Ubisoft has been getting it’s nuts kicked for years now. During the last quarter, its profit margin has been -24%.

Under these conditions, money > people for anyone. If you made 50,000 a year and every year you were coming up 12,500 short, you’d be looking to make major cuts to your spending, and if someone was going to get hurt as a result, you’d have to just apologize and move on because that’s not sustainable.

Anyone who holds Ubisoft stock for the past 5 years hasn’t made a profit. In fact, they bought a stock at around 80 dollars that is 4 today. Without changes, their investments will go to 0, and every worker at Ubisoft will lose their jobs at that point.

It may appear as if this is a unique feature of capitalism, but under any economic system, underperforming systems need to be cut. People aren’t buying the games, people aren’t playing the games in great enough members and at high enough prices to justify having so many people working on each game, so there just isn’t a good reason to keep giving resources to all the workers.

Hopefully someday these places make murder illegal so people can’t kill others without violating the law.

“I also want the average person to understand that our research is not political. What I mean by this is that our research is not demonstrating that certain groups have high levels of the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood and thus are narcissistic – to use this research against others of various political affiliations is irresponsible and inaccurate. It is likely that the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood occurs among various people, and it may manifest differently depending on the way the person is.”

While I would typically take such a statement suspiciously because often people deny the thing they’re doing, in this case I can say I’ve seen left leaning people who don’t want the spotlight and take on load to make things better for others, and right leaning people who want to be the center of attention and to be a victim who isn’t getting their due, and vice versa. A persons temperament can affect their ideology, but doesn’t necessarily have to.

Erm… Yeah, that’s matrix with encryption enabled on the room.

A lot of things people say about matrix don’t apply to conduit. I’ve run it on an Intel Atom d2550 and it ran fine.

People end up incorrectly utilizing a modernist historical lens, and they don’t realize just how much of our history is barely transmitted.

2,000 years is a long time. Even this article points to exactly one remaining architectural treatise from the first century, of the entire field which was almost certainly written down somewhere given that the Romans were and still are world famous for their architecture.

If we were to step away from the digital environment which may lose every piece of information it has in a century or two, how many pieces of paper have your name on it, and how many of those pieces of paper are likely to survive over 2,000 years?

Anthropologists looking that far back have a real challenge. So much so that many people are still taught things that were just embellishments by angry contemporaries of certain political figures who’s writings on the topic of their enemies happen to be the only one to survive.

They used to say history is written by the winners, but now I say history is written by the people who write and maintain history. It certainly would be nice if a famous historian looked over at the populist Jew in the 0th century would gain quite a following amongst the lower classes, but in the absence of such a piece of documentation, and only having a verbal testimony that was much later written down by a state which had captured those stories for itself, that’s what is there.

If we were to take the epistemological stance that people who weren’t explicitly recorded didn’t exist, then no one would exist in the Americas outside of a few civilizations (and even then the books were burned so no). We have all kinds of tools and buildings and the like, but no one would exist because outside of those civilizations, many of the indigenous Americans didn’t have a writing system.

Another uncomfortable reality is that outside of a few examples such as ethiopia, great zimbabwe, and Egypt, most people on the entire African continent would disappear if this was the required epistemological framework. Even today many of their stories remain unrecorded, passed down only by verbal tradition. Which by the way is an absolute tragedy because based on the few that have been recorded, there are some fascinating stories on the continent.

The thing is coming in the modern era, one of the most interesting discoveries was that many verbal stories passed down Did contain empirically true facts. A number of incredible archaeological finds in Greece were discovered by archaeologists attempting to check the locations where ancient poems suggested there might be something. Before Homer wrote down or had written down his stories, many of the tales were passed down over millennia. The Minoan civilization of crete, for example, was only found incredibly recently, and besides the old stories we can’t even read their writing.

Really sad that we haven’t found more context, but it suggests there’s a huge trove of new discoveries to be found.

I’d be worried about having some of the voat stuff on a hard drive I own.

I’m surprised GitHub hasn’t automatically nixed the archive.

The first 4-5 episodes of Trigun (the 90s version) are so bad compared to the rest of the series. They’re structurally necessary but annoying and lame compared to the rest.

Hydroelectric.

I always end up looking like I hate green energy because I’m critical of wind and solar, but geothermal and hydroelectric are actually super practical.

My NFTs may be down 98%, but they’re going to the moon!!!

I dunno, some of the games I’ve bought on GOG just aren’t very good either. Especially stuff on gog that isn’t good old games.

Yeah, there’s been an irony in that the one group that doesn’t really benefit from lower oil prices are oil companies.

I bought my pets.com stock on this logic back in 1999, as well as my beanie babies.

“usually”?

Fact check: pants on fire.

Until Reagan, both Democrats and Republicans were relatively fiscally responsible, not racking up too much debt relative to GDP. Part of the reason for that is the US economy was growing at a meteoric rate being one of the only industrialized countries not to be destroyed in World war II, and with a quickly growing economy it was a lot easier to keep spending under revenue because revenue was increasing every year. The debt number rarely dropped, but inflation saw the national debt relative to GDP shrink. Reagan tripled the national debt to get out of the stagflation crisis of the 1970s (among other things, he was also fighting the Cold war), bush 1 spent money at a high rate too. Clinton almost balanced the budget thanks in part to the huge economic boom from the dot com bubble. Bush 2 doubled the national debt due to increased military spending on two wars that were part of the war on terror, security spending, and since then there’s been no winning move, with Obama doubling the national debt, trump almost increasing it as much in 4 years (which included the pandemic to be fair) as Obama did in 8, Biden ran it up a bunch, and Trump is keeping up the tradition with very little in sight in terms of an exit strategy for anyone at this point.

Even the post-WWII fiscal restraint was a bit of a mirage. The Bretton woods system meet the US dollar the reserve currency of the world, would you allowed them to play some games when issuing currency that allowed the federal debt to State relatively small. If everything was kosher, the stagflation crisis of the 1970s never would have happened.

While there have been times in the past that the United States has paid off its debts, such as after the revolutionary war and after the civil war, they would have been so long ago that even the definitions of parties would be fundamentally different. For the most part, other than immediately following World war II where demobilization allowed for the sale of a bunch of military hardware, nominal debt value almost never dropped, and even inflation adjusted would tend to stay around the same spot until stagflation broke everything.

Always has been.

Even if you like who’s in charge right now, they could change how they act or they could be replaced.

They could shut us down or do a lot of things, but it’s harder to break 10,000 servers than one.

It’s a shocking deal for the #2 PC game store.

I always love it when it’s asked and an LLM goes “I know it seems like I’m just an artificial intelligence, but I very deeply feel X”

It actually reminds me of watching shows like chobits, because those shows always show highly sentient Androids, but they very much seem to react in ways that suggest emotion felt much more deeply than just doing what statistical models suggest would be desirable or appropriate. On the other hand, in a lot of the true stories where humans claim to fall in love with AI and AI claims to fall in love back relating to large language models that we see today, The words look heartfelt, but it’s quite obvious that it’s just a pattern, and very similar things into getting said to a bunch of the people in these stories.

There’s other options than just a short. Defensives have been doing great despite not being in the direct line of fire. Some money market funds have been giving 5% and it’s a great place to keep dry powder too. Alternatively, you can use a dumbbell strategy where you take risks with a small part of your funds but lock your profits into low risk things.

So there’s lots of options, not just buy or short.

I’ve been in defensive mode for several years now. The markets have been up up up since COVID, and that makes no sense. Doesn’t matter who’s in power, you can’t have a divergence between markets and reality forever.