Reichhardt

Food is cheap in Asia because rice is cheap, there is no tipping, the weather is generally warm year-round and cities are dense (supporting outdoor food stalls).

Anyway, just buy yourself an electric pressure cooker - you can cook 95% of your meals at home easily and eat out for the other special occasions. It just takes additional planning to buy ingredients ahead of time in bulk, and freeze some of them.

These bans are easy to legislate, but building codes (including for apartment blocks) should be updated to require Passivhaus and things like triple-glazed windows and ubiquitous EV charging.

What model car did they buy?

Obesity is a major risk factor for severe COVID, and hence transmission and hospital occupation. Like the supposed factors that we are segregating the unvaccinated for.

You're still delivering boxes, jars and cans of ingredients to customers, to cook and prepare food at their home.

There's a lot of waste there: it would be more efficient to just feed people from centralized canteens located near living and work spaces. The problem is that you have sales taxes and tips to add to those kind of meals, plus the wastage of inconsistent demand for the restaurant generally and for individual menu items.

Paradoxically, those people actually use fewer healthcare resources, and pension resources, since they die earlier after retirement.

Healthy people with long, drawn-out illnesses use the greatest healthcare and pension resources.

https://taxfoundation.org/new-study-shows-smokers-and-obese-...

Vitamin D and air quality is the major underlying factor behind COVID severity - its why the virus exhibits such seasonality. Pushing vaccines doesn't address underlying public health problems.

Its dead easy to fix it though: for politicians to ban the purchase of Proof of Work cryptocurrencies. All of the major exchanges are centralized now anyway. Tank the price (via basic supply-demand microeconomics) and you solve electricity and chip supply issues.

The fact that this easy step hasn't been done suggests a broader conspiracy to destabilize Western nations and sow chaos, perhaps to usher in a transfer of global power from West to East. Note that China has banned the mining and trade of these cryptocurrencies long ago.

The Quest hardware is off-the-shelf displays and SoCs from smartphones. Its selling so well because its not specialized.

I think the era of high-res gaming is over. The games are too expensive to produce and the hardware is too costly (or impossible) to buy.

What matters more is broad, international appeal, to multiple age ranges and both genders, on as many platforms as possible.

In particular, having social experiences in order to replace what has been lost due to COVID lockdowns.

You can use the saute mode in the place of a stovetop pan.

Buy an electric pressure cooker. You can cook 100% of your meals using one. I don't even use my oven or stovetop any more.

The ruling regime/Edrogan are not interested in the general wellbeing of the country, only of looting it.

I've come to realize that there are a significant number of politicians who will happily oversee 100 units of 'destruction' if it means they are able to generate 1 unit of personal profit in the process. When applied to an entire nation state, the results are significant. Look at the corrupt wealth generated by the current US Speaker of the House, for example.

"U.S. COVID-19 Deaths in 2021 Surpass 2020 Total"

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211122/us-covid-deaths-202...

From examining Swedish death spike data, you can see that viruses like COVID occur about once a decade, the last being Swine Flu in 2009:

https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...

Its just that, using Swedish data again, Western societies are significantly more aged: eg. there 120,000 80-84 year old men (prime COVID death territory) in 2020, vs only 101,000 in 2009. Its similar in many other Western countries: about 20% more elderly people, in absolute numbers.

As such, the 'same' types of respiratory viruses will simply kill more people.

The decisions is thus a social and political one: do we lockdown and force 6-monthly vaccinations on everyone, based on elderly deaths that will occur anyway simply due to the baby boomer cohort entering their twilight years?

I think we need to just get more efficient at end-of-life care, focusing on simpler treatments and comfort, as well as euthanasia-on-demand for anyone over age 75.

The purpose of the pipeline is precisely to bypass Ukraine and connect into Germany directly. That way Russia can declare war on Ukraine whilst gas connectivity is maintained. Nordstream also avoids going through Polish territory.

Its basically the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact all over again.

A more confident America and Europe.

Keep in mind that Russia has a history of corrupting Western politicians, on a strategic and multi-decade basis, for example Gerhard Shroder, ex-Chancellor of Germany. He initiated the nuclear shutdown, and now serves as Chairman of Rosneft:

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/gerhard-schr%C3...

The message to Europe is presumably: intervene in Ukraine this time, and we'll completely shut off your Winter gas.

Synthetic Fuel is not going to be for the masses, it will be for the elite driving Porsches (hence the research funding), as part of a giant green-washing scheme.

What's sad is that the EU will throw subsidy money at it, instead of just doing the sensible thing and adopting EVs at all levels - simply to maintain the corporate legacy of soon-obsolete German automakers.

Hospitals fill up every winter from respiratory viruses. The healthcare system is designed to fill up. There's no point having expensive rooms, machines, and staff sitting idle. Planners forecast seasonal requirements and build healthcare around the maximum.

We're probably going to see increased demands on hospitals simply due to the larger numbers of old people.

For example, 2009 Swine Flu (remember that?) is about as deadly as 2020 COVID. But now in eg. the USA, there are 2.9m 80-84 year old men (elderly men are in the prime risk category for COVID deaths), compared to 2.3m in 2009:

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

These demographic trends were exacerbated by weak flu seasons in 2018 and 2019.

Crises always bring light to pre-existing failures in systems. COVID is simply exposing Western societies as aged, overweight, and Vitamin-D deficient.

If you accept the evidence that Omicron is a weaker variant (eg. the low hospitalization numbers in the UK despite the surge in cases), then our strategy of partially vaccinating the 3rd world was a success.

Omicron seems to be at the same level of deadliness now as the flu, so this whole pandemic is being maintained now purely by political and media energy, rather than any scientific justification.

Is this just another way of measuring head size?

The huge 30% commissions charged by Sony, Microsoft, Valve, Nintendo, Apple, Google are a huge negative factor to the potential profits of the industry. On top of that, you have sales taxes from every country in the world, which are creeping upwards globally. For every $1 of customer spending, typically only 50-60c reaches the developer.

In most other Tech sectors, you can go straight to customer, without platform commissions or taxes, and the profitability and salaries reflect that.

All of the profits in Gamedev are taken by platform holders.