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Genuinely curious:
Is the author saying that ACO and VBC were decent ideas that got UHG’s fingers grafted into the legal structure, or are they just saying that ACO and VBC are bad in general?
And I knew that we had some awful structures within our healthcare system, but I LOATHE UHG and didn’t realize that they OWN our medical system. Disgusting.
Been playing Dishonored for the first time and really enjoying it. I’m only at the bridge and trying to play a low/no kill game. I’m not succeeding just yet, but it’s been really enjoyable and they do stealth really well. I’m baffled that they mismanaged to get the team that made this and Prey to push out Redfall? Man.
Just picked up FFVII after the second or third hiatus or my third or fourth attempt to play it. FINALLY made it to the Nibelheim story and past Midgard. And that somehow still manages to work on me as a first time player.
Just beat Banner Saga 1 and have never felt so much like a failure after “beating” a game. That game is trying to unseat This War of Mine for decisions regretted/minute.
I’m wanting to start up my Nintendo series playthroughs again by either starting Mario Galaxy 2 or trying to remember what on earth was happening in Majora’s Mask (3DS) something about the water temple maybe?
I beat Hyper Light Drifter for the first time. And I think I spent some time on the new Mario kart levels, though that might have been last week.
HLP is a fascinating game with a novel approach to gameplay and world building. A few controls issues annoyed me, but they were growing pains and not fully learning the system. I love games that use that particular art style. I think I’m doing Mario Galaxy next.
I’m trying to figure out my second Voucher game to get.
My top choices are: Arceus - I enjoy pokemon, but it sounds like a lot of “research” busy work. Pikmin 4 - I haven’t clicked with Pikmin demos previously, but the idea has always seemed pretty interesting if I’d let it go farther. Mario Wonder - feels shorter, and more peripheral to my interest, but I’ve heard great things. Xenoblade 3 - I’ve only played XBX before and not all the way through. RPGs aren’t completely my thing, but I’ve heard great things.
None of them are THE game I’m after with pros and cons to each. The decision paralysis is rough and I don’t see anything worth waiting for before May.
For me, my “misery is the point” game was This War of Mine. I got it just before Ukraine, but still couldn’t stomach it. My first character had a kid that was constantly crying and whimpering and I just couldn’t do it. I was bad at it—if you can be good. I couldn’t help others in the ways that I wanted to. I couldn’t stop the whimpering. Then I went out as someone else and came back and the dad and kid left. And I had to stop there for a bit.
I set it down to come back later, then Ukraine happened. Where it was hard to stomach while I knew this was hypothetical and the Euro-setting was pretty abstracted from the current reality there—though still very present elsewhere—knowing that people on the ground were looking and sounding similar to what was happening in game and seeing that in news daily just cut off any desire I had to play. It’s powerful and DEEPLY empathetic, but that spiral of misery and failure was the point and it made it in spades.
It’s less the repaired retail market (which they control on Amazon at least) and more the “I could repair this for cheaper than half of a new phone” lost sales. They’ve been quietly letting that group slip by for years of progressively more expensive to “repair” (read, “swap modules”) while people who could get a basic repair done for cheap are pushed to buy new phones instead.
What are the holes that can be poked into this as written? I firmly believe Apple is still against repair that would eat into their new sales. So where does this, as written, give them the room to keep that going?
Is it just that they can continue to make their “screen issue = replace whole top shell of laptop” and similar the default and draw the line there, standardizing high-cost repairs even if it’s just a wire or small component replacement? If they don’t allow ANY standard repairs more granular than swap module for module, they don’t have to provide more granular resources than that. I’m not fully up on what repairs Apple authorizes.
This is definitely a win to some degree, though. But when your opponent goes to your side and draws a line, that always gives me the chills.
This is a gross overreach. Just stop.
I feel like the sci-fi trope of an ai that chews through everything in its way to achieve a single goal with no consideration for complexity or other factors isn’t sci-fi, but it also isn’t the ai that’s doing it. There are groups like the ESRB who simply want to reduce their job to a single goal with no consideration for complexity or other factors likely these children’s privacy (which should be one of ESRB’s goals, arguably).
Just like in those stories, these groups are chewing through other aspects of life that are absolutely significant in order to optimize a single metric to the exclusion of all else.
So, ignoring the fees involved in making it happen at all (which I assume the person did, because wow.) Say they spend ⅓ the price of the car to get ⅔ again as much use out of it. That’s a profit. They’re probably looking at replacing the car and not the battery when thinking about it, so it’s really good then. And they probably assume the device is transferable, so they can get more than one use out of the investment.
So they’re selling themselves on almost 2x performance that they can apply to all future batteries or cars and thus they extend the life of each car in the fleet by a lot.
And if it’s doesn’t live up to the claims, they pay ‘nothing’ and reap any benefits they managed to get out of it. And SURELY it would give at least SOME benefit, right?!
It’s absolutely stupid and foolish, but it’s not one single thing that makes it stupid or foolish, it’s a cascade of assumptions and estimations that makes something stupid sound plausible. There’s a world where the person “logic-ed” their way into buying this scheme—and either way it was a scheme—that was sold to them as no-lose.
They just had to forget all the other associated costs. The real world is probably either that they were completely incompetent and bought “battery rejuvenation technology” or that they tried to payout to a buddy and were had.
There’s a reality here where someone saw this as a no-lose situation. Either:
A. We get some improvement, but it doesn’t reach their claims so we don’t go forward.
Or
B. We get the promised improvement and it’s actually worth it.
They missed a few obvious issues in that the cars may become safe or get worse longevity from the experiment. That and the contract process took time and money if they had a reasonable expectation of failure.
Still, it’s not entirely stupid and so long as Mullen got NOTHING besides a scam record, this could be a win.
For me, TotK has been great for forgetting what’s next. The whole game is chunked into small little tasks that string together. It’s rare that I’ve managed to set a goal and gone straight to it. It’s usually “warp to x in order to do y but now, z is on the way and it says to go to b. But b redirects me to do g,h, i, and j before I can fight my way to c. Aaaand whoops I just finished temple and I was just trying to deliver eggs to the shop keep.
That may not be to your taste, but I’m enjoying the happy accident moments of the game. I feel like a diagram of the quest flow would look similar to a technical diagram for the whole us postal system. Just play in the sandbox and have fun. You’ll eventually get where you’re going!
I’m disappointed I didn’t see a piracy parody of this before seeing this. Come on internet.