Cocodapuf

I've always found this interesting. Human beings (or any vertebrates I suppose) are really more of a colony than a single being. And it's not just a technicality, it's meaningful. Much of that colony interacts with your nervous system and affects your moods and behavior. You think you have total control of your mind, but you would think and act differently with a different balance of gut bacteria. Chew on that for a while...

Yeah, the CIA is a constant problem. They spend a lot of money to spy on a lot of people in extraordinarily dumb and inefficient ways, including a lot of Americans (which to be clear, is both illegal and not their fucking job). They meddle in the affairs of foreign countries in ways that to my knowledge, have only ever worked in the best interest of dictators or terrorists. They actively subvert the separation of powers within the US government by wasting absurd amounts of funding to duplicate the capabilities that other agencies are supposed to be providing them...

Side note here, you know the fastest airplane ever made, the SR-71 blackbird? Well the CIA wanted some, but only the air force had them. There was a way for the CIA to officially request intel from the air force, but they didn't want to do that, so they got lockheed to make them their own special version called the A-12. Now the Blackbird was also one of the most expensive planes to operate in history, the A-12 was not really any different in that regard. But in general, the air force had much more infrastructure to help keep costs to a minimum. Basically, the air force is good with planes. The CIA, they're good at burning money and ignoring civil rights.

Don't even get me started on the prism program. Fuck the CIA. Fuck mass surveillance. Get real jobs.

This appears to be my local stadium!

I don't understand your gripe here. What's wrong with those terms?

It looks to me like he's retiring, happy and rich.

Hey, if I've offended you, I do apologize for that, it truly wasn't my goal. But I do strongly disagree (which is allowed).

And I think it's pretty obvious that microtransactions could never, ever, possibly be more lucrative for Valve than selling games. It's just a numbers thing. I mean, dlc can sometimes make more money than game sales for some titles, that's a fact. But Valve has what, a dozen games that they could potentially sell dlc for? That's a pretty hard limit. Whereas they also make money on every title sold in the store, and there are currently over 10,000 titles available from the steam store. That's just like, a lot more than a dozen...

Um, no?

I guess this must be surprising to hear, but it's just easier to sell content of actual value than bullshit. Yeah... some people will buy bullshit, and yeah, one can take advantage of those people, but having actual products is still a better business model.

But hey, if you've got these things all figured out, totally start your own game studio/global digital distribution system. Go make bank on microtransaction garbage.

I mean, they get a sizable cut from the majority of games sold on PC. I think that's their business model.

I hear you about loot boxes and skins and stuff. It's just, that has to be a small part of their total profit.

what's the worst they'll do? chain you to the desk and make you work at gunpoi-- yeah... they'd probably do that...

Yeah, he probably would. Luckily He doesn't have enough ICE agents to do that. And as ICE is his only personal army, that's the force he'd have to use.

In other words, he's all talk, he's out of cards to play here.

The picture isn't great, but I'll bet the framerate is amazing!

That's a good post, and you're right about nearly all of it. I'm with you all the way until your conclusion.

Without the experience of building and sustaining an underwater base, we die on Mars, if we can even get there in the first place.

A few things, first, there's no doubt that we could have gotten there in the 60s we had the technology then, and we still do. But that's obviously not the hard part.

Second, no part of a sustained base in space requires a base underwater, they're a mostly different set of challenges. Honestly, I expect time will tell on this one (and pretty soon), the US and China are both racing to put a base on the moon, nobody to my knowledge, is planning a deep sea base.

And it's quite understood that the moon is a stepping stone, if you can find water there, that's the essential material needed to sustain life. But it's also exactly what you need to produce rocket fuel. If you create a spacecraft capable of getting to the moon, refuelling there would allow you to get to anywhere else in the solar system. So while an underwater base could teach some of these lessons, I expect that In practice, a moon base will teach us how to live everywhere else in space. Because not only is that closer to the goal, it's what we're actively doing.

Yeah, that's pretty great. I really want to believe that's 100% true and not an exaggeration in any way. Tuffy for the win.