Bay 12 Games Forum

Looks like Trump's ordered hospitals not to send covid data to the CDC, but instead straight to the white house. They've got a bespoke database built by private company Palantir, which is run by Trump supporter Peter Thiel. So effectively they want to hoover up all the Covid data and stick it into some proprietary database run and managed by a third party pro-Trump company. Sounds like a nightmare for transparency, and the motivation is clear, since they'll have a private database with all the data in it, Trump can finally control those "numbers" he's always worried about.

Oh here's the best laugh in this thing so far:

While Ophiuchus IS a constellation, it isn’t a zodiac sign. The sun passes in front of it, not in it, like it does for the 12 zodiac we are familiar with.

Oh bwahahahaha!. The sun merely passes "in front" of Ophiuchus, rather than "through" it, as it does for the proper constellations.

Apparently there's a big blow-up on Twitter because of astrology.

A NASA article has pointed out that because of precessions of the axes and the general movement of the Earth and sun, the path of the sun is different through the constellations now. This includes different start and end dates for the official 12 star signs, but not only that, the sun now spends a good 3-4 weeks in the constellation of Ophiuchus (the snake). So, technically anyone born in that period should be of the Ophiuchulian star sign. Astrology fans are furious and refuse to believe it, which is odd for apparent believers in the power of the stars.

That's a very inaccurate depiction of the plot, and has the order of events mixed up. You come to an island inhabited by mercs who work for a Dr Evil type. About halfway through the game the evil dudes lose control of their genetic mutants, and those over-run the island. Most of the people you haven't fought were killed off by the mutants already. So you spend a lot of time fighting across the wilderness first against the mercs and later against the mutants, and you need to focus on survival skills here, something the 2nd game doesn't really have. So that's something #1 has going for it: it's survival based, limited ammo, no "free refills" like the 2nd game and later. If you want a wilderness shooter with survival and ammo management that matters, you'd go the first game. It gets pretty difficult and it's slow going, so you need to use a mix of stealth and combat if you want any hope of survival. So think of it as a steal / survival shooter mix. Then right at the end you get tricked into injecting some mutagen. But that's a trick by literally the final boss on the island, and you get the antidote. So no, you don't "turn into a mutant" then murder everyone. That never happens.

Note that in Far Cry #2, while in the opening you see civilians, the civilians have basically ceased to exist by the time you actually have control of the character all the of civilians have mysteriously vanished. The ethics in that game are if anything, much worse, since you work for murderers and murder the people you work for as soon as a higher bidder comes along, along with pretty much everyone you meet when you're out and about, in an entire supposedly populated country rather than an evil scientist's island base.

Where #1 has it over #2 is because they don't try and mesh everything into one GTA-style open world, so the set pieces are architectural far more distinctive. It's a far less forgiving game too, so that could count either way depending on what type of game you want to play. In Far Cry 2, I worked out that if you got the jeep with the explosive cannon you could basically sit back and shell everything to death and if you were careful you could keep that jeep alive pretty much permanently. The game was far easier then. I'd jump in and replay Far Cry 1 on a harder difficulty before bothering with #2 again. #2 is just a sandbox.

Two different video cards both not working on the slot could point to something being wrong with the board. I wouldn't just assume that slot is working for graphics because it detected a Wifi card in the slot. So, buyer beware before spending money on a whole new video card in the hopes that that one works.

If you have a damaged video card there are several ways it can manifest. Firstly, the machine might just not boot. Second, it could boot but not register any card there. Third, it could identify the card but there are any of a number of things that go wrong with it. For example, Windows starts up but you get a bluescreen of death, since it tries to access the hardware for the additional screen but fails.

if both cards are doing the exact same thing with the exact same symptoms then that makes it a little less likely it's the cards and a little more likely it's the board.

The final point of which is clearly apparent because say 1 kilo of potatoes costs say $1 where a kilo of beef costs about $10, despite taking up 36 times as much land. If it was merely about which thing you wanted to grow on the land you'd clearly choose the potatoes. Which by itself should be the proof that they can't grow potatoes there. Another way of looking at it, if it was merely about them putting cows on perfectly good land that could just grow potatoes, because of greed/profit, then they'd do that right now and stick cows in instead of potatoes in prime potato-growing regions rather than just have the cows out in the midwestern scrublands.

So the land isn't comparable and arguing about how much room things take up is silly. The potatoes are grown where they are because that's a prime potato-growing region, and it's more economical to put potatoes there instead of cows, and the cows are grown where they are because that's prime cow-growing region and it's more economical to put cows there instead of potatoes. In both cases, they choose whatever will make the most food for the least space, in that region, so saying there's some other potato-growing region where they have higher food density thus there's a problem with the cow grazing is a stupid argument

EDIT: also the biodiversity point isn't really relevant. with less grazing animals you'd need to compensate with more land turned over to intensive cropping, which may be worse for biodiversity in those regions. At least you can have native grasses growing in the pasture lands.

Sure, that land could go to growing additional corn or potatoes, but there is in fact other land that could go to that, but doesn't, already. More people could grow more potatoes and absolutely saturate the potato market, but it wouldn't necessarily be sustainable to do that. The amount of potatoes we grow isn't constrained by the amount of land we have, it's constrained by the fact that people need to make a net profit off growing potatoes, so the amount we grow is a set ratio based on how much it costs to grow, process and distribute relative to the amount of demand that exists. Prices will fall and margins will go negative if they over-produce potatoes, and people will be pushed out of the market, meaning production will fall again, which is why that doesn't really happen already. If you want to make foodstuffs from potatoes more abundant, you don't need more land you need to streamline the production so that it's cheaper. higher demand for potato-growing land will follow from that, not the other way around.

If they can't do the feedlot thing so they don't want to grow the stuff you mentioned, there's no reason to expect them to switch to the corn, potatoes etc already unless there's some economic incentive to do that, and you've just massively reduced the value of their land, by definition, since you're preventing them from growing the thing that's the most economically viable out of all their options. The effect of doing so would be like the logic behind tariffs. i.e. bad logic. There's also the problem that really cheap food floods into poor countries as imports and this is in fact a big cause of third-world unemployment and collapse of rural economies, since you cannot really compete with international agribusiness. Just producing more food isn't necessarily a solution, so saying that we could switch those feedlots to producing more potatoes, corn, wheat and what have you isn't necessarily going to be a good thing.

Quote from: Reelya on July 11, 2020, 11:08:09 pm

using animal dung as their cooking fuel (which kills hundreds of thousands of children each year).

What is the danger? fire accident, tiny particles, or poisonous chemicals?

Particles.

https://www.thethirdpole.net/2014/07/16/cook-wood-dung/

The World Health Organization Household Air Pollution and Health report released in March this year states that over 50% of premature deaths among children under five are due to pneumonia caused by particulate matter (soot) inhaled from household air pollution. Over 3.8 million premature deaths annually from non-communicable diseases including stroke, ischemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer are attributed to exposure to household air pollution, adds the report.

India faces a significant challenge in providing access to adequate and affordable energy. Roughly 85% of rural Indian households are dependent on traditional biomass fuels for their cooking energy requirements
...
“Most villagers think that since cow dung is easily available and is for free, why should they spend money on buying LPG (cooking gas) connections or gas stoves,” elaborates Kandath. “Moreover, since cooking and organizing fuel is a woman’s job, the men are far from keen to invest any money in it.”

So this effectively kills more children under 5 worldwide than literally every other cause put together, and a lot of it is in fact cow dung rather than wood since wood has some value whereas the cow dung is abundant and doesn't cost anything.