You only see the things in his immediate vicinity because it’s a story not a financial report. If he’s vaccinating kids on the other side of the planet, we aren’t going to hear about it unless it’s relevant to the story.

Nice try RFK Jr, but you’re not gonna assimilate me that easily.

Being a criminal is practically a requirement for a post in this administration.

In an order issued by a Texas federal court last week

Ah, say no more.

The difference between my proposed policy and the ones you are discussing is that I would suggest that there should be some amount of funding for it coming from the government. I wouldn’t object to parents being able to invest some additional money into the account, but I don’t think it solves the problem if parents are the only ones contributing. Kids already put a strain on finances, and most people aren’t going to invest money they need today in an account that won’t be touched for more than half a century. Lower income families in particular would get the most benefit from such a program and would be the least likely to use it unless it was funded by the government.

I wouldn’t even want to make this an optional program, I’d say the account should be created automatically and parents can gain access in order add money of their own or possibly to adjust the investments among a defined set of options. When a kid comes of age they would be able to claim the account, and they should be able to contribute to it with a withholding from their paycheck.

I’ve always thought that we should offer some kind of a credit to parents to invest in a retirement account for their kids. Nothing huge, but something that will get six decades of compound interest. Not only would that help all future generations to retire in an economically sustainable way, but it should also be a slow and steady boost to the economy.

Unfortunately, that would be unlikely to happen in the best of times. The people who would benefit most won’t be voters for years, and won’t actually reap the benefits until the politicians passing the law are all long dead. Given the dystopian nightmare timeline we’re in now, I’d say the odds of a program like that being created are slightly lower than the odds of us trying to fund social security by invading Ireland to find their leprechaun gold.

Since OP didn’t bother, I went looking for the recipe

Ingredients Yield: 24 squares (one 9-by-13-inch pan)

• ¾ cup (170 grams) unsalted butter (1½ sticks)
• Nonstick cooking spray or neutral oil
• 1¾ cups (385 grams) packed light brown sugar
• ¾ cup (170 grams) canned pumpkin purée (not pumpkin pie filling)
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2½ cups (320 grams) all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt (such as Diamond Crystal)
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• ¼ teaspoon ground cloves
• ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1½ cups (9 ounces) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate chips

Preparation

• Step 1

In a small (preferably light-colored) saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Continue cooking, stirring constantly to prevent the milk solids from burning, until the butter foams, darkens into a light amber color and becomes fragrant and nutty, about 3 to 4 minutes more. (Watch closely to make sure the butter doesn’t burn.) Immediately pour the butter along with any of the browned milk solids into a large heatproof mixing bowl. Let cool for 20 minutes until warm but no longer hot.

• Step 2

While the butter cools, heat the oven to 325 degrees. Grease a 9-by-13-inch metal or glass baking pan with cooking spray or oil and line with a strip of parchment paper that hangs over the two long sides to create a sling.

• Step 3

Add the brown sugar, pumpkin purée and vanilla extract to the cooled butter and whisk until smooth and glossy. Add the flour, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda, salt, ginger, cloves and nutmeg and stir with a spatula just until a soft dough forms with no pockets of unincorporated flour. (Try not to overmix.) Add 1¼ cups/216 grams of the chocolate chips and stir to evenly distribute throughout the dough.

• Step 4

*Transfer the dough to the prepared baking pan and press into an even layer using a spatula or clean hands coated with nonstick spray or oil. Sprinkle the top with the remaining chocolate chips, pressing them in so they stick. Bake until the bars are puffed, the top is lightly browned and a skewer or knife inserted into the center comes out clean with just a few moist crumbs attached or with smudges of melted chocolate, 30 to 45 minutes.

• Step 5

Let the bars cool in the pan on a wire rack for at least 1 hour. Using the parchment paper, lift the bars out of the pan and cut into 24 squares. The cookie bars will keep in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 5 days.

With the renewed interest from the show, it would make sense for Microsoft to get someone else working on a Fallout game since Bethesda isn’t going to do it any time soon. However, I would think that Obsidian would be the more natural choice. I would guess that MS would prefer to utilize one of the studios they own rather than license it out, but I could be wrong about that.

And even if they did license out development on a Fallout game, I would assume that they would be in a hurry to get something out there, which would make Larian far less appealing to them. I agree that they would probably make an amazing Fallout game, but another studio would probably make a decent enough game that costs less to develop and pays off sooner.

Huddlefish

They’re trying to portray it as something that was done from the very beginning, as opposed to something they only pinned down in preparation for the 3rd game in the series. Nothing wrong with them getting through two games before writing out their bible, but that doesn’t make for a very compelling article.

“A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I’d talked about it, I’d hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me, we put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.”

So, no they didn’t know the “deepest secrets” of the lore 20 years ago. One guy had vague notions in his head, and they only actually fleshed it out when they were working on Inquisition.

One of the things that sets the original apart from a lot of other open world survival craft games is that it was designed to be a single-player experience. Hopefully they can make it work well for both solo and co-op, but that’s a tricky balance.

One thing I’d really like to see is for creatures to be able to damage structures, and to balance that by having defenses to protect those structures. Being able to throw together an invincible fortress in seconds made some of the dangerous areas a lot less threatening.

Bloomkkake

This argument just dismisses all criticism of the rules and implies that the “game” portion of the role-playing game is irrelevant. By that logic, the design of D&D 5e (and every single rule and mechanic in it) is no better or worse than any other game, including stuff like F.A.T.A.L.

If the rules don’t matter, why bother? Why buy books, learn a whole system, and go through the effort of trying to use a specific RPG instead of just doing free form role-play?

If they do matter, then they can and will impact the quality of your experience in positive and negative ways. They can be well designed, easy to understand, and effective at serving their purpose, or they can be poorly designed, incomplete, confusing or nonfunctional.

Sure, you can ignore rules when you don’t want to follow them, and you can do your own thing and homebrew it if you like. You can also ignore the ending of a book and write your own headcanon, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any point in criticizing bad writing.

To put this another way, why have rule books and a character sheet with all those numbers on it? Why not just flip a coin whenever you want uncertainty about an outcome? Would a game with only that mechanic be just as effective as D&D at providing the type of experience that D&D is trying to create? If not, then why not? What makes the big complicated mess of rules that is D&D better than my single rule RPG?

Trump has a lot of wealth on paper, but a lot of it is tied up in real estate, which isn’t the easiest thing to turn into cash when you need it. And a lot is tied up in stock, but since he got caught fixing the books for the Trump Organization, he can’t really use that as his personal piggybank without a lot of scrutiny. And Truth Social is worth over a billion on paper but will crash if he starts to sell any of his stock, which would cause a lot of new problems right now.

Meanwhile, he is burning through money at an insane rate. I mean historically, he’s lost far more money than he’s ever been worth. He’s always had to have new businesses and schemes to cycle through as the old ones crumble. He basically never made a profit until the Apprentice, and that actually caused problems because he’d structured his operations around losing money, leaving other people holding the bag when things go completely south, writing off the loses for tax purposes, and, well, cooking the books.

But with hundreds of millions in judgements against him, on top of the hundred million plus in legal fees, he’s in a bit of a bind. He already had to put a $175 million up for bond to appeal the judgment civil judgment against the Trump Organization. If he loses the appeal, he’s out not just the $175 million, but the full $489 million judgement, plus about $115k a day in interest. Plus he’s got the E Jean Carroll judgments and ongoing cases because he’s a dumb bastard that can’t stop himself from committing defamation every time he leaves a courthouse after losing a defamation case.

While he has been funneling money from his PAC to cover his legal bills that only goes so far, and as I understand it, he can’t use that for actual judgements against him. If he loses the election, he may be fighting legal battles for years to come, that PAC money will likely dry up, and if he doesn’t have the cash when the court demands it, he could see his assets seized and auctioned off. If he wins the election, he can do basically anything and we’re all fucked.

So to simplify this a bit, imagine that he spent almost all his money on a lot of properties without getting a single monopoly, while his opponent has hotels on the dark blue and green properties. He keeps trying to survive the gauntlet and pass go to stay in the game, and maybe he can survive by mortgaging everything, but it’s much easier for him if he has the cash to pay the bill.

First character: A brooding loner with a tragic backstory, full of obvious parallels to my own life.

Second character: Yes these mechanics I’m combining are wildly mismatched, but my backstory explains it all.

Third character: A centaur that I play as a cab driver. Work in references to Taxi Driver, Cash Cab, Fake Taxi, etc. 100% dedication to the bit at all costs.

Fourth character: Mysterious backstory and ominous foreshadowing throughout the campaign, all leading up to the moment in the final session when I unleash the pun that the entire character was built around.

I would like to have an option that works like the instance block feature on connect. It blocks the instance and then puts a “comment hidden due to blocked instance: exampleinstance.net” which lets you know that its there and gives you the option to unhide that comment if you want to know what it says.

How well does it operate during sub-optimal conditions? Electricity can be stored in a battery, so you can spread your power out over time. I would expect some flexibility in this, since heat doesn’t instantly dissipate, but if conditions remain poor for an extended period, I would think this would be much less resilient.

No one’s trying to put terraforming Venus into next year’s budget. This is all theoretical talk about what would be possible to do some day.

The cost of terraforming Venus would be large, but the benefits of having a second habitable planet are also quite large. Even ignoring the benefits of having more land and resources, there’s also the just the fact that being on two planets means we can potentially survive as a species if something happens to one of them.

It would also have to be heavily automated, and only really becomes realistic once you have machines that are essentially self-sufficient at which point the concept of “cost” becomes a lot fuzzier. It would mean dedicating resources, but you aren’t paying an army of self-replicating robots.

However, the sheer scale of the task means that the benefits would only be seen many generations later. It would require extreme efficiency and long term planning with little tolerance for error. The kind of people who would make such an investment are unlikely to just hand the money over to the shadiest billionaire they can find. And it would be difficult to keep a scam going if they need to show continual progress decade after decade.

Maybe we’ll never see enough progress to overcome the kind of greed and short term thinking that would doom a huge, world-altering endeavor like this. But if that’s the case, it’s more likely that we’d just never try. All the more reason to keep pointing out what could be instead of just accepting the shittiness that we see today.

Why not both?

Although Mars is still a terrible candidate for terraforming. It’s at the outer edge of the goldilocks zone, and even if you can solve the temperature, radiation, and atmosphere issues to create a viable ecosystem, it’s still going to cause problems for humans thanks to the low gravity.

Venus on the other hand could realistically function as a second earth if we clean up the atmosphere.