213374U

I'm not sure why the "screaming left" would do anything after AJ launches a new TV channel. I mean, AJ simply practices the same pragmatism as Qatar itself. If anyone from the left, screaming or otherwise, believes that Qatar works to advance anyone's interests but the Emir's, they only need to be reminded that Qatar is hosting the forward headquarters of USCENTCOM... while simultaneously providing funding to a variety of Islamist groups throughout the ME. In short, Qatar gon' be Qatar. So AJ launching a new product to fill what they perceive is a niche left untargeted by the rest of the msm establishment is fairly ho-hum.

Nah, I see what you mean. "States" is certainly pushing it and the report doesn't really 'state' as much as it insinuates. Even if they have found someone to take over (big if), seeing the project to completion has to be a monumental task. Otherwise they wouldn't have replaced the whole studio in the first place. I'm curious who would even want to take the project on, who can also be expected to finish it with any certainty. Can't be many candidates.

Their year-end report states that another studio has taken over. However the decision not to name it is certainly eyebrow-raising and it could be corp-speak for "we asked XYZ to take a look to see if it's salvageable" rather than work on the game in earnest. It stands to reason that the new studio wouldn't want to have their name associated with this dumpster fire until they are confident that it can be turned around. Refunding preorders made on a game that's basically riding on nostalgia and name-dropping is probably not something PDX want to think about and the decision not to cancel it outright may be a good indication of the volume of said preoders.

Report: Techland Is Bleeding Talent Due To Autocratic Management, Bad Feedback, And Lack Of Direction sadge

I have to say, I'm surprised. PDX have developed a bit of a reputation for releasing broken stuff so this is not in character for them. I wonder whose lap will this hot potato land in. Harebrained?

I tried playing XWA with a PS4 gamepad not too long ago. Getting the axes to map correctly was a bit of a nightmare but once that was out of the way it worked pretty well. Aiming with the analog stick was tricky, but that's probably more down to my own lack of skill with a controller than a problem the setup itself. I didn't find the lack of buttons to be an issue, honestly.

Zor beat me to the punch. Thank the flying spaghetti monster for real-time notifications. I like that you're name dropping behavioral science and confirmation bias and ****. Makes you look real smart-like. But the real kicker is that you're doing it while showing your own confirmation bias by parroting some ZH nonsense when data from an org that can spell shows that, in this case, renewables weren't the problem and they couldn't have been because they weren't relied on to pick up the slack -- gas was. It's really great because I'm not even a huge fan of wind myself and have spoken against excessive enthusiasm about renewables here in the past. "Confirmation bias"... heh.

Haha. So "data" from market watch and financial types to counter official data from ERCOT (you know, the bunch ****ing running Texas' power grid) and the US Energy Information Administration? Much financial. Such informational, wow. I mean, it's not just that some random financial douchebags are being misleading with those charts -- the ~50% wind drop figure is from feb 9, before the storm even started. You can clearly (to the extent the pictures allow) see that there are similar decreases before, storm or no storm -- this is why the nominal reliable capacity for wind is rated by ERCOT at less than 40%, while gas is supposed to be 100% reliable. Or at least I'm guessing those are the dates in the charts because they are so tiny that it's hard to tell. I'm sure that's not at all on purpose in an effort to obfuscate and mislead, no. It's just an unfortunate side effect from financial types these days not being able to afford more than 56k dial-up so clearer images are out of the question. http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/197379/CapacityDemandandReservesReport_Dec2020.pdf No, "wind power failed to deliver it’s expected power – almost 40% of expected power" is ~false~ because a) only coastal wind energy production was rated at ~40% (with wind from the Panhandle and Other regions being rated substantially lower than that), and b) that figure is not a fraction of the total production but rather a fraction of the nominal total wind power generation in Texas. ERCOT has wind and solar classified as "intermittent renewable", because they are aware of the fact that they are not fully dependable. Which is why, on the other hand, gas is 100% -- not because Texas gets 100% of its power from gas, but because it's supposed to be 100% dependable and not fail when it's cold, cloudy, or not windy enough. So no, Texas' problems weren't related to wind farms failing in any way any non-financial type with excessive positions in fossils could possibly conceive. Sean Hannity was lying, Greg Abbott was lying, and you -- you are very much lying. What's funny is that Abbot at least attempted to clarify his comments to Hannity. But here you are, doubling down on the lies.

No. https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/regional/REG-TEX http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225369 "As of 9 a.m., approximately 46,000 MW of generation has been forced off the system during this extreme winter weather event. Of that, 28,000 MW is thermal and 18,000 MW is wind and solar." It wasn't "wind farms failing" because wind provides a small fraction of Texas power (under 10% compared to about 65% for gas in total dependable capacity). It was, in fact, mostly natural gas pumping systems freezing because Texas NG is wet and kept under pressure to run vertical separators at or near the wells. When the valves at the separators freeze, gas simply no longer reaches the compressors (which may or may not be offline themselves) down the line and power plants run out of gas, literally. Stop lying.

Looks surprisingly good.

I don't know what to tell you. I don't play on console but I think the option should be there?

neeeeeeeever mind

Well, the option to disable chromatic aberration was added with patch 1.2. Is your game updated?

We don't like words like "mass murder" around these parts. They make investors shift in their chairs during earnings calls. See, the worker class just becomes obsolete as a whole. And as with anything obsolete, it's simply "phased out". It's called growth in a highly dynamic economic environment, friend.

We were talking basic necessities: rent, medicine and groceries. Groceries aren't much of a problem currently, but with massive trading on futures contracts, the risk is there that a bubble could happen. Jury's still out on whether speculators contributed to the 2008 food crisis, but it's pretty clear that they didn't do what speculation is classically supposed to do: reduce volatility and hedge against price spikes. So either set price controls on staples to discourage trading above a certain point, or re-introduce regulations that stopped excessive speculation. I brought up pharma profits because it's the most egregious example of a market sector in need of regulation. I feel this is so self-evident that going again is beating a dead horse: prices in the EU are regulated, whereas they aren't in the US. Compare treatment prices for stuff like leukemia, MS, and other chronic diseases. And somehow, pharma business is still incredibly profitable in Europe. But this has an even darker side -- it's more profitable to focus research on treatment of a select few chronic problems than diversify and try to find cures for the as many diseases as possible because you can keep patients on meds indefinitely and there is no limit on what you can charge for drugs. And lastly, mortgages. Mortgages aren't owned by individuals or small businesses -- they are owned by banks, and bundled and resold on the derivatives markets to investment funds (yes, banks and funds also make trillions). Unlike small proprietors for whom owning an empty house can make no financial sense, big players can suck up these "losses" to keep market prices artificially inflated. You are right that interest rates influence rent prices, but interest rates on mortgages have remained constant or declined, contrary to what the end user is seeing in many places: a housing bubble. So it turns out that low interest rates actually benefit these big traders because leverage works to their advantage, but it's also in their interest to keep prices high. Much like futures contracts, they have no intention of ever taking possession of the good being traded, it's simply an investment vehicle to be endlessly recirculated. Again, the goal is not to force your pops to make peanuts on rent from the apartment he bought thirty years ago -- it's to stop speculation by market players who don't give a **** about what they are buying or selling, just RoI, on stuff that people need to, like, not die from exposure.

You are assuming that the costs to producers would increase such that they would eat up profits, which is hard to imagine especially in the case of pills that cost literal pennies to make. This adds up to profits that are measured in trillions industry-wide. Costs would have to increase a lot to drive an industry like that out of business. So the bottom line is yes, they would have to collectively roll with not raking in trillions. Oh, the humanity. But for the sake of argument, if the costs of, say, building houses increase legitimately as a result of workmen's wages spiking (and not investment trusts buying up real state), prices should be adjusted accordingly. Yet somehow, I'm not fully convinced that the current housing bubble in the US and Europe is the result of a massive hike in the price of bricks and concrete.

Um. Setting maximum prices on essential stuff like medicine, groceries and housing is to central planning what removing a wart is to neurosurgery. Nice slippery slope though.

That's only possible with bubbles though. If your landlord immediately racks up the price by $500 you go live elsewhere where rent hasn't been raised because it makes no sense to raise rent on an empty house. Your former landlord is now making a grand total of $0 and the new one is making your old (or close to) rent. Market self-adjustment is an old chestnut, and I think the last few years should be evidence enough that markets are much more sensitive to market manipulation and (de)regulations than the kind of thing you're referring to. I'm not a huge fan of UBI myself. Something like public job guarantee programs are more appealing to me on a conceptual level and they also have the advantage of preempting any "lol u just wanna stay at home playing videogames all day" arguments from neoliberal minions.

Fundamentally there's no reason it can't work. I mean, corps and banks have been getting public monies for a while in the form of stimulus packages, tax breaks and bailouts. It doesn't seem to be "trickling down" all that much. Why not try giving that money to random people and see if it "trickles up", eh?

The way I understand it, the huge trials were meant to accelerate results by increasing the amount of people exposed to the virus who had been vaccinated. This wouldn't necessarily mean substantially better quality (statistical power) results. Remember Fauci's remarks that the trials could be stopped early if results were good. That meant observing enough difference between the placebo and test groups to conclude that the vaccine was working -- positives would have accumulated quicker if more people were part of the study. I'm no mathematician though.

Pretty sure that 2000 people would be enough if it was a randomized test. For 60M people, 2000 offers a 95% CI of about 2. So yeah, a pretty representative sample. That being said, I'm not familiar with thresholds normally used for drug testing.

Oof. Would not want to be working IT ops at CDPR right now.

GAO report finds that US sanctions exacerbated Venezuela's economic decline

Well, the lobbies and games used a P2P model (which opened up the potential for a lot of cheating but no one really cared because it's co-op). Only the matchmaking and $$$ totals were handled by EA's (or XBL) servers. Calling it matchmaking is being generous too because it amounted to "put this player who just queued up in that game over there with an open slot", and even that would sometimes fail. So the service is nowadays likely run on a calculator in the broom locker, especially with the decreased player load.