TroublesomeTalker

I'm curious what the 'right' amount of people being supported that makes it magically sustainable. UK pop is close to 70 mil, with half a mil in Leicester (ISH). Let's be generous and say 0.5% of the population gets these PIPs then. Tax Rates are upwards of 40% for some folk, logically we can afford to care for this many people (and more). Hell the massive Social Security bill is always 2/3 pensions. I'd suggest raising the retirement age a year, which would more than cover the discrepancy, but there's some evidence that life expectancy is going to decline in the coming years, which in concert with the raising ages means retirement is going to be a luxury if they aren't careful. Of course the actual solution to this is the same one that never ever gets discussed. Raise wages and increase Tax take, given it's the wagies that actually pay tax, not the massive mega corps. I'd hoped for a visionary take on the Labour party, the focus being Great British Energy to get energy security, followed by a modern farms initiative to get food security. Instead we get the same old shit sandwich we've been being fed for thirty or forty years.

Hard agree. It's wonderful right now. I put the AAAs that I'm interested in on a wishlist for when they get to a reasonable price, and buy the indies on release (because loads of them have demos and I already know it's my bag).

I do not have a ton of sympathy for people lamenting the state of AAA DLC laden micro skinner boxes - because you can always just choose something less abusive.

The sheer variety at the moment is so good.

They can announce $80 dollar games if they want but there's more than a few indies I'd rather give $15-20 too. I may buy it if it gets to $20. Assuming there's nothing else on the indie scene grabbing it first.

Bastion 2 ?

Have you read the news lately? We're just training for the next few years.

Per core. It ain't that low.

40 core dual slotted xeon runs at $60/month? For patches?

I... Don't see the issue here. Let her spend her backhanders standing up a Mastodon instance, and then enjoy it being flooded with lettuce images, gifs and videos, we'll find out exactly how censored it is within hours. It may even last as long as her stint as Prime Minister.

ALVR isn't awful. I needed new hardware and bit the bullet knowing I was likely going to lose VR, but with the hardware upgrade, it's nicer in the new machine (Bazzite, 7900XT) than the old (Win 10, 2080 Super Max Q). Definitely not a drop in replacement yet though.

Now do the same for your shitty AI search that drive me to finally jump to DDG.

I agree with you on Burnout 3. But Paradise has a per street crash mode high score, which while not as good as 3s, is enough to scratch the devastation itch, and it's easily accessed on steam. So I don't think it's fair to say it has no crash mode. Just a vastly inferior one!

And I'm saying it's the same as world. You can drop off the net and play. Private session --> drop connection, play on. Can't say I've ever tried starting it with no network because there's no way in hell it's running on the deck, but you could with MHW, so I wouldn't be surprised if the same rules apply. I will try to remember to check later.

So far, yeah. If it's like World, eventually there's a quest that is just too damn hard to carry alone (Extremoth in Vanilla, I'm looking at you), but if you are not a completionist, sure you can be offline and single player for most of the story line. Actually it looks like offline support is slightly better in this one.

I'm not a total solo hunter, but I am 90% of the time, don't really play with randoms.

It's a "how the mighty have fallen" kind of thing. They are well into the click-bait farm mentality now - have been for a while.

It's present on the news sites, but far worse on things where they know they steer opinion and discourse. They used to ensure political parties has coverage inline with their support, but for like 10 years prior to Brexit, they gave Farage and his Jackasses hugely disproportionate coverage - like 20X more than their base. This was at a time when SNP were doing very well and were frequently seen less than the UK independence party. And I don't recall a single instance of it being pointed out that 10 years of poor interactions with Europe may have been at least partially fuelled by Nidge being our MEP and never turning up. Hell we had veto rights and he was on the fisheries commission. All that shit about fisherman was a problem he made.

Current reporting is heavily spun and they definitely aren't the worst in the world, but the are also definitely not the bastion of unbiased news I grew up with.

Until relatively recently you could see the deterioration by flipping to the world service, but that's fallen into line now.

If you have the time to follow independent journalists the problem becomes clearer, if not, look at output from parody news sites - it's telling that Private Eye and Newsthump manage the criticism that the BBC can't seem to get too

Go look at the bylinetimes.com front page, grab a random story and compare coverage with the BBC. One of these is crowd funded reporters and the other a national news site with great funding and legal obligations to report in the public interest.

I don't hate them, they just need to be better.

But the BBC is increasingly unable to accurately report the news, so this finding is no real surprise.