It’s the Brussels effect, it’s been mandatory in the EU for a while now.

I don’t get what FSD adds to the highway experience though, a Kia can drive hundreds of kilometers on a highway with basically no input as well.

AI makes revenue go down, stock value go up. The real economy doesn’t matter, only Wall Street vibes.

Apple does the exact same thing

You can absolutely make unit and even integration tests in games, but I agree that I don’t think it’s really done because of the domain. Things are more caught in QA or more like Early Access these days.

I stand corrected. Thanks.

And I want a Pilatus PC-12 for free with no maintenance costs, but life is more complicated than that.

Okay, I work as a programmer, and there is a reason projects work the opposite way. You first have to have a working product that comes back as good from whatever QA you have, then you optimise and build on it. If you have to optimise on day 1, nothing will ever get done. I should know, that’s why I have a ton of personal projects in development hell.

Why would games be different?

MS hasn’t released an Office version outside 365 for 8 years.

365 is Office for them.

So the reason is not that they would need to pay more and don’t want to, but that nobody knows who to pay, what to pay, and how to pay. There is literally no way to send a package to the US today and know how much it will cost.

So this is not Trump being aggressive in negotiation, but just being incompetent.

Yeah, but there’s the catch, they would have to compete on equal footing with indies then. Money is their only advantage.

I think it’s more that the megacorp business model is fundamentally incompatible with making good video games. Their only reliable competitive advantage is money, they can spend more on a single project. But if they spend so much, they can’t go as risky as indies go. A ton of indies publish shit games, it’s just that some are absolute gems.

Point is, AAA games can only match indies in originality if they are okay with tanking the IP and the studio just to make something original. But since they are megacorps, they will never be okay with that. The also can’t amortise the risk over a lot of small projects, because then they lose the ability to outspend indies and would have to compete with them directly.

It’s like a sort of inverse economies of scale.

I have a feeling that Vance is the pro-Russia voice in Trumpworld now. Trump is a weathervane, and Vance is a bit on the periphery looking in from Europe, since he never got to say anything while the EU/NATO people were there. We also know of his personal hatred toward Europe.

I sincerely hope the US doesn’t elect him next.

Graz, Salzburg, Innsbruck come to mind

Enterprise lags behind Home and Pro. Consumers are QA for Enterprise.

Simply meeting would display that the UA government is considered legitimate by Russia.

Putin can either lose face by attending, or lose goodwill with Trump by denying the photo op to him.

There was no header on the request saying I want ads though

Technically it’s where you live, but do both, and also the media.

A rearmed EU will be less dependent upon the US. If we are expecting the US to go bad in the following decades, then EU less dependent upon it might be less likely to partake in pummeling Russia when that happens.

To be honest, if the US and Russia started a war in eg. Kazakhstan or Afghanistan, the EU would most likely not care and I also think it shouldn’t. IMO we should stop trading with Israel as well, and I’m not alone here. I doubt after Ukraine even Poland would deign to help with a new war, and even the Israel thing is more of an inertia issue in the EU rather than anything else - not like that absolves anyone.

Ukraine was a European thing because Ukraine was attacked because it was aligning with the EU. Nobody sane in the EU wants war with Russia for the sake of antagonizing Russia. In fact, even the people who don’t like Russia are mistrustful and not hateful, as in nobody wants to see Russia fall apart, it’s just that its leadership broke so many promises that people think that it is a good idea to expect it to honor any deal or stay at peace.

You weren’t using it, now you are using it. That’s too “at the expense of everything else”.

Sorry, but this is a pet issue of mine, and not even because of the Russian war or even rearmament. Public investment is taking loans from corporations, and giving it to people as wages to do stuff. This drives inflation somewhat, but since it increases wages the people don’t feel it, but the loans given to corporations also inflate. This all drives the economy, since people having more money means they spend more, which makes companies compete more for that money, it’s all in all a good thing.

What I mean is that even if nothing like this was happening, if we paid a bunch of people to dig a hole, and another bunch of people to fill it up, it would still fuel the economy and make more money for everyone in the EU. Now if we spend that money on not pointless things, like the new military bill that includes a ton of money for infrastructure, building roads, railways, bridges, etc. that’s even better.

What I mean is that this is an investment, even if it doesn’t look like it. And we wouldn’t be doing it since German conservatives would rather we hoard money than spend it, so the same companies can keep winning in the market. Public investment actually makes corporations richer as well, just not always the same corporations, as it also increases competition, so the current winners don’t like it.

Think of the New Deal and its results on the US economy. It didn’t take money away from other public services, in fact it produced more taxes to fund them. Or look at Russia, it’s the same deal as with the war economy, except if done in moderation, inflation won’t run away so much that the EUR won’t stay convertible like the RUB, and wages, taxes and profits will go up.

OK. I don’t know where the ship is going or what its captain thinks. I’m just seeing that it’s been promised things completely different from what transpired for all my life.

Don’t we all, man. The scary part about Russia is that there does not seem to be an endgame, there doesn’t seem to be a next chapter to the plan. I wish you guys all luck and a better future.

I guess the question is, what’s Russia’s endgame from all this? Because if we say that the Russian army of today is superior to the Russian army of 2022, which is debatable because while they are more competent, they also lost insane amounts of material, both ground, sea and air war machines; the Russian economy is still worse than it was before?

So what can Russia do with its improved army? Invade the Baltics? That’s a non-starter because of the EU. Invade Georgia? The only significance of that is that it prevents Europe from having an alternative oil and gas supplier than Russia. Invade Kazakhstan or the Caucasus? Wouldn’t that just create another Afghanistan/Ukraine moment where the rest of the world can just send random shit to that country and delete Russian divisions?

Russia also lost the Middle East, meaning Syria is gone and even Iran has its own problems. I’m just not seeing any way forward from this, even if they can patch the economy together.

He measured NATO’s response

To attacking a non-NATO country. NATO’s purpose is not to defend random places and support random revolutions and occupations around the world - despite what the US thinks, and despite how much we sympathise with Ukraine - but to defend each other. Poland just bought hundreds of tanks, and we got to see where we are missing things. And as shitty the rift is with the US, Russia now has a rearming EU to worry about.

he found a way to fight wars and not break

He put the country on a war economy which is going to cause an insane recession if not an outright collapse if the war ends. They won’t even be able to go back to their pre-war military strength. This was always an option, coming back from it is not.

he confirmed that the resource exports money source can be reoriented to other countries than the West

At insanely low prices, and by creating even more dependencies on untrustworthy partners. Who’s to say China won’t use the new dependency to invade Russia? Can Russia depend on that?

They proved that to themselves too and reacted. Changed the military doctrine, evolved new tactics and strategy, built new MIC production chains.

It went from an army that could threaten Europe to one that could threaten Ukraine. I know, drones are the new thing, but all of Russia’s adversaries have much greater manufacturing capabilities than Russia, Russia is not going to outproduce the West or China in drones. Just to mention, Ukraine and Russia are largely peers in drone warfare, except all those drones are being blown up in Ukraine. Europe is stockpiling. In the meantime, they lost their whole Soviet stockpile of armor, and a sizeable chunk of their airforce.

EU’s defense spending increasing is at the expense of other things.

This is the new big lie of Russia. No, defense spending is coming from loans, basically a credit line we didn’t use because the Germans were jacking off to austerity. How that works is that if we overdo it, we’ll see more inflation, so you can check when we overdid it. Social spending is not being cut, there are maybe some programs somewhere, but that neolib shit has been going on forever, we’ve been fighting it forever, it’s just now Russia saying “you’ll all be poor”. Inflation is back to normal levels, and if anything, increased public spending will increase wages across the EU.

The economy is not completely wrecked.

Just look at the numbers. It’s a war economy. 40% of the Russian budget is going towards the army, and if the war ends or this money runs out - that’s 2027/28 if we’re being generous - you’re going from a labour shortage to 10% unemployment. That’s “dissolution of the USSR” level economic turmoil.