That, or, hear me out, the owners of these publishers are pushing an agenda to shape the public narrative around certain issues.

They’re asking large institutional shareholders. Stuff like black rock and people who manage investments for pension funds.

At least with the dot com bubble there was a clear and obvious use case, the industry just outstripped the exiting capacity.

Rice is… really really no where near the top of the chain on problematic crops. It’s mostly grown for direct human consumption, unlike corn and soy, and, although quite water intensive (at least for wetland rice cultivation) most of the production is done in areas with the water resources to support it, Yangtze river, peal river, Mekong delta, Ganges river, the lower Mississippi river, ect ect.

Obviously there are some serious issues with conventional rice cultivation, but, in terms of the number of people it supports relative to the over all impact it has… it’s definitely not something the average consumer should be putting at the top of their list to cut out.

Rice, generally speaking, is not a significant contributor to animal feed, at least the grain isn’t. Most rice is grown for human consumption.

There are plenty of crops that do need to have their cultivation scaled back as they’re mainly being used inefficiently or wastefully, but rice isn’t really high on that list.

It’s also worth pointing out that about half of corn and soy production is not profitable, like, most people growing it are not making a living off it, they’re breaking even at best. Most farmers in the US make the majority of their household income in jobs off of the farm.

Most farm land in the US is not cultivated to generate profit, but to maintain it’s status as “agricultural land” which excepts it from many different types of tax (or at least subjects it to a far lower rate). Making it an untaxed store of wealth. There is a reason that the largest owner of farmland in the US is bill gates. Corn and soy are grown because they are the most “hands off” crops, requiring the least amount of ongoing intervention for something that breaks even.

In all likelihood, if we shut down the ethanol program, very few people would loose their livelihoods, but there would be an economic impact in that more people farming for tax reasons would be taking a loss on that. Many might choose to sell off their lands and move that wealth in to different asset classes, which would have knock on effects.

If the game was crashing to desktop, it was probably not a graphics card thing, but that you were running out of ram and the system was just automatically killing the program when that happened. That’s a system stability thing, it prioritizing the needs of the system and desktop over a program so as to prevent the whole system from crashing.

The easiest solution to that is to increase the “swap” size (IE a bit of storage that gets set aside to act as back up memory). That is a system level thing, but it’s not really a big deal to change.

If you were getting to the command line, Linux was running, although, if it was just the command line then it may have been an issue with the desktop or window manager not starting. And if it was an issue with the desktop or window manager, then I could see changing some boot loader settings fixing that. Like, making sure the boot loader automatically starts the desktop when the computer boots. not sure how you got from messing with graphics card to the system only booting in command line, but, shit happens. I’ve broken my system in weirder ways while pulling at the guts.

By switching from cinnamon to XFCE desktop you may have solved the issue with the game crashing simply because you had more memory available, as XFCE is a much lighterweight desktop.

If the games was slowly slowing to a crawl before freezing up completely but not outright crashing to desktop, that could have been an issue of running out of video ram for the the GPU, I’ve had that happen with helldiver’s 2. I don’t remember exactly what I did to fix that, something with the launch options that affected the graphics settings or capped the frame rate I think. Not sure how changing between desktops could have fixed that though.

I mean, a lot of people have lost their jobs at these companies due to gen AI, but it’s not because it’s replaced them. It’s because these companies are burning cash like crazy on gen AI even as it looses them billions upon billions every quarter. They’re letting people go to cover some of that cost and then spinning a positive narrative to shareholders about increased efficiency and productivity.

There is also a lot of still born projects and initiatives that are getting dropped because the executives now have an excuse to wash their hands of them without admitting to shareholders they made a bad call. Like Microsoft and their failed attempt to roll up the games industry.

It can be. Healthcare in the US is a mixed bag depending on the person, the area, and the situation.

Getting care is enormously expensive if you’re not insured, not because it’s actually that expensive to provide the care, but because health insurance providers like to negotiate discounts with healthcare providers (hospitals), so healthcare providers set artificially high prices so they can give insurers huge discounts while still making a significant profit.

There are a lot of ways to get health insurance, but it’s a messy, bureaucratic, and regionally dependent system. So a lot of people slip through the cracks, and even people who are insured can end up in a situation where their insurance won’t pay for something and have to pay the full, artificially inflated, price.

Birth in a hospital very much falls in to this mess, and someone who is uninsured might very well avoid going to a hospital because of this, or someone with insurance might find out that their insurance doesn’t have a deal with the specific hospital they went to, so they’re stuck with the bill.

You can probably get a pirate hat online for a few bucks. And there are plenty of discoverability systems not based on integration with a subscription service.

CSL2 still has some serious performance issues, like it’s better than it was, but at high pops it really start to chug, and a lot of weird behaviors start to occur in parts of the simulation. Which really makes it hard to build out complex multi modal transit networks which kind of require a large pop to make work.

It does some things better than CSL1, namely around allowing a city to operate without cars, and supporting mixed use buildings. Although it has 0 support for bikes. Like bikes just don’t exist.

I jump between both depending on what I want to do. If I want to build a compact city with nearly no cars, I got to CSL2. For large cities with complex transit networks I go for CSL1.

you may not need a dedicated GPU, the iGPUs on AMD CPUs have gotten really good lately, like better than a mid ranged dedicated GPU from even 4 years ago.

My laptop has a 780m integrated GPU on its 7840HS cpu, and I’ve been blown away at its ability to run modern games. Like, sure, not running cyberpunk 2077 at max settings at 120 FPS in 4k, but running it at medium settings at 60 FPS in 1080? It’ll do it just fine.

My laptop was a bit pricy, but I did a little searching and saw that there’s something called the GPD WIN Mini, the 2023 model was listed as having the same CPU/iGPU as my laptop and it was listed at 700$. It’s an odd form factor, and I couldn’t see it in stock anywhere.

You might be able to get the kind of performance you’re looking form the iGPU on an AMD ryzen 7 or later CPU, and something without a dedicated GPU will probably be a lot cheaper.

If you don’t mind a non-traditional form factor, as other’s have mentioned, definitely check out the steam deck. It’s very affordable and very capable, and other than the form factor, it is just a computer running Linux. You could even boot other distros on to it if you don’t want to run SteamOS (Valve’s arch derived distro).