a lot of that is equity firms, but we're not building comblocks either so the alternative is legacy housing that's unobtainably expensive or renting forever. Developers need to be prevented from building that shit, but people don't have a lot of agency in housing,

well, yes, again, but then also again: how do EVs change the equation here?

there's like a hundred things that need to happen all at once, very few US politicians are interested in making any of them happen, and in the meantime we might as well have electric cars instead of SUVs.

there's no in the meantime. All the needed changes I assume we agree on could be done in the now, but they won't be, and they also won't be once you exchange every ICE car for an EV because why would you? The system can keep on trucking fine with EVs instead of ICE cars, why change?

because living in the suburbs is miserable even with electric cars?

I certainly think so, but somehow those houses keep getting bought

we need government intervention and central planning for any of this anyway

True, I don't blame people for buying EV cars. Either you save some money - which is good - or you pay more for the common good of reducing CO2 - also good!

EDIT: Just to be sure; doing the better thing but paying for it is bad, but like good on an individual levle

But like sticking to the US theme, the republicans aren't going to do it and the last democratic president hooned an 8 ton E-Hummer around and then called it the future of transportation (when he wasn't busy suggesting everybody not in a car would be required to carry a transponder so self driving cars could happen). So who enacts the change here? The suburbians sure won't, everything is the same except their car goes MMMMMM instead of vroom now.

i love trains and bikes but the infrastructure doesn't exist and we're shitty at building it so I guess everybody in the lurch in the meantime is supposed to starve to death

Obviously yes, unlimited genocide on all the KKKar DriverSS /s

The point is why would you stop building / inhabitating suburban sprawl if the electric car gets you there and back just fine? Like what changes here for it to herald the 2 decades of bike and rail construction?

EVs are a gap filler

are you, by chance, interested in purchasing any number of bridges

Ive put 5 hours into it so far and like another 5 in the demo and I gotta say if you can afford it this is one to buy.

well maybe he runs a bespoke COBOLT consultancy and is the only one who can't work with COBOLT. It'd be true in that case.

Office politics, i.e. power plays. Having information and deciding who gets it is a massively powerful position in an office. So Senior Manager Butt Dickdong who otherwise has nothing to do with the thing has to sign off on the slides because it allows him information before the rest and the chance to torpedo it or give some favours away. Of course having nothing to do with it, Butt doesn't really know anything about it and as such needs constant explanation because he thinks if the slides are for an egyptian client you should use Papyrus font like they do over there.

It is also why these things are so hard to get rid off, it'd mix up power structures. I don't think most of the people doing it are consciously aware of it in the Machiavellan sense but they do know it internally. Also partly why consultants are so common now, it gives the C-Level Suite an excuse to say "oh this is just objectively better" to Butt who can't really argue against it. Now of course consultants also design the worst shit known to man because they depend on you coming back to them because otherwise they'd slowly work themselves out of a job, which they are accutely aware of and trained on.

After finishing the Yakuza 0 story and I think about 50% of side content roughly I've started Yakuza Kiwami and am again, in awe. They're all so much videogame

I get plastic instead of glass mostly, glass is heavy as shit. What I do not get is plastic instead of paper. Like if you need it to be tight to water, sure, but so much stuff is plastic with airholes, just use cardboard

Esoteric Ebb is due to come out on march 3rd and from having played the demo it's so far the only thing that really got that DE vibe to me (currently downloading zero parades).

I thought Rue Valley was nice and you feel the influence, but it's sort of "If you like CONTROL, you'll like Alan Wake 2"

They hand those out for free

If I hand a bartender 5 moneys I get a beer, if I hand a teacher 5 moneys I get like nothing

wanting a very specific power tool and then spending 1,5 years scouring craigslist or local equivalent for it to get it at an insanely cheap price

woke alex jones voice: they're turning the freaking frogs carbrained

It sounds like bad fiction honestly

It's a bit less ancap than it might initially sound but it does still sound like to me of having the inherent issue of being mostly reactive instead of proactive.

My theory is that it's a reaction to Ukraine being insanely corrupt and they figured out they wouldn't be able to unfuck the traditional structures in the midst of being invaded and as such just basically built a new one on top

I feel like historically most countries realized that when you actually need a coherent organisation to do shit under pressure, i.e. what you want out of the armed forces, the free market bullshit is right out.

Now there's the counterfactual here which is Ukraines weird discord run gamified RL-EXP-Point gathering for resupplies. Given the whole premise of that entire war I'd say just on that aspect the ukranians seem to be doing oddly well with it considering how fucking stupid it sounds, but then again russia seems to be doing the same sort of war-but-neoliberal here. Which is a scenario that neither meshes well with 24 hour global burger king deployment capabilities nor what the USAF usually gets tasked to do

they might be, my point is they're doing an insanely bad job against protecting against that exact threat

I admit to having pentester brain here but that's not impenetrable to anybody who actually wants to get in there instead of being mostly opportunistic about it on a random break-in risk vs. reward scale. Guarantee you whatever money they spent on bullshit security systems would've been better spent as insurance to just get your home cinema back at 10% of the price since all these places are furnished by interior architects and not like, actually living there, bribing local politicians so a cop car idles outside all day or, if you wanna go really woke with it, welfare. And "guy who really wants to get in there, to get to you, specifically" is like the one thing the police are incredibly bad at protecting against even if you're rich.

I think this mirrors the WSJ-Article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/the-mega-rich-are-turning-their-mansions-into-impenetrable-fortresses/ar-AA1Waeot

About $1 million was spent on bullet-resistant smart glass. And the front-entry security features cost more than $1 million.

Real good use of money to save you being burgled like one one of those rich people home cinema systems that costs 250k or whatever

Bonus lmao:

The home’s most fortified feature lies hidden behind a wood-paneled wall: a reinforced concrete safe room with a 2,000-pound door and an air filtration system built to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers standards.

Imagine the horror of being able to play any video game with a 5 year old graphics card, who would buy the overpriced scalped GPUs now?!

Barring notable examples like STALKER 2 isn't this just now and has been for a while? I feel like I see so many people talking about their RTX 2000 series still being fine and I don't really see anyone futzing with ubermegaültragraphics anymore á la Crysis 1 back then, it seems to be mostly endless shaders for GTA IV and V.

The underlying technology isn't really inherently bad, presenting it in chatbot format definitely is though.