I hope broader international recognition of Palestine helps spur more recognition of Kurdistan.

That shit should be illegal.

Leave room for my detritus.

I want to be a Camus but most days I’m a Cioran.

We put Kalashnikov on Sergey’s rowboat, Ukraine cowers before invincible Russian engineering!

I mean it could be better, though. Could do with fewer natural disasters, or perhaps another continent in the Pacific so it isn’t so empty. Or maybe burritos that grow on trees and a mild concentration of opium in the air. That’s the Earth I’d want to live on.

To me, the most unrealistic part of that ad is not the edge to edge displays, or the holograms emanating from them, or the overall inefficiency of it all, but rather just that you could never have a place that full of screens without ads being everywhere.

I remember first watching that video on my first smartphone and thinking “When will they ever make a phone without bezels?” And now they pretty much have, but my experience was not some artistic interface full of aesthetically pleasing data and art. It was a YouTube video completely surrounded by ad content.

TBH I’d give earth a B or a C.

I feel like there must be a better planet out there somewhere.

You wouldn’t believe how much more Americans already pay in taxes for healthcare than other countries and then having to pay insurance on top of that.

Insurance has allowed the healthcare industry to balloon costs beyond any reasonable limit. Allowing the government to dictate prices instead can only help drive cost of medical care down and make the situation much more affordable for all, even factoring in what we pay now in both taxes and insurance.

Forbidden Kitkats

They’re sold for scrap. Just gotta go to a scrapyard and say “There was something wrong with mine, I replaced it, here’s the old one I’m selling for scrap.”

That or extract the previous metals yourself and sell them directly.

Some nicknames do a consonant shift for the first letter, like William > Will > Willy > Billy

Margaret > Meg > Meggy > Peggy

Hard to compete when the government heavily subsidizes the local industry while simultaneously making it very difficult for foreign companies to operate.

Tech news tells me that this measure ended up getting postponed. Not defeated, just postponed.

I’m sure it’ll end up back on the table when they think it has a better chance of passing.

Amazing progress. Hopefully the rest of Asia can follow suit in short order.

I met a number of LGBTQ+ folks in China who were wonderful, honest people, but most of them were afraid to publicly display or talk about their sexuality/gender identities due to the risk of social/legal reprisal, given the deteriorating state of policies towards LGBTQ+ rights in recent years.

While other countries in East/Southeast Asia have begun to open up to the idea of same-sex marriage like Taiwan in 2019 and now Thailand, a lot in China see this as a symptom of growing westernization to be opposed. Logic being that if the westernized countries who we don’t like start to embrace the idea, we should reject it. And unfortunately a lot of Asia follows China’s lead in particular.

Fair, but not-shitty companies eventually become shitty companies in almost every circumstance. I hate making the argument that someone is fine because they only hurt a few people compared to the guy who hurts lots.

This article corroborates the statement that Tencent owns 30% of Larian, but they do not have voting rights. Swen Vincke and his wife control the direction of the company with their combined 70%.

I realized I was actually slightly off base on the Epic share numbers, where Tencent owns slightly less than the 49% I had initially stated. This article claims the number at 40% total capital, which works out to 48.4% issued shares. However, CEO Tim Sweeny remains the majority shareholder of the company, and Epic has apparently stated that Tencent does not have any involvement with the way they run their business (at least as of when this article was written in 2019, I don’t know if things are different now but I have not heard as such.)

It’s a situation similar to Epic. The controlling shares are in the hands of the CEO, Swen Vincke in this case. But at least Tencent only owns 30% of Larian, which is better than 49% of Epic, even if the end result is effectively no different.

You are able to click again to skip the animation. The rest of the setup though is important to be able to apply bonuses.