An astounding story of what could have happened if we hadn’t arrested Elizabeth Holmes and let Theranos just keep going.

Food deserts in the south are worse than just “need to drive to a grocery store.” Often the only nearby (short drive) is a store akin to Dollar General with very little or no fresh produce. If the closest place you can get decent quality fruit and veggies is an hour drive, you’re going to end up on a diet of corn syrup.

Look up food deserts and reconsider whether urban and rural citizens in America have the same diet.

No, it would be cynical to say that all talk of space colonization is actually a lie to spur interest in government funded space technology, which gets contracted out to one major company owned by the richest man in the world who has become that rich off the back of other government subsidies.

Wait–

If Ukraine has taught us anything, no guarantees are enough.

Thankfully for Taiwan it takes more than 4 years to build and bring up a state of the art fab at a new tech node.

How long do you think fabs take to build and upgrade? Intel was working on fixing 10nm for years, this isn’t a software situation where turnaround times are measured in days or weeks. Going from tapeout to silicon for a single line is a 6 month process after the technology process is solidified, forget if you’re doing it while trying to figure out yield problems.

This is a pretty dumb take, honestly. Intel for basically forever operated using their own fab exclusively. After failures to maintain good yield rates at their 10nm node, they had the option of continuing to delay new product lines and be eaten by the competition in AMD, or give in to TSMC temporarily while they worked on fixing their fab in parallel. In fact, they were criticized greatly for not switching to TSMC much earlier.

Split AWS and Amazon retail.

A major issue for the US is that when the president changes, the DOJ can simply elect to stop processing the suit. It’s hard to get 8 years of uninterrupted movement on an action like this.

You need to read The Amazon Anti-Trust Paradox by current FTC head Lina Khan. She argues that the consumer price oriented monopoly definition is old and outdated in the modern setting. Price is not a sufficient proxy for market competitiveness, and in fact, price is often used to kill competitiveness by undercutting new and innovative products.

Because the point of this is to force friends and adult family members to purchase extra copies of games. Do yall actually think Valve is giving away free game access?

To those who are saying it’s not IP locked: people on reddit are all saying that the newer sign-ups are locked but they didn’t clear older sharing from early beta.

Musk is definitely one of them.

Musk is a rich trust fund baby whose fortune started off the back of Apartheid. It’s not a shocker that he’s a mask-off racist. He’s done nothing to prove himself a genius, just a skilled grifter and financier.

Hard disagree. The district system of Civ 6 was half-baked, and the new one for Civ 7 seems way more interesting with districts growing more organically. Civ 6’s world congress was garbage. The eras system needed serious work as dark/golden/heroic eras just didn’t feel impactful enough aside from getting a monumentality era early. The new map generation with navigable rivers is a huge plus as well. The climate system in Civ 6 was a dud too, not nearly impactful enough. I think they could’ve made a Civ 7 which fixed all the broken Civ 6 systems and made a great game.

I don’t think Firaxis would agree with any of my feedback because I think I disagree with them in a fundamental sense about how the game should be oriented. Mandatory disasters appear to be a fundamental part of the Civ 7 game philosophy: you build your civ, face the crisis, reset your civ in a new era, and start over with some amount of carry-over. I get the motivation: by forcing these soft resets, Firaxis is making it so you can’t snowball so far ahead that the mid/late game is a chore of uninteresting gameplay. An advantage in the first/second eras won’t put you in so far of a lead in the third era that it’s just a rush to hit the next turn button. On the other hand… that also means that everything you do in the first/second eras counts way less, and that feels bad.

Granted I obviously haven’t played the game yet; this is just my read from demos and press around the game/design philosophy. We will see if I’m right or not.

The crisis system, the era system, and the changing civilizations system all feel especially game-y to me. I get it, Civ is first and foremost a video game. Still, the idea that there are pre-defined eras, and that you have to hit a crisis at the end of each pre-defined era, feels artificial and unnatural. Why can’t I lead my civilization through into a new era unscathed? Why is that disallowed?

Don’t get me wrong: I like the idea of eras and crises. If, instead, eras were triggered by hitting certain milestones or accumulating enough points (e.g. hit some combination of weighted tech/cultural/religious/economic development) - I would be down for that. Different civs would hit those at different times and you would strategize around hitting your new era at the right time. Crises are also totally valid: if your civ is too large and there’s too much corruption you could have a civil war. If too much of your civ is following another religion there could be unrest. Those are all interesting and fun ideas, but the important part is that the goal is to avoid/mitigate them and play around them - not that they’re some kind of inevitable occurrence that you’re forced into even if you play otherwise perfectly.

It feels like Firaxis decided to lean hard into “Civ is a board game focused around balance” and completely away from “Civ is a game about growth and optimization”, and I don’t know if I’m here for it. I guess we’ll have to see.

Well yeah, lemmings are rodents cats aren’t welcome

Yeah those memes were cringy as fuck thank god no one’s doing anything that dumb

Google will take a hard right turn and SCOTUS will welcome them with immunity as long as they stay in line.

What a coincidence, a strong liberal fundraising account getting banned just as Musk promises to donate $45mil/month to the Trump campaign and complains about the “woke mind virus.” I’m sure you can point to similar conservative accounts getting banned and staying banned for several hours right?