People forget that national guard isn’t a full time position. It’s usually one weekend a month and one week a year.

So calling them up is very disruptive to them, they have jobs and lives that are being massively interrupted by a call up. When it’s to deal with flooding or wild fires, or like any sort of actual emergency, that disruption is probably justified to them.

This is definitely pissing off a lot of them, especially given that they’re best positioned to see what a non issue the situation on the ground is.

“Wait, you mean our effort to attract more people with good educations to improve our knowledge base and marketability to businesses might attract people who have… gasp educations?”

It’s so crazy to me that people will rush out and try and ban tools like these, rather than force car companies to use more secure systems. Like, banning these is futile, they’re not that complex of a device to make, the core issue here is that car companies have fallen over them selves to be “tech forward” to justify pushing further in to the premium price range, but have completely failed to secure their systems.

We do love our takoma park retirees.

The funny thing is that “old white people” is exactly who this is for. That is the demographic that cares most strongly about “crime rates in cities” despite that demographic being least likely to actually live in a city.

Some suburbanites out past Arlington might like it, but probably not enough to vote for trump since he just fired a bunch of them. This isn’t a show for the DC, Maryland, north West Virginia area. It’s a show for where their base actually lives.

there probably shouldn’t be a lot of friction for things the player isn’t supposed to be focused on, like say the interface should be unobtrusive and easy to navigate, a player probably shouldn’t have to use moon logic to figure out how to open a door. Things that aren’t the focus shouldn’t require the player’s focus.

but a story driven game should have the player focusing on the story, not actively encouraging them to ignore it!

Players who don’t care about the story would probably be better served by a different game altogether.

the industry has also be caught in the grips of budget gigantism by an influx of investor cash for the past decade.

Outside investors saw dollar signs with the rapid growth of the market, and also huge financial successes like fortnight. So they were willing to put up a lot of funding in hopes of outsized returns. Pressure from investors and management meant appealing to the largest audience possible, and also chasing the latest trends. Despite the huge budgets, the games were unfocused and bad, both from trying to appeal to too many audiences, and constantly changing direction during development to chase trends.

I think that’s kind of the kicker, a lot of studios and franchises got big based on the quality of their story telling, but did poorly with audiences that were just there for the gameplay. The gameplay in these games is there to serve the story, to support it and facilitate it, not to shine by it’s own merits. But if you’re just there for the gameplay and don’t care about the story, then the gameplay will be boring.

So they’ve sanded down the story to make it easier for people who don’t care about it to follow what’s going on, and thus make the gameplay work for them…

But now you have a story built to serve gameplay, and gameplay built to serve the story. Nether is good on its own merits, so no one really likes it.

To me it feels like there is a fundamental dissonance in the video game industry. Where major publishers and studios can’t seem to internalize that there are two things that people might come to a game for; Video games as experiences, narratives, things to be explored; and video games as … well games, a set of mechanics to be interacted with, to be challenged by. This isn’t to say a game can’t be good at both, but many games are weighted one way or another.

Factorio is a truly absorbing gameplay experience, but it doesn’t really have a story beyond what is needed to frame and flavor the gameplay.

“Vampire the masquerade: bloodlines” is a classic of atmosphere, character interaction and role play, but just about everyone who played it will tell you the combat is serviceable at best, and there is one level in particular that most people just remove with a mod because it’s just combat, with no dialog or interactions with other characters.

So many major studios and publishers seem to routinely focus on the wrong elements of previously successful games. Taking the wrong lessons and misunderstanding what made previous title’s a huge success.

People are not coming to your story based RPG to play it mindlessly while listening to a podcast or audio book. If people are doing that, then clearly they’re not coming to it for the story, and the solution to that issue is to write a better story or refocus around what ever they are coming for.

Oh boy, I can’t wait for the thriving trade in VPN accounts made outside of the UK then sold to UK citizens by a third party.

Realistically, I don’t think trump is getting what he wants out of all this, normalization is not the goal, none of this is particularly exceptional in regards to how the national guard has been used in the pass. Situations like the battle of blair mountain for example.

Far more likely he’s trying to instigate chaos, create news stories he can spin to his base about how out of control things are, attempt to justify to them further consolidation of power, as well as create a plausibly deniable excuse to invoke legitimately more extreme measures like the insurrection act that would let him straight up ignore PC.

Law as written, calling them up was legal, and, law as written the governor had no authority to countermand that. Was the civil disturbance real? Not really. Was the behavior of the ICE agents legal, definitely not. But, calling up the national guard just in case there is a civil disturbance is legal. And the president doing so against the will of the governor is also legal, as can be seen with the Little Rock nine in 1957. The governor saying “no don’t actually” would have been ignored by the national guard, and ultimately would have been worse then what happened. The situation didn’t escalate and thus trump didn’t really get what he wanted.

It’s going to keep happening though and something will break at some point. It’s also worth pointing out that newsome is hardly “the left” most of the Democratic Party isn’t “the left”. And they’re going to sleep walk through this national crisis because that’s what’s most convenient to them.

I mean, if border patrol agents don’t have to identify them selves, who’s to say this other armored group hiding their identity and refusing to show proof aren’t also border patrol agents?

In all honesty I think the point of a lot of the border patrol methods are like this to encourage certain groups that want to harass minorities to start doing exactly this.

Governors can’t call up the national guard if they’v been federalized. Federalization super secedes governor orders.

Pot calls the kettle black.

Like, they’re both liars. Both are making unreasonable promises to suck up as much capital as possible.

Could maybe ad another layer that selects a smaller group from among them.

“No, you see, we promise all this tech is real and awesome. It’s totally another hyper growth market that will drive economic development! Ignore the fact we’re slipping in to recession despite this being a “booming” market.”

The thing is, companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are already profitable, so it could lose them huge amounts of money, with no real meaningful benefit to user retention or B2B sales, but the companies as a whole would still be profitable. It could be a huge money black hole, but they continue to chase it out of unjustified FOMO and in an attempt to keep share prices high through misplaced investor confidence.

Apple’s share price has taken a pretty big hit from the perception that they’re “falling behind” on AI, even if they’ve mostly just backed away from it because users didn’t like it when it was shoved in their face. Other companies are probably looking at that and saying “hey, we’d rather keep the stock market happy and our share prices high rather than stop wasting money on this”.

It’s so disingenuous and absurd to claim this is a AI problem. It’s an over saturation of qualified individuals in a field, problem. These companies and executives are just using AI as a cover story to hide the fact that the industry is not growing fast enough to employ the number of skilled professionals in the field. This was the point of the whole “learn to code” talking points. Executives and shareholders wanted an over-saturation in the field so as to push down wages and reduce the bargaining power of employees.

This situation kind of hammers home the importance of a robust social safety net, strong unions, minimum wages that keep up with inflation, and maintaining an affordable cost of living. There being a saturation in one job market should not doom people to poverty conditions. Even a job at chipotle should pay well enough to live comfortably on, and workers there should have enough bargaining power to ensure decent treatment.

Like, we need to act collectively to ensure stability and prosperity. There is no path that someone can take individually to ensure these things, no escape hatch to prosperity for “hard workers”. “Learning to code” and “Get a CS degree” seemed like a straight forward answer, but here we are.