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2 yr. ago

  • I would be curious if a centrist Republican could work with (centrist) Democrats to gain the speakership in exchange for some key concessions, such as pledging to not follow the Hastert Rule (a rule that most Republican speakers follow, that they will block a bill that does not have the support of the majority of the majority (Republican) party even if a bipartisan majority supports it). That assumes that a lot of Democrats will trust a Republican to be bipartisan and not weasel out of their word or be pressured by their party follow partisan lines.

  • I hate capitalism, I just don't know of a better alternative. Nordic socialism is just capitalism with a big government. Soviet socialism failed miserably (it turns out, it is very hard to plan an economy). I have never heard a solid plan for communism that works on a national scale, never mind a plan for transitioning to such a society.

    On the other hand, capitalism works reasonably well most of the time and we can just fix issues with it when they crop up (and we have a big backlog of issues to fix).

  • Not really. She is an idealist and visionary. She has an idea for what the future of the country should be, but, from what I have seen, she never gets too deep in the details of how to achieve it. We need people like her to say that we should not be using fossil fuels to power our transportation, but we also need people who can determine how much funding the government needs to provide to put more chargers on public parking, what the fine would be for hogging the parking spot, how many parking enforcement officers we will need to patrol them all, how much the power grid will need to be updated to provide power to the chargers…

    Yes, many of the details fall to the executive branch to execute, but Congress needs to allocate funding for it, remove legal barriers, decide on penalties for non-compliance, etc.

  • Where would people take trash then? Home with them? Most people would just drop it on the beach.

    I feel the exact opposite of you: more trash cans in public spaces.

  • Also parking too close to a street corner. Technically illegal but very rarely enforced. It is a real safety hazard since, instead of being able to stop at the stop line and see perpendicular traffic, and driver has to enter the intersection to see (and then have their line of sight blocked by a parked vehicle in the perpendicular direction).

    It also makes large vehicles like large trucks and busses take turns very wide.

  • Half of the scenarios you noted are not ones I have ever heard of (and I would bet are totally made up). Why would WalMart shoppers be exempt from sales tax?

    You are right that advertising price with tax may be unreasonable. That does not preclude the store from putting the price with tax on the shelf. Out of all the scenarios you described, the only one that this would not cover is having an item be taxed differently if bought in conjunction with another item, but that can be noted in the same way that stores note a bundle or a bulk sales price ($1 each or 5 for $4).

    There is difficulty in the case of a charge in tax rate (how often do those happen? Once every few years) or if there is a tax holiday (I see plenty of clothing stores have a sign for "15% off the marked price"). Those can be handled by having computer controlled shelf prices, which have existed for at least 20 years but never caught on much.

  • The rice growing is not Harvest Moon-style "plant your crops, water them every day, and harvest after five days". You need to monitor the water level of your field, the water temperature (and air temperature), crop spacing (it is not grid based), the nutrient ratios, the field aeration, etc. Your first couple of years are going to be a rough until you level up and unlock actual numbers for these instead of having to guestimate.

  • Any of Peter Molyneux games would make good remake targets, but you would want to remake the game he hyped, not the game he delivered. I would love to see a development team, with all the new game libraries and faster hardware try to deliver on some of his unfulfilled promises.

  • My wife and I enjoy shows like House Hunters occasionally. We like watching house tours plus they discussed the pros and cons of each home and how they would renovate or remodel the home. Plus, you get to see one of the houses redecorated (even if it was just staging).

    Sure, the buyers and agent might be actors, but the houses are almost certainly real (it seems much cheaper to just rent and stage a couple of houses to film in than to build multiple rooms just to get 10 minutes of footage).

    Also, reality shows have inspired some amazing progress in documentary editing. I don't think shows like Last Chance U and Drive to Survive would have been half as good without it (even if they are not educational or totally accurate).

  • Too bad. The original Detective Pikachu had the same issue: the "puzzles" were obvious and half the time, the game explicitly walks you through the thought process to solve a puzzle before you are given a chance to try it. It targets a much younger player base than main-line Pokemon games.

    It is in sharp contrast to the plot, which hints at some very dark things (land sharking, the long term damage of improper criminal convictions). The overarching story of the game is trying to uncover the fate of your father, a private investigator who came down with a violent case of "missing".

  • You cannot stop people from agreeing to all campaign for a single candidate, but you don't need to put it in big letters on the ballot. A ballot can just be a list of names. The major parties can inform most voters who they endorse for president. They may also be able to get most people to associate a Congressional or Senate candidate with their party. But, when a voter is looking at their ballot, there is no way that they will know if a party enforced "Smith" or "Jones" for state treasurer, unless the candidate changes their legal name to "Democrat Jones".

    It would probably mean that most voters will just not vote for down ballot candidates, except a very few who brought along the party's list of recommended candidates or crazies like me who try to research candidates on the ballot.

    Also, there is no reason for the state to host and administer primaries for major parties, police that a given voter does not vote in multiple parties' primaries, or forbid a locally popular candidate from appearing on the ballot just because they are a member of a national party who endorsed another candidate.

    I am not sure if it would be the best choice, though, since it would make it more likely that a party insider would get elected (since they are going to appeal to party die hards).

  • I rarely do, but they are very handy for quickly scanning a long document (drag the scroll bar until I see a header, stop, read the header, and keep going).

  • Google's chat programs (Hangouts and Texting) are the worst at this. Not only do they put fuzzy timestamps to messages (5 minutes ago, 1 hour ago) they group messages together. Bring back chat clients that had an exact time stamp on every message.

  • Democrats can actually pass bills 50/50: if the US Senate ever has a tie vote, the Vice President gets to pick a winner.

  • Purely coding, gender may have no relationship to individual code quality.

    The desire to have diverse teams comes from studies that show a correlation between team diversity and making better decisions. A team with diverse backgrounds is likely to consider more options and bring up more concerns. That is important when doing design work or code review.

  • I agree. HR is constantly trying to train managers to write more inclusive job descriptions. I also wonder how many female candidates are lost in pre-screening.

  • I assume that there is some fixed resource cost for the servers on top of the per-user cost. For example, they need to maintain a user database of every single single account that ever played online.

    Also, systems that are designed to scale up well are often not designed to scale down (for example, the match making queue is sized for 10,000 users. It may be something that is not too hard to fix, but fixing it would involve rewriting code that they are not familiar with (all of the devs probably moved on to other work and likely many are no longer with the company) and is going to introduce all sorts of new scale issues (for example, a server needs 1 GB of free memory to run a vulnerability scan. If you cut its memory allocation by 50%, that might not be the case and you will not know it until the 3rd Tuesday of the month when the scan is scheduled).

    It is possible that it costs Nintendo almost the same to run online match making for 10 players as it does for 10,000.

  • Nintendo also has a history of positioning their last gen console as the budget alternative to a newly released console. They have even made brand new redesigns (Wii Mini, GBA Micro) of last gen systems.

    When a new system comes out, especially if it is backwards compatible, there is a flood of used systems in the market from people trading up. Those systems need games to play and Nintendo is happy to supply them with all of the games they missed.

  • Both IGN and PCMag are citing the same translation coming from VGC. Reading the original article, it reads a bit different to me than what they are saying.

    “We are still working on software for the Switch for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2025,” Furukawa said.

    That could mean that they are wrapping up development on the last Switch games in Spring of 2024 or it could mean that they will keep working on Switch games beyond April of 2025. It just means that the switch is not dead.

    Nintendo is yet to officially comment on plans for its next console. However, according to VGC sources, the company has dispatched Switch 2 development kits to key partners, with a launch planned for the second half of 2024.

    That implies that they know someone at a video game studio who says that Nintendo has made a Switch successor dev kit for third parties to prototype game engines on and that Nintendo thinks that they may launch a new console for Christmas 2024 (but it may slip later).

    So, more rumors and speculation with no new announcements either way from Nintendo.