No economic model predicted the 2008 recession despite it being blindingly obvious that you can’t create millions of expensive mortgages with rock bottom rates and expect everything to be fine when the rates go up.

The most annoying part of all this is other companies will see the hubbub around jeans and decide that making obnoxious dog whistle ads is the way to go because no advertising executive has a functioning brain and they all infinitely copy each other, wringing every bit of value out of a concept. Oh, Wendy’s Twitter is being rude to people and it gets engagement? Better make sure Milwaukee Tools also claps back at the haters now

The reversal also becomes impossible if an observer retains information about measurement outcomes, as this resets the initial conditions within that observer’s branch of the universe

I thought the multiverse interpretation was discredited because it’s unfalsifiable

That’s the one

Ed Zitron’s Business Idiots essay continues to ring true

They’re nobodies compared to Superman and Superman is all over the headlines right now

They’re all former Ubisoft and the core studio is only like 30 people. They had a bunch of art asset and music contractors but a contractor relationship is different from laying off employees imo

Semantically all online bots are programs but it’s a little wobbly past that. Typically a bot is just an autonomous program like a web crawler or a social media engagement farm.

The obsession with fucking coal miners too. Yell louder about commitment to obliterating land and poisoning the air in service of an industry that employes fewer people than Arby’s.

The gameplay really does boil down to “pick up large object, throw to kill enemy instantly” once you get the powers rolling. The gun has so many different modes and options and upgrades but flying into the air and turning Hiss into wallpaper with a boulder is pretty much always the most viable option.

I’m sure there’s some metatextual things going on there with how Jesse is increasingly embracing her anomalous power as Director while literally rejecting the Gun because it’s a direct symbol of the Board’s hold over the department of control and the Directorship.

Stylized games don’t age, really. Team Fortress 2 is old enough to vote and still looks and plays great.

In the open letter the HL story writer published after it was clear HL3 was never happening, he made it clear the Combine have at least one Dyson sphere which puts them technology-wise well above super Earth. Though it’s completely unknown iirc if they have FTL. Intra-dimensional teleportation seemed to be an unknown tech to them

Eh, if someone is unaware of the scale of the Combine in lore it’s not hard to think the two forces are roughly equal. Earth is a crappy backwater to the Combine and you never really run into anything but the dregs of their forces during the games. Even the slug dudes you meet in the later games are the ones too inept to get a better posting on a planet that doesn’t have a poisonous atmosphere.

It was probably written by an LLM

There’s a billion websites for card templating

Why not consider one of the dozens of solo ttrpg systems that exist instead of cramming DND into a niche it’s not designed for?

Also LLMs aren’t “they” any more than they’re “he” or “she”

Firstly, a black hole isn’t an object, really. If you manage to compress enough mass in one place, gravity becomes the dominant force and the mass collapses into itself, eternally compressing and densifying. This is the singularity at the center of a black hole, and we use the term singularity because it’s describing a single unmeasurable point in spacetime.

Next point: high gravity curves space. Light only travels in straight lines if it can get away with it, so when light bends in space it’s because the space being traversed is deformed by gravity. Like, the Earth is, as far as it cares, going in a straight line that happens to curve back to where it started. If gravity is strong enough in a region, all possible “paths” through space become bent inwards to higher gravity. Like, even a perfectly straight line away from the black hole will be forced inwards again. That’s the event horizon, the region in space around the singularity where nothing can escape anymore: all paths go deeper into the black hole.

Third point: weird shit happens inside the event horizon. We’re well into Math now because we can’t actually see inside these things, but we can use math to theorize and describe the inside of a black hole. Basically, time and space switch places inside the event horizon. Because every possible direction you can move in only takes you deeper, that means the future is the singularity, and as you move forward in time you move closer in space to it.

So in net: they’re not really holes and they’re not really physical objects: they’re regions where every path in space is forced into going towards the singularity, which is itself infinitely small and infinitely dense.

Anyways, you can accurately calculate the precise size of the region. It’s called the Schwarzschild Radius, and it’s the size of the black hole that any particular amount of mass, if forced to collapse, would become. Turns out that if you calculate the size of the black hole that contains all of the mass and energy in the universe, it would be about the size of the universe, but not quite precisely. That’s all that’s been calculated.

Besides all of her negative qualities as a person she was also a really bad host. Persnickety and clearly hadn’t bothered to read up on the answers because she’d clearly wait for the producers to tell her whether an answer was wrong. No charisma with the players. Idk what they were thinking

The only places it seemed to work were those that were already established as the centers of capital and were thus benefiting from the expanding frontier of exploitation. Capitalism has run out of land and run out of people outside the imperial core to further exploit and so turns inwards to devour its once-beneficiaries. Internationally and especially in the global south it has served no purpose, ever, except to brutally oppress and exploit.

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