what makes the conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism so nefarious.

The conflation happens on both sides of the argument. The two extremes need each other to justify themselves.

I believe both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. The issue is that both claim the same land and neither tolerates the other at this point. It doesn’t help that none of Israel’s neighbours want Palestinian refugees so the crisis is exacerbated to such an extreme.

Nobody contends that the “shared identity” of Israel has no right to exist

That’s where things get tricky. There clearly are people who claim Israel (and Jews in general) as a shared identity and cultural group have no right to exist. These people are traditionally called Nazis.

You’ll also run into trouble talking about historic Palestine, previously part of the Ottoman Empire, and long prior to that the Kingdom of Israel (around 1047-930 BCE). The Israelis aren’t simply a group of Ashkenazi Jews who moved to the Middle East during the Holocaust. They’re a people who have lived in the area for thousands of years and maintained a distinct culture throughout occupation by other empires.

It seems you’re conflating the words nation and state. A nation is a group of people with a shared, named identity, such as Hawaiian or Palestinian. A state is an officially recognized group with sovereignty over an area of land. Many nations exist which do not have their own states.

All nations have the right to exist by the human right to freedom of association. Sovereign states have no right to exist: their existence is asserted and defended by force and by mutual recognition with other sovereign states.