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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 8th, 2023

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  • I’m right there with you. I absolutely hate Paradox’s DLC policy and I’m guessing they lose a ton of paying clients the moment they hit the store page and get a 200-500€ price tag for the full experience, or even over 100€ for just the best hits for a really old game. I know they have mouths to feed, but i really don’t like the way they do it and how they abuse their position of niche games nobody else makes. Nevertheless, even though you may choose not to purchase their expansions, you still have extremely healthy modding communities to carry you over.

    Still, i wasn’t coming so much from the angle that it’s a smaller company providing better value than larger companies, rather showing to the OP that there are non multiplayer games that easily can provide over 500 hours of entertainment regarding the slighly off topic matter presented on the latter part of their comment. Of note is the fact that they don’t use grinding mechanics to do it, for the most part (x series can be a little grindy in some aspects, but not overly), which is the mark of how incompetent devs try to get more “entertainment” hours out of their games.


  • Stellaris, civ v, oxygen not included, city skylines, x3/rebirth/4, workers and resources: soviet republic, kerbal space program, rimworld, crusader kings 2 and 3.

    Basically anything civilization/city/base/colony builder is my jam and some of them have over 2000 hours over the years. I like building perfect societies and roleplay how people live in them in my head while i do it. It’s one of the ways i relax and express creativity.


  • I don’t know about other downvoters, but i downvoted you because you said kids should be beaten into submission at school. Corporal punishment is the refuge of bad parents and it’s not a teacher’s job to harm your children that way. There is not a single justifiable reason that you need to be physically violent with a child to educate them. In fact, that only makes it worse. You either raise a fearful child or a hateful one. Either way, in my book, it’s child abuse and you were calling for it.

    And boy would i cause all sorts of sky falling down trouble on the poor soul that decided to physically assault my child, undoing my job of teaching that violence is only a tool of self defense. I suffered significant corporal punishment growing up and i can guarantee it improved my life in no way.


  • As a European, the Euro can’t replace the dollar. It’s not about how stable it is, it’s about how many Euros there are. Whichever country will be the world reserve currency will have to produce so much currency to be used all around the world that their non digital exports will never be competitive. The Euro just isn’t produced in large enough quantities to be used as a world reserve currency, its production and distribution is tightly controlled for use in European and European partner markets. At least not right now. A long time ago some OPEC countries wanted to try out the idea of using Euros, but just couldn’t get enough liquidity to trade all the oil in Euros.

    Donald Trump wants the US to both be a goods exporting powerhouse and the world reserve currency. He thinks it’s possible, that these diametrically opposed goals have a middle sweetspot where one can be just enough of a world reserve currency not to worry about debt anymore, but also a country that others depend on for manufacturing. That’s what all the tariff dancing is all about. I think he’s nuts, but hey, every economic theory needs to be tested. Just wish we were testing more sophisticated economic theories.

    Anyway, as of this moment Europe is not geared for it. Not industrially, not financially and to be honest, i don’t think Europe is even into it. But it’s not impossible. It would just require a lot of changes.


  • My completely anedoctal reasoning is that at this moment Portugal and Spain have more pressing local fish to fry and the whole American issues are taking a backseat on the public discourse. Most people you talk to will be out of the loop over the DOGE, MAGA, nazi salute plot. Moreover the smaller volume of luxury car sales are also contributing to a lagged response. People who were going to buy Teslas made that decision a while back.



  • So military question, in America do civilians salute ? I see Trump saluting in a suit. In my country that’s a no-no. Only military personnel in uniform and appropriate head apparel may salute, like all the soldiers next to Trump. Or is the president considered a military person since he’s commander in chief ?

    I mean civilians can salute if they want. There’s no penalty. It just doesn’t carry any meaning from a civilian. Military personnel can’t salute out of uniform, though. You may get disciplined over that.


  • You really don’t understand who you’re talking to here. The average person hasn’t heard about browser extensions. I’m serious. The amount of even engineers that work with me who are incredibly good at one specific thing, like autocad design, but don’t really know or care about general computer things is pretty high, let alone non technical personnel. I’ve had people ask me to explain extensions and how to use ad blocking software. People just want a computer that works and does the thing they want it to without fancy things.

    People don’t fear the terminal, they just don’t understand it and they don’t care to memorize things to learn it. If Linux wants to be an end user desktop, you need to do everything by the GUI. What is intuitive, interesting and easy to you is a nightmare for other people. I’m assuming vice versa if the accountant gives you a 10 dimension excel spreadsheet or something. It might just be me projecting my fear of accounting excel spreadsheets.



  • Maybe AstraZeneca CEO should figure out where the massive windfall covid vaccine profits went and invest them wisely instead of filling the pockets of shareholders. Dude got massive taxpayer investments, spent the last 5 years acquiring smaller healthcare companies, snubbed a uk plant investment because they didn’t get enough money from the taxpayers and bragged about how much money they were making about a year ago from the pipeline investments.

    Clearly there isn’t enough space here for AstraZeneca’s shareholder greed and progress it seems, but it sure as hell isn’t the job of the European taxpayers to prop these guys up. Honestly i find it embarassment that a company that has been all about bragging about growth these last 5 years now complains they aren’t competitive enough because they aren’t getting enough free money.



  • Top quality comment. Developing Russia into a strong nation would be a century long effort and would require a complete change in way of thinking.

    If anything, they only expanded their cannon fodder doctrine to their economy as well. Russia will never be a great nation by itself. They will only be one by taking great nations next to it. Putin knows this and it is what i suspect the reason for these senseless wars. Even the atomic bomb is useless to them if nobody attempts to go into Russia. Brickwalling them economically and militarily will lead them to degenerate and die, owing to their self destructive policies, which is why Putin is so against a defensive organization forming around them. It’s why he’s so invested in Donald Trump to turn around the already forming brickwall.

    It was never about the range of the nukes, intentions of the US or the alleged offensive intentions of NATO that never existed. It’s purely and simply because if Russia doesn’t take land to exploit from people who actually can carry out meaningful progress and development, they degenerate as a country. Their doctrine is self destructive and they have never known any better.


  • Yeah it’s true but they also always kinda sucked militarily. Today, they’re struggling against Ukraine. Their peak was during cold war soviet era and even then, they got their ass handed to them by the Mujahideen, which is seen as the event that broke them up. In ww2 they struggled against Finland and just barely made it out of their fight with Germany still a country. Only because the nazis were too confident and got into a two front war. In ww1 the eastern front was basically Russia stacking up defeats. Before that they got their ass kicked by Japan. In Napoleonic times, France handed Russia several defeats, even with other countries helping it. In pre Napoleonic times, again, just Russian defeat after Russian defeat.

    It’s just a matter of fact that for as long as Russia has existed, they have always been a big unmaterialized threat. Even far back in the congress of Vienna in 1814 everyone was already assuming Russia was going to industrialize and how powerful Russia will become and in the end… nothing.

    I seriously don’t think Europe needs even half of what the US has, even to face Russia. Nobody does, US military expenditure is ridiculous. I also think Russia is only still a country because no country in history ever wanted to occupy undeveloped tundra. Even the mongols only sorta occupied it by asking them for tribute and leaving them mostly alone.

    Should Europe become complacent ? No, but seriously all Europe needs is a half decent unified army and a cooperating industral military complex for domestic use to go with it and i don’t really think Russia will ever be that big of a threat.