peekaboo 
I remember holding a presentation about perovskite and multi-layer "tandem" solar cells for a green science fair in secondary school. I did it together with someone and the presentation was well received. I have fond memories of learning about this.
Also Total Recall
Reminds me of the Nisour Square Massacre in Baghdad by Blackwater mercenaries:
One of the senior military officers who testified before the grand jury, Col. Michael Tarsa, said that he rushed to the scene and came upon a “white Kia with two corpses inside, decimated with bullet holes and on fire,” the report said. He also saw other nearby vehicles “riddled with bullet holes,” even though they were “apparently fleeing the shooting.”
For the record, this isn't in China. It's a project in Malaysia near Singapore that is targeted at rich people. It's basically a "sustainable" gated community.
And by "sustainable" I mean that they destroyed wetlands to build it.
It was a project by a Chinese housing developer and was an extension of the real estate bubble over there. A lot of buyers were Chinese, however, according to Wikipedia:
initial strong sales from China collapsed after its leader Xi Jinping implemented currency controls, including a $50,000 annual cap on how much buyers could spend outside the country.
The developer responsible is one of the big shots that suffered when the housing bubble was forced to pop. I have no qualms riffing on this particular project.
Sounds like what we have in the Netherlands, pretty much exactly.
As a Mega Man fan (Inafune was the steward of the franchise until he left), I apologise.
For me it's the Nintendo 3DS. Still have my white original 3DS from 11 years ago, jailbreaked it a year ago. I also played on my niece's DS as a kid, moslty Mario Kart DS, New Super Mario Bros. and Mario 64 DS. And Mega Man Star Force, the most impactful game in my life, is a DS game that I played on my 3DS. I'm very fond of the DS aesthetic.
The 3DS has plenty of good games on its own, but it can also play DS and GBA games natively, each with huge game libraries and lots of amazing titles. It can emulate NES, SNES and even Genesis pretty well too. The default UI is very pleasant and calming, it has a charm like the Wii and WiiU that became completely lost in the Switch. And the homebrew scene is super lively and still evolving.
I also just love the DS/3DS as a concept: it's the size of a smartphone and the clamshell design is unique. With stuff like a camera, internet access and other function, it was like a prototypical smartphone in some ways. I want to see a modern take on the DS with a good camera, bigger screens and better hardware, so that it could replace a smartphone.
It of course can't handle more modern consoles, but for retro gaming it's great. And if the screens are too small you can always emulate on a pc or laptop. And it beats the Switch in pocketability.
Uh, a median wage will always have 50 percent of people above and below it, because that's how a median is defined: as the middle of a number sequence.
I think you meant the average wage, which is ~$60,000 in the US and in Russia it's $15,000 (nominal) or $41,333 (PPP*). For reference, the average income for Poland is $21,000 (nominal) or $49,000 (PPP*). Two-thirds of Americans earn below $60,000. Russia's income inequality is similar to that in the US: both seem to have a Gini coefficient around 0.4. Therefore, we can assume that it's a similar distribution in Russia, aka two-thirds earning below $15,000 (nominal) or $41,333 (PPP*). (*2022 PPP values from OECD)
Taxation also affects things. An NYT article mentions this (April 27, 2024):
Most Russians pay income tax at a flat rate of 13 percent, significantly lower than what taxpayers in the United States and Western Europe typically pay. In an interview in March, Mr. Putin said he planned to introduce a new progressive tax scale in part to alleviate poverty, a popular message among many Russians who support increasing taxes on the country’s rich, which have historically been low. The article is about the government looking to raise the tax rate to 15 percent for people earning above $10,000 (nominal).
Using official statistics, consumer prices in Russia since February 2022 have risen by 20-21% in total. For the same time period it's 14% in the European Union and 10% in the United States. This is similar to their inflation rates for 2022+2023. If I add up month-on-month CPI increases for the period by hand, it's 56% for Russia, 18% for the EU, and 40% for the US. I don't know where that discrepancy comes from, did I do something wrong? I used Consumer Price Index data from Tradingeconomics.com
Finally there's incomes. Wage growth in the EU and US is on average similar to their inflation rates. But in Russia it's 36%, significantly higher than the inflation rate of 21%. Of course there's the matter of how that growth is distributed, but at a first glance it suggests that not as many Russians suffer from the higher prices as the high inflation rate would suggest, though this will vary by region.
I have a feeling that no one here has read the full article. The most I have seen is "by the fourth word I knew it was a loser".
While most of the article is indeed dedicated to "works [that] tend to be of the techno-futurist variety", a significant portion of the article is dedicated to voices ciritical of this type of optimism:
To emphasize a cheerier one, examples tend to be cherry picked or gently massaged. A section in Ritchie’s book argues, correctly, that deaths from extreme weather events are fewer than they were in the past. But this section all but ignores the fact that extreme weather events are becoming more severe and more frequent, a trend that will continue even if harmful emissions are slowed. And it ignores any deaths from extreme heat, which Ritchie attributed, in conversation, to the insufficiency of the data.
The journalist Jeff Goodell has studied that data. The title of his recent book, “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet,” suggests a more sober perspective. (In conversation, he described himself as broadly bullish about the climate crisis, which came as a surprise.) He wanted to use his storytelling, he said, not necessarily to inspire hope or even anger, but to communicate what the planet faces. “Because you can’t talk about solutions until you understand the scope and scale,” he said. He is also skeptical, he said, of much of the sunny, solutions-minded messaging.
“It makes it feel like climate change is like a broken leg, “ he said. “With a broken leg, you’re in a cast for six or eight weeks. You suffer some pain, then you go back into your old life.” He doesn’t believe that’s the case here.
“We’re not going to fix this,” he said. “It’s going to be how do we manage to live in this new world.”
Another excerpt:
Can a better future arrive without political intervention? Fisher doesn’t think so. Her book, “Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action,” which she describes as a “data driven manifesto,” posits a world in which climate shocks become so great that they spur mass protest and force government and industry to transition to clean energy. “It’s the most realistically hopeful way to think about where we get to the other side of the climate crisis,” she said.
That realism imagines a future of food scarcity, water scarcity, climate-spurred migration and increasing incidences of extreme weather. Fisher also predicts some level of mass death. “There’s no question that there are going to be lives lost,” she said. “Already lives are being lost.” Which may not sound especially optimistic. But Fisher’s research has taught her to believe in, as she terms it, “people power.” She has found that people who have had a visceral experience of climate change are more likely to be angry and active rather than doomy and depressed.
“The whole point of apocalyptic optimism is being optimistic in a way that actually helps get us somewhere,” she said. “It’s not shiny and rosy and like cotton candy. It’s a bitter pill. But here we are and we can still do something.” In this sense, hope is a spur, a prod, an uncomfortable goad. And imagining a better future is a brave and even necessary act.
My takeaway is that it does try to investigate the question at least, and not as an endorsement of that "techno-futurist" optimism. But more than anything, it pulls up different voices and then does the whole "who knows who is right?" that is so prevalent in Western journalism trying to be neutral.
I feel like people in this instance are jumping to conclusions based off first impressions and presumptions. Presumptions that happened to be incorrect this time. This may come across as me defending the NYT as a whole to some, which isn't my intention. I just find it disappointing when people are making points that are brought up in the article itself and those are made by all the others as well. No one has talked about the critical voices mentioned, and how right or wrong they are, which could be an interesting discussion. Instead people are all rehashing the familiar talking points against the techno-optimism stuff (which are valid!), and it all feels kinda stale.
AstroStelar
joined 8 months ago
They added a general disclaimer that some dialogue is inappropriate for modern times and not representative of Capcom's current values. Some examples, courtesy of the ESRB:
There's nothing visual going on, it's just "spicy" dialogue, but I support their decision to add a disclaimer. But merely acknowledging this is too much for these people...