They don’t know what else to do.

Seriously. How do you keep growing this company?

There goes the sweets! Now she’s even more annoyed!

Some kinds of black dyes are actually just really dark brown. When they start to fade they turn lighter which reveals the brown colour. There’s no way a poop stain transferred to your sock in the laundry. The enzymes in laundry detergent break that stuff down and keep it suspended in the water.

Just be glad your brother isn’t a pigeon or other similar sized bird. A pelican can and will swallow smaller birds whole!

Even something very simple like a coffee shop is difficult to run as a co-op.

Yes, if you have a few friends who are all passionate about coffee it’s possible for you all to get loans / mortgages to pool together enough money to buy/lease a small commercial property and open a coffee shop together. The only really significant pieces of equipment are the espresso machine and coffee grinder, both of which can be bought used for a few thousand dollars.

But here comes the issue: suppose it’s you and 4 friends who started the coffee co-op with $200k each (total $1 million) to buy the real estate and all of the furniture and machinery. Now the 5 of you work in the coffee shop and it starts growing more successful so that you need to hire more baristas (or pastry chefs or sandwich artists) to work there. How many baristas can you find who can afford to put up $200k to buy into a share of the co-op?

Or even more fundamentally: what if 2 out of the starting 5 decide that working in a coffee shop is too exhausting and they don’t want to do it anymore so they quit? Now the other 3 need to put together a total of $400k to buy them out? Or do you have a clause in the contract which says they forfeit their investment if they quit? Now I dunno about you, but as much as I love using my espresso machine I would never want to enter a contract like that! I’d much rather keep my $200k in the bank and work as a regular employee barista knowing I could quit any time I want.

They don’t have access to capital (means of production). Consider the following scenario:

All of the employees at a car manufacturing plant are sick of being paid a fraction of the total sale price of the cars they make. They decide, in solidarity, to quit en masse and start a worker co-op car plant instead so that they can all enjoy sharing 100% of the profits themselves.

So they quit. Now what? Well, knowledge isn’t an issue because they already knew how to operate all the machines in a car plant. The problem is that they don’t have the money (or the land) to build a new car plant. We’re talking billions of dollars and a huge piece of land which ideally should be located on a railroad line so that parts (which are very large and heavy) can be delivered affordably by rail.

So where are they gonna get the money? Not from private investors, of course, since that nixes the worker only profit sharing arrangement. Not from banks either because these workers, while highly knowledgeable and motivated, don’t have any collateral to put up for the bank loans. The banks do not want to be in the position of repossessing a bunch of specialized manufacturing equipment and trying to resell it at a loss.

The common response to this is: the government. But think about that. Do you want your government giving billions of dollars to a few hundred people so they can start a car plant and then keep all the profits?

I’m glad things are better for you!

I hope you still have a serious girlfriend!

That’s an interesting take! I’m getting to be an aging gamer myself and I no longer really play story-focused games. I play Roguelikes which I can pick up and drop any time, 5-10 minutes at a time, here and there. These games are designed to have maximum replay value. So even though I don’t have a lot of time I spend it on replaying rather than playing new games!

It’s an interesting difference and I think it depends on what we both look to get out of games.

I think it was inevitable. Before HL2 we had Deus Ex. It was glorious. Fans loved it. Game devs looked at it and went “F*%@ that! We’re not making 3 games worth of content when you’re only going to see 1 on a given play through!”

So that defines the basic tension. Gamers love replay value and multiple paths and different character builds and tons of secrets to explore. Game devs on the other hand want players to see every little blade of grass and tree they worked so hard at placing in the game. I think they also have a lot of data from achievements that show most gamers barely finish the game once, let alone discover all the secrets and alternate endings etc.

Yeah that’s how the Total War series does it. A single unit could be up to 200 people. It tends to make the unit far less maneuverable though. This means it leans pretty far away from what the WarCraft/StarCraft fan is looking for with highly microable units.

I read a piece not too long ago by one of the developers of WC1. He originally had it so you could select all your units at the same time and just order them to attack. The lead designer said that was too boring and easy, so he had him limit the unit selection to groups of 4.

After trying it both ways, they agreed the smaller group limit made the game more skilful and interesting to play. Ever since then RTS games have gone towards increasing the selection cap more and more! I think it’s a mistake.

I loved the first one so much. I’ve been hearing the remaster for WC1 won’t have online multiplayer. That’s a huge disappointment for me. Hardly anyone ever got to experience that game multiplayer. I played it with my friend exactly once, when I brought my computer over to his house. It worked over LAN and I think also modem, but not the internet.

I don’t think trust is at issue here. If the game sucks, don’t buy it! There’s millions of other games to play.

There is reason to hope Blizzard will turn around. Bobby Kotick is gone. Microsoft owns the company now. Say what you will about Windows but Microsoft tends to take pretty good care of the gaming franchises they own. I think a lot of AoE fans are pretty happy with how that’s going. I could be wrong though?

They did this for people with WC3 CD keys.

I wonder if I’ll get access to it with my WC2 original CDs.

Double dosing on ADHD meds might not kill you but it can cause anxiety attacks or even seizures. If it’s an extended release formula then you could be in for a very bad day!

They’re really in a bind though. Indie games are great because there are thousands of indie developers out there making games and we get to play any ones we want. All the indie games that fail don’t matter because we don’t need to pick the winner ahead of time.

AAA studios can’t operate this way because they can’t predict what will be a great game that everyone wants to play. The only leverage they have is that they can afford to hire a large team of artists to create all the graphics.

It’s really the same situation that Hollywood film studios are stuck in and the result is basically the same. Hollywood makes their MCU graphics extravaganzas and AAA studios makes their Call of Dutys.

I’m actually taking a weekly course on model railroading! We have homework involving stuff like modeling terrain with plaster and painting landscape layers! I would not get that stuff done if it wasn’t due at the next class!

Just need a professor emailing you that your crocheted sweater is due tomorrow at 8am!