Ioper
1mo ago
Is the lord of the rings American? Most of the cast is British and almost everyone involved in making of the movie is commonwealth.
What is American is the financing.
Ioper
1mo ago
Not that big a premium. I'd have to buy groceries in excess of $5000 a month for car to just break even with home delivery.
You need other frequent or important uses of the car for it to be remotely economical.
Ioper
1mo ago
But I prefer planning my meals.
I thought i did too, because that was how my mother taught me, but when i stopped it was as if a massive weight came off my shoulders. Now i just shop every other day, buy what's on sale and make something from that. If me or the family happen to crave something specific I can adjust on the day. I plan like 1 meal a week and I love it.
I have three sons, do practically all the shopping and I have been doing just fine without a car for the past 4 years. If I lived in a suburb it would probably not be fun but I live in an urban area with a medium sized shop between me and the subway station. An alternative is of course having your groceries delivered, which is still far cheaper than owning a car.
On the rare occasion we actually need a car we just borrow or rent one. We found owning one was excessive for our current needs.
Ioper
1mo ago
And what is their plan for the future? What percentage of GDP is manufacturing? What percentage of global manufacturing is in china? Who are their customers?
China's plan is to increase manufacturing from an already very inflated state in a world where their customers are increasingly hostile to them. This is not a risk free state of affairs.
The industrial base is what you would call an asset.
It is an asset if you have (enough) paying customers, otherwise it's a liability. Overinvestment in industrial capacity is a common and recurring problem not just in China. The difference here is the scale as well as overreliance on external customers.
Ioper
1mo ago
Financial "collapse" leading to severe internal turmoil and/or communist crackdown/extremism is a possibility. China has a severely over-dimensioned property+construction sector and now also a severely over-dimensioned manufacturing base. If they can't get (enough) paying customers for their exports then a lot of these investments will be worthless.
There is a lot of malinvestment in china and as much as people have been wrong so far predicting a Chinese contraction/collapse, it is still very much a question of when the chickens will come home to roost, much like America and the rapidly escalating levels of national debt, deficit and asset inflation.
Perhaps it isn't a question of who's gonna win but if anyone can avoid losing. Perhaps we're heading for a period of global economic contraction and malaise, with at best Japan style anemic growth/contraction everywhere. Unless AGI pans out that is...
Ioper
1mo ago
I agree that the trends you describe are observable (even if I disagree a bit with your dates) but I think an equally important factor is market conditions affecting budgets.
Middle budget is where an art form usually thrives and both for movies and games that category has almost disappeared. To be financially successful you now need to make a truly mass market game (probably with micro transactions) or develop something on a shoestring budget. The former almost always results in slop and the latter seldom has enough resources to truly shine.
I could play RTW, but I don't, because the new games are better by my taste, barring a few features.
The way TW games resolve combat is way worse from RTW2 onward. It's so much worse that even with all the other improvements, additional mechanics and content I think there is a good argument for the older games being superior in their own way even today. The new games aren't a straight upgrade beyond visual fidelity and the amount of content.
Similar things are true for many genres/series but not all.
Ioper
1mo ago
I think the single thing I hate most about all games in the past 10 years is the pathological need to turn everything into a story. I don't care about the plot, I don't care about the NPCs, I don't care about voice actors or dialog or the poetry of the stars. I want decent mechanics and an interesting gameplay, maybe hidden stuff or puzzles.
I'm a story-fag at heart but I share this sentiment 100%; not because I dislike stories but because the writers are so incredibly dogshit. If your writing team is at best mediocre (it is) then please shut up or at least keep the narrative simple and minimalistic. Having narrative choices and reactivity for the player is great but the amount of useless prose and "lore" is getting completely out of control.
Ioper
1mo ago
School might not be directly liable for long term consequences like someone eventually becoming a drug dealer but they are legally responsible and liable for most of what happens in school, extending far beyond just education.
Ioper
1mo ago
That depends entirely on what constitutes "special education programs". I remember going to some supplementary reading classes during grade school, along with a good number of other students, for an hour once every couple of weeks for maybe a year. Were we a special education program? It wasn't part of our regular class and we met with a special education teacher. Some other people went to a speech therapist, was that a "special education programme"?
Without knowing how special education program is defined, these kinds of stats aren't very interesting.
Ioper
1mo ago
There are multiple responsible parties. The parents are the primary responsible party but the school is another.
Ioper
1mo ago
Surely it's both? The schools have control over the children 8h a day, time during which they interact with their peers. This is very likely the most important part of the day for socialisation and a part that the parents can't really influence much.
Of course the parents play an important role but so does the school. It's a collective responsibility.
Why not both? Extremist twitter brain rot turbocharged by copious drug use, in combination with being surrounded IRL by people competing to suck you off.
What are these very low IQ estimates?
I thought the early estimates were something like 85 and we've now moved to something like 88-90, which is on par for estimates of Sicilians and some 10 points ahead of India. That does not seem like a massive change, nor constitute an estimate of 'very low IQ'.
Ioper
1mo ago
Same, although i have to admit that there likely is a fair bit of selection bias going on seeing as I'm only meeting the people who emigrate.
Ioper
1mo ago
I personally know several (if we count things like ministers of state, GMs of governmental agencies, ceos and judges), its not that rare.
I wouldn't say its common though and most people of influence are often at least "morally malleable" in my experience, like our current Prime Minister in Sweden for instance.
People don't really notice when someone is just quietly doing their job, not being corrupt. People notice corruption scandals and overgeneralise.
If one lives in an area with low social trust and normalised corruption then things are of course different.
Ioper
1mo ago
Not if a cardinal value is that following rules is very important, more so than the object level on any individual case.
Ioper
2mo ago
I believe you're confusing citizenship by investment with residence by investment.
Ioper
2mo ago
I've had this happen to me with many things not copywrited but I suppose such "instructions" perhaps could bleed over into other areas.
Wasn't Pdf scanning just fine as far back as in 2015?
It seems to me that major advances have been in the cameras and the video/photo processing. If you don't care about that then there is little to no functional difference between the current phones and phones from 2013.
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