Man. I get being disappointed. I really do get it.

But tarring all these guys with “hitler youth” when just like every other group, at worst it’s a 45-55% split… Come on. That’s a hell of an insult to throw towards people, many of whom are doing their best and didn’t vote Trump. Doing your best, doing everything that you can do, and still being met with scorn… I know how bad that hurts. I know how it sucks the will right out of you. I know it drives people away. And even if it doesn’t drive them to Trump because they’re good people, it sure isn’t going to drive them towards finding a solution.

Ooh, very nice! I’ve visited the country once, and ever since that visit whenever I taste dill I’m instantly transported back there. You guys have some really underrated good food!

Oh yeah, I wouldn’t say that Nintendo are paragons of virtue or anything. But they are far, FAR better at making games that offer a wide variety of experiences (edit: when compared to Sony/MS. Indies are king). Similarly, sure the Switch control scheme isn’t something nobody had ever conceived of before, but it’s very distinctly different from the Xbox/Playstation controllers.

They’ve got like… what, 7 or 8 IPs that they actively maintain, right? And about 10 more derelict but still iconic IPs. Plus some stuff made by other companies that’s exclusive to their hardware.

-Mario -Zelda -Pikmin -Splatoon (Hey look a gun game) -Fire Emblem -Donkey Kong Country -Super Smash Bros

Dedicated 3rd party: -Xenoblade -Pokemon

All these games have really different themes and gameplay styles and aesthetics, and that is the reason why I’m convinced that the Switch 2 is perfectly positioned to just completely take over the market the way the Wii did- Nintendo is large and competent enough to avoid the issues that plagued the PS5 launch and later life, and fresh enough to get people interested, unlike the Xbox.

Where Sony/MS have uhhh… Looks at the PS5 exclusive games… Looks at Halo/Call of Duty/Fortnite…

Pffff. The AAA industry is notorious for being about as stale as a three week old french baguette. If it isn’t a Gun Game made for chasing the most recent trends, then chances are they don’t even want to sniff at it. To say nothing of the absolutely egregious thirst for Profit that plagues a lot of titles. It’s one thing to be a $70 game, and another thing entirely to be a $70 game with a subscription, ingame puchases, and day 1 DLC.

Sony and Microsoft can have their pathetic little ‘arms race’ about processing power and framerates and 150GB+ games.

In the meantime, Nintendo is likely going to step right up with something that has a nice fresh, intuitive control scheme like the Wii or the Switch, with a solid release library that covers a variety of styles and appeals, and promptly curbstomp the living shit out of the competitors. The market is absolutely wide open for a smash hit console in the near future, coming off the backs of the PS5’s no-games failure and the fact I haven’t even heard about the Xbox in about 3 years.

Yeah, checks out. I’m just a UK guy, but when the Tories were all having a media circus about “Oh inflation is done now, we’ve stopped inflation, the cost of living crisis is done!”, I mean… no amount of lying to my face is going to stop me going to the shops and wanting to scream when I see the price of Everything has jumped up by 20% again.

I can’t imagine that’s any different at all in China. You just can’t really hide something as objective as the cost of a bar of chocolate.

I don’t rightfully know, but my heart says “The hotwheels logo”

It’s pretty modern if you mean popular, although the idea itself is REALLY old.

Rather than going into specific examples because there are a lot of them (especially in gaming and TV), I’d like to say my piece on cliches.

Basically, cliches come to exist because the cliche trope is a really good idea.

“The Butler did it” as a murder mystery trope is a fantastic idea because some people with too much money will use the protection money affords them to mistreat their employees, providing a great motive you can build on to create a great story with relatable morals and characters. It sets up a character with perfect motives, means and a reasonable position of trust to avoid suspicion.

Similarly, “Hell good, Heaven bad” is a fantastic trope because it lets you step back and analyse things like the negative impacts of religion and how authorities (and the bible) will portray themselves as good regardless of their actual actions. Plus of course there were periods of time where people were told doing virtually anything that didn’t fit into an extremely narrow worldview meant you were going to hell. You know, stuff like basketball and Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, the problem with cliches is when someone sees a popular idea that’s also a very good idea, but doesn’t understand why it was a good idea. As a result, when they use the idea, it rings hollow at absolute best, and that kind of terrible execution of something that’s already known and popular tends to be especially disappointing. I think the best example is The Hunger Games, which absolutely defined young adult dystopian fiction for years because it showed how the media industry mistreats its workers, and Alleigant, which used a lot of ideas from Hunger Games (and some other things) without actually understanding the ideas.

(TLDR: Hunger Games has a love triangle as a prominent plot element, but the actual reason is that it’s perpetuated by the media pretty much on pain of death for Katniss so that she can entertain the viewers. By contrast, Alleigant also has a love triangle but the triangle IS the plot element and the author bends over backwards to make it happen despite the fact none of the characters really feel like they’re suitable for it)

Anyways, cliches aren’t bad but you need to know how, why, and when to use them in order to actually fulfil their potential, and the heaven-hell one you’ve mentioned above is no exception.

Gonna say it, this REALLY feels like a case of the news cherry-picking what parts of a protest they show. Between the unreasonable viewpoint that’s directly adjacent to a very sensible and popular viewpoint and the fact we KNOW the media have a very vested interest in trying to push pro-genocide narratives (such as anti-Israel protests being pro-terrorist)…

Yeah, even someone as gullible as me? I’m not buying this.

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NINETY SIX PERCENT???

Bro how the hell did Boeing piss these guys off so much??? The closest my workplace ever got to a strike was when we literally didn’t get a raise one year during Covid, and that was 62% to strike. We were all pissed at the company over that one for obvious reasons, but this…

To me this result off the back of a 25% raise says one thing: This isn’t about pay. This was never about pay.

Combining that with what we know about the company’s culture of shutting down anyone with safety or wellbeing concerns in the name of faster cheaper production of aircraft…

“You call talking to a fox a survival skill?”

“Eh, whatever works.”

Oh, big wins! Given how notoriously shit russian logistics have been (and how hard logistics are in general), every bit of pressure on the supply chain is a huge deal.

Insane how the Republicans made ‘unconstitutional’ into another meaningless buzzword in order to try and dodge the responsibility for Jan 6th.

Oh I like this topic! Fun fact, Ball Bearings are actually a SUPER important little thing and a major hallmark component of the industrial revolution. You need to be able to make really good ball bearings in order to make a rotating joint that’s just decent, and churning out perfect little spheres by the tens of thousands was one of the first tests of the modern world’s capacity to make things in industrial quantity.

Basically, a standard rotating joint (simplified) has an inner metal band, eight ball bearings equally spaced around the inner metal band, and an outer metal band that traps all the ball bearings between it and the inner metal band. This means that the two bands can be rotated with incredibly low friction and relatively low wear. This is used in basically every machine with moving parts, and trains absolutely fit that criteria.

But it’s definitely not operated with zero wear, especially in machines that are constantly operated and weigh a lot, like trains. Ball Bearings can and will wear down during operation and need to be replaced semi-frequently.

As for buying them from China… I would assume that’s totally possible, but China might not have enough stock, or they could be trying to leverage their position to sell the ball bearings at a high markup since Russia doesn’t have the ability to buy elsewhere.

Nice! I know there’s still much further to go before justice is done, but this is a step in the right direction, and I can appreciate it for that.

I will pay for an adblocker before I pay for an ad provider to stop harassing me

Well. That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?

She does have the distinct advantage of being under the retirement age. We’ll have to see what her policies are and how she performs in debates, though.

OK, checking out the article, actually it seems totally innocent on the maintenance side of things- there was a turbine blade fracture during flight. Turbines are generally very reliable but it’s a gargantuan pain in the ass to test those blades because they’re crystalline structures, so a fracture goes from nanoscopic to taking out the whole blade all at once. I wouldn’t expect maintainers to catch that.

The criminal part is actually way more interesting and concerning.

Civilian aircraft are built to be safe. I mean REALLY safe. Every system has a redundant (backup) system you can switch to if that system goes down and a way to isolate a damaged system. Planes can fly on only one working engine, or even safely glide down to the ground if they have no engines. We literally blow some engines up in their final stages of testing to make sure they can’t blow up hard enough to take the wing out. Regulations demand it.

So that’s why this is a criminal case. Because after that engine blade came loose and hit the wing, it ruptured a fuel line…

In an aircraft that was designed in compliance with regulations, while this would still be be cause to turn around and land the plane, it shouldn’t actually be a safety problem at all. Just isolate the damaged system and switch to the redundant one. And they didn’t have the ability to do that. Meaning that their aircraft design itself is likely out of compliance with regulations and doesn’t meet the minimum safety requirements to have civilians on it. Which is… honesty way weirder, because who the hell signed off on this thing if it had a design issue like this?

Yup, most engine manufacture is undertaken by specialists. As a good example, Rolls-Royce is an airplane engine company that sometimes makes cars as publicity stunts.

HOWEVER.

It’s not just about who makes engines. Aircraft are meant to last a good 30 years in service and you can’t just ask some schmuck to clean it for $7.50 an hour and call that maintenance. Maintenance is extremely skilled work that tends to be operating under horrible time crunches, especially if a part is suspect and needs to have a plane partially taken apart so it can be changed for a fresh one- a plane that might be due to fly again tomorrow. Maintenance that needs that sort of knowledge tends to have some involvement with the parent company who built the planes, or is even contract work for them.

Boeing is rather notorious for being willing to put the schedule before safety- we’ve seen that in a lot of other accidents. I would absolutely believe that a Boeing manager skimped on engine maintenance because someone in the chain of command said “Get that plane out of the maintenance hangar today or you’re fired, and damn the safety regulations.”

But, that’s just my industry knowledge. The actual circumstances could be way different, so let’s go read the article.

They do have their place- just that place isn’t “something you can just drink every day without thinking about”