Instigate

Once upon a time, professional athletes weren’t even allowed to compete in the Olympics. While I think that rule was a bit silly, it underscores how it’s always been up to individual nations to fund their athletes; the IOC just provides a stage once every four years. In ages gone by, professional athletes would have second jobs or would work during the off seasons because of a lack of pay. I’m not sure how this is a modern or a new problem.

While I loved PropertyCity while I lived there, my early years in RuralTown showed that’s where the real Country really is. We had a herd of FarmAnimals and would always go down to the WaterBody on the weekends where the LargeMammals roamed free and wild!

I absolutely love this idea, and not just because I proposed to my wife on Cape Tribulation where the Daintree Rainforest - the oldest rainforest in the world - meets the Great Barrier Reef - the largest reef in the world. Fun fact: it’s the also only place in the world where two UNESCO World Heritage Sites back onto one another!

These wildlife corridors and reserves are becoming more and more necessary, particularly as terrible fires ravage our landscapes (not so much in the Daintree, but elsewhere). The Black Summer fires of 19/20 absolutely devastated so many native populations across the country and many have not come close to recovering since then. We’re in for more and more of these continental catastrophes, and given we lead the world in mammal extinction and are fourth in total species extinction, we really need to get our lazy arses into gear. This is a great start but it needs to be dramatically expanded.

Welp, looks like it’s gonna be yet another Ubisoft cash-grab. Yay.

I’m not sure that your two categories of gamers are necessarily mutually exclusive. I’d consider myself somewhere in both of those camps. For instance, I have hundreds of hours logged each on a range of open world games like Skyrim, BotW, WoW etc. but I also love to play incremental games which satisfies my mathy brain. I’m generally a min/maxer and completionist and in RPGs this often means exploring every location, killing every enemy and collecting every item before progressing the main story, so as to be maxed out at all points in time. I’m not a big PvP fan, but when I do engage in PvP I tend to find some balance between whatever the meta is and whatever my personal playstyle ‘feels’ is right.

Yeah it’s totally worth it though. They’re extremely diligent by industry standards when it comes to ethical sourcing of cocoa.

The blocks are a bit weird, the segments are an odd geometric tessellation where no two pieces are identical. Great chocolate though.

No one is going to crash the economy so you can buy a house I’m sorry.

I think you might have missed where I said this:

I say this as someone who is lucky enough to be able to have a mortgage: it’s inherently unfair that my fellow citizens have to miss out on that opportunity.

What you say also seems extremely unlikely to me, given that humans who have sufficiently advanced to the state we live in now will be unwilling to accept subsistence lifestyle.

I didn’t predict anything; you’ll note I said that this is what I would hope happens.

I’m not talking about a market failure; I’m talking about trying to take away the whole concept of a ‘market’ applying to residential real estate altogether. Because it’s so intertwined with the value of our economies, taking it away will cause a significant, permanent shrinking of GDP and other economic measures, and I think that’s appropriate given the circumstances we’re in now.

It’s a big and bold move, and as I’ve said before none of us can be exactly sure how it would pan out, but nothing is gained in life if nothing is ventured. We need to try something. I say this as someone who is lucky enough to be able to have a mortgage: it’s inherently unfair that my fellow citizens have to miss out on that opportunity.

A policy this significant would cause a market crash so massive that it would entirely reshape the market. I don’t think any of us could genuinely guess how it will work out.

My hope is that it would cause a crash so significant that essentially all owned properties that are not lived in enter the market, causing homes to be sold for insanely low prices in order to avoid paying taxes, causing rates of home ownership to skyrocket. The government then needs to buy up anything leftover to rent as social and affordable housing to low-income people who can’t afford a mortgage at that time. Crashing house prices also mean that the value of these taxes drops in absolute terms as well.

Then we have a situation where everyone who has a stable income owns a home, and those who can’t will rent directly from the government at extremely affordable rates. Homes are the object we as humans own that we regularly lease to one another the most - particularly for profit or capital gain. It’s super weird and it needs to stop.

The main issue is that economists would shit their pants because so much GDP growth is locked up in our property markets. It would cause at least a recession, if not a depression, and depending on which country did it, the effects could ricochet throughout the global economy such as during the GFC.

It’s pretty simple, just have a new real estate investment tax that is only levelled on residential properties you own but do not reside in, and that tax needs to be set at a rate higher than the property market is expected to gain. E.g. (with made-up numbers) if the property market gains 5% value per year on average, set the tax rate at 10% of the value per year. There’s an insanely slim chance you can still make money on the investment, but 99+% of investors would dump their properties immediately, leading to a massive crash where average people could suddenly afford to buy the home they’ve been renting.

That’s a fair call. I just think all reasonable measures should be taken to limit the attractiveness of vapes to children, and that’s just one piece of the puzzle. It’s not a necessary piece, but I think it would have helped as part of a suite of measures to regulation. I think you’re right in that online glorification definitely had a role to play here as well.

If the government, 5-10 years ago when it would have been apropos to do so, looked into vaping and drew up specific regulations to have legal vaping, we wouldn’t have the issue we have today. Instead, because of almost a decade of inaction, we now have a new generation of nicotine addicts that they’re hurriedly trying to stop.

We needed regulated, plain-packaged and limited-flavour vapes available to legally buy at a reasonable price to quash out both smoking and prevent kids from getting addicted, but that horse has already bolted.

The cynic in me says they intentionally didn’t regulate vapes because the science wasn’t ready yet, and they didn’t want to accept any blame for legalising something that could end up to be pretty harmful in the long term. So, because they didn’t want to accept that risk then we now have a whole generation of vapers whose health issues we’ll be dealing with for 80+ years to come.

Spoken as an ex-smoker, current vaper as a smoking cessation method.

From the article:

Her ex-husband – and Tyler’s father – Jayson Boebert was famously arrested in 2004 for exposing his genitals in a bowling alley where minors were present. Rep. Boebert, who was 17 and not married to him at the time, was one of the witnesses in that case. He got four days in jail and two years probation for lewd exposure and public indecency.

Holy fucking shit mate, I’m a social worker who works with people experiencing violence and fuck you highlighted the issue far better than I ever could. Thank you for giving me the tools to better explain myself when I need to.

I never understood why Americans call a ‘#’ a ‘pound sign’ but then if you put words in front of it, it suddenly becomes a ‘hashtag’. Shouldn’t it be a ‘poundtag’? I mean the rest of the Anglosphere refers to a ‘#’ as a ‘hash’ so it makes sense to us, but why do Americans call it a hashtag? Seems weird to me.

This is absolutely what a ‘Smurf’ account is - someone who is very experienced or has a significant backing behind them accrued from other account(s) creating a newer account to pose as an inexperienced player in order to be matched with them. In World of Warcraft, a ‘Smurf’ is a character that you intentionally don’t let past a certain level and throw a tonne of gold and gear at so that when they come up against regular players that level they have an insane advantage.

Well, yes and no. Paying that fine once would just be a cost of doing business, but now that the precedent has been set if they continue to do it they’ll continue to get fined in that order. Those fines won’t need court cases, so they’ll need to be paid quickly and in full. Sure, the fine they received didn’t really hurt them but it will change their behaviour. It will also prevent others from engaging in the same behaviour.

I don’t think the EU wants to bankrupt companies like Apple - it’s not in the collective best interest. They need to guide behaviour by setting up punishments that are deterring but not destructive. I think €500m fits that pretty well - it’s akin to giving a child a timeout while their friends play or a smack on the back of the hand. It’s doing what it’s intended to do.

Then put the games onto high-storage solid-state cartridges like Nintendo does. There’s no reason to be limited by existing technology like Blu-Ray except for laziness. Hell, they could even just put an SD card reader in as the physical game tray and put games onto SD cards if they’re that lazy and don’t want to spend on R&D.

Removing the capacity to have physical copies of games at all is always a bad move that is disingenuously masked with a “but the world is going all digital!” all the while knowing that this gives them greater control over things we’re supposed to own.

And it’s obvious that your comment was entirely unnecessary.

Ahh okay, so it’s not confirmatory for the diagnosis but rather assessing the impact of living with Coeliac? That makes sense. I’m having a full endoscopy/colonoscopy later this year for a similar purpose. Fingers crossed everything comes up clear for you mate!