This is what really shits me. “Oh, the sports companies won’t be able to fund themselves.” If that’s true, too fucking bad. Our laws shouldn’t exist to arbitrarily prop up certain industries even when we’ve decided that the industry is causing harm.

But also, it’s just fucking not true. You can make an argument and say “oh but gambling companies fund 60% of the sport league” or whatever number it is, and pretend that banning gambling would cut the NRL’s budget by 60%. But that’s just not how it works. They’re sponsors because they were the highest bidder, not the only bidder. You’d just go to the next highest bidder if gambling sponsorships weren’t allowed. In the short term, maybe a 10% loss of revenue at most. Realistically, in the long term, it’d be negligible.

Same goes for pokies at local pubs and clubs. Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population and 18% of the world’s poker machines. And if you look specifically at poker machines not located in casinos it goes up to a ridiculous 76%. The entire rest of the world doesn’t allow poker machines at local clubs like we do, and their venues do just fine. The cries that venues would die off if they couldn’t have pokies are just nonsense.

They’d have very little chance in a copyright suit and they know it. Because you can’t copyright game mechanics or general concepts, and those are the things Palworld pretty obviously copies.

Reverse image search says yes, Singapore.

That bastion of socialism.

A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.

True, and that’s important context if you’re trying to get a deeper understanding of how Julius Caesar came to have the power he held before his assassination.

But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

While I still maintain my stance that anyone who votes 3rd party in a FPTP election is a moron, this does seem unfair.

The challenge was brought by Republicans, but it’s a challenge based on Libertarian Party rules of how they choose who to nominate. The only people who should have standing are Libertarian Party members.

If they had put in their nomination forms late or made some other error with the process of doing the nomination, then it would be fair for Republicans or Democrats or independent voters to challenge to get them removed. But an internal matter that the article says was completely uncontroversial internally should not be brought by outsiders.

It literally was though. Not a military intelligence tool, but a big business intelligence one.

Niantic was founded by Google and their first product, Field Trip, and their first game, Ingress (a much better-designed game than Pokémon Go, btw) were pretty obviously about gaining geolocation data for Google to improve their products like Maps and Shopping.

Honestly I’m a light hobbyist myself. My exposure to history is primarily via YouTube channels like the excellent Historia Civilis (their series on Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Roman Republic is stunning) and via games like Age of Empires.

I just don’t understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying “yeah, we’ll let you do that in order to maintain the peace” and then falling into civil war anyway.

How much of that sounds familiar…?

I’m confused, why do you think “stop providing aid to assist in genocide” is the take of a tanky?

Ok this got a chuckle out of me. But yeah, I don’t see any problem with people expressing agreement verbally.

Imagine a real conversation where you’re only allowed to agree with someone with nods, never saying “yeah I agree completely” or any other verbal feedback.

Honestly I didn’t even read the article. Shared it purely based on the headline.

You say “handful”, but it still hand thousands of players, and the thing that makes me sad about this screw up is that of those who played it, it was probably someone’s favourite game…

…Is what I was going to say, until I looked at the Steam charts. It hit an all-time peak of 607 players, with estimates of total ownership ranging from 9.5k to 25.1k. It very well still may have been someone’s favourite game and I feel really sad for them that it’s gone, but wow the game still did so much worse than even my expectations based on the reporting.

Yeah, it’s one of the very few advantages of the fact that their elections—even federal elections—are not actually standardised nationwide. States run them according to their own rules. Mostly this is a bad thing, but it does mean that one place can improve their system like this as an experiment, without needing to convince the entire country to do it at once.

So I think there are 2 states that do IRV currently. And there might be a few more places where IRV is used in non-congressional/presidential races.

Oddly, IRV is actually seeing some success, slowly growing across the States. But compulsory voting is basically a non-starter over there.

As someone who’s worked at elections a few times before, please please don’t do this. We’re barely above minimum wage and receive an hour of online training. We don’t know how to handle that situation. One voter, one cross off, one issued ballot, it’s supposed to be. It’ll make things very awkward at the end of the night when it comes to reconciling the ballots if the numbers don’t add up.

Just take the ballot and put it in the box. What happens between then, I don’t care.

See this, this I get. This is an actual reasonable problem. And we could be talking about it wrt Retold, since Freyr is a day one DLC.

Personally I’m not too concerned with it because even if you ignore Freyr, the cost of Premium is $25 AUD more than standard, and it includes two future DLCs (which they’ve already said will be $15 USD, probably $20 AUD each). So Premium is worth getting just for the two future pantheons. And since Premium includes Freyr in addition to the future pantheons, it ends up not looking like an added cost in the way it would otherwise.

But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that there’s actual playable content not included for free that’s available day one. And it would leave me very angry if the prices had ended up such that the best deal for everything except the day-one DLC actually cost less than the best deal for everything including Freyr. But all this discussion about cosmetics. Not even interesting cosmetics like unit skins, but something that’s basically just profile pictures. Is annoyingly distracting from that conversation.

You buy it for the expansions. The Chinese, one more as-yet-unannounced pantheon, and Freyr. The other stuff you get with Premium is basically irrelevant.

I’d much rather have a conversation about the day-one DLC of Freyr, and the fact that they’re charging for the future Chinese pantheon despite Chinese being available in 2014 Extended Edition and no previous Age of Empires Definitive Edition removing a civ that was previously available (indeed, aoe2 and aoe3’s DEs both added new civs in addition to all the existing ones). Granted, there are extenuating circumstances there, in that the EE Chinese DLC was so terrible it basically killed the game and they’ve promised the upcoming expansion to Retold will be “all new Chinese”. But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

This discussion about what is basically profile pictures is some irrelevant bullshit as far as I’m concerned. I don’t give a shit about it, and I find the rhetoric from people claiming they do care (especially that one person claiming that this is a reason they’ll avoid Retold entirely because it’s “an advertisement, not a game”) extremely unconvincing. It’s eye-rollingly stupid to care about this when there are real things to get upset about both with this game and in the wider gaming industry.

where I’m actually playing a game and not an advertisement

That’s more than a little bit hyperbolic.

One of the advantages of compulsory voting is that it necessitates fixing some of the problems you mentioned. If voting is compulsory, you can’t have a situation where people are unable to vote due to work. You either need to make prepolling easily accessible, or put voting at a time that most people are going to be able to get to the polls without their work being affected (Australia uses a Saturday, or you could declare the polling day a public holiday) while mandating people have enough time off to go and vote during the day. Ideally both. You also need to have enough polling places open with enough staff that lines don’t become unreasonably long. At my last election here in Australia, I had a 40 minute wait, and it was a huge scandal because of how poorly managed that election was. The idea of lines taking hours is entirely foreign to us.

Not voting is still an option. You must turn up, get your ballot, and take it straight over to the ballot box, without writing anything. Or you go and draw a picture of a penis. Or write some shitty message. The only thing that matters is that you turned up and put a ballot in the box.

But the truth is—and this is really the biggest factor when I look at Australian compared to American elections—the vast majority of people do have an opinion and they know who they think would be better. Many just don’t care quite enough to get off their couches and go and vote. In America a big part of the campaigns are about “get out the vote”. It’s getting people who agree with you (or at least prefer you to your opponent) to actually vote for you. You end up with the more extreme voters voting reliably but not the less politically engaged. And so of course politicians are less likely to pander to the less engaged. They aren’t going to vote for you anyway! Compulsory voting flips that. You now have to actually care about everyone. Your campaign has to involve not just convincing your supporters to go and vote, but convince the public at large that they should vote for you.

It’s not perfect. Not by a long shot. But it really is such a massive improvement with one quite easy step.

I suspect the people who would set this test would be the exact opposite of the people you want to set this test, in more than 50% of the seats.