Considering how terrible the writing is on Starfield, I’m not sure Bethesda has it in them anymore. The quests are often incredibly boring, and the worldbuilding itself is a bit meh. Same with the books you find; they cheaped out and used public domain materials for the most part, and the books that do have in house content are… not great. What I liked about Oblivion and Skyrim was that the books you could find really helped to “fill out” the world, but in Starfield they’re just either uninteresting or plain bad – like those fucking cringy joke books

Most pleasant gamer

Oh yeah I was specifically talking about all these new technologies, not just incremental improvements on the existing ones. Hybrid organic cells have been promised for a long time and it’s not just a question of scaling etc., but that they have had serious issues that have so far meant that they were a complete non-starter for any actual real-world use. I didn’t look into this any further so I don’t know of Longi solved the stability problem, though, so it may be that they’re finally actually ready to even start leaving the lab

Yeah, all these super-efficient panels are all well and good but like you said they’ve been promised for over a decade and have yet to leave the lab due to a bunch of different problems such as stability for these organic hybrids. I wonder if these newest ones have actually managed to solve the stability problem, or is this yet another cell revolution that’ll be coming Real Soon Now™ in 2034

It’s not like literally all Russian artillery gets destroyed before firing off a single shot. Fuzing absolutely does make a difference

Not all that cute though

Yeah, there’s a reason why they suddenly have a lot of trouble selling their military hardware even to countries that haven’t sanctioned them.

Well, other reasons in addition to the fact that the stuff they’re fielding themselves in Ukraine keeps getting blown the fuck up and they have had to replace it with something that was initially being built for an outside customer. “Yeah you remember those tanks you ordered? Weeelll you’re not going to be getting them quite on schedule, there’s been some… uh… complications. The turrets… they, uh… experienced rapid unplanned disassembly caused by… uh… assembly workers smoking in the crew compartment. Definitely not caused by inferior westoid antitank missiles in Ukraine, our cope cages work against those 100% of the time and it’s not like we’d use your tanks in combat, no siree Bob”

It’s not “Brussels” pushing for this, it’s braindead MEPs who were lobbied by various shady organizations

Sure!

• article from Yle, the national broadcast company: https://yle.fi/a/74-20087808
• Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-introduce-200-euro-fine-participation-illegal-strikes-2024-02-22/
• more in depth article by SAK, a “labor confederation” (sort of like a union of unions): https://www.sak.fi/en/whats-new/serious-grounds/restrictions-right-strike

Reportedly the Russian factory workers are being paid quite well.

Paid well for Russian factory workers

And the lack of quality is just a myth I think. There’s no indication that’s actually true.

Then you haven’t been paying attention.

Honestly, just properly funding anything that is designed to do benevolent things for the community as a whole is a tough sell with way too many US community politicians

This seems to be a problem with at least conservative politicians everywhere. In Finland where I live we do still have the vestiges of a welfare state (and it really is vestigial at this point), but right wing politicians keep dismantling it and cutting taxes on the rich, and later on leftist politicians find it impossible to roll back any changes due to resistance from the right.

Yeah. Government-owned companies producing shells that probably wouldn’t pass QC in “the west”, and paying employees a pittance in comparison. Also at least based on aerial photos, Russians seem to use contact fuzes a lot (you can see the difference from the “splash” patterns) which are a lot cheaper than airburst / multifunction fuzes, but admittedly those might well have been old Soviet stock and their new production could well be more modern.

Still, regardless of the fuze used it’s no surprise that Russian production is cheaper.

Yeah this is absolutely the most fucking infuriating part about conservatives. They’ll crow about how “leftists” (ie. what seems like anyone left of the Strasserites) want to have a one-party fascist state that controls every aspect of people’s lives, and when they get in power they start doing exactly what they accuse leftists of wanting.

They also have a real habit of blaming all of their own fuckups on the left; our current extremist government got in to power by claiming that our previous leftist government caused some sort of massive debt problem (government debt did increase, but they had COVID to deal with), when the reality is that it has been the previous 20 or so years of right wing governments who have consistently cut taxes for the rich and sold government property to cover for the budget deficits. Conveniently reich-wingers ignored the part where their ideology is the one that wants to cut taxes, leading to higher debt and cut social programs and public services, and somehow they’re stupid enough that they don’t even see it themselves and they believe it when their lying politicians claim it is all the evil leftists’ fault that our public healthcare is now completely broken and the welfare system is among the worst in Europe.

I did nazi that pun coming 🙄

The way I’ve understood the “defund the police” movement’s point is that they’re saying police funding is excessive because a lot of the things cops do should be handled before the cops have to get involved, eg. with higher funding for mental health and social services, housing for homeless people etc. So the point is that you wouldn’t need as many cops in the first place if things were handled more humanely “downstream” so to speak, instead of just letting problems fester until things go sideways

Or a FAT meme you’re too young to understand? I honestly can’t remember if NTFS needs defragging or not, I haven’t used Windows since Win7

I assume that the reich-wingers will use these protests as justification for crackdowns.

Here in Finland we had months of strikes against our current extremely conservative government’s cuts to public services, welfare etc. – naturally their reaction was to refuse to negotiate and make political strikes illegal, and to use the strikes to vilify unions and as scapegoats for poor economic performance

YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO, YOU’RE NOT EVEN MY REAL DAD

On the other hand most Linux desktop users are Normie’s, think Steam deck and so on.

Jesus fuck what a statement. Your parents probably regret having you.

Yeah, although without the cool space station and cyberpunk-ish tech. I doubt we’ll get that far.