These pods are only used on rails with very low ridership. They would switch to a train if ridership increased.

Look at it this way: you can have a train that has a capacity of 100 people, but it only runs once a day due to the low demand, and only 2 people want to ride it at that time of day…Or you can have 10 pods, which do not require as much railway maintenance, and they can carry the 10 people who actually want to use this railway, completely on demand.

Yeah, a train is better if you want to move ten thousand people a day at peak hour. But this is a cheaper way to move ten people at different times across a day. And it’s a cheaper way of inducing the demand that would justify the more efficient kind of expansion.

If I were in Olga’s position I’d go create another Natasha account on the same platform and start making videos saying “Hey, Natasha here. I just learned what things are really like in Ukraine and I’m furious about what Russia is doing to innocent civilians. Putin is an evil man. Also my main account has been hacked, please report it so I can get it back.”

If Natasha is Olga then Olga is Natasha. Olga probably has a case to take over the accounts, given they’re videos of her, and start pushing out antiwar propaganda.

Maybe I like mischief too much

The pun works equally well in English. “Aw, man!” has the same meaning as Ach mensch.

8 didn’t do any retcons. A retcon would be “actually Snoke isn’t the main villain, he’s just a clone created by Palpatine.” 8 was perfectly happy to play nice with all the facts established in 7, and then have Ben kill Snoke as the first dramatic climax of the movie. 8 gets to have two dramatic climaxes because Rian Johnson is a brilliant filmmaker.

When I first got into D&D I didn’t know what edition I was playing. I knew there were multiple editions, but I couldn’t find the edition number. The box just said Dungeons and Dragons.

It was 4E, and I played multiple other systems before I finally got into 5E.

Well it didn’t “undo” anything in 8, it just undercut and betrayed its core themes. That doesn’t erase 8, it just spits in 8’s face.

It’s impossible for 8 to have undercut 7’s core themes, because 7 doesn’t have any.

Snoke wasn’t set up to serve as villain for three films. He was set up to serve for two films, same as the emperor. You’re just salty that your fantheory didn’t come true.

So, you also maintain that 6 undid 5 by killing off the Emperor, right?

Name one thing 8 undid from 7.

Hey, 8 tried to tell a different story. It’s a story about how the legend of “Luke Skywalker” is overblown and doesn’t do justice to the man himself or to anyone around him. It’s a story about how war has a big negative effect on the rest of the world, even places far away from the war. It’s a story about how sometimes the world doesn’t work the way myths do, with awesome magic powers and heroic sacrifices. It’s a story about how everyone is important, and the “great man” idea of history is false. Those are stories that Star Wars hasn’t told before.

8 redeemed the mistakes of 5 and fixed Star Wars.

I prefer to call it the Sokka problem.

Of course. Everything important that ever happened has to involve a far-off backwater that nobody’s even heard of.

(I actually like Tatooine’s inclusion in KOTOR purely because it makes the planet an even more transparent Dune ripoff)

George Lucas created the Star Wars movies after R2D2 and C-3PO crash landed in an escape pod in his backyard, and they told him the story of the Empire, the rebels, and the Jedi. Earth is the only planet that has Star Wars because it’s where R2 and Threepio ended up.

Workplace comedy about Jedi temple guards.

The red circle is helpful for me because Stack Overflow’s UI is garbage. I always read the post, and then read the thing under the post, which is a bunch of nerds nitpicking over TLAs instead of an actual answer. Every time I open that site I forget that the answers are underneath the neckbeards, because it’s so unintuitive.

Narcisstic Personality Disorder is a lifelong disability with no cure. You can be a nice person with NPD. You can be a wise person with NPD. You can even be a healthy person with NPD, because disorders and illnesses are two different things. Having NPD is like having type 1 diabetes. You can live a normal life, but it’s still going to take constant attention to treat, and some stuff is always going to be just a bit harder for you. The myth that people with NPD are abusers is pseudoscientific bigotry. There are plenty of self aware people with NPD and there are plenty of non-abusers with NPD. People with NPD are most likely to be the victims of abuse compared to the abuser, but the kind of people who prey on the disabled to satisfy their own desire for cruelty don’t want you to believe that.

It sounds like you don’t want capitalism. It sounds like you want market anarchism. Look up mutualism some time.

WOW is proof that human beings are biologically programmed to work together to achieve goals. It’s a shame capitalism suppresses this desire in people and forces them to only let it out in games. Imagine if we had a society where people’s work was properly valued, where they could self organise to accomplish great things.

The “thousands of people” watching your “stream” are bots. They can respond to what’s going on in the video in real time because they’re bots. Actually I technically think this would be more efficient and therefore is probably designed so that it’s only one LLM pretending to be thousands of people, but I’ll call it bots because that’s easier to visualise. The bots know what’s going on in the “stream” because they can understand what the “streamer” is saying, which means the pickup artist can put on a convincing performance to trick the mark. If it was just a recording, it wouldn’t be able to respond to novel situations caused by the mark’s behaviour.

I don’t actually know if this technology even works, but that would be the intent used to sell it to pickup artist bros.