No, it would be cynical to say that all talk of space colonization is actually a lie to spur interest in government funded space technology, which gets contracted out to one major company owned by the richest man in the world who has become that rich off the back of other government subsidies.

Wait--

Kind of a weird post, it's a pretty long book why did you keep going? It's a fun bit of wish fulfillment, a story about engaging in serious and violent revolution against a colonizing empire. It's a bit on the nose, yes, but if you hated the book instead of just thinking it was a bit cartoonish in certain respects, then you might want to ask yourself some deeper questions.

You need to read The Amazon Anti-Trust Paradox by current FTC head Lina Khan. She argues that the consumer price oriented monopoly definition is old and outdated in the modern setting. Price is not a sufficient proxy for market competitiveness, and in fact, price is often used to kill competitiveness by undercutting new and innovative products.

The crisis system, the era system, and the changing civilizations system all feel especially game-y to me. I get it, Civ is first and foremost a video game. Still, the idea that there are pre-defined eras, and that you have to hit a crisis at the end of each pre-defined era, feels artificial and unnatural. Why can't I lead my civilization through into a new era unscathed? Why is that disallowed?

Don't get me wrong: I like the idea of eras and crises. If, instead, eras were triggered by hitting certain milestones or accumulating enough points (e.g. hit some combination of weighted tech/cultural/religious/economic development) - I would be down for that. Different civs would hit those at different times and you would strategize around hitting your new era at the right time. Crises are also totally valid: if your civ is too large and there's too much corruption you could have a civil war. If too much of your civ is following another religion there could be unrest. Those are all interesting and fun ideas, but the important part is that the goal is to avoid/mitigate them and play around them - not that they're some kind of inevitable occurrence that you're forced into even if you play otherwise perfectly.

It feels like Firaxis decided to lean hard into "Civ is a board game focused around balance" and completely away from "Civ is a game about growth and optimization", and I don't know if I'm here for it. I guess we'll have to see.

The thing is: Biden is pro-Israel but also pro-Palestinians. He's providing aid to Gazans and pressuring Israel to minimize civilian casualties. It's not great, or even good, I agree - but it's a whole lot better than Trump who would be pro-Israel and anti-Palestinians. You'd see humanitarian aid end and the US support total war instead of the (slightly) restrained version we're seeing now.

Columbia journalism students are reporting live: https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/story/online-streaming-and-running#

Apparently TikTok sent out push notifications telling users to call their representatives. Minors were being provided instructions with their representatives' phone numbers and contact info, but didn't even know who they were calling and were asking basic questions like "What is Congress?"

Kind of shows the amount of power TikTok has over American youth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence

Libertarians think they're smarter than everyone else and never wonder why the fence is there in the first place.

Okay but she's actively choosing to be that famous. She spent 6 years with Joe living a quiet low key life, but she decided to do another breakout into more fame and this is the cost. Plus she could charter jets like other celebrities, or idk just not fly home every weekend from halfway across the world?

I feel like 90+% of the time I use Google, it's just because it's more convenient than going to the actual website I want. Like if I want a Wikipedia article about a movie, it turns out it's faster to type in the movie name in Google and click than go to Wikipedia and search the movie.

If you were curious how rich people justify this to themselves and whitewash their behavior:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/

Maybe the cars are doing surveillance with the police, but that idea seems far fetched and unrealistic

I'm sure that's what people said about Ring, or Facebook messages being used to arrest women for abortions. Why would a company turn down an extra revenue stream (or subpoena)?