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I’m right there with you. I absolutely hate Paradox’s DLC policy and I’m guessing they lose a ton of paying clients the moment they hit the store page and get a 200-500€ price tag for the full experience, or even over 100€ for just the best hits for a really old game. I know they have mouths to feed, but i really don’t like the way they do it and how they abuse their position of niche games nobody else makes. Nevertheless, even though you may choose not to purchase their expansions, you still have extremely healthy modding communities to carry you over.

Still, i wasn’t coming so much from the angle that it’s a smaller company providing better value than larger companies, rather showing to the OP that there are non multiplayer games that easily can provide over 500 hours of entertainment regarding the slighly off topic matter presented on the latter part of their comment. Of note is the fact that they don’t use grinding mechanics to do it, for the most part (x series can be a little grindy in some aspects, but not overly), which is the mark of how incompetent devs try to get more “entertainment” hours out of their games.

Stellaris, civ v, oxygen not included, city skylines, x3/rebirth/4, workers and resources: soviet republic, kerbal space program, rimworld, crusader kings 2 and 3.

Basically anything civilization/city/base/colony builder is my jam and some of them have over 2000 hours over the years. I like building perfect societies and roleplay how people live in them in my head while i do it. It’s one of the ways i relax and express creativity.

So apparently, from what i read, USAID, while it did some collateral good, was used for covert CIA foreign interventions meant to carry out incredibly damaging experiments for no reason other than CIA being CIA. A lot of these harmful missions were done under covert names like “sex changes in x country” or “lgbt support in y country”. Allegedly Trump saw this and killed the program, just out of bigotry, either before the CIA explained it to him or despite it.

Now i had doubts about this myself so i checked online from several sources and the consensus seemed that it checks out. Major news outlets wrote pieces on it. Even USAID defenders always say some variation of “even though USAID was involved in CIA operations destabilizing foreign governments, that was not its main purpose”.

So if this is true and as far as my research has lead me, i have no reason to believe it’s a fabrication, thank goodness USAID is dead. I thought the US CIA programs of destabilizing foreign governments for shits and giggles was a thing of the past, but i was unfortunately wrong and i now realize that not even aid should be accepted from the US and I’m glad Trump destroyed that program.

I don’t know about other downvoters, but i downvoted you because you said kids should be beaten into submission at school. Corporal punishment is the refuge of bad parents and it’s not a teacher’s job to harm your children that way. There is not a single justifiable reason that you need to be physically violent with a child to educate them. In fact, that only makes it worse. You either raise a fearful child or a hateful one. Either way, in my book, it’s child abuse and you were calling for it.

And boy would i cause all sorts of sky falling down trouble on the poor soul that decided to physically assault my child, undoing my job of teaching that violence is only a tool of self defense. I suffered significant corporal punishment growing up and i can guarantee it improved my life in no way.

I would say for this to happen, the biggest challenges facing Europe would be to massively develop its services and post soviet democratic countries would have to be on board with their exports losing competitiveness in the global market. Poland, for instance, is industrializing further but interesting to note that 90% of their goods market is the EU and only 10% goes of out EU. So in a way, post soviet democracies can still be goods exporters inside EU’s internal market. Letting go of industry is not something i believe post soviet democracies would ever accept.

Western, central and southern europe already survive on luxury and unique regional products to support their industry despite their high cost of living, so competitiveness is not a big issue there.

As for services, specially tech, European customers are used to having easy access to highly unregulated digital tech from the US, with union busting, privacy invasion and low taxation, that gives them an unfair edge against tech developed in Europe. Europe has begun to subsidize all European tech (you can even see some games and software with EU stickers for receiving subsidies), but i think Europe needs to tax US digital services and goods, otherwise there is no competing with massive billionaire fortunes that are president friends. There’s no competing when your competitor’s workers don’t have maternity leave, work 60-70 hours a week and have 10 days holidays a year and thank goodness nothing like that will ever fly around European unions. Trust me, Elon and Walmart tried. Without taxation motivation, there will never be a European alternative to US tech, but they don’t want to tax tech without an alternative. Catch 22.

And this is the EU. Anything that takes the US 10 years, takes the EU 20. This is good in a way, because everyone is heard and there is no crazy orange lunatic coming to change fundamental laws overnight, but to react against something like this will take a while. In the EU we’re used to wait, we understand why we wait. But international markets might not be so patient. Also by the time the EU starts changing meaningfully, it is very possible Trump is not president anymore, making the change pointless, so i see the EU doing their usual “looking busy and waiting” routine.

It might happen, just not soon.

As a European, the Euro can’t replace the dollar. It’s not about how stable it is, it’s about how many Euros there are. Whichever country will be the world reserve currency will have to produce so much currency to be used all around the world that their non digital exports will never be competitive. The Euro just isn’t produced in large enough quantities to be used as a world reserve currency, its production and distribution is tightly controlled for use in European and European partner markets. At least not right now. A long time ago some OPEC countries wanted to try out the idea of using Euros, but just couldn’t get enough liquidity to trade all the oil in Euros.

Donald Trump wants the US to both be a goods exporting powerhouse and the world reserve currency. He thinks it’s possible, that these diametrically opposed goals have a middle sweetspot where one can be just enough of a world reserve currency not to worry about debt anymore, but also a country that others depend on for manufacturing. That’s what all the tariff dancing is all about. I think he’s nuts, but hey, every economic theory needs to be tested. Just wish we were testing more sophisticated economic theories.

Anyway, as of this moment Europe is not geared for it. Not industrially, not financially and to be honest, i don’t think Europe is even into it. But it’s not impossible. It would just require a lot of changes.

My completely anedoctal reasoning is that at this moment Portugal and Spain have more pressing local fish to fry and the whole American issues are taking a backseat on the public discourse. Most people you talk to will be out of the loop over the DOGE, MAGA, nazi salute plot. Moreover the smaller volume of luxury car sales are also contributing to a lagged response. People who were going to buy Teslas made that decision a while back.

Thanks! It’s interesting to find out how differently things are in military procedure in other parts of the world.

So military question, in America do civilians salute ? I see Trump saluting in a suit. In my country that’s a no-no. Only military personnel in uniform and appropriate head apparel may salute, like all the soldiers next to Trump. Or is the president considered a military person since he’s commander in chief ?

I mean civilians can salute if they want. There’s no penalty. It just doesn’t carry any meaning from a civilian and looks kind of goofy and out of place. Military personnel can’t salute out of uniform, though. You may get disciplined over that.

You really don’t understand who you’re talking to here. The average person hasn’t heard about browser extensions. I’m serious. The amount of even engineers that work with me who are incredibly good at one specific thing, like autocad design, but don’t really know or care about general computer things is pretty high, let alone non technical personnel. I’ve had people ask me to explain extensions and how to use ad blocking software. People just want a computer that works and does the thing they want it to without fancy things.

People don’t fear the terminal, they just don’t understand it and they don’t care to memorize things to learn it. If Linux wants to be an end user desktop, you need to do everything by the GUI. What is intuitive, interesting and easy to you is a nightmare for other people. I’m assuming vice versa if the accountant gives you a 10 dimension excel spreadsheet or something. It might just be me projecting my fear of accounting excel spreadsheets.

Ah yes, the appeasement strategy. Works every time, for whoever is on the receiving end of it of course. One would think Europeans would know better, but i guess life teaches you the same lesson until you’re ready to learn.

I mean where will Microsoft stop with this ? So force people to create accounts, people create accounts, then remove them and only use local accounts or find some other loophole. Then what ? Lockdown windows usage until you have a Microsoft account with a real phone number, always connected and at least one up to date copy of birth certificate or passport ?

Isn’t the money from selling microsoft products enough ? Or is the AI slop that nobody wants so expensive to develop?

Maybe AstraZeneca CEO should figure out where the massive windfall covid vaccine profits went and invest them wisely instead of filling the pockets of shareholders. Dude got massive taxpayer investments, spent the last 5 years acquiring smaller healthcare companies, snubbed a uk plant investment because they didn’t get enough money from the taxpayers and bragged about how much money they were making about a year ago from the pipeline investments.

Clearly there isn’t enough space here for AstraZeneca’s shareholder greed and progress it seems, but it sure as hell isn’t the job of the European taxpayers to prop these guys up. Honestly i find it embarassment that a company that has been all about bragging about growth these last 5 years now complains they aren’t competitive enough because they aren’t getting enough free money.

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Oh shoot the actual Nigerian King coming up to London to sue Shell.

Do you figure they ignored his messages thinking it was just spam the first time his administration contacted them ?

Here’s a copy paste from superuser that will hopefully show you that what you said is incorrect in a way i find expresses my thoughts exactly

Magnetic Field Breakdown

Most sources state that permanent magnets lose their magnetic field strength at a rate of 1% per year. Assuming this is valid, after ~69 years, we can assume that half of the sectors in a hard drive would be corrupted (since they all lost half of their strength by this time). Obviously, this is quite a long time, but this risk is easily mitigated - simply re-write the data to the drive. How frequently you need to do this depends on the following two issues (I also go over this in my conclusion).

https://superuser.com/questions/284427/how-much-time-until-an-unused-hard-drive-loses-its-data

Tape storage is the gold standard but it’s just not realistically applicable to low scale operations or personal data storage usage. Proper long term storage HDDs do exist and are perfectly adequate to the job as i specified above and i can attest this from personal experience.

I did not meant to come across as saying that HDDs don’t suffer bit rot. However, there are specific long term storage HDDs that are built specifically to be powered up sporadically and resist external magnetic influences on the track. In a proper storage environment they will last over 5 years without being powered up and still retain all information. I know it because i use them in this exact scenario for over 2 decades. Conversely there are no such long term storage SSDs.

SSDs store information through trapped charges which most certainly lose charge through quantuum tunneling as well as generalized charge leakage. As insulation loses effectiveness, the potential barrier for the charge allows for what is normally a manageable effect, much like in the CPU like you said, to become out of the scope of error correction techniques. This is a physical limitation that cannot be overcome.