One of the nice things about Factorio is that you can finish a level and put it down and come back later. That's harder to do with an RPG like Expedition 33 or Dragon Age.
Not a ton of plot. It's mostly just a building sim.
I waited years for the FF7 Remake and then even more years for the FF7 Remake to come to PC and then even more years for the sequel to the FF7 Remake to come to PC and now I'm waiting for the three-quel to release, at which point I will begin waiting for it to come to PC.
The mechanism for manufacturing bullshit is moving from a largely human endeavor predicated on a handful of big name labels circulating rumor and innuendo to an increasingly automated process driven by digital hustlers and independent con-artists tapping into third party toolkits.
When you're coming out of the generation that got lied into the invasion of Iraq and bullshitted into the First Trump Admin, largely thanks to heavily consolidated traditional media pushing Oil Company and Big Bank financed misinformation, it's hard to talk about "truth getting less relevant". This was a generation that saw Dan Rather lose his job for accurately reporting a sitting President's embarrassing record in the Air National Guard, while the network next door was pumping out an endless stream of "Climate Change is a Hoax" and "Jimmy Carter caused the Great Recession" headline gore.
AI isn't the game changer we like to pretend. The volume of misinformation and outright fabrication in the US media has a long and storied history.
Now, homeless people collecting rubbish to sell for scrap does also happen in the US, but the US at least doesn’t claim to be a socialist country.
The US doesn't have guaranteed housing. China does. The major catch is that Chinese guaranteed housing is tied to your municipal "home city" and getting that changed is a pain in the ass. So the homeless people you'll find in major urban areas are residents who left their rural neighborhoods in pursuit of a better life in the city and fell through the cracks.
That said, the low cost of living in China definitely improves the prospects of even the most desperately poor. What's more, Chinese policy with respect to "internal migrants" is radically different from the US policy of mass criminalization and imprisonment.
Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises. For example, during the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s export-oriented economy, especially of manufactured goods, was severely hit, causing about 30 million migrant workers to lose their jobs. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when service and manufacturing jobs were seriously impacted, many migrant workers returned to their homes and land in the countryside.
The domestic policy around perpetual family ownership of property is critical to limiting poverty in China in a way very few other countries enjoy.
So when you say
China has no functional social safety net
I'm genuinely not clear if you know what you're talking about.
I walked past a location in Shenzhen which was advertising that they were hiring. Their offer of pay: ¥200 a day, for a 10-hour shift, six days a week. In one of the most expensive cities in the country.
Those studies gave a wide range for the number of birds that die in wind turbine collisions each year: from 140,000 up to 679,000. The numbers are likely to be higher today, because many more wind farms have been built in the past decade.
Those numbers are not insignificant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the birds killed annually in other ways, like flying into buildings or caught by prowling house cats, which past studies have estimated kill up to 988 million and 4 billion birds each year, respectively. Other studies have shown that many more birds—between 12 and 64 million each year—are killed in the U.S. by power lines, which connect wind and other types of energy facilities to people who use the electricity.
Justify the latest military operation to the press
Induce a panic in Congress to get the Pentagon more money
Lie about how the latest military engagement is going
Seems to fulfill all the basic responsibilities of a modern Secretary of Defense Offense. Why do we even need Hegseth at all? Hell, why do we need the Joint Chiefs? Just direct all future queries to the GenAI.mil platform. We can scrape every bureaucrat over the rank of Major with this thing.
Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes.
One of the more notable achievements of the last two decades of Chinese economic improvement has been the degree of urbanization, particularly in the western end of the country. This used to be a point of criticism among western economists (Chinese Ghost Cities being a popular meme during the '00s/'10s). Now we just don't talk about Chengdu or Lhasa or Lanzhuo at all.
It’s not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it’s a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US
In my experience, having done a little traveling through Appalachia and the northern end of the Gulf Coast, urban migration has solved a lot of the back country issues by hollowing out the country's interior. If we didn't build a highway through a chunk of the state, people just stopped living there.
Chinese rural communities have experienced a similar hollowing out, particularly in the 80s and 90s when the prosperity on the coasts fully eclipsed the poverty of the western interior. But because agricultural labor was seen as critical to social stability, the state simply refused to let people leave. The end result was an enormous black market population that became a nightmare to manage. And so the late Deng and Hu governments (and early Xi government - although by then much of the work was done) spent a significant amount of resources and labor back filling rural development. Hu, in particular, was a champion of the rural west thanks to his policy of low taxes and high investment.
This didn't eliminate the developmental black holes on the Chinese map. But the expansion westward was its own kind of economic revolution. One that culminated in a virtual elimination of the poverty the country had become known for during the Reagan Era.
The difference in approach - demanding people move to the cities rather than demanding public spending move to the country - is a critical point of divergence between American Neoliberal and Chinese Socialist domestic policies.
I really am failing to make the connection between how learning a second language as an optional class leads to “freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services”.
American public school kids don't normally get access to electives until at 6th grade (sometimes not until 8th or 9th grade depending on the state and district). So "optional" in theory is a deliberate effort to delay bilingual learning in practice.
Mono-lingual populations are more easily primed towards hostility against minority speakers. So your senior staff is biased towards English as a primary language when hiring the next generation of public workers. And these workers are increasingly both unable and unwilling to provide services in secondary languages. This creates a natural barrier for any minority speaker from even interacting with public bureaucracies.
In my city, nearly all public services are available in English and Spanish at the minimum, and frequently Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian as well.
Bigger and more egalitarian cities, with large minority-language populations can staff their departments with fluent minority-language speakers. And under more liberal and egalitarian governments, they do. But as the population grows more reactionary, these kinds of skills get drummed out of the bureaucracy.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 2,500 troops Tuesday about the foreign-language skills he championed as a congressman, an active-duty Army officer was complaining about the paucity of military personnel who can speak anything other than English.
On March 1, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 13166, which designated English as the United States’ official language. This Executive Order is no longer theoretically in effect, and existing federal civil rights laws and regulations require language access for individuals with limited English proficiency in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.
Nonetheless, numerous federal entities are pursuing policies prioritizing English as the only language, effectively reducing or eliminating Spanish.
couple more years until AI is going to be indistinguishable from actual footage
Eh. We've had the capacity to fake footage for a long, long time. Con-artists were faking UFO sightings in the 50s and fooling people. Skeptics were questioning holocaust photos and 9/11 footage a generation ago and straight up denying dashcam footage of police brutality straight into the modern moment.
AI can fake a particular moment and whip people up, but it can't stand any serious interrogation or follow-up. It is only good at showing people what they were already primed to believe.
Finish a run, excuse me