DdCno1 @ DdCno1 @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Correct, and it wasn't even made in the Soviet Union:

https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/russia-receives-30-vintage-t-3485-tanks-from-laos

That's what tends to happen when you send a parade army into a war it was never meant to fight.

The "well-regulated militia" part afterwards isn't vague, but gets ignored by self-proclaimed "originalists".

They go after this platform, because it's a favorite of mass shooters. You know this.

It's not interesting, it's simple: Don't vote for fascists, no matter what. This means AfD and, if by that point, Conservatives are willing to form a coalition with them (I hope not, but Merz scares me), those are impossible to vote for by any decent human being as well.

The AR-15 is designed for hunting humans, not game.

As good an excuse as any to post this infamous video:

https://youtu.be/j00abiiaDgc

I swear there's another one, but can't find it right now, so it's definitely not a fluke.

The studios who do this mostly aren't looking for an actual artistic vision. Play any of the recent Ubisoft open world games and you see at best moments of it during distinct, isolated sections (usually trips caused by substance use) that were clearly tackled by smaller teams within the large group of developers. The rest were busy making 15 different types of trees.

They do exist and in greater numbers and variety than ever before. Play Undertale, Baba is You, BeamNG.drive, FTL, Disco Elysium, Emily is Away, Islanders, NEO Scavenger, Rodina, Whispers of a Machine, Proteus, etc.

Totally random examples, but I could name dozens more. We are spoiled with great games that are pure expressions of their developers' visions. There are more of them than anyone can realistically ever play.

That's not how this works. You can comparatively easily scale up art departments, but you can not do the same with engineering and design. It's also much less difficult to find competent artists in their respective niches than programmers and designers. Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level. Especially in the area of software engineering, game studios also have to compete with other fields with inherently better work/life balance, which is far less so the case with e.g. texture artists, modelers and animators.

Art can also be produced sequentially in large numbers and making more of it at a certain high enough level of quality makes a game appear more valuable to consumers. It's practically guaranteed: Spend more on art, have more stuff you can impress people with, a more enticing value proposition. You can spend a fortune on game design and programming, but that's invisible and there is far less of a guarantee that it'll work out in the end (see: the phenomenon referred to as development hell), let alone attract customers.

Try marketing a game on mechanics and design instead of graphics. Most people pay maybe 15 to 30 seconds of attention to promotional material at best before making a purchasing decision. The vast majority of gamers do not read reviews, let alone whining essays about how some journalist doesn't care about graphics (which have been written since the 1980s - there's nothing new under the Sun). You can wow customers with fancy trailers and gorgeous screenshots, but you can not explain why your game that you spent 100 million on game design alone on has better game design than that blockbuster with individually modeled and animated facial hair.

Would you describe someone who has likely driven a Jeep as smart?

At least in China's case, the harassment extends to ethnically Chinese people who have lived their entire lives abroad and never set foot in China.

This appears to be the new norm among autocratic regimes (although it isn't all that new - think of Trotsky, for example, or the infamous umbrella murder).

Vietnam is doing this as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%E1%BB%8BnhXu%C3%A2nThanh

https://rsf.org/en/dissident-exile-stops-blogging-because-family-vietnam-being-hounded

Eritrea, a regime that is similarly repressive as North Korea, but far less known, is also notorious for this:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2019/06/eritrea-government-officials-and-supporters-target-critics-abroad-as-repression-stretches-beyond-borders/

Saudi Arabia is among the worst in this regard:

https://freedomhouse.org/report/transnational-repression/saudi-arabia

I'm getting the impression that liberal democracies housing refugees and dissidents from autocratic regimes are unprepared to counter these threats. It is our responsibility to protect people seeking refuge and this includes proactive action against governments that seek to extend their violent rule outside of their borders.

It wouldn't be a Republican ban if it wasn't tackling a fictional "issue".

Apples and (lab-grown) oranges.

But what about...

You would think that millions of global COVID deaths that he (and Xi - but nobody is allowed to vote that idiot out of office) is primarily responsible for would finally keep people from voting for the "it can't get any worse" guy.

COVID-19 killed almost three times as many Americans as died during WW2 due to both inaction and deliberate malicious actions. This alone should have resulted in a prison sentence for Trump and his inner circle.

Imagine the Papal States never dissolving and becoming a nuclear-armed power in the 20th century, using the threat of nuclear annihilation to maintain their independence and increase their global influence.

That would be an interesting alternative history scenario.

No need to make excuses.

The durability of electric car batteries is far better than expected. Even in the case of early models with extremely basic battery packs and no active cooling (e.g. Nissan Leaf), the packs almost always outlast the cars they're built into:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/08/01/electric-car-batteries-lasting-longer-than-predicted-delays-recycling-programs/?sh=bad42e453329

Maintenance of EVs in general is far simpler than on ICE cars. There's a much smaller number of components. Almost everything related to the drivetrain is practically maintenance-free.