bingrazer

It seems this may be to cover up the bad news that Take Two/2K have changed their ToS to essentially allow all their games to be spyware. As the article says, it doesn’t look like the games have actually been updated yet, but that could just be coming

Also, even without updating the game files, it limits how you can use the game you purchased. You can be banned for using a VPN or playing he game on a VM and you risk being banned for using mods (it makes no allowance for mods in SP or private MP).

I agree completely, the Democrats losing is entirely their fault. They’ve been unappealing for years so they can chase those corporate bribes. But if you listen to them it’s never their fault. I voted for them, but I didn’t like it.

Indeed, but instead we get someone who will take a torch to it. One vote was for someone who would make things worse more slowly and the other was for someone who would make things very bad very quickly. We decided to go quickly.

The last third aren’t necessarily ok with the healthcare situation, it’s just not their top concern. Some of them might be most concerned about being sent to a concentration camp or losing their job (which would affect their ability to afford health care plus a bunch of other stuff).

Theoden: this glass is half of what I’d hoped for

The problem with using wind and solar is that you’d need a lot of it due to the energy requirements. While both should be used extensively, there comes a point where the resources required (these would likely use precious metal catalysts) to build the CCS plants and all the power infrastructure for it and waste produced makes it the obvious choice to just use trees.

If you look at how trees function, it is an incredibly complex process with some rather extreme conditions which are difficult to replicate with machines. If someone does manage to get it done efficiently then that’s great (though I think this is unlikely). But I don’t want it to become like recycling did: an excuse for companies to do whatever they want. The original expression was “reduce, reuse, recycle” with recycling being the last resort, but now we never hear about the first two because they get in the way of obscene profit.

Carbon capture (more specifically direct air capture) is not a viable option due to the energy requirements and the low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon capture is largely promoted by fossil fuel companies for the same reason that recycling is: “let us keep doing what we’re doing because there’s some magical way to undo the damage, we just need a few more years of research”.

However, plants do the same thing and already exist. Trees in particular have shown some promise for being able to be a precursor for many polymers. This would at least mean that any plant matter used for this did pull CO2 out of the atmosphere in the last few years (so relatively neutral compared to the other options), whereas fossil fuels are releasing carbon that was removed from the atmosphere millions of years ago.

EDIT: TLDR, oil drilling should be banned or severely limited, but DAC is not a viable option and is only relevant because oil companies keep pumping money into it. Biomass is potentially an ok feedstock for plastics (but not for fuel).

Most plastic can’t be recycled into something usable. Plastic degrades quite a bit with each recycling, leaving a bunch of microplastics behind (same thing with “biodegradable” plastic). It would be better to tax it enough (or ban it) to make it not used in certain applications.

Sorry, deleted my comment because I didn’t think anyone saw it yet. Looking closer this appears to be a consequence of them changing the names of the original oblivion. Looks like it messed with SteamDB. Checking the page for the deluxe edition shows it was always $20 (which SteamDB is wrongly interpreting as the price for the base game).

So in this case Bethesda did the appropriate thing and tried to clarify the original is the 2009 edition and I rushed to get upset at them for something they didn’t do.

I’m stuck here for at least another year and a half

When the consequences for being critical were less severe they were doing the exact same stuff