Maybe a nice bell but that site design is like nails on a chalkboard to me. Could they have a normal photo of the bell? Drives me crazy when sites do this. I know it’s not specific to this company either, I’ve seen tons of other companies that do this.

I looked it up. 2022 IIHS crash tests showed the Tesla model 3 as being much safer in front impacts.

Modern cars may make the engine fall in a crash, but it’s still better not to have that mass there in the first place. Having said that, the safety advantages of a frunk may be reduced if you have a bunch of heavy cargo in there.

Putting part of the battery in the front, in the crash zone, is going to reduce safety, not improve it.

One of the main things that improved EV safety over ICE cars is the frunk itself. By removing that massive engine from the front and replacing it with a crumple zone, the car becomes much safer in front impacts.

I doubt luck had much to do with it! This just seems like a convenient way to embezzle a few hundred million of investor money as a favour to a friend.

Somewhat, but not formally. Epic did keep those 1000 staff on Fortnite until now. They would’ve laid them all off years ago under the Hollywood model (gone as soon as filming completes).

It would be a win in the short term for the developers who unionize but I think it would be a long term loss. The AAA games industry is already in a pretty precarious position. Hollywood (which I think is a preview of things to come for game studios) is practically moribund.

The issue is that the bar keeps getting raised on production costs. That means spending more and more money up front which involves bigger and bigger risks. This in turn leads studios to take fewer and fewer risks in gameplay design, story, and all the other innovations that people want.

At the same time, the indie game world is getting better and better at innovating and capturing more of the many small niches that people are looking for. This further adds to the pressure on big studios to spend more on artists and level designers. It’s a vicious cycle!

I think unionizing will lead to the closure of a lot of game studios for the above reasons, so those developers may find themselves in the indie game market (which offers zero job security and is really feast or famine in terms of success).

I feel like that would change video game development to be like filmmaking. In Hollywood, everyone working on a movie is unionized but jobs are not steady. You have to get a job on each movie separately and once filming wraps up you’re out of a job again.

Game publishers seem to already want that sort of model anyway. They don’t want to hire 1000 people full time. They want temporary workers until the game releases, then a small staff for maintenance and updates.

Tons of them. Besides mixed-use zoning bans, there’s a widespread problem of regulation on everything from road widths to sidewalks to house and lot dimensions, setback requirements, lawn sizes, fencing, 2-way street requirements. All this stuff combines to reduce density and make older style high density single-family and multi-family mixed neighbourhoods impossible.

I don’t think it’d be hard to leave if you had. You can export your issues to CSV. Everything else is just git.

I just don’t get how you could read my original comment and think I’m some ostrich sticking my head in the sand. I follow current events, I just don’t obsess over them with every spare moment of my free time.

Sounds like you may need to speak to someone about it. I’m sorry for upsetting you!

Because I’ve been hearing about wars and chaos for decades now. I hear about this stuff literally everywhere. I’m aware of it. I don’t need it shoved in my face 24/7. It’s exhausting.

It’s also addictive for a lot of people. They get so engaged with this stuff online that they neglect their real lives. That’s not healthy.

I interned at a private school for a few months. The quality of education difference is not that stark. Most of the money is spent on non-educational luxuries such as fancy sports facilities, libraries, school plays put on by professional theatre companies, and lavish trips abroad for the students (spend a semester studying in Paris).

I encountered all the same issues with disinterested students multiple grade levels behind on reading and math that I’ve seen at public schools. The difference is that these students take month long vacations with their families and play extracurricular sports in fancy gyms, rather than struggling with issues at home (both parents working, needing to care for young siblings instead of studying, addiction to social media, etc).

I did also encounter really advanced students at the private school who were placed in special classes with fewer than 10 students per teacher and fancy giant touchscreens in the classrooms instead of whiteboards. How much did they benefit from that? Very little, I imagine, as in my experience the best students I’ve met were all extremely self-motivated and needed few resources other than writing materials and a large supply of challenging assignments to work on. I’ve seen those students everywhere and the ones at the private school weren’t getting much out of all the fancy stuff.

Munchos are okay for a bit. Eat too many and you get overwhelmed with salt and oil. I guess that’s a feature or something.

In my town restaurants come and go so fast the yellow pages are basically always obsolete.

Apologies are an admission of liability in the corporate world, therefore extremely rare. Corporate-speak non-apologies (with sweeping changes to reverse the damage) are just about the best you can hope for. If you’re looking for someone to blame for the non-apologies, blame lawyers. Otherwise blame Microsoft for everything they’ve done to screw up Windows (which is far worse than a silly non-apology).

Looking at your phone when you’re out with friends.

I would say that, but… there are a lot of, for example, Japanese companies that have been around for decades or centuries making great stuff the way they always had. Unless you’re saying Japan isn’t a capitalist country (I’d love to see how that argument plays out), I’d say there’s some difference in company culture that leads to enshittification.

I’ve heard in some cases it happens when a new CEO takes over and they have no respect for the existing culture, and just want to “make their mark” by chasing short term profits.

HP used to make a lot of great stuff. Their spectrum analyzers were the best in the business. At some point they flipped a switch and went into full enshittification mode. They burned all their bridges with their most loyal and informed customers.

It’s easy to get mad at people for not knowing the things we know. It’s incredibly frustrating. But then they know things we don’t. Turns out there’s way too much stuff to know and we can’t all know everything.

Modern life is unbelievably complicated and everyone is failing to manage that complexity to a level that would satisfy all the idealists. In light of all that, I find it hard to blame them for it.