Drug Wars was so great. Best part of math class.
EnsignRedshirt
joined 5 years ago
What's funny is that I think some of the more rational leadership in the US were already getting their heads around to the idea of needing real industrial policy, but those same people also understood that breaking China's critical minerals bottleneck would realistically take a couple more decades (factoring in political manoeuvring and general inertia), and so getting tough with China was going to be mostly bluster for the foreseeable future. Trump has accelerated the timeline by forcing the issue, but it doesn't change the fact that replacing China's mineral supply is still going to take many years (assuming they manage to get their shit together at all). They can "fast track" projects all they want, but that's just going to cut a 20 year timeline down to like 15 years.
They still need to do it, and Trump can still spend the rest of his term playing silly buggers with trade and geopolitics, but at some point the US is going to have to deal with the fact that there is no replacement for the Chinese supply chain for the next several election cycles. The US also isn't going to have a fully domestic supply, relying on Canada and Australia at the very least for new sources.
In terms of nothing ever happening, I'm not sure which potential outcome counts as which. Half-assing something like that would indeed be incredibly stupid and disastrous, but not half-assing it would imply that they're capable of learning anything. I honestly don't know which would be more surprising.
Can confirm. I acknowledge that “donut holes” is valid, but my brain looks at this picture and says “oh, Timbits.”
Having worked with lots of government departments (in Canada, but the principle is the same), basically all government "inefficiency" is caused by high accountability to the public. Governments have more guardrails on their activity than privately-controlled organizations, much more transparency, and much less discretion to jettison their obligations. Otherwise, government is just as efficient, or inefficient, as any other large institution. There's no magic energy field that makes government somehow worse at everything just because it's the government.
It's also very funny to hear startup people talk about inefficiency as if startups don't have a literal 98% failure rate. We would crucify our governments if they took risks like that, even though that's apparently how you create value.
Regardless, it's always been clear that these people are either too ignorant to understand, or too dishonest to admit, that their definition of inefficiency is just "things I don't like." It would be like if I pointed at the Pentagon budget and said that it represents $800B in government inefficiency. I do believe that money could be spent better elsewhere, but I'm not a child so I understand that it's being spent more or less exactly how the decisionmakers want it spent.
He's become quite the lolcow lately. I wasn't familiar with him or anything he's done other than the Machine story, but I've been seeing him pop up on YouTube a bunch for being a drunk narcissist who can't stop showing his ass. It would be a good bit if it weren't clearly an earnest manifestation of mental illness.
They better follow through on the Dragonball theme park, istg
They literally put in the newspaper that he got mad.
I liked MASH. It handled progressive/liberal themes better than a lot of contemporary media. Pretty overtly anti-war and pro-humans getting along, I can't really fault it for that. Not to be apologetic about it, but it probably went about as far as it could for a show made at the time. Even with the whole Klinger dressing like a woman to get out of the army thing, he never actually convinces anyone that he's crazy, or even that dressing like a woman is that big a deal, and there was even an episode where a Swedish doctor mentions to him that they've been doing gender reassignment surgery in Sweden if he wanted to look into it.
The anti-communism and colonialism are there, for sure. More obvious as a lack of self-awareness about them than in any overt way. I'm sure the writers thought they were being pretty edgy and enlightened, even while not really being that critical of their own deeper biases.
It's sort of hard to analyze a show made in the 70s that was set in the 50s. For example, it's not clear how much of the misogyny was from the fact that it was a somewhat exaggerated depiction of the 1950s (in the military, no less) vs how much of it was just baseline 1970s misogyny. In absolute terms it's very standard lib media, but made well before that was the norm. This was when you could say the n-word on TV but you couldn't say "pregnant". You can analyze all the problematic stuff, but at some point you're just criticizing 20th century American culture broadly and not really making a point about the show itself in context of that. Not that 20th century American culture is worth defending, just that there's not much to pick at that's specific to this show. America in the 70s was racist and misogynist, news at 11.
Star Trek is still the GOAT of being ahead of its time and actually influenced by leftism as opposed to left-liberalism, but MASH was alright compared to a lot of stuff that came before it, and plenty that came after it. Watching it without a laugh track would probably improve the experience.
Bodied.
Stardew Valley has sold tens of millions of copies, and the developer only got a publisher to help him get his game ready to go on Steam, so I’m guessing he kept the lions share of those sales. He’s now wealthy enough for us to start hating him on general principle. He’s going to be fine whether he releases another game or not.
I hope he takes his time and enjoys the process. He seems like a very nice, humble guy who only ever wanted to make a game that people would like, and a decade after his breakout success he has yet to be milkshake ducked even a little. Time will tell if having a nine-digit net worth will make him a bad person, but so far so good. I say let him cook.
Which Zelda game is this?