Zoraptor

Another body exchange, this time 1000 Ukrainian to 35 Russian. Definitely should have had the hundreds of Russians killed in Kupiansk this time, but the ratio i still in the high 20s to 1. Next time, the hundreds killed in Zaporizhia oblast maybe.

Don't know for sure, but that's certainly what I've heard as well. I don't think there's much doubt that Steam has added features which are designed to be addictive every bit as much as, say, Facebook has too.

Valve getting sued in New York for loot boxes. Or at least, that's the headline version. Seems to be more about there being a marketplace for selling the results of loot boxes than the mechanic itself, which is why they're targeting Valve/ Steam specifically instead of other who just use loot boxes. IMO, should have happened way sooner.

The mere act of casting votes is certainly not of itself a good thing. If there's no real choice it simply acts to grant legitimacy which hasn't actually been earned, which is of course why a lot of authoritarian countries still hold elections. If you look at the last US Presidential election, which Trump won handily, the proportions were: Harris ~31% Trump ~32% Didn't Vote ~36% ie ~2/3 of people in the US didn't vote for its President, and more than 1/3 either didn't like either candidate enough to vote for them nor dislike a candidate enough to vote against them. Not exactly healthy. (Really, the Roman Republic model was an awful one to choose if you wanted proper (little d) democracy since it started breaking down as soon as Rome stopped being a regional power; and along similar lines as you see in the US. Probably better than Athenian Big D Democracy at least though; nothing quite as unique in history as stampeding voters into voting to execute all your- victorious- admirals, rejecting peace and then losing the war spectacularly a year later)

That's Andrew Mountbatten-Pervert, since he isn't using the Prince title any more. And arrested for leaking economic policy to Jeff rather than boffing 17 year olds in questionable circumstances.

Yep, it doesn't really take anything into account except the money spent. All it does is encourage wasteful spending, system gaming and accountancy tricks- like pretty much every other Key Performance Indicator.

Overall spending is a bit of a blunt metric anyway, for much the same reason as gdp nominal- it doesn't actually measure what the money buys, just how much is spent. Russia produces ~7 tanks for the cost of a single Leo2, and practically they're both likely to be destroyed by a thousand dollar drone made in China. The problem rump NATO has is that so much is outsourced to the US, and reliance on fancy overpriced gear that sounds great in lieu of stuff that just works. Not being able to spin up shell production properly, in the EU*, after 4 years and allegedly still being outproduced by North Korea alone kind of epitomises it; it's really really basic stuff that has been around for 150 years because it works, it should be cheap and easy, and there isn't really anything that can go wrong with it. *you do occasionally hear about how production has increased, but that increase largely comes from buying off non EU sources. They do at least have France with an independent nuclear deterrent, and while no longer EU Britain could make theirs non dependent on the US with a bit of time. It would certainly be... interesting to see how the Rules Based Order deals with (practically, justifies; not like they'd actually sanction Poland or Germany) one of its own members breaking the NPT though.

If there's one thing Trump has proven it's that Europe does need another military union/ alliance. NATO minus the US would mostly lose the ability to wander around invading random countries- ie 'force projection'- which may be a big loss if you want to have the North AtlanticTO fighting China in the Pacific, but isn't much of a loss for a defensive alliance in the geographic North Atlantic. Europe does love convincing themselves that everything is going to work out if they just stick their fingers in their ears and sing loud enough for long enough though.

Answer is that it probably wouldn't inconvenience me much, since I doubt I'd have much problem circumventing anything short of a full Great Firewall of New Zealand. However, compulsory use of the internet for storage of important information like your identity needs opposing on principle, especially when it's done mostly so politicians can take An Achievement to The Electorate. Last month a compulsory use privately run health database got hacked here that was used by a third of the country's population. It appears they gained access through brute forcing a password, and much of the data wasn't encrypted- about as basic mistakes as it's possible to make. So far, zero consequences for the guys running it. You also know that people will go full UK and let Peter Thiel/ Meta/ Cambridge Analytica et alia have access to all that lovely data.

Is it going to be harder to circumvent than the Aussie one? My nephew and all his friends are still happily posting on their toktiks, chatsnaps and instagrammes months into the ban, and he's a pretty obvious 12 year old.

2 years is a bit far the other way. How many AA level games take two years to make nowadays? I can't actually think of a single one recently. I'd also rather suspect Avowed in particular suffered somewhat from the MS acquisition; suddenly there wasn't pressure on to deliver a game in a way that would keep Obsidian solvent. Average profit margin is almost certainly rather misleading, because most games don't make any money back at all. You have 5 games with identical budgets, one makes double its costs, the other 4 make only 80% back. That's an overall/ average 20% profit over those five games. But only one was a success and made money, four lost it.

I think Gromnir's pretty safe from that at least. You deliberately write badly, then blame others for their 'misinterpretations'. This happens very frequently and has happened at least three times in this thread. It's also happened to others. It's very much a you problem. Again, I'm specifically not arguing with you, that's why everything is just repeated. Took long enough for you to notice, since I told you in the very first reply. Bonus, takes me nearly no time at all. Probably 75% is mucking around with quotes and the disappearing cursor. OK, you brought up Blix, in the context of WMD, per the quote of yours that you keep on ignoring (this is a pattern). I just brought him up to show you didn't provide sources. Very relevant here, since you complained about me not providing them. OK, you kept repeating that searching for information about Reza Pahlavi when you wanted information on him was ridiculous while searching for iran protests was the thing to do. I even quoted you doing so the post previous. Another literal lol. Pointing out that you do exactly what you accuse others of is not whataboutism, nor is it gaslighting or any other phrase those who cannot argue their way out of a paper bag use reflexively; it's just the truth. The first defence of anyone caught out in hypocrisy is to scream whataboutism (we're talking about what is wrong with you only! anything else is whataboutism!) and the only reason you're doing it here is because you don't have an actual refutation, because you cannot have an actual refutation. All those things you've accused me of you've done yourself. I'm generally of the opinion that even people I don't like or don't value the opinion of are at least worth listening to, but this and you... I even feel bad laughing at this point.

30% doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Perhaps even quite reasonable, within the limits of what you'd expect from MBA types. I'm not sure there are any publishers that would metaphorically get out of bed for something that takes 5 years to generate a 10-20% profit even in a sector where most products lose money; the lower end is probably a practical loss due to inflation. Companies will take low reward so long as it's also low risk (and low opportunity cost, ie you don't have something better to do with the money) but gaming is really not low risk; on an individual title basis it's high risk and mostly relies on big returns from a few titles rather than moderate returns from lots. That's a not unusual length of time for games today, at least when they have pretensions about being a big hit. Which is a bit of an indictment on the industry as a whole.

It's not illogical in the slightest. It's the result of your writing in pidgin, which is a choice you make. As it stands, I'll take it as that though because this is even more boring than the rest. That's in the context of you not providing sources and congratulating you for finding one that time. Highly relevant, given your conduct here. And congratulations even if- or perhaps more so because- it showed what I was saying was correct. Really? You called looking for reza pahalvi ridiculous, on this very page, to whit: Oh dear. Well, someone can't it seems, though you do seem to be predominantly lying to yourself. Makes things easy for me, I just have to check your posts on the same page since you can't be consistent between them.

Finally finished watching Rings of Power after a bit of a summer hiatus. Overall, still rate it as being OK, and the first season would have got a lot less criticism if it had been more like this. Most of the criticisms of the first 6 episodes still stand, though most of them are just kind of annoying more than anything. Rather less of the extremely annoying once you notice it indirect speechifying in the last two eps at least due to all the ackshun. However, much of the improvement was due to what we seemed to deliberately not get much of in S1: aping the still far superior movies. Balrog, Sarumanesque wizard standoff; the siege of Eregion was... strongly reminiscent of Helm's Deep, even allowing for both having to have similarities ie both being sieges. And it still has the ultimate problem: if Sauron can subvert Celebrimbor's mind- and he'd be at worst the third greatest elf on ME behind single G and double G- then what does he really need the rings for?