tormeh

The Witness (2016) is a really good puzzler, as is The Talos Principle (2014) (it's gotten a UE5 remaster now).

In fact a core demand of the yellow vest protests were... the lowering of a tax on fossil fuels. I think these guys might be the baddies, actually.

The US spends 80% more on R&D than the EU, while having 100 million less people. It’s just not close. The first step to changing something is to understand it. Huffing on copium helps no one.

That's just taxation. Which is something Sam really really hates. Easier to just borrow money forever. It's risk free, after all.

They're only the floor because they're seen as risk free. "Why lend someone money for less than what the US government is offering you? The government is always gonna pay you back, after all". If that mentality changes then treasury bonds will no longer be the floor, because you'd rather lend the money to someone else than the US government.

Not that this isn't disastrous for the US. Increased taxes, cuts to medicare/medicaid/military, a government default, or a mix of all three are an inevitability. The US government can probably keep paying interest payment costs with more debt for a while, but not forever. These movements in the bond market takes us closer to the end of the USA's debt spree.

This is so great and so bad at the same time. We're gonna have to go back to using tar and shit for things we actually want to last. That's not going to be cheap...

A large investment in xAI might give you access to a member of the US government. That's not something you get by investing in Walmart or Visa. Yes, this sucks.

Oh absolutely, PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard are absolutely crucial. This position allows them to leech off the entire dogital payments system in a way that does not have anything to do with their cost of operating. So an alternative doesn't hurt.

Regarding online ID: The Norwegian government websites only accept ID from Norwegian providers, and if you want to sign anything with a commercial party you'll need Norwegian BankID. Germany operates entirely on wet ink sent by snail mail. Some government websites accept ID cards, but the commercial world has not taken notice at all. I don't know where this unified European ID world is, but my guess is Theoryland and maybe Estonia and Finland.

Good that they're working on it, but man is this stuff slow. Germany's still all in on PayPal. I think the EU should just create a common solution. Oh, and create a common way to confirm identities and sign documents online. This national fragmentation is just dumb.

True, but when the salaries in the US are double or tripple that in Europe it just doesn't work out. American labs are also better equipped on average. No way Europe can compete with the US for scientific talent. The money is just not there. Our only hope is that the US voluntarily exits the competition, which seems to be what's happening.

This. The solution is a people-carrier. The ground clearance of an SUV or the cargo bed of a pickup truck won't help with anything.

The ID. Buzz looks pretty sick atm, but it's a tad expensive.

Worth noting that the y in "ye" is not actually a y: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_articles#Ye_form

Tldr: "Ye" is pronounced identically to "the". The "th" sound used to have its own letter that somehow got to be written "y" until everyone decided that was quite silly.