I’m actually OK with games costing a bit more to sell if they cost a lot to make; god knows, the devs deserve to get paid properly. But, one, that money won’t actually make it to the devs, and two, any time Randy Pitchford is for something it’s really hard not to automatically be against it, on the assumption that he’s so consistently wrong about everything, and just such an unbelievable piece of shit, that just assuming he’s in the wrong is the safest bet.

Seriously, why do they let him talk? The man is a walking PR disaster.

Then again, we should all be asking how the hell he’s not in jail for possession of child porn, so I guess this is a pretty minor thing in comparison.

Because of course he wouldn’t pay up. The man could literally afford to take more money than any one person could ever spend in their life, put it in a pile and set it on fire, and not be any more than a fraction of a percent poorer, but he’s still such an unfathomably awful cunt that he just has to stiff people anyway.

Economics is a science, at least in theory, but it’s a science that’s being practiced very badly.

The core issue is that pretty much the entire field has decided, collectively, that there is absolutely no requirement to test their assumptions against reality. Basically economists will build a model that reflects a vision of reality that seems to make sense to them, and then build a whole set of assertions supported by that model. I don’t recall the origin of the quote, but it’s been said that “Economists would study the price of milk by assuming an infinite number of frictionless spherical cows operating in an infinite vacuum.”

When economists (most often ones who would describe themselves as progressive economists) actually do test the models against observable reality, most of them come crashing down. Good economic science instead says “What does reality tell us, and how can be we build models that explain it?”, but right now good economic science is very much running against the mainstream.

There are good economists out there. The youtube channel Unlearning Economics is a fantastic starting point, as is this lecture series from McMaster University; https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzLUWMt2NZLRmKY_kEiLc-hvOcyOlgE4N. I also suggest looking into David Graebar, Cristobal Young, and Mark Blyth. The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight by Young and Austerity: The History of A Dangerous Idea by Blyth are both superbly informative and easy reads.

I actually think that in Israel’s case, threats are the only option left. The world has been trying far too much subtle diplomacy with them.

This is what Biden could have done. Threaten to cut off all aid until the genocide stops. The option was always there.

It’s very much a stopped clock scenario of course. Trump is being the same bull headed idiot he always is, this just happens to be the one time that’s appropriate.

And it won’t matter because he’ll fold like a cheap suit. He’s all bark, no bite.

Audiobookshelf for audiobooks, calibre-web for ebooks. Don’t try to get it to get one thing that does both well, you’re better off with two solutions that are both better at their respective thing.

Please give this game a try, it really is a lot of fun. They’ve come up with some really uniwue gameplay that feels unlike anything else out there, and their understanding of the setting is spot on.

So, from what I’ve read, and you’re welcome to correct me if I’m wrong on any of the facts here, your DAO operates using a governance token that can be traded on crypto markets.

If that’s the case, those are just grey-market voting shares. All you’ve done is create a corporation and sell shares, while avoiding all of the legal protections that would be afforded to your shareholders if you actually went through the process of creating a corporation and holding an IPO.

So, based on those facts as I understand them, I guess I’d say I have two problems.

1. Voting power decided by buying power is about the most undemocratic system possible short of autocracy.
2. Obfuscating the purpose and structure of your organization to either intentionally or unwittingly dodge regulations that would protect your shareholders is not a great look.

Honestly, I’m the idiot here for not immediately assuming this was somehow about attacking trans people.

God I hope they do. It’ll be hilarious to watch how quickly all the incels turn on Trump. Not to mention all the married Conservatives who hate their wives.

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And the sad irony is that if he actually asked the Dems to help him get this through Congress, they’d probably agree. But he’s such an unbelievably terrible deal maker that he can’t actually do that.

I’m a little confused on this point. I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all. It’s some sort of proprietary (edit: apparently open source) peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation? I’m not really familiar with this project so I’m certainly not trying to defend anything, just unclear as to why people are calling it a blockchain project specifically.

Edit: OK, after some more digging I see what people are talking about. The project itself isn’t blockchain based, but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.

Who are definitely real people and not his sock puppet accounts.

Jesus Christ, he’s still alive?! I haven’t heard that name in years.

For those not blessed with the knowledge of our divine Lord and saviour Derek Smart, God’s gift to fame designers, oh boy, grab your popcorn, this is going to be good.

And by “good” I mean that whatever Derek has come up with will manage to be the most objectively terrible version of that thing possible, and he will aggressively defend it as the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of everything, ever.

What made those jobs great for the middle class wasn’t the fact that they were blue collar manufacturing jobs, it was the fact that they were unionized.

Unions and high top tax brackets built the American middle middle class between the fourties and the eighties. Yes, offshoring allows companies to seek lower wages elsewhere, but the solution to that is not sweatshops at home. You need to start by building up strong labour rights and investing in education and infrastructure, which drive investment in job growth. Stop trying to regain all the jobs you lost and work and improving the jobs you have.

Yes, leftists have been warning about globalisation for decades, and they’re right, but lets not pretend that what Trump is doing is even in the same continent as a solution.

“Corrupt reasons” is actually giving him too much credit. He’s tearing up everything Biden did because Biden did it. He did the same thing with as much of Obama’s legislative agenda as he could.

It’s pure pettiness. He can’t allow his predecessors to have a legacy. His ego cannot afford it.

So, all of the 40K systems follow on from the rough rules template of 2nd edition WFRP, which is a really solid foundation, albeit a bit long in the tooth by modern system design standards. There are 5 games and they all share the same basic core mechanics:

• Dark Heresy - Small teams doing investigative work for the inquisition
• Rogue Trader - Run a mobile heavily armed nation state doing whatever the fuck you like in space
• Deathwatch - SPESS MEHREENS
• Black Crusade - CHAOS SPESS MEHREENS
• Only War - You’re guardsmen, you do war stuff.

Only Rogue Trader ever got a 2nd edition, which made the character creation much more flexible and cleaned up some other system stuff.

Since then, the license and mechanics have ended up in the hands of the same company that made WFRP 4th Edition, and they’ve given it more or less the same treatment. My recommendation would be to pick up Imperium Maledictum, which is basically a reworked version of Dark Heresy built around expanding out the concept from “You are acolytes working for an Inquisitor” to “You are some kind of peons working for some kind of patron”, with the details being a lot more flexible. So you could be members of the ecclesiarchy working for a powerful minister, low level assassins cult members doing hits, low level mechanicus working for a tech priest… Whatever the GM likes. You can still run Dark Heresy in this framework, but with the flexibility to do other things as well.

It’s also a cleaner, more modern version of the system, doing away with somewhat archaic ideas like your skill with firearms being a stat just like your strength. It keeps the core ideas of the mechanics, but strips away some cruft and generally creates a cleaner feeling system. My only complaint would be that it badly needs some expansions to up the numbers of available talents (think “Feats” or “Class abilities”) as they’re kind of the core of how you build a character and right now the small pool feels quite restrictive.

Yeah, “someone said it on Bluesky” isn’t exactly a great foundation for an article.

What little I know of MtA lore is nuts. Canonically, the Technomancers (who are basically the Illuminati) faked the moon landing to convince the world that the moon (actually Arcadia, realm of the Fae) is nothing but a dead rock in space. By doing so they leveraged the power of mass unconscious belief to distort reality to actually make Arcadia nothing but a dead rock in space.