• 3 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Which makes them superior, which is why they are used. Cost can’t be ignored any more than the torque or speed, speccing parts that are considerably more expensive that achieve equivalent results is bad engineering unless you have a very specific application that requires it.

    If it was ‘objectively inferior’ we wouldn’t use them. You build to your requirements, not by playing top trumps with competing technologies while ignoring the cost.






  • I agree it’s not particularly impactful, and most would have made an exception, but it only takes one person to argue that it’ doesn’t matter, or to defend it as something deliberate on the news to upset a lot of people.

    Id say the biggest problem with this reasoning is that these protests do not save millions of people, and that that number would be easy to reduce, that the only reason that those occur is that nobody fancies doing anything about it.

    In the same way, my employer going out of business would be a big deal to me, my colleagues and a few others, but it’s ultimately unimportant compared to climate change. But if that happened due to these protests, it wouldn’t actually fix anything.

    I don’t dislike these protests because I don’t agree with the core message, I dislike them because I genuinely see them as counter productive. Talking to people about climate issues at the moment feels like I’ve jumped back in time 20 years, and mainstream beliefs 5 years ago now get you put in the “tree hugging hippie” catagory, as people think about “those protestors”.

    This can’t change overnight, as I’ve said, there no ‘just’ anything when it comes to the fuel and infrastructure that powers our world. The faster we change, the more impact there will be on quality of life, these are sacrifices that everyone will have to bear, and so the main battle is the political will, it’s about people across the world choosing to make sacrifices. This is why poisoning the otherwise positive image of environmentalism and pissing lots of people off for intangible ‘gains’ genuinely concerns me.


  • I really disagree with this premise.

    For example, where I’ve worked, I’ve generally found it easy to make improvements that solely benefit the environment, even though they are virtually always more expensive and carry no other advantages, and often additional disadvantages.

    Since the more recent protests, though, and especially after we all nearly lost our jobs due to the antics of a handful of protestors, that support has just gone. Being greener is no longer and end unto itself, and people don’t want to either be seen as supporting their cause or ‘helping’ the people who cause real problems for everyday people.

    It may not be logical, but even I am quieter about my environmentism because I don’t really want to be associated with people who proudly block ambulances and cause pain for thousands of regular people.

    Because ultimately, nobody’s going to ‘just stop’. We’re not here due to the scheming of a few people, there are a lot of reasons oil is currently so ubiquitous, and fixing it is going to be a fairly gradual process. Fortunately, oil isn’t the only way we can fix emissions, and so progress over spans of a decade or two, when that progress is going in parallel, can yield dramatic results.

    My concern is that antics like these are going to slow or even reverse some of the political will to suffer the short term pain required to make these changes as quickly as we need.


  • It’s a failed state that ‘elects’ terrorists who have destroyed any actual opportunity for economic independence or peace.

    There’s no way forward with Hamas in charge IMO. But what can be done. Any kind of ‘go in and fix it’ from Israel is going to be terrible in terms of optics even if done with complete benevolence, which it won’t, even if they’re not as bad.

    They could just annex it and move forward with a highly inclusive approach, give Palestine the quality of life they deserve. But that wouldn’t sit right with many, for quite fair reasons. Leave a power vacuum? Unlikely to go well.

    I think Palestine needs external support and guidence to stand on its own and be a functional state. I’d say that Egypt or Jordan would ‘look’ best to do that. But it raises a huge number of problems.

    At the moment it’s basically festering, and things will never improve under the current leadership. What they demand is not reasonable or acceptable, and what they will do until they (Hamas) get what they want is also unacceptable.

    So really, it’s a question of whether Palestine will ever deal with Hamas themselves, and if not, who else can/should.




  • I mean, what are their salaries? I genuinely don’t know, one would assume that a specialised job like that would command a pretty solid salary, and the assumption would be that working on a project like this would get them to the top of the list for applications to other companies.

    I don’t know how the job was advertised, but seeing how the industry works from the outside, I would never assume a job for life at a game studio, but you could still count on security after working on a project like this.

    I work a steady job, it’s hard, and the pay is okay for me, I suspect a game dev will earn several times what I do, part of which is due to the short term, or at least risky nature of the roles, the rest would be down to the specialist skills.

    I don’t really think that forming a union signifies that at all, I’d say it’s more likely down to the ongoing working conditions.

    Because you can always go and get a warehousing job or similar, it’s steady, but kinda boring and lower pay.

    The money may keep rolling in for those who invested the most and took the largest risks. But that’s irrelevant IMO. You take a job for the pay that’s offered, and it lasts as long as it does, how long that is depends on the kind of role.

    I’m making assumptions, but I think everyone here is too. But I do particularly resent the ‘slaves’ comment as it is disrespectful of the employees, and diminishes actual slavery which is bigger than ever.