“It’s only sunny during the day” is a line uttered ad nauseum by people who didn’t see lithium batteries falling through the same price drop.

Now Is The Time of Monsters

you techno utopians are funny.

I remember hearing this about solar power ten years ago. And electric cars. And cloud computing, even.

It was never going to be economically viable. Always ten years away from viability. Not competitive with whatever the industry leader was at the time.

Really putting all your chips on “nothing ever changes”

But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?

Eventually. But, much like traditional fission power, you’ll need a very large and complex piece of infrastructure to deliver it.

You won’t be able to put a fusion plant in your basement like you can put solar on your roof.

Practical power production through nuclear fusion still requires significant developments for it to be realised at scale, though several startups are already planning to deliver it within the next few years.

US-based Helion Energy secured the world’s first purchase agreement for nuclear fusion energy in 2023, promising to provide 50MW of fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.

I mean, time will tell. But that seems a bit sooner than 2100.

There’s good, actually.

Smaller communities don’t fill up with annoying bots and toxic personalities

Communities driven by bots should die

Reddit is fully automated now. It’s a Look-Don’t-Touch platform. They have AI to handle the actual participation and only want lurkers who can be milked for ad revenue.

But, we literally colonised the states and started half this shit.

Brits were fucking around in India, blowing dissidents apart with cannons this time last century. They were financing and profiteering off South African apartheid fifty years ago. They helped us invade Iraq under Bush. They’re participating in the Gaza Genocide right now.

This isn’t new.

The countries that hit the brick wall fastest during the Arab Spring were - curiously - the ones where the US had the biggest influence. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, Iraq… all saw the movement flatline in a matter of weeks. Egypt and Turkiye saw some early movement and even a successful turn of government, but immediately boomeranged back to military dictatorship when too many Arab Nationalists started gaining steam. Gaza and the West Bank had a moment, only for the Israelis to freak out and start killing people for mentioning the Nakba.

Libya, Syria, and Iran saw real instability, though. The Qaddafi government came crashing down, with its ex-leader dying to sodemy by razor blades. Assad put down his revolt with horrible violence per family tradition, buying himself another ten years of dictatorship. Liberal Iranians once again became cannon fodder for the counter-revolution, while Americans were prompted to liberate the country in the same way we’d liberated its Saddem-Era neighbor.

None of these stories ended well, because none began with an eye towards actual democratic liberalization. The Arab Spring was a beautiful narrative spun atop a horrifying region wide civil war for control of… oil.

Finally! Only took them 20 years.

Are they axing all the conservative subs or just focusing in on the really fascist ones?

Oh… no, wait. I’m receiving a note. Nevermind, that’s not what is happening at all.

The Lich system was pretty close to the mark. Possible that developers gave the underlying features of SoM a wide berth out of caution, but so much of this seems to boil down to “we don’t want to risk the possibility of a lawsuit” rather than “we can’t just do our thing and see if WB’s lawyers care enough”.

So long as you’re not directly ripping off the code from another system, patent courts have been pretty generous in interpreting overlapping abstract concepts.

But any kind of suit is scary, particularly for studios that aren’t geared up to fight them.

Millions of fake IDs have been leaked.

But it’s just vanilla combats with predictable outcomes.

So they invented… the first dozen seasons of the Pokemon cartoon?

They patented a very specific algorithm for a very specific kind of game. You can still do knock-offs of the system in the same way you can make RTS games without asking Blizzard’s permission or platformers without asking Nintendo’s.

I would suspect that SoM’s system is complex enough that nobody’s been eager to try and replicate it. But they high level concept of randomized enemy generation isn’t something you can patent. Neither is randomizing story elements between NPCs.

How much TrumpCoin did the host country buy in advance?

Forming an agreement to protect Poland at all costs and calling it the Warsaw Pact.

What? No? Is that one taken?

Jesus this is a bad take

80 people were killed, cities were bombed, and we’ve got shits on here doing “it was an inside job, aktuly”

Fucking vile.

Look up the stats on defensive gun uses. Just Google it.

The vast majority (90+%) end with no shots fired- the criminal sees the gun and runs away.

Because it’s regularly over reported.

People call the police and claim they saw/heard a thing, then grabbed a gun. Police arrive to investigate and it is - predictably - nothing. Resident self-reports that they must have scared the ephemeral assailant of. Cops dutifully write it up without further investigation.

Gun-as-security-blanket is registered as successful defensive use.

Absolutely crazy to think Trump isn’t aggressively contesting the entire Pacific Rim, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. FFS, how many times does he need to bomb Iran or Yemen before this shit is settled? How many times does need to send Steves Banon and Miller out to Germany, Poland, and Hungary to whip support within the fascist parties? How come the common denominator between every banana republic fascist in Latin America is their Austro-Hungarian parentage and their avowed support for Israel?

Might be closer to say he’s ceding the African/East Asian Global South to the Israelis/Saudis/Qataris/UAE. But even that gives him far too much credit.