Bauxite is the obvious one. Bringing bauxite to Australia. How could you forget about bauxite?

But Hamas won, they completely control the ‘unity’ government and Fatah have vastly less power. If divide and conquer was the goal Netanyahu would have been funneling resources to Fatah and not Hamas. But he has consistently empowered Hamas because the international community can’t accept a Hamas-led state.

That ended over 15 years ago.

US support for Israel continuing the current conflict or US support for Israel in general? If really forced into it, maybe the Democrats can withdraw their blessing for the current conflict, but I don’t see how they could end support for Israel. If Putin wins the US election who knows what could happen but short of that Israel is just too important to the US empire and they know it. I mostly believe the official line from Washington that they don’t have that much leverage against Israel - in the sense that Bibi&co have enough counter levers to make acting against them more costly than it’s worth for the Democrats.

Hence the bullshit antisemitism law, the brutalizing of campus protests, etc. Democrats are even willing to drive down turn out among their base in one of the most important elections in US history over this - I just don’t see them doing that if they had a better card to play.

I doubt it will change even if the US withdraws support, but I’m a cynical depressive type.

Our fundamentally inhuman treatment of the Palestinian people led to October 7.

There are only two ways to prevent it happening again. We could stop the unconscionable deprivations we inflict on the Palestinian people or we could speed up the genocide we’ve been engaged in.

No surprises that the government compromised of war criminals and people the Israeli courts have deemed to be terrorists are going for the later. The far right are in charge and they’re pretty open that this is the goal.

It’s not divide and conquer, that implies keeping multiple groups at parity and fighting each other. Israel intentionally kept the crazies in charge to undermine the viability of a Palestinian state.

Kind of like modern pickup trucks

Except nice to look at, yep!

Pick ups seem like a great example because they are so often a status/identify token.

A lot of these hand axes may have had some kind of not-strictly-functional purpose during their heydey in the stone ages as well. Heaps of them show no evidence of wear or use and are noticably gorgeous - just really pleasingly shaped.

the operation is highly organised, technically savvy

Of course an operation this sophisticated targets people looking to buying luxury brands for cheap, that sounds like an ideal mark.

Dear god in heaven - I’m pretty sure that applying percentages to a d20 violates the geneva convention.

Thanks for the horror story! What a cautionary take in how to destroy an otherwise serviceable core mechanic.

Could you elaborate a little on the design issues?

From Wikipedia it looks like you roll 3d20 looking for at least two successes, where the TN is a character attribute.

I find success counting mechanics are much lower cognitive load at the table than adding up mechanics, plus there’s a sensible limit to the number of dice and players will always have the target number written on their character sheet.

Plus that gives you a fairly clear 4 levels of success which is always easy to interpret as crit/pass/fail/crit fail.

I personally don’t like using D20s but that core mechanic seems fairly smooth and elegant to me. Where does the physics degree part come in? Too many overly complex subsystems? Weird character creation?

Unlike in history, we don’t really lose information anymore

I wonder if this thought was also articulated by librarians at Alexandria.

That code is to computer porn as the Hunt the Wumpus is to computer games.

Boeing is now killing people outside of their planes.

That’s a great line!

That sounds like an incredibly exciting moment in the fiction! I always ask the other players what they think about character X bringing heat down on the crew.

One of the tensest most dramatic scenes i’ve seen in blades started with the characters doing a very threat-of-violence based intervention on the addict who kept mouthing off about their scores (+heat after indulging their vice). The target of the intervention made some very good points about the character who organized the intervention and there was this moment where everyone, one by one, changed the target of their drawn weapons.

“Because” often doesn’t make sense in the real world where anything that happens is the sum total of multiple factors. Especially a trend as broad as enshitification.

Being publicly traded seems like a contributing factor, but a sole owner can still enshitify through greed or incompetence.

I would guess that market consolidation and low competition are more of a factor.

Think of them as 2 methods for determining policy

They’re not though.

Democracy is a strategy some states use to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the populace. Science is a method for producing knowledge.

Policy is determined by the financial interests of our elites, our global imperial interests, and the form of our bureaucratic institutions.

Democracy, science and policy are three very distinct domains.

Civilization is one of those great words (like Innovation) where if you’re using it, you’re definitely using it wrong.

When you say civilization, do you mean: The State, Justified Violence, Official Oppression, Bureaucracy, A Standing Army, Cultures you Agree with, or just Table Manners?

if politicians would grow a backbone, most of the problems we have would be solved

Politicians aren’t scared to do what’s right. Their job is to act in the interest of their fellow elites. The most successful at empowering their fellows are given more power. Solving society’s problems isn’t remotely on the agenda.

If anything, we want more cowardly and timid elites. Politicians with a backbone are just more dangerous predators.