The sad truth is that there are overriding geopolitical strategic interests behind the US support of Israel. The American executive power recognizes this, so military support is not going to go away as long as those interests are a concern.

They may pay some lip service to the whole genocide thing, but this is ultimately realpolitik. Human lives do not matter when they are not American.

If y’all’s voting system wasn’t so fucked up maybe you’d have more than two viable political parties, and maybe then the primary process wouldn’t be so important.

Here where I live the candidate list is generally selected completely by party insiders, but it doesn’t matter so much because I have a choice of 15+ viable parties in parliament to choose from.

this HN comment at the top illustrates the perspective:

worker-owned cooperatives have not taken over the market, although they are an available institutional form, because (a) they find it hard to raise capital (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit,

In other words, The market system as it currently exists maximizes profit over worker welfare, and that’s why these coops are not successful. That’s a fairly damning indictment of the market.

Hydrogen is a Japanese government strategic initiative, they want to be world leaders in the technology so they’re encouraging Japanese companies to invest. And giving out hella subsidies too.

This is bigger than Toyota. Hydrogen is a strategic initiative from the Japanese government, they are sick of having to import all their fossil fuels and are betting hard on the technology. Not just for cars but in general. Toyota is receiving big government subsidy checks to push that stuff.

China leads the world in both renewable energy usage AND coal use. And by a lot.

They also have some of the most people (is India ahead nowadays? I can’t keep track), and they manufacture tons of things meant for export to other (including western) countries.

The point being, everybody is greenwashing. China is greenwashing their energy mix. Western countries greenwash their own energy by essentially outsourcing the production and thus pollution. And this isn’t about China really. I could say the same for a bunch of countries.

The small consolation is that beside all the green propaganda, some progress is at least being made. Probably not enough, but some.

I feel like you’re giving them entirely too much credit here. The things in your list are in my opinion either not that outstanding, or they haven’t actually accomplished them yet:

-They’ve constantly been working on a budget that was only every a fraction of a budget for something like a AAA Star Wars game would get.

Already discussed in a comment below, but this is just demonstrably not true. Their development costs so far are the second highest of all time. Maybe there were some periods where money was tight, but that’s pretty irrelevant to me. More relevant is what they’ve delivered with all that money.

-A ton of the core mechanics had to be made from scratch, because the current industry standard would constrain the game

I’m not 100% sure what this even means. Like, It’s pretty common for games to make their own mechanics, if you’re not Ubisoft. This is not that special.

-They swapped over to using what is close to a brand new game engine.

Swapping engines sure is tough to do, but this is generally not a good sign. The only reasons to change engines partway through is either you’re in development so long that the engine is too outdated to deliver an acceptable game, or the scope of the game has changed so much the engine is no longer suitable. I don’t know which one applies here, but either way it’s just a ton of wasted work.

-They have steadily and slowly rolled out new core game mechanics

I mean, good I guess but that’s sort of the expected standard for early access? Not what I’d call outstanding

-They’re working on simulating an entire galaxy’s economy.

“Working on” is doing an awful lot of lifting in that sentence. So they haven’t actually accomplished this thing yet? Is the asteroid thing you’re describing already in the game? I’m also really sceptical of “an entire galaxy.” How big is the galaxy currently? A real life galaxy is 100 billion stars. They’re not going to have a 100 billion stars, right?

-You can download the game in its current state, and hop on see what they’ve created at any time.

Outstanding accomplishment. You can download and play the game, wow. I sure would hope so after all these years.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to shit on Star Citizen. If you paid money and you’re having fun playing it and feel you’re getting your money’s worth, who am I to object?

Where I do object is, fans of the game seemingly often evaluate the game based on the promises the development team makes, rather than what they have actually delivered. What the team promises is awesomely impressive. What the game currently offers is… not that.

Why do these websites feel the need to write an article mindlessly regurgitating two Hideo Kojima tweets? You could just go and read the tweets themselves instead.

It’s not intended to be a carbon sink. It’s essentially intended to be a more carbon efficient way of producing margarine without having to grow e.g. palm oil and destroy forests. They thought, instead of making plants do the work of turning water and CO2 into fats, let’s just do it in the lab.

The basic science could work, although it’s usually tough to beat “put seeds into ground and wait” on pure cost. However the fact that they compare this to butter makes me sceptical. Given how wasteful growing a whole cow is just to make some milk fat, it’s easy to look efficient compared to that. They would compare themselves to sustainably produced margarine if they were honest.

Airplane mechanics are held responsible for their failures, should we throw that out the window and when they forget to tighten down a bolt that drops a plane just say whelp, better luck next time, lets get George some more training and hope he follows the procedures that are in place to prevent that from ever happening again.

You are joking, but that’s almost exactly what happens. Aircraft investigations are universally conducted on the basis of not assigning blame, but figuring out how to prevent this in the future.

The point is that airplane mechanics generally do not forget to tighten bolts out of pure evil intent. They are for the most part just ordinary humans who can be expected to behave as such. Therefore when an error occurs it is a failure of the system, not them personally. Replacing them with another human who makes human mistakes doesn’t fix anything.

In this case we ask the same thing: what happened that caused things to go so wrong on this set, and what can we change to prevent that from happening again? I’m quite certain that putting this person in jail is not the answer to that question.

Abe was shot from just a few meters away though. Hard to miss at that distance (well, one would think. The assassin missed his first shot).

I agree with your take. The power vacuum would be incredible. In my country, I’ve seen a political party completely collapse from infighting after its charismatic leader was assassinated.

It might be more about energising the base to turn out rather than swaying the undecided voters at this point.

Wojak is a polish word that means something like “soldier” or “fighter.” Wojak images generally intend to convey someone in great pain, but dealing with it.

This has nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalists would abolish this rule immediately and exploit everyone to work 5 jobs simultaneously.

I don’t know what hotels you go to but my experience has been pretty mid across most of Europe. Bog-standard continental breakfast buffets. Croissants, orange juice, cereal, toast, all of mediocre quality.

Not terrible as it is, but you can likely get infinitely better breakfast by hopping over to any cafe across the street.

You could bring them to Mars and burn them there. Thicken up the atmosphere a bit, maybe add some water.

That 2% includes forgetting to use one, running out and being too horny to abstain, and various other excuses for why you’re not wearing one when you’ve agreed beforehand that you would.

Not so. The 98% figure assumes correct use of the condom every time. In the real world where people are imperfect, condoms are only about 87% effective.

Maybe. On the other hand, changing out your candidate after one debate doesn’t inspire much confidence. And you lose the advantage a sitting president usually has in elections.

A new candidate might indeed do better, but the DNC is risk averse as hell. I don’t see them having the balls to make a move like this.

It kinda sounds like you’re standing ready to assassinate the democratic candidate and you’re just waiting for my approval to pull the trigger. What exactly is your point?