Yes, it’s actually huge. Especially for maintaining a weapon as complicated as an Abrams tank. If it can be repaired close to the front lines then that has the potential to cut days off the turnaround time compared to towing it over to Poland.
It makes me so depressed thinking about how many thousands of Ukrainian lives could’ve been saved by just giving Ukraine full and enthusiastic support immediately instead of dragging it out this long.
In the past several weeks, I have watched dozens of sleek U.S. military planes descend over Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I live. They were the first flights to land since gangs blockaded and halted commercial air traffic in March. U.S. news reports suggest that the aircraft contained...
Yes. Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier. Former cop. Alleged to have perpetrated massacres against the public killing dozens of people and burning down hundreds of homes. As a leader of G9 he publicly threatened genocide unless the prime minister of Haiti stepped down.
This is all information I got from Wikipedia. I don’t know the veracity of any of it. I don’t live in Haiti and don’t really follow the situation there. Whoever Jimmy is, he doesn’t have very good PR. That’s all I can say for sure about him!
A bit confusing to read. The points are placed on the y-axis using ordinals rather than cardinals. This means if you were to extend the plotting (say, up to 200) it would cause the existing data points to move around. That’s not usually what we expect when plotting data.
Edit: actually, the problem is more severe than I initially thought. If the y-axis were plotted with cardinals (the way we usually plot data) then the German case would show 10 horizontal lines, immediately revealing a pattern in the data (caused by Germans speaking the ones digit before the tens digit).
There’s nothing inherent to running a business that implies cannibalizing one’s own brand reputation for short term profits. That sort of behaviour reeks of an inexperienced and perverse management culture. You can find countless examples of businesses where the brand’s reputation for quality, reliability, and safety are considered sacred and any employee who publicly damages that reputation is ostracized. Japanese companies pretty commonly have these cultures, for example.
They’re paying the Filipino care workers about $710/month. Paying a professional Korean working parent to stay home from her job to care for her own kids would cost a lot more than that, both in terms of the money spent and the cost to the employer to train and hire a temporary replacement.
I’m sure if they could pay Koreans to do the work they would. The issue is that they’re too expensive. Korea has a highly educated population with extremely fierce competition to get into the best universities (the infamous CSAT) and the best jobs after graduation. Koreans who do not make it tend to move overseas where their education gives them an advantage over other immigrants for college and job spots. This process leaves very few available workers for many different low-skilled jobs (not just child care).
We need to make a distinction between child care and early childhood education (ECE). Korea does have ECE programs at their universities and so presumably there are spaces available at ECE programs. However these are expensive because they’re staffed by highly educated professionals, so only well-off parents can afford them.
This is of course true in any country with a highly educated populace. The issue has been called “cost disease.” When you have a highly efficient, highly productive economy, you end up having to pay less productive workers more. For example, compare a typical office worker with a hairdresser. An office worker today is far more productive than they would’ve been a hundred years ago. On the other hand, the hairdresser today is exactly as productive as they were a hundred years ago.
Hairdressing productivity has not increased at all whereas office work has. So if you want hairdressers to still exist you need to pay them a lot more than you would have a hundred years ago (commensurate with the increase in productivity of office workers), otherwise the hairdresser might as well get an office job!
You can see this story repeating itself throughout both Korean and Western economies (and anywhere else where productivity has increased dramatically). And in all of these countries you can see a lot of reliance on foreign workers to fill in these sorts of low skill jobs (such as basic childcare).
The other aspect of professional child care facilities that I see no one talking about is real estate. These facilities need a ton of space in some really expensive areas to handle a relatively small number of children. Paying for an in-home childcare worker can be a lot cheaper than a professional facility for the simple reason that you don’t have to pay for the overhead of the facility’s rent and maintenance costs.
His main thesis is that players constantly demand stronger AI (that doesn’t cheat) but when they try it they hate it. The issue is that strong AI doesn’t role-play like an actual historical leader, it plays like a “gamer” who will stop at nothing to win.
That is, strong AI opponents treat Civ like a game of poker and they’ll use every possible means of defeating you. They’re not reliable allies or trading partners, they’re bluffing, duplicitous liars.
Human players who play against such AIs report a very negative experience. Many of the diplomacy functions in the game become rather useless against such an untrustworthy AI, and the whole situation devolves into something more akin to “turn-based Warcraft” rather than Civilization.
Close. They’re actually there to preserve existing power structures. This is why you’re more likely to find them out cracking heads than chasing car thieves.
Have you ever had the experience of meeting an old friend after not seeing them for many years? If yes, did they seem the same to you or different?
I have had this experience several times and several times they were a different person than I remembered. We got along easily when we were young but now we have almost nothing in common. I’m sure my own changes as a person had as much to do with it as theirs.
Married couples sometimes get divorced after many years for this reason. “I was so in love with him when we were young but now he’s changed.”
The US now, more than at any time I can remember, seems to be polarized into two groups who absolutely despise each other. Why not be honest and declare the experiment a failure? Split the country in two and go on with your lives.
When I said “I can remember” I was specifically referring to living memory for me (as a 40yo), not to ancient history going back to the civil war.
I have heard people talking about a potential looming second civil war. When I see Supreme Court justices openly taking sides in political debates I start to wonder what will be next.
Says a well educated black man sitting on the supreme Court of the United States only because of brown v. Board.
His point is that the harm of segregation is that it simply blocks Black people from accessing society’s resources, which he experienced directly as a child being forced to use a segregated library until he was 13. What he’s arguing against is the idea that Black children need white children around them in the classroom in order to achieve.
He was born in a literal shack to a family descended from slaves. The theory that he needed more than just having the door unlocked for him is what is so deeply offensive to him.
I’m not defending “separate but equal” and I think you’re wrong if you think he is. He’s saying it’s a harm if Black people are prevented from attending Harvard by law. Same goes for any of society’s resources. It’s a matter of locked doors.
What he’s arguing against is the theory that Black children need help from their non-Black peers to succeed in school. He’s correct when he states that this theory is founded in an ideology of racial inferiority. His experience growing up in a family of grinding poverty and rising to the highest court in the country is proof against that. It’s easy to see why he would be deeply offended by any theory which invalidates his accomplishments.
I’m not defending him as a person though. He has some serious issues with conflicts of interest that are deeply undermining the judicial independence of SCOTUS. But the idea that he somehow lucked out and got a free ride through life is preposterous and demonstrably false.
So you’re telling me there was a grand conspiracy to secretly tutor and groom Thomas through elementary school and high school, through university, law school, and his whole legal career in order to install him in the Supreme Court in order to prove a point… what point is that exactly?
The difficulty setting in Civilization games has never been “how smart is the AI.” The AI always plays with the same level of “intelligence” (which is almost none). What the difficulty setting controls is how much the AI cheats (which is a ton at the highest levels) and how aggressive it is.
My problem with Civ 5 (as a player of the series since the beginning) is that they’ve added a ton of stuff to the game that doesn’t actually make it more interesting or challenging to play. At the same time, instead of improving the AI to make it more interesting and challenging to play against, they decided to hobble all of the strong strategies from the early games in a way that just makes the game more annoying to play.
The fun part of the Civ series has always been about building the largest, most technologically advanced empire and steamrolling all the AI’s cities. Since Civ 5 this has been flat out impossible due to the changes they made to the game which cause exponential corruption / waste for large empires and the inability to stack units which means large armies are extremely tedious to manage.
No. The ICC never tries anyone in absentia. His arrest warrant, if approved, will stand for all time until he either dies or is arrested. There is no statute of limitations for any ICC charges. This means he is effectively barred from visiting any party to the Rome Statute (124 countries).
It also means he could potentially be arrested in Israel and handed over to the ICC if he loses an election and the new government wants to get rid of him.
That’s not an answer. That’s just restating the name of your position.
Here’s an example: suppose I buy a bunch of woodworking tools and put them in my garage. I now have a woodworking shop which I can use to make and sell furniture. Is that capital? Am I required to surrender my garage to the authorities?
Because woodworking is a fun hobby that you can turn into a business. Because I value craftsmanship and attention to detail over mass-produced furniture. Because I believe in independent artisans, apprenticeships, and the sharing of knowledge.
If you are in favour of a world where this is not possible then I want no part of that. That sounds like a horrific dystopia!
I also believe you put far too much faith in democracy. Look at the democracies we have around the world today. Sure, they are not as bad as the totalitarian states but they are far from perfect. Democracies are also struggling from a crisis of faith in institutions. How are you going to build a collective society when everyone has lost faith in institutions?
You make it a business to support yourself and your family. Otherwise you won’t have much time to devote to it and you won’t be as good as it.
Anyway, how are you going to get anyone in a democracy to vote away their own property rights? The Soviets certainly did not achieve that. They used violent revolution to achieve their ends. We all saw how that ended up. The most stalwart opponents of Marxism today are those who knew what it was like to live in the Soviet Union. A system where hard work is devalued and freeloading predominates.
Because lots of people don’t want to go into a job and work with other people. They would rather work by themselves or with their family members.
When you work in an office or at a factory you recognize that some people do way more work than others. If everyone’s getting paid the same then that is extremely demoralizing.
On top of that, you have all the politics and drama of the work place. Just because you succeed in a Marxist revolution doesn’t mean you have eliminated interpersonal conflict forever. Gene Roddenberry tried to portray that in Star Trek and it was laughably unrealistic.
Human beings are innately competitive for social and sexual reasons. That doesn’t go away when you eliminate private ownership of capital. People just find other ways to screw each other over and gain an advantage. Formal power structures get replaced by informal ones.
The deepest reason to want to have your own woodworking business is an overwhelming desire for self-sufficiency. When people have screwed you over and made your life miserable it’s an incredible escape to be able to switch to working for yourself. If you take that outlet away from people you will face violent resistance.
The insect glue, produced from edible oils, was inspired by plants such as sundews that use the strategy to capture their prey. A key advantage of physical pesticides over toxic pesticides is that pests are highly unlikely to evolve resistance, as this would require them to develop much larger and stronger bodies, while bigger...
There are player-run servers for MMORPGs such as Ultima Online and EverQuest. If the developers released the server software the fans wouldn’t have to implement their own (which they did for those two games). If the company is no longer running their own servers they are no longer making money from subscriptions so they won’t lose money to competition from player-run servers.
A roguelike without procedural generation is like Tetris where the order of the pieces is the same every time. Some roguelikes let you save the seed and replay the same run but this is generally referred to as cheating and done for recreation/research purposes, not for seriously attempting to win the game.
Funny you should bring up Caves of Qud. That game is pushing the envelope in terms of procedural generation. They want to do a ton of the world building and background stories with procedural generation while leaving the main plot hand-crafted. They also do a really fun procedural detective story with one of the quests, so the clues and evidence you find when investigating the crime are different every time.
I think a lot of the fun of that game is with exploring the procedurally generated environments and doing the random quests. There just needs to be more research into generating branching plots and simulating events, with chains of causality. Dwarf Fortress does a lot of this in its world generation, for example.
I think what works for Minecraft is the spatial nature of the game. Procedural generation gives the player a new environment in which they can role play as an architect and engineer. While nothing stops you from building exactly the same structure every time — block for block — it’s more fun to design your structures into the landscape itself, like a real architect would! The same goes for Daarf Fortress and the like. It scratches an engineering/managerial itch.
So, I’m a big JPRG fan and just playing through Mother 3. I love Mother 2 (aka Earthbound) as well. I love the music, quirkiness, style, pacing, simple yet rewarding tactics in boss battles....
The reason the Mother series is so good is because it’s completely honest and lacking self-conscienceness. A lot of games today make a fatal error: they draw too much attention to the author. This is especially the case with homage or tribute games. They don’t allow you to immerse yourself and have that pure experience because the game is chock full of these little reminders that you’re playing a video game.
I have an extension that can individually disable all the most useless/addicting components of the Youtube site, such as shorts and whatnot. On the search page, I have turned on:...
I’m really surprised at how bad of an experience people are having! I have a bunch of channels I follow and people I interact with. Some big channels but most small. I love channels with only a few hundred to a few thousand viewers. The creators post their videos and then I talk to them through the comments. We have some really interesting conversations.
Lots of other channels I follow I don’t interact with but still really enjoy. A lot of hobby channels are amazing! I generally avoid the news and politics stuff, though I still occasionally watch Ukraine videos or Trump trial stuff. I get sick of those after one video though!
You can subscribe but you can’t comment without an account. I know YouTube has a terrible reputation for the low quality of comments but that’s exclusively a large channel problem. Small, niche channels actually have decent discussions.
I agree with him on right to repair and other rights issues but I can’t stand the guy. He’s incredibly abrasive and annoying. I’m interested in people who have interesting things to say. Long, angry rants about stuff I already agree with are just a waste of my time.
The French National Assembly on Thursday unanimously adopted a bill aimed at restricting the manufacture and sale of products containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals.” The MPs, backed by the government, voted to exclude kitchen utensils from the scope of the text....
Pyongyang Says It Will Send Support Troops to Ukraine Within a Month (www.kyivpost.com)
Ukraine destroyed columns of waiting Russian troops as soon as it was allowed to strike across the border, commander says (www.businessinsider.com)
Ukraine destroyed columns of waiting Russian soldiers with HIMARS, a Ukrainian commander said....
Broken records: How WaPo and the NYT are recklessly spinning false political narratives (www.rawstory.com)
U.S. Military Planes Are in Haiti. Haitians Don’t Know Why. (foreignpolicy.com)
In the past several weeks, I have watched dozens of sleek U.S. military planes descend over Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I live. They were the first flights to land since gangs blockaded and halted commercial air traffic in March. U.S. news reports suggest that the aircraft contained...
The numbers 0–99 sorted alphabetically in different languages
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom – Announcement Trailer (youtu.be)
Canada’s rich getting richer, StatCan report finds, with 90% of Canadian wealth now in the hands of homeowners (www.thestar.com)
archive.ph/JxZih...
Boeing sales tumble as the company gets no orders for the 737 Max for the second straight month (abcnews.go.com)
South Korea thinktank suggests girls start school earlier to raise birthrate (www.theguardian.com)
Critics label as ‘absurd’ idea from government-backed thinktank as country seeks to address population decline...
Israeli military rescues four hostages alive from Gaza, including Noa Argamani (www.nbcnews.com)
Sid Meier’s Civilization VII - Official Teaser Trailer (www.youtube.com)
I hope it’s better than Civ 6.
Police Are Sending Student Protesters to the ER. Campus Cops Don’t Keep Us Safe. (truthout.org)
Even old, crusty Klingons know to celebrate diversity. Happy Pride! ❤️🖖🏻🏳️🌈 (lemm.ee)
Proposed Texas GOP platform calls for the Bible in schools, electoral changes that would lock Democrats out of statewide office (www.texastribune.org)
How a Toronto police complaints officer belittled a criticism about bike lanes — and why advocates say it’s a problem (www.thestar.com)
A former Miss America is running for Congress as a pro-choice – and anti-Trump – Republican in North Dakota (www.independent.co.uk)
Clarence Thomas Just Set Civil Rights Back 70 Years (www.theroot.com)
Gamers Are Becoming Less Interested in Games With Deep Strategy, Study Finds (www.ign.com)
'Ethical Nightmare': House Democrats Demand Alito Recuse From Trump Cases (www.commondreams.org)
Netanyahu angrily rejects move to seek his arrest, lambasts the ICC saying it has compared Israel to "mass murderers" (www.bbc.com)
What's our stance on sex work? (lemmy.world)
Sticky trick: new glue spray kills plant pests without chemicals (www.theguardian.com)
The insect glue, produced from edible oils, was inspired by plants such as sundews that use the strategy to capture their prey. A key advantage of physical pesticides over toxic pesticides is that pests are highly unlikely to evolve resistance, as this would require them to develop much larger and stronger bodies, while bigger...
ENDLESS Legend is Currently Free to Claim on Steam (store.steampowered.com)
Offer ends on May 23rd.
Stop Killing Games Canadian Petition - Now Open For Signature (www.ourcommons.ca)
cross-posted from: lemmy.giftedmc.com/post/441893...
Nintendo president: “Game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated” (mynintendonews.com)
Games like Mother
So, I’m a big JPRG fan and just playing through Mother 3. I love Mother 2 (aka Earthbound) as well. I love the music, quirkiness, style, pacing, simple yet rewarding tactics in boss battles....
Youtube is now unusable without a frontend (lemmy.world)
I have an extension that can individually disable all the most useless/addicting components of the Youtube site, such as shorts and whatnot. On the search page, I have turned on:...
France votes to ban ‘forever chemicals,’ exempting frying pans (www.politico.eu)
The French National Assembly on Thursday unanimously adopted a bill aimed at restricting the manufacture and sale of products containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals.” The MPs, backed by the government, voted to exclude kitchen utensils from the scope of the text....
Top Democrats won't join calls for Justice Sotomayor to retire, but they still fear a Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeat (www.nbcnews.com)