The dinner looks pretty mundane to me. I get it, a well-connected socialite arranged a dinner with some high-profile tech-bros, but so what? Seems like a bunch of Capitalists, doing capitalism.
It's even more innocuous, this seems to be a social dinner with spouses etc. Basically the kind of thing that happens eery week in NYC or SF.
A better idea would be to arrest every state legislature who passed constitutional violating laws about guns and throw them in jail, much like should have been done for the violation of the civil-rights act. If there are no consequences for states passing unconstitutional laws, then what is the purpose of the constitution in the first place?
Goddamn, I thought American Liberals were the worst possible "left" party. But apparently the UK thinks that burning wood is a reasonable substitution. Maybe one day someone somewhere will understand that the CO2 is the problem, not the fuel source.
While you are correct that by the end of the game each civ looks the same, and at the beginning of game the initial starting strategy is basically the same, a lot of the civ customization is the flavor. England for example has a distinct art style, they have english music, their flag, and even their unit art. In Civ4 they reach their peak power at an era appropriate time, (red coats and banks) whereas Rome get's their legions at the beginning of the Iron Age.
I played Humankind on release and yea it was a mess, but it worked somewhat because it was doing something intentionally different from the Civ formula and the expectations were that it wasn't Civ. As someone who loves Civ4 as the pinnacle of the series, I greatly appreciated Humankinds attempt, even though the game isn't all that great. I still have ~100hrs in it though.
Civ7 was the last straw for me. Firaxis do not have any talent left and they are coasting on the brand. The entire idea of changing civs throughout the game is anathema to the entire concept of a Civ game. They've lost the plot. Forget any of the other mechanics they've implemented or moving away from board game mechanics, if they can't capture the extremely rough alt-history appeal of the franchise, they've lost anything that makes Civ interesting. They aren't making a civ game anymore.
I mean some rigidity is perfectly fine, especially in a game like Civ where the whole purpose is that you get to play as Rome and conquer the modern world. But in order to "play as Rome" you need to the game mechanics to limit you as the Roman civilization to make sure that you are distinct, at least initially, from say China, or France, or the Aztec or whatever. A fully "custom civ" would be extremely out of place in a Civ game, not to mention would certainly be imbalanced.
Why did they bother bypassing congress? I assume just for expediency, cause it's not like congress wasn't going to send unlimited
aid without conditions anyway. Maybe this way Trump got to pick the grifters and so congress-critters are upset about that?
New York City is beholden to the Governor of New York for a lot of stuff. Governor has a huge amount of authority over the MTA, Metro North, tolls into the City and I'm pretty a huge amount of city tax revenue is only authorized by the governor. It makes a lot of sense to be friendly even if she is a neo-liberal ghoul. An endorsement is pretty much the least he can do.
That's cool, too bad they are apparently as morally bankrupt as the USA leadership otherwise they would advocate for the utter destruction of israel and the public execution of any Chinese citizen who had ever invested a single Yuan into genocide.
Nah. Trump will bomb a couple of random Iranian targets, claim that the grand-pumbah of islam was killed and then he'll declare victory and leave, just like last time. Iran will shoot 1000+ missiles at Israel, Israel will spend $200million of US military AID to blow up 90% of the missiles and the remaining missiles will kill 17 people and then Iran will declare victory. Israel will sortie 2 American f-16's to blow up some long abandon "nuclear sites," and then Benjamin will get his propaganda win.
At the end of the day a few billion dollars will be wasted, and literally nothing of substance will happen.
What's the date of the picture? Because yes, that does change things a bit.