Mate, we are talking about a societal collapse. You won’t have oil available and you won’t be able to refine your own diesel at home (especially without energy).

Your argument about solar panels being difficult to produce is utterly out of place. Your diesel generator and your car are more difficult to produce, but you already own them from before the downfall. So if you own an EV and you own solar panels then it doesn’t matter how difficult those are to produce when you’re just using them.

Lol, Diesel can on average only be stored for 6 to 12 months before degrading. Good luck with that.

If a collapse ever happens I’d rather have solar panels and an EV. Fuel production and transport would instantly grind to a halt and the existing fuel goes bad soon after.

Damn, they are getting younger and younger. Just recently a 13 year old drilled into a patient during brain surgery in Austria /s

Facebook doesn’t make phones.

Also there’s already a ton of depth on the game

I think I’m too jaded in this regard. Reading the wiki I don’t really see depth. Sure, there are activities with fun names, but they are all the same (you start the activity, you walk to finish it, you get random rewards). And all the items seem to be either for selling, basic crafting or just giving you a boost percentage for the activities you’re already doing.

What the activities are missing are risk/reward, decision making, surprises, etc. Or as you’d say in game design “meaningful choices”.

Sure, you have the choice on what skill you work on, but besides skill go up, items to make the activity faster and gold (not sure what it’s for, besides buying mats/items again?) that seems to be it.

I guess combat could help if there’s actual resource investment and risk there. Like are you going to tackle this level 10 monster for higher rewards, with more likelihood to either fail (or spend extra resources on healing potions or whatever)? Or play it save and go against weaker monsters? There should also be extra gold sinks to work for / use the money you accumulated, be it limited use items, cosmetics and so on. And of course ways to play the game differently from other players, like classes, masteries, skill trees or whatever (and no, clicking an activity that says “Sandcastle Building” vs clicking “Ship repair” aren’t really choices).

Just from someone who values gameplay a lot, I don’t see much difference in playing the game for an hour or 100 hours, in the end it keeps boiling down to the same actions with no depth attached. Personally I didn’t see the game value of it, compared to a step tracker (just that the step tracker doesn’t stop counting when it’s “full”, I didn’t like the step mechanic either where you get bonus steps only. If I’ve done my walking for the day I want to spend the steps, not select an activity and I get double steps for it next time I walk).

Ah yeah, I’m not a big mobile game fan and heavily play PC games. I just missed the draw of it, but had wrong expectations probably. In my head it was more of a sandbox combat game with gathering/crafting, so I kept trying to get to the actual game part :)

While I’m not motivated at all by just achievements or grinding for grinding sake (incremental games are a slight exception there, but progress is much faster / you do have some goals dangled in front of your face). You’re probably aiming more for a classic fitness tracker, but instead of step counts, graphs and so on you present it in game form. Which is valid, but just not what I was after.

As it gets brought up in this thread: When it came out I actually liked Pokemon GO, because the gameplay was interesting. Originally it only showed Pokemon near you and how far they are away (with 1, 2 or 3 foot steps). Which meant you wandered around and actually met people back in the city, grouped up to search or they knew where it was. That all got dumbed down until everyone was just sitting at the same spot and farming unfortunately :-/

I tried it out a while ago and didn’t mesh with it at all. Like the options I had was gather things, minor crafting and traveling. But zero goals or combat (as far as I could tell at the beginning). So after going around, gathering and crafting a bit I got bored and gave up.

Hell, I even traveled around to just find if there are any encounters or places with more happening and I didn’t find anything.

So it felt meaningless to grind with nothing to grind for.

Good joke, you’d have to double and triple check every single citation as LLMs love to hallucinate.

I wouldn’t risk my title or expulsion because an LLM fucked up my work. Even one missed reference or a false citation could cost you plenty.

Steam simply due to the convenience and already having a ton of games there. Steam sales are nice too of course.

GOG is awesome, but more for older games or for games I want to play at a LAN. Like the good old days where you hang out with friends, throw a CD (or now USB stick) their way and ten minutes later you’re playing together.

The secret is a bidet. Much cleaner and suddenly I spend a third on toilet paper compared to before (you still use some for drying and checking).

That’s just a tiny tiny part of it.

And on the other end are the actual ads, which are part of marketing campaigns. Where each campaign can define a specific target demographic (doesn’t have to, but usually they do as it’s just wasting money otherwise).

So for makeup the ad might target white single women in the age of 16 to 45 who live in better income areas for example.

I bet you have a hundred conversations with your friends where you didn’t receive a fitting ad afterwards.

Oh, I fully understand you, I just hate the idea.

Yes, they could work out a pretense of “One China” while staying separate and just adding a trade deal on top. Just as Ukraine agreed to be independent, give up their nuclear weapons and live in peace with Russia, having guarantees they wouldn’t be attacked.

Sorry, but the only thing I’d accept is China declaring Taiwan as its own independent country. They can add a trade deal on top or whatever else they want to sweeten the deal, but that’s what it takes. As long as China keeps up the idea that Taiwan belongs to them this is never going to work out.

I mean hell doesn’t exist, so the actual answer is none?

“One Country, Two Systems”: Hong Kong, along with Macau, are the only territories in the People’s Republic of China to supposedly enjoy a “high degree of autonomy” and freedom under the “One Country, Two Systems” principle as guaranteed by the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Hong Kong Basic Law.

Hong Kong even has their own government (which was undermined by the CCP), of course it’s relevant.

Taiwan would first become a puppet of China, then forcefully gets fully integrated. There won’t be any independence, especially not economic independence as China wants the chip factories.

How well the diplomatic solution of “One China, while keeping their autonomy” works could be seen with Hong Kong. Lol.

Free Hong Kong, fuck the CCP.

Taiwan should be an independent country, full stop.

It already reduced the services severely. The included Amazon Music sucks if you don’t pay extra. The included Amazon Video has ads now. And Prime gaming has reduced the offers.

While YouTube premium gives you full access to YouTube music and 1080p Enhanced Bitrate video quality. I only got it for the music, no ads on TVs is a bonus (Already had an adblocker for phone/PC).

Amazon has around 310 million active users. Amazon has 230 million Prime subscribers, even though it costs up to $15 a month. Yes, those include cheaper student subscriptions of course, but still.

Of course 30% is optimistic, but the average people I know happily watch those fucking ads. And don’t even complain about unskipable double ads. They don’t like them, they’re still too lazy to install an ad blocker as long as they get their content. Each one of them would absolutely shell out 5 bucks to continue watching (it’s less than a single beer when you go out).

There is no diplomatic solution except one: China recognizes Taiwan as an independent country.

That’s it, done, this is the only solution to this whole fuckery. If that happens the US could just bugger off (well, if we hope China keeps its word and doesn’t suddenly attack afterwards). What other damn solution is there?

You underestimate how addicted people are to YouTube. There is no alternative to it.

Twitch is streaming focused, the vods absolutely suck. Kick? Same.

What else is there? TikTok? Instagram? Neither of which provide long high quality videos.

After all we are talking about YouTube literally blocking everyone and putting up a banner: $5 a month or you’re out of luck. If someone already happily pays $18 a month for Netflix, what is 5 bucks?

It would be a huge gamble, but it could pay off. Seriously, how many people are watching YouTube every day? Hours of their favorite content creators.

Imagine a rug pull, YouTube is now a pay only service. No ads, but everyone has to pay $5 a month to access. I’d bet with you that a surprising amount of people would just pay that to continue using it.

How many? Nobody knows, but it would certainly be 30% or higher. Now imagine 30% of users paying just $5 a month how much money that would be.

It can be done, YouTube just doesn’t do it right now as they still earn plenty with ads. If suddenly everyone started to use an ad blocker then things would change very quickly.