Spider

Disadvantages of Gerrymandering:

• the number of representatives for each party elected do not match the population’s actual preferences.
• reduced competetion between political parties means the population’s needs receive less attention.

Disadvantages of a one party dictatorship:

• The number of representatives for each party elected do not match the population’s actual preferences.
• Absent competetion between political parties means the population’s needs receive no attention.
• no checks and balances means no bill of rights exists.
• no checks and balances also means no regulation to protect the population’s needs.
• possible human extinction in nuclear winter.

I think it’s possible for digital sales, as opposed to subscriptions, might become a viable business model.

Everything is in subscriptions because its possible to mitigate that 30% tax by doing bulk inventory magic and pooling resources. No customer would pay an extra 30% on every individual transaction when they feel that owning something digitally should be cheaper than owning it physically. Thats why Google Play Movies/books/whatever is like pretty much the only pay-for-digital license thing in the play store and all the other 3rd parties are left only giving out rental subscriptions. 30% is simply far too much to add onto every item.

Oh, I just got back from there.

For a vacation less than 90 days, you only need a passport from your home country, and proof of your return flight in less than 90 days. Drugs were covered in another comment, but dont bring veggies or meat products into Japan, even if its like a Slim Jim thing you got at the airport, they’ll give you a hard time over it. The trip can be long, so its worth planning it out to give your future tired self less things to think about. Expect to be sleep deprived your first 2 days.

Travel agencies are good for booking hotels in advance, which i highly reccomend to do 1 month before. I stayed 2 weeks and that I think was a great amount of time. I booked the hotels and plane in advance, then had $2000 in savings to convert to cash yen for the actual trip. Use cash, Japan is very cash heavy. That was way more than enough spending money actually, i probably could have done it with half that amount. Fall time has great weather, and I avoided the more expensive spring season / cherry blossom bloom. That sounds nice, but tickets are more expensive that time of year.

Travelling in Japan, there’s the fast way and there’s the cheap way. For trains, they have the shinkansen and the regular regional trains, and for roads theres the side streets and the expressway. Beware expressway tolls. Getting out of Osaka wasnt too bad but getting back in beaned my wallet for ~$90 USD. Theres toll gates less than 5 minutes apart there. If you have 4 or more people in a car the expressway might be cheaper than the shinkansen, which you need individual tickets for each person. Using the expressway isn’t required, you can take side streets the whole way.

I had local friends who knew the language and could drive. They made my trip amazing. I tried to study some japanese language but when it really came time to interact with people i could not cut it. I really needed my friends to do anything more than sightsee and shop outside of tourist traps. My appearance and dress alone indicated me as an Obvious Foreigner and so people were quick to help and give me menus to point at. Even if your speaking skills were terrible, manners make up for it. Learn the local customs and formal etiquette, and people should forgive awful broken sentences and be patient with you. If you remember only one phrase: sumimasen. It’s excuse me / sorry / can i have your attention all rolled into one phrase.

Beds really changed the whole game.

Building a base didn’t just mean a place to put your chests, it also had to be a place worth spending the whole night in. I cared a lot about making the interior a nice place to be. And the exterior of the base had to be a good fort too because you couldnt skip all the monster spawns at night.

Back then I took minecraft to be like a fort building game. Explore by day and craft by night. The first night I spent huddled in a small dark grave i dug for myself in a wall. It taught me that a good base was important.

I think beds were added in the halloween update if i remember right. I was blown away how they skipped monster spawning. That’s when I felt the game changed direction the hardest, because you no longer needed a base to survive.

A lot of the time its impatient management who want the fastest solution right now, demanding their jenga tower built from hollowing out the middle and never allowing time to fill in the gaps with any new blocks.

But i’ve also seen just plain inexperience from devs who have never seen a project become technically bankrupt. Some people just carry the expectations for a short lived app into a constantly iterated long lived app, not realizing that is the way to crunch and missed deadlines.

Compounding the inexperience issue is the use of bad architecture. Architecture is a bigger picture thing, not something to bang together a bunch of use cases and a bunch of factories. The purpose of architecture is to keep development easy and smooth for now and the future. If it doesnt feel nice to work in, it’s not doing its job. If devs keep trying to cheat it, its time to add convienience tools to encourage them to do it right.

Clean Architecture for example is very nice, it really shines in projects intended to be iterated continuously on for over 5 years and many more. It mitigates the pain of replacing and upgrading old obsolete stuff. Using it for one marketing campaign app that’s going to live for only 3 months is overkill though. For very short projects, you can see how its the wrong tool for the job.

Selecting the right architecture involves understanding the patterns used and knowing what problems those patterns were meant to solve. Thats the way to know if those problems are relevant to your project.