Bad Dragon

They haven’t gone overboard with THIS one, because they already went way the fuck overboard years ago and never got back on board

Man I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and make my next machine a linux one

You love to see it! Every little bit helps.

Fun fact, a Tesla spokesperson describing the car’s features was talking about how they wanted something on the car that didn’t make it to final release and said “But sadly we couldn’t get that law changed”, which does… kind of imply that they lobbied the regulatory bodies into allowing this piece of shit to exist.

Very informative, thank you.

You can kind of see how all these problems would compound with each other and make each other worse. Of course people don’t wand to pay taxes to a government that will waste or embezzle their money. But the government does need money to make things happen that might improve the situations of the everyday worker. The government needs competent administrators, lawmakers and judges to properly regulate the private sector, but the private sector can pay a competent person triple what the government pays because the private sector isn’t subject to laws that force them to be ethical.

Guess there’s a reason that corruption is such a common cause of failed governments.

ELI5: Why is the greek economy so fucked?

Somehow this is worse than Reddit. Sure Reddit isn’t good, but at least Reddit was sane enough to understand concepts like ‘working too much is deeply unhealthy both physically and mentally’ and ‘corporations should not hold absolute power’

Honestly, you love to see it. A wealthy person? Suffering actual, meaningful CONSEQUENCES?! It almost defies belief

Lies, there’s no knot in this list

Quality is a spectrum. Sure, Mercedes isn’t Rolls-Royce. Mercedes makes cars as their main business and turns a profit from that, Rolls-Royce is a company that makes aircraft engines and produces cars sometimes as publicity stunts (because a car built to the tolerances of an aircraft engine is, shockingly, going to be very precise and well-made).

But Mercedes is definitely a higher quality of build than like. Fiat or Ford. To an average person, you buy something like Toyota if you want reliability and a long-lived vehicle, or Mercedes for a smoother drive full of tiny little expensive gadgets that will probably develop a fault after 3 years.

(No idea why they’ve listed BMW here though lol, those things just love perpetually breaking down, because the systems they use to get that unique tactile feedback while driving that some people crave are absolute dogshit when it comes to life expectancy. They use a fucking chain for a timing belt instead of rubber. Don’t ever buy one unless your idea of luxury is constantly having to shell out on repairs and tow trucks. If you have to experience one, just like. Get one as a hire car so you don’t have to own the fucking thing.)

“Until war aims achieved”

Alright I know the statement is one that’s very dependent on context, but… man, that phrase could have come right out of Putin’s mouth circa 2022 while he was trying to justify his invasion of Ukraine.

In the interest of transparency, I don’t know if this guy is telling the truth, but it feels very plausible.

Yeah that checks out. I’m not even american but I’ve got to say every single American healthcare worker I’ve ever met on Discord is CONSTANTLY and incurably miserable because they work inhumane hours for so little money that they actually can’t afford rent anyways. I know someone that spent an entire month doing 10-hour shifts 6 days a week which made him unbelievably sick and exhausted, and by the end of it then his paycheck didn’t cover replacing his car’s spare tyre. I know someone else who was ordered to come in every single day in the two weeks after her mother died and on the day of the funeral or she would be fired immediately and without recourse, while her boss took his fifth vacation of the year. I know someone who spent seven years studying to be a nurse and their debts are so bad that I’ve had to talk them out of suicide twice because the job doesn’t pay SHIT.

TLDR: Frankly I’m amazed America still has ANY healthcare workers based on the ones I’ve met. The situation isn’t great in a lot of places because medicine can be expensive, but good lord is it truly bad in America.

What about Firefox? Can’t say that I’ve ever heard of Kagi myself, what makes it so special?

Aside from the usual conundrum of “any way to not starve or become homeless that doesn’t involve whoring out to corporations has been removed from society”, Tesla… wasn’t always like this. Musk didn’t found it. Musk didn’t build it. He just bought it so he could pretend to be clever.

Holy shit, this is a REALLY misleading headline.

if it was just him quitting, that would be terrible; it would be an anti-war person giving up their power to legally obstruct the war.

It’s “his opposition National Unity party will withdraw from the coalition government”. Unless this article is missing something, wouldn’t breaking up the coalition just basically completely paralyse Israel??

Holy fuck. I knew that AI did use above average amounts of power, but THIRTY FUCKING PERCENT added to the total emissions of a data giant like Microsoft??? That’s absurd! How the hell did they create something so inefficient??

Yeah, I love my local pizza place and I’m on good terms with the owner, but the prices have gone up enough that I’ve set a hard limit of only going there once a month, and there are some menu items that I explicitly just will not buy because they’re so overpriced.

Cost frankly does define my dietary habits. The number one reason that I don’t decide to grab the odd piece of vegan chicken to put in a bagel is because it costs 50% more than regular chicken.

While you make fundamentally good points, I think there is a core reason that balance is important to me: DnD is a multiplayer game, not a singleplayer game.

I actually think it’s fine that different classes are strong at different levels! The entire premise of Wizard is that they’re a squishy who will die if they’re sneezed on at level 1, who grows into a reality-warping god by level 20. Having someone that needs to be looked after at low levels and can then look after the team at high levels encourages teamwork!

The reason that I say DnD is so badly unbalanced is because once level 5 comes around? Casters very, VERY firmly become way better than non-casters for two reasons. Casters have AoE damage, and casters have utility. Non-casters have no utility, and because they also really struggle to increase AC, they can’t function in any role except for single-target damage. A good level 5 caster can make the rest of the party feel really lackluster because they can do in one turn what the rest of the party needs 4 or 5 turns to do (HP and AC are much less of an issue at this point too). And this gap only gets wider and wider with every passing level, which rapidly makes it less and less fun to play a non-caster.

Once level 13 hits, anyone who isn’t a full caster is completely irrelevant. That is not fun for anyone who isn’t a full caster. Hell, it’s SO badly broken at this level that it’s almost certainly the reason why Baldur’s Gate 3 only goes up to level 12- and that game already does a huge amount of buffing martials and nerfing casters. A 13th level caster can instantly beat pretty much any encounter not explicitly designed to bully them, and even then there’s a good chance they find a way to solo the encounter on turn 1 anyways.

I mean, even as a DnD player, I appreciate that you DO need to turn a profit as a company, and I enjoy my favourite hobby getting wider attention. I’m actually not opposed to them making this into a bigger franchise because I think that it IS suitable to fill that sort of Marvel role, contrary to the article. It has clearly defined heroes and villains, iconic designs, and very flexible storytelling, all of which CAN be compared to a more mature Marvel. Making a handful of recognisible heroes and villains and promoting them honestly seems like a perfectly sensible and legitimate business tactic.

HOWEVER.

As a DnD player, I also actively dislike the story design in most official content because it’s painfully generic. Everything is made to be very comfortably within the realm of mass appeal and staying within the realms of conventional fantasy. They have unspoken rules and tropes that they simply Do Not Violate and as a result they struggle to craft stories that aren’t predictable. They are noticeably complete shit at having any idea how to make a force for good that’s more powerful than the players that isn’t used as a punching bag to make the players feel like they’re in danger. And my point is that they COULD and should take more risks when doing storywriting and character design, because the nature of DnD is that even if you totally fuck something up, because everyone runs their own worlds a retcon isn’t going to destroy everything- and more than that, writing out a story, while time-consuming and requiring effort, is nowhere near the money sink that a movie is. It’s fine to take risks! Defying conventions is OK! It’s completely fine if not everyone likes each product, so long as it’s well-made on the whole!

Otherwise the game is also super unbalanced (I know this because I have extremely extensively created homebrew for it, I can tell you EXACTLY how and where it is unbalanced), although this isn’t as bad as it would be in a lot of other games because you won’t really notice the balance issues if you’re just playing a casual game with your friends. If one of your friends is trying to play the game optimally though, then they can rapidly make the game unplayable by taking advantage of especially unbalanced parts of the game.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that the absolute greatest strength of DnD is the fact that players can do whatever they want. So trying to make stuff that tells players they need to act a certain way is only going to diminish that strength.