Good to know, I haven’t picked it back up since free lanes landed. Might be time to give it another go.

Thanks!

I put a ton of time into starfield, still consider it one of my favorites. But I put it down and have tried to pick it back up a few times and just couldn’t get into it again.

One thing I thought would be a simple fix to add more interest to the game would have been to randomize the “play sets” you find on the planets. There are maybe a dozen different kinds of sites you can find on planets and I still remember the first time I wandered off the storyline and found some pirates in a base. It was fun and exciting. But the 50th time you enter the same identical base with the exact same floor plan, exact same enemy placement, etc, it gets boring.

I thought it would be easy for them to make some building segments that could be mixed and matched procedurally to make new base designs. Even if the segments were kinda chunky, entire floors, you could still get a lot of different layout combinations with a handful of each. Even if you just had 3 floors in a base and 5 of each, that’s 5 X 5 X 5 = 125 different combinations.

Sure you’d still know every floor, but it would make exploring the little side play sets more interesting and rewarding.

I still think though that the first time I had a zero-G gunfight on the casino ship was one of the most fun gaming sessions I’ve had.

Could the American people at least get some kind of punch card for every time this sack of crap announces a peace deal is almost done.

Maybe on the 10th punch we get a new President for free.

I recently went to San Francisco for a work trip and Waymo’s were everywhere in SOMA.

I tried them out twice. Both times were after dinner back to the hotel I was staying at, traffic was heavy but weather was your normal bay area weather, 60 and clear.

They worked fine, picked me up, dropped me off, navigated without issue even on some of the more challenging streets. Seemed expensive, $20-25 to go 1-1.5 miles, but I only needed two rides while there and used it both times so maybe that’s competitive or even a good deal compared to uber.

I think the thing that struck me most though was the first trip. A very cheerful robotic voice explained how Waymo worked, the car was almost impossibly clean like no one had ever been in it, the music was some pleasant background music with a cover art that was some swirl of colors. I started thinking about how every part of this experience is aritificial. The voice greeting me, the, probably ai generated, music and album art, the driving robot.

I’ve worked in startups for 20 years now, building little companies into big companies all with missions to change the world for the better in some way or another. That was the Silicon Valley vibe when I got there in the late 2000s, the dot com bust was over and VC was flowing and people were building stuff.

Waymo is interesting because as a service it did exactly what I wanted, got me from the restaurant back to the hotel room to sleep because my jet lagged Ohio brain thought it was 1am. It was clean, efficient, and pleasant. Although the pleasant had this odd feeling of not so much pleasant as designed to be unoffensive.

It was a weird little peek into a potential future, and I can’t say it was bad but it definitely felt different.

On my ride home from the airport back in Ohio I took an uber and the driver was an older gentleman who happened to live the next town over. We chatted, he told me about his ex job as a chemical engineer at a plant that exploded, his ex wife who was an amazing gardener and also a former junkie, we passed a gas station and he let me know that it was run by a father and son who always did right by him and that’s where I should take me car.

I’m not one for chatting most times, I’m not very social. The proximity of the two experiences though showed me the stark difference. I can’t really say an elderly man being forced to do gig work to make ends meet after a colorful life is a particularly good future either.

I feel like I might have been building to some sort of point, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe just wanted to share some random thoughts that recently popped up. I get the appeal of Waymo. I think if you rolled it out everywhere and it worked as well as I experienced and was a reasonable price it would dominate. I’m also not sure if I’d want it to, but it seems that the future has a way of happening with or without our consent.

Well heat islands are a real thing. If you put 9GW of energy into a data center and dont want to fry the electronics you have to expel that heat somewhere.

Data centers often expel their heat into the surrounding ecology via air con and liquid cooling.

This is selling fear because this data center won’t obey the laws of thermodynamics?

Ok I also had this question and everyone was just cracking jokes instead of answering it.

Business Development Representative is the most likely correct answer given the context

My spouse and I bought 5 acres in rural Ohio. About 3 of it is wooded.

We are actively converting the land back to wild prairie. We have tons of wildlife on our land, deer, rabbits, groundhogs, birds of all sorts, stink bugs (you take the bad with the good), and all sorts of creepy crawlers.

We actively have worked though to rehabilitate the land. Started by seeding clover along with the grass to help with nitrogen and then are working with some people from our local library that help restore land back to its natural biodiversity. Not there yet but making progress after a year and a half.

We let the leaves fall undisturbed to make breeding ground for insects and last summer as the days got long and hot we were treated with a brilliant light show of fireflies in the forest every night for a month or two.

If you want to live in nature you can go to where it is or you can restore where you are.

Thanks for sharing. I hope you get your surgery before any of those negative long term consequences.

I suppose no matter who is paying, private insurance or public, there can always be more need than resources. In the US the rationing just happens by those without enough money foregoing care.

Wishing you all the best

I’m in the US and a common thing detractors will point to is that socialized medicine means having to wait.

I respect your privacy but if you feel willing to share I’d be curious as to the nature of the surgery. Seems the doctors think you need surgery and you have to wait, I’m mostly curious what impact the waiting has for you. I’m assuming it’s some amount of hardship, because you went to the doctor for it in the first place, but on a scale from “my shoulder hurts when I do X” to “I’m completely incapacitated” where do you feel like you land?

Does the system prioritize in some way? Are more minor surgeries further out than more serious stuff? I would imagine, but I’ve only ever been in this system so I’m curious how they decide who has to wait another few months.

In my limited experience here in the US, my entire adult life ive had what would normally be referred to as “Cadillac insurance” (this is the highest level of insurance paid for by an employer) I’ve also had to wait months for procedures and then pay thousands out of pocket along with the $20k or so we pay every year in monthly premiums.

But waiting 6 months then told to wait another 6 and another and another, does seem dreadful. I think the longest me or my spouse have needed to wait for a procedure is on the order of 6 months but it would be scheduled within that window. Although for some reason just getting in to see a doctor can take month or two (always quite frustrating when you are ill and they will see you next month, let’s hope it doesn’t last that long) but then you have expensive supplemental care like urgent care.

In any event, I’m more curious than anything having only had experience with US healthcare, fun stuff like fighting with insurance to pay for anesthesia for surgery because, yes Doris, it is a medical necessity.

Thanks for reading, hope you get the care you need soon and that you aren’t in too bad shape in the meanwhile.

By this logic as long as the executive branch filed a new report once a week with a new operation name they could commit US forces to a theater of war indefinitely.

Clearly this is against both the spirit and the letter of the law, but I have no faith that congress will fight to enforce it or if they did that the Supreme Court would do fuck all to stop it.

We find ourselves in “they thought they were free”

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

It’s such a wild lie that for some reason we are all supposed to take seriously.

We all work at companies, the executives aren’t doing anything earth shattering. Most executives seem to be running the playbook of “give the customer less and charge them more to increase profits”. Wow, what innovation!

I would love for someone to be able to point out some concrete brilliant ideas that an executive actually had that went from “vague bullshit” to execution without getting worked and reworked and reworked by a bunch of normal employees until it was actually viable.

Steve Jobs made the iPhone, oh by himself, did he design the chips and write the software? Sure the vision is great, but for every iPhone there are a thousand CEOs that basically keep the lights on an already functioning company and raise the price. Oversee a rebrand. Go on the news and talk up their company.

And they’d have you believe that that’s worth 300-400x what a regular employee.

That every day they are coming in and providing more benefit than a worker does in an entire year. It’s the most obvious bullshit we’ve ever been asked to swallow

This assassination attempt was almost definitely a false flag.

Let’s, for sake of argument, say it wasn’t.

The location has plenty of security, security that successfully stopped the gunman.

In what world would this mean “obviously we need more security.” The security worked, it has enough funding, also the thing that protects the president is the secret service which is part of the department of the treasury, not DHS.

So the secret service did their job and stopped a threat and for some reason that means we should give an unrelated part of the government more money.

Ohio has entered the chat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Ohio

I’m sure the loss of hers immunity in close living quarters won’t have any negative effects.

Real quick question, if someone wanted to dismantle our ability to fight and win wars how exactly would their actions differ from this administrations?

I don’t think the popular vote compact would diminish the two parties.

As far as I understand it the compact says all the states in the compact will pledge their electoral college electors to the popular vote winner.

The popular vote winner is still just the candidate with the most votes nationally so all the incentives and structures that lead to two parties are still at play.

Third parties are suppressed in a winner take all system largely due to the spoiler effect, a smaller third party pulls votes from a larger party.

Voters would still be incentivized to vote for one of the two major parties witb the same logic as today, a vote for a third party has little chance of winning and so it largely has the effect of denying a vote to the major party you would most align with.

To be clear, I think the way we’ve arranged democracy in America is quite stupid and mathematically guarantees a duopoly of parties both of which become enmeshed with and captured by the donor class. A popular vote compact is better than the goofy electoral college, I just don’t think it really does anything to break the grip of the two party system.

Supreme leader trump hs declared that to protect capitalism domestic oil producers are restricted from selling on the global market.

Patriots must sell oil only to the homeland and forego the global markets.

CPAC has burst into chants of USA USA and free market analysts on Fox News are calling this an obvious win.

Comrades, trump has said if any privately owned oil fields produce oil for export he may have to seize the means of production. Truly a new golden age is upon us.

It’s even worse.

There’s no advantage here. He said this to have a fleeting moment of feeling special because he knew something private and had the power to reveal it.

That’s it. That’s all he got out of this, for a second he got to feel like a big man, and that was enough to smile and tell everyone someone else private medical information.

See how important I am, I know something not everyone else knows. Sure it’s terrible news for that guy, but I’m not that guy so why would I give a fuck. He said he would stay and lick my boots up until his death, so I guess the only real tragedy is at some point he will die and I’ll need to find a new person to lick my boots.

That’s what’s flowing through trumps rotten brain

Capitalism.

Now there are all kinds of things people think of when you say capitalism, the free market, democracy (for some reason), etc.

But I mean the idea that the guy that owns the means of production should get the value produced by labor.

If you boil it down to that, it’s kinda crazy. You want to start a company digging holes, but you don’t have enough money to buy a backhoe.

Fred has plenty of money and can afford a backhoe. He buys it and makes you a deal, you can use his backhoe and he will own the company, you go out and dig holes and he will pay you a couple bucks an hour.

Obviously he has to charge the people that want the holes dug more than he’s paying you to make it worth his while, and he has to recoup the money he spent on the backhoe in the first place.

Fred will never pay you enough to live and save up to buy your own backhoe. After a while he’s made back all the money it cost him to purchase the backhoe.

So now the situation is this. A customer wants a hole dug, you come and dig the hole, and Fred, who has done nothing and already recouped all the money he spent to purchase the backhoe, gets most of the money. And that arrangement just goes on forever. When Fred dies, Fred Jr will inherit that backhoe, Fred Jr will have never spent a dime for that capital, in fact Fred Jr will have had a very comfortable life paid for by the sweat of your labor digging holes.

Fred Jr will get most of the value of your labor for his whole life for doing nothing at all, just because he happened to be Fred’s son.

This is the way we decide who gets the rewards of all the work humanity collectively does (under capitalist systems) and it’s resulted in a hundred or so people so insanely wealthy we can’t even conceptualize how much money they have and everyone else scraping by.

And very serious people (often paid by those billionaires) will be on the news (or replying to this very comment) telling you how this is just the only system that makes sense. But listen closely when they do, they will always say it’s good because of free markets, or competition, or democracy or something that is NOT capitalism. Capitalism rarely defends itself by talking about why it’s good for the rich guy that owns the capital to get all the value, it always misdirects you to something else, a free market or freedom just generally. The freedom to pick between 10 different ultra wealthy companies that own everything and work to make them even more wealthy for your entire life.

Wakes up and says he’s going to hit Iran 20 times harder today.

Finds out about mines and says… he’s going to hit Iran super duper hard.

You might want to save some room throughout the day for escalation you fucking moron.

I remember the day so clearly when Bernie had won a few of the early primaries, Biden was coming in 4th and seemed like he would wash out.

A colleague told me something big had happened, it was the day all the other centrist candidates pulled out right before Super Tuesday and threw their support behind Biden. It worked he ended up winning a bunch of primaries in a bunch of states that would later go on to vote for trump in the general election, but that was enough for the media to crown him the winner.

I was in California at the time, working phone banks for Bernie, and there was tons of excitement for him. That day was a gut punch, I remember thinking “we haven’t stopped our slip into fascism just pressed pause”

Ive never wanted to be wrong more in my life. Now I look around and think about the 4 years where we could have zealously prosecuted MAGA for the crimes they committed right out in the open (every time I bring this up people go, “oh you want them to punish their enemies and ignore the law.” No I want them to enforce the laws which would have the side effect of actual consequences for MAGA)x

Instead, and unthinkably after a terrible pandemic response and literal attempt to overthrow democracy, the bland 4 years did nothing to prevent another trump term.

• Biden didn’t deliver punishment for MAGA to hold them accountable
• Biden didn’t change the conditions of American life enough to make the siren song of the fascists unpalatable

This isn’t to say he didn’t do anything good, but look where we are. The actions failed to meet the moment and now we are asking ourselves “will an armed paramilitary force prevent people from voting?”

Love Biden or hate him, this is where we are.