“Why hasn’t anyone designed a building like this before?”

“Oh.”

I guess China is no stranger to the high inflation more risk-averse economic environment.

Took me a year and 150 applications and 10 interviews to find the job that I wanted. I wouldn’t want to wish the stress of job seeking on anyone.

My uneducated guess is that banking corps getting “harmed” by the fact they can’t suck money out of their borrowers will have to spend more effort putting each order through the courts.

At the very least, the more times that Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan is blocked like this, it will get it into voters’ heads that it’s not the President and Democratic party’s failure to act but co-ordinated obstruction by Republicans and the financial institutions.

You make a decent point, but the disconnect between people paying for content and the money going to the people who contributed effort to it is getting wider and wider.

Popular shows that people subscribed for get axed after 1 season or moved to another service. All the work people did for Warner Brothers’ Batgirl gets thrown in the trash so that WB can get a tax write-off, before any movie watcher can even give a cent to them in support.

The point is big studios make so much year after year that pirating their stuff doesn’t make a dent in whether the people they hire get paid accordingly.

Many scene groups actually purchased the games and cracked them, I’ve read NFOs that say “buy the game, we did too”.

People recording in movie theatres have to either sneak into the theatre or buy a ticket themselves.

Someone scanning a book to post online had to have bought it or borrowed it.

Yes some games are cracks of illegitimate obtained leaked copies or other unscrupulous methods.

I have played pirated games in the past but my Steam library has thousands of dollars worth of games I bought, many of which I wouldn’t have if I weren’t interested in these type of games to begin had pirating games not been possible.

Sure, the opportunity cost from piracy’s “lost sales” to the publisher/licensor is non-zero. But how many sales that would have happened varies greatly on the perceived value vs. price of the product, and how available it is. If it’s not in stores anymore and can only be bought from scalpers on eBay, the publisher cough Nintendo cough doesn’t see that money anyway vs. pirating it.

Some countries have a blank media fee on writable casettes, discs and hard drives that are paid to music and movie studios for this purpose.

Caltrain and Metrolink (California, USA regional trains) have the right idea. Low income Americans by and large carry EBT cards. They give a 50% discount on tickets when scanned. Of course this could be technologically easily made free but it’s a start and the remaining challeges are financial and political.

I did an EU Rail pass trip (same as Interrail but for people outside EU), because I love taking the train. Visited 9 countries in 3 weeks, spending 120 hours of my trip on a train or transferring. I had a lot of fun.

Every train system is a little different, fare structure is a bit different here and there. In Germany it’s easy to get around without paying extra, in France you’ll have to pay extra often. Italy it’s a small fee but you have to pay it for every reservation.

You can get used to sleeping on a train, and if you’re young enough then some NightJet 3 seater coach cabins aren’t too bad. But be careful of overdoing it; at the end of the 3 weeks I was so tired I took the wrong train from København, Denmark and ended up in Nykøbing Falster at 2AM.

Wherever you go, be mindful that cost of staying varies wildly too, especially if you’re coming from Romania. Switzerland was expensive as hell for a young and broke traveler like me.

Including the plane ticket, rail ticket and reservation fees, hostel fees, food, beer and a couple souvenirs, I spent 4000 CAD over the 3 weeks, which works out to 200 CAD a day. This was in late spring 2022.

Be aware of the weather of where you’re visiting, this is true of any international trip but if you will be travelling far across various European climates it’s extra important to remember.

Official Blizzard, idk if you’ve played just the original basegame or the Brood War expansion. There is Starcraft Remastered, which has updated graphics and usability improvements but doesn’t add much other than that over the original.

An open source Brood War engine seems to exist but development appears to have stalled.

For SC2 the coop missions and the custom games are imo the most fun to be had in that game.

In terms of RTS genre, BAR is an epic scale free and open source RTS that feels like a distant cousin, but doesn’t have the deep lore that Starcraft has yet.

I’d also recently caught word from a fellow Lemming about a new game in development called Stormgate, worked on by some ex-SC/WC devs under a new studio. Gameplay has a very similar look to the former two.