elektronika

> alcohol hasn't just permeated the fabric of society, but is the fabric in many situations

First, congratulations on three years clean. I respect anyone who can cut things out that they find problematic for them. However, the framing of alcohol as a social necessity isn't really true anymore. Alcohol consumption is in a widely publicized decline and alcohol companies (similar to mobile games in this regard) are aware the majority of their revenue comes from anti-social heavy drinkers. Just about the only circles I'm aware of that still run on booze are college greek life.

> programmer with political views

It's dishonest to downplay what his "political views" entail. He compared the removal of minorities to pest extermination.

> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.

The USA has dozens of schools on military bases that house families of our soldiers. Is the intention that they be struck for propaganda? No. It's to educate their children just like in Iran.

This isn't going to stop until police officers who abuse their authority face real consequences. They won't because their victims are never anyone with real wealth and influence.Prosecutors aren't willing to touch this sort of case. There should be a national registry of officers fired for misconduct that makes them ineligible for rehire in all jurisdictions, but police unions and the politicians they back would never let it happen.

> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel

There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.

Do you really think we'll have optimization in an era of metrics encouraging developers to approach shipping a million lines of code a month?

Right, it's dystopian if they do it, but utopian if we do. If anything I'd trust Chinese surveillance more. It's accountable to the government not the whims of profit motive and private individuals.

We all know how much local PDs like collecting traffic fines, but I wish they would enforce the laws around yielding to pedestrians with the same enthusiasm as speed limits. I walk a lot and pretty much every day someone blows by in front of me while I'm in the crosswalk or takes a right on red into me because they're not looking. It'd be trivial to set up a sting for this sort of driving, just have one plain clothes officer cross back and forth with another cop parked on a side street ready to flash their lights.

> The level of international coordination with vaccine rollouts and agreements between countries was way more than I had initially expected

Did we forget the DoD running anti-vax propaganda campaigns because the USA's vaccines weren't ready as quickly as Sinovac's: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...

CPI functions to obscure disproportionate price increases in essentials by lumping them in with cheapening commodities (e.g. electronics) that have a high demand elasticity. It's as much a choice to to use CPI to come to the conclusion things are fine, as it would be picking "arbitrary items" such as the essentials: food, shelter, medical care, and transportation that would paint a picture distinctly less fine.

I hear this all the time as a rationalization for why people don't go out anymore, but I don't buy it. You're afraid people on the internet might see you having fun? I've had people shove a phone in my face and take video while I was out dancing. It's rude, but it's not a big deal. The reason people don't go out is because Live Nation/Ticketmaster made live music outrageously expensive and strangled small venues.

It's very blatant and below that range. They got many orders for the exact same model that's around $50k.

Watches are the commodity of choice for corruption in some circles. I know people in jewelry and a significant portion of their transactions are watches to Chinese businessmen, formerly through Hong Kong, now through Singapore. They're high value items with razor thin margins.

Americans like to downplay the impact of the situation of their birth in their successes and others' failures.

> AI and automation makes things so cheap that today's underclass lives better than kings ever did

I suggest you go share this opinion with the people living on the street because they can't afford housing.

> The question is whether we feel air travel is as essential to everyday life as busses and trains are.

Anywhere I can get to by train in the USA I can go faster and cheaper by plane. By bus I can go "cheaper" if I ignore the value of my time and the people offering me meth at the bus-stop.

> Specifically, for the least happy group, happiness rises with income until $100,000, then shows no further increase as income grows. For those in the middle range of emotional well-being, happiness increases linearly with income, and for the happiest group the association actually accelerates above $100,000.

Exactly. There are other things you can do to be happy and some personalities are simply miserable, but there's nobody who's better off with less money. I'd be curious to see if this holds in societies with better social safety nets for whom money isn't as directly tied to survival or options in how to live.

The state of the UK suggests to me that Orwell's writing was as much an expression of British post-colonial anxieties as it was an indictment of the USSR. His books are no doubt pushed in US education system for their nonpartisan anti-communism.

1984 was surprisingly prescient about automatically generated propaganda. The slop deluge we're going through certainly echoes the "Novel-Writing Machines".

Under qualified immunity cops are all but completely immune to being sued.

More accurate to call it the War for Terror at this point.

Sadly, or not, they still sell the best laptops.

A market economy is just as good if not better at denying "the agency to live their lives as they choose". Do you think the bum on the street or the poor family working paycheck to paycheck have more agency than someone with a decent job at a state owned enterprise and a social safety net? It's absurd.

They will fall in line as property crime increases.

Is it any surprise when wealth inequality has been increasing in the USA for the past 50 years? Globally the picture is even more bleak.

Universities are just as bad or worse on this front. They will buy up properties with no plan simply because they have the cash to throw around and don't have to pay tax.

So glad we don't have propaganda, only independent journalists who just coincidentally parrot the same think-tank talking points. See the wealth of articles that are even more obviously wrong predicting China's collapse.

> The reason for the "talent shortage" (aka "talent more expensive than we'd like") is really just because hardware design is a niche field that most people a) don't need to do, b) can't access because almost all the tools are proprietary and c) can't afford, outside of tiny FPGAs.

Mostly B. Even if you work in company that does both you'll rarely get a chance to touch the hardware as a software developer because all the EDA tools are seat-licensed, making it an expensive gamble to let someone who doesn't have domain experience take a crack at it. If you work at a verilog shop you can sneak in verilator, but the digital designers tend to push back in favor of vendor tools.

If you can't beat them join them. The rest of the world is getting the same thing as China, but less transparent and more hypocritical.

It's tiresome. I would rather read the bullet points he fed in and be done.

Try Generals Evolution mod for RA3.