Thanks. As a non-USian who doesn’t follow US domestic news very closely, I also had no idea about the context.

At a conceptual level, it makes 100% sense that companies are moving away from bespoke engines and towards a standardized engine. This is something you see in many different industries. Spending a whole bunch of money and effort when 95% of your requirements are the same as everyone else is a bit silly.

However, you’re completely right that there’s the same danger as in other industries where the ‘boring software infrastructure’ gets standardized and outsourced: a niche monopoly able to exploit their position. What tends to happen in the long run is an open source project for that infrastructure run by an NGO with the industry members (in this case AAA game companies) on the board of directors.

Get yourself a fairphone next time you need a smartphone. They’re not perfect, but they’ve tried to disentangle their supplier chain from the orphan crushing machine as much as possible.

It’s built up social capital. Canada for decades internationally has been generally on the popular side of conflicts and has done real humanitarian work. Canada has also built up a reputation as a reliable ally, that does what they say they’re going to do.

So yeah, as a European with a high opinion of Canada, I think it’s deserved despite your internal problems.

Throwing random stuff into a pot in order to prepare food is technically cooking, but it sure doesn’t feel like the fancy stuff that other people are doing with recipes and reliable results xD

I just kinda throw stuff in there, and 9/10 times it tastes pretty good. I guess as long as you’re starting with a decent soup base and everything going in is either pre-cooked or has time to cook it’s hard to mess up.

Fellow non-cook that sometimes dabbles here: my favorite easy food prep is a pack of ramen, then add a whole bunch of stuff I like. I cook this according to the directions on the packet, but while it’s boiling I’ll add a teaspoon of my favorite hot sauce, some smoked tofu, maybe some kimchi, corn, beans, and/or whatever I’m in the mood for.

Hello, Ivan from the Eastern European Times, I have a question: is Florida man somehow related to Balkan Uncle?

Even the idea of St. Petersburg being an important Russian warm water port is outdated. With Finland and Sweden now in NATO, their use of the Baltic sea is entirely dependent on NATO allowing it as a direct result of their own actions. Finland and Sweden would never have joined NATO without the Russo-Ukrainian war.

I don’t see that happening either. The UK saw the writing on and accepted it mostly gracefully (with some shenanigans here and there ofc). I can’t imagine the US deciding, by themselves, to drastically scale back foreign bases or stop doing whatever they’re doing in the middle east.

Stop de kindermoord!

Read an analysis about that: it’ll take years. It’s not just a case of load on boat -> profit, a lot of the infrastructure takes those minerals south to the US. You’d have to build new loading, rail, unloading and port infrastructure.

This may very well be worth the cost and even starting that process is a strong signal, but it’s not as simple as flipping a switch.

That sounds like a just so story.

Spanish raiders could and did very easily talk to the locals they were subjugating to find out more about the plant. It was often described at that point as “a kind of truffle”. It was considered for a long time to be suitable for peasants and slaves, but not anyone with the option to eat ‘better’ food. The real reasons it took so long for potatoes to catch on are deeply rooted cultural norms around farming, class stigma around this ‘peasant food’, and worries around it being poisonous.

At every stage of it’s introduction into european diets, they knew how to cook it.

I actually prefer the smaller squad sizes and more barebones strategic level. Having a more RPG-like structure and more focus on a small number of characters is my jam. I looked at xenonauts, I think it’s absolutely amazing for a specific kind of player, and I know that I’m not that specific kind of player.

Menace’s solution to this is to basically remove the option for most weapons to miss entirely. A squad in that game is treated like a single unit, the equivalent to an XCOM/Xenonauts soldier. When you attack, it’s the same percentage roll applied to every bullet in the burst for each soldier. This means a single attack might have 40 individual dice rolls. The question is not if you hit, it’s for how much. Seems like a nice way of solving that issue without adding a whole bunch of units.

Cyber Knights does something similar: an attack with most weapons is a burst with each bullet’s chance to hit being individually rolled. This normalizes the chance to hit so it’s not all or nothing.

I love that game, played the crap out of it, waiting for another major patch to come back.

I was considering buying this as a massive fan of XCOM 2.

Was.

I’ll just keep playing Cyber Knights: Flashpoint thank you very much.

I’ve heard of it. No way it lasts more than 5 minutes before being turned off. Every piece of software has bugs, and you bet your ass every single person would immediately start brainstorming.

They threaten the UK, France, Germany, etc for their internal audience, not the external one. To a middle class Russian (the target audience), those are “the west”, great empires, powerful players in the great game of geopolitics. It’s an empty affirmation to Russian citizens that they’re still at the big boy table. It would look bad internally threatening “weak Poland” without following through.

That doesn’t change or connect at all with the actual danger of an invasion. Before the full-scale war with Ukraine, Russia was “trying to negotiate between Ukraine and separatists”, they weren’t saber rattling. They quietly put their troops on the border for a “training exercise”, denied they were preparing for an invasion despite the British screaming from the rooftops, and then went in.

Specifically about Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia: yes, they’re in more danger than Poland, but an attack on them would pull Poland in. Poland sees an attack on them to be fundamentally the same as an attack on Poland.

they think they can ride it out in bunkers

It’s so nice of them to prepare all this shelter, food, generators, fuel, etc for their heads of security. So generous of them doing this with the absolute certainty that they’re going to get shot in the head and their shelter taken over as soon as the doors close.

Sorry, I obviously read too much into the final sentence of that comment.

People are obviously free to use, remake and mold language as they see fit. If that’s the way you’re using Muslim, then go for it. As a piece of friendly advice, because of common usage, don’t be surprised that people understand that word differently.

The stereotyping of brown skin = follower of islam (to use your terminology) I can 100% understand being very frustrating and annoying. For people that have given this more than 10 femtoseconds of thought, it’s obviously ridiculous to “present” as any particular religion outside of wearing traditional religious garb or wearing religious symbols.

Fair enough. I’ve seen countless examples of citizens in the same country not having access to the same services, resources and in some cases even legal recourse as other citizens. Reminds me of some pictures of “White residents only” signs I saw from Jim Crow era US.

If that’s the way you’re using the distinction, then yeah, it’s functionally the same as being discriminated against and a second-class citizen.