People are homeless not because the government lacks funding, but because the government doesn’t give a damn. Those billions being given to Ukraine were never going to be spent addressing poverty had the war not happened, and if Congress suddenly had a change of heart, they’d have zero problems finding and allocating as much money as they want to anti homeless programs Ukraine war or not
Unreal Engine royalties only start after you make $1 million from a project. Even then, it’s 5%, and waived for sales done on the Epic Store (whose 13% cut is almost a third of what Steam takes). If you are a small indie dev, you won’t be paying Epic a dime unless you start rolling in some serious dough, and even when you do, 5% of your revenue for using one of the most powerful 3D game engines is pretty fair
The 3 Gorges Dam in China slowed the Earth’s rotation by .06 microseconds per day due to the amount of water moved altering the Earth’s moment of inertia
Developers are on the hook for potentially infinite losses without gaining revenue in a per install fee system. Expenses are entirely unpredictable for developers and bad actors can run basic install scripts to cost the company a lot, so if Unity stays their current course for a few more weeks, many of the larger developers using Unity will begin switching engines even if it means delays. It’s absolutely worth it for a developer to port their game over no matter the cost, because they are easily looking at no limits to their costs if they don’t
Countries have the right to expel foreign diplomats and embassies as long as they don’t arrest them or go through their stuff when they leave. The newly couped Niger junta requested the French ambassador leave and revoked his visa, but the French are still refusing to leave, claiming that because they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the new junta, they don’t have to follow the junta’s orders to leave. Regardless of your opinion of the new junta, in how does a former colonial power be in the right when they are blatantly ignoring the legal rights and sovereignty of their independent former colony’s government that is doing things by the book? They stopped sending the ambassador food and are confining him to his embassy until he leaves, especially given the current junta that is extremely gentle treatment
The dependence they had on Western technology was a key motivator against war precisely because the US can unilaterally restrict access to their tech. Going to war means losing US tech, and Russia decided that war was worth losing US tech
Unironically this is the one area where Epic Games is absolutely in the right. They have a 12% royalty on games sold on their platform and a 5% royalty on sales over $1 million for games made with Unreal Engine, with the UE royalty being waived entirely if it’s sold on the Epic Games store. They get a reasonable cut for maintaining one of the most powerful game engines and charge nearly a third of what Valve does for their storefront. If the Epic Store wasn’t so dog shit, they’d be an actual competitor to Valve
If there’s one place I’d expect to have trouble hiring, it’s the Pentagon’s IT team. They regularly deal with the most sensitive information about the US military, and need to have clearance to see all of it. That gives them an incredibly slim hiring pool, so it’s no surprise their IT team sucks
China is facing a massive traffic issue with cars that makes becoming a car-dependent society difficult. As their middle class becomes larger and wealthier, the amount of cars on the road has increased exponentially, far more than their road and highway systems were designed to handle. While the US has had over a century to build society around car ownership, China has to scramble in order to build enough infrastructure to accommodate all their new cars, a task much more difficult than building public transportation. Add in China’s heavy dependence on foreign oil imports compared to the US, and being a car centered society just doesn’t make sense for them
Ukraine has been in war economy mode for over a year now, and it’s not sustainable long term while all of the sanctions on Russia haven’t crippled their economy to the point of being unable to continue fighting. Their ability to fight Russia is largely dependent on continued western aid, largely from the US, which has become increasingly controversial politically. The current counteroffensive has been a slow, long grind without much in the way of territorial gain so far, further decreasing popular support for Ukraine in the west. If Russian sympathizers in the US government manage to block aid to Ukraine before they are able to break Russia’s defenses, the Ukrainian Armed Forces will run out of funding and equipment and be forced to negotiate best case scenario, or be overrun by the Russians worst case scenario. It is still a long time until the next US election so they should still fight, but unless they’re able to make dramatic gains like they did previously, Ukraine may have to negotiate eventually
Salt 2 is a pretty good indie pirate game. You sail around a procedurally generated archipelago doing quests for various factions while building up your ship, and it’s pretty relaxing. It’s still in development so it’s missing features like ship to ship combat, but it’s the closest thing to a single player sea of thieves
They didn’t intend for there to be a war. They fully expected to just walk in without much resistance, take over the country without much hassle similarly to how they took over Crimea, install a puppet government, and have the west barely react just as we haven’t been reacting to their annexation of parts of Georgia, Crimea, and their conflict in Donbass for years
The FOSS crowd is incredibly cringey and annoying
Any country, US or not, spying on other countries’ citizens ought to be taken as a matter of national security in the target countries. China does take it as a matter of national security, which is why, among other reasons, many foreign social media sites and services are blocked, run as separate instances from the rest of the world, or restricted heavily
Even the premium Peacock plan gave ads for Peacock content
You just need 3 largish televisions, a small TV or monitor for the top, and stuff to mount each screen in that configuration. Your PC doesn’t need to be that good unless you are doing something like gaming, just enough to run 4 1080p windows. Once you connect them, it’s fairly easy to adjust the configuration in Windows to extend and rotate the monitors to make the setup work. Depending on how you get the televisions (you can buy them used, flat screen 1080p TVs have been popular for a long time and are relatively affordable) and how you decide to mount them, you can build this setup for only a couple hundred
When the words “experimental nuclear reactor being built near you” doesn’t attract massive groups of protesters fueled by the coal companies, allowing for the tech to actually be built and tested
For decades, the Republican party has had the Baptist/Evangelical vote in the bag without having to actually do anything thanks to abortion. Republican politicians could rile up their base attacking abortion and be excused for not doing anything about it by their constituents as abortion was a constitutional right, and because abortion was a constitutional right that couldn’t be taken away, those who cared about it could still be in good conscience when they vote for a Republican. The dog caught its tail when Roe was overturned, and now that abortion can be outlawed on every level of government, Republican inaction on abortion will see their support among Baptists/Evangelicals tank. Overturning Roe is the most self damaging thing the Republican party has ever done, and now they are forced to choose between catering to religious fanatics or normal people
The software 2B2T and other major servers run is typically custom made. The reason servers like 2B2T need a player queue is because the official Minecraft server software is garbage and runs everything on a single CPU thread, placing a firm upper limit on how much stuff can run on a server. Server networks like Hypixel shuffle players through lobbies and mini games on various different servers to spread the load, but since 2B2T is a single world, they have to run a custom, highly optimized server file to be able to handle their player numbers. If Mojang would invest in developing more scalable server software, player queues would be a thing of the past without having to ban them, but Mojang would rather harass server owners for having to accommodate Mojang’s poor product than actually fix the underlying issue
Western doctrine is also largely based on the US’ needs. Artillery just isn’t practical for the US, who needs to be prepared to fight all over the world oceans away from home. Artillery is much more stationary compared to air power due to the size of the guns and the difficulty moving them, while the US can easily fly planes anywhere we need them. As such, Western doctrine became heavily reliant on having air supremacy and massive amounts of air support and our equipment was designed for that battlefield. Ukraine just doesn’t have nearly the same arial capabilities as NATO, relying much more on artillery which NATO weapons and doctrine weren’t designed around, and they’re having to figure out how to make them work without air power