nayroclade

As much as I love text and point-and-click adventure games, there's always been an inherent contradiction to them. On the surface level, they promise nearly infinite freedom, more than any platform or first-person shooter game: That you can go anywhere, talk to anyone, perform and action on any object, and solve problems in whatever way you want. But in practice they're incredibly constrained. The world is an exquisitely constructed stage, with nothing beyond its margins, and there is only a very narrow, winding path to success. Puzzles have a single, usually somewhat tortured solution, and alternative approaches that would work in the real world are either not considered or declared impossible for spurious reasons.

Beating an adventure game is often an exercise not just in problem solving, but in building an intuition about how the game designer(s) wanted you to approach puzzles. Tuning into the vibe of the game world and understanding what interactions and approaches are likely to work and which won't. The most you can hope for is that the solutions have at least some logic to them. It's a bit like learning to solve cryptic crosswords, where you need to learn a hidden language to unlock the actual problems. This can be an enjoyable and rewarding experience, but it is definitely not the infinite freedom that the genre seems to offer up front, and I suspect for as many people who fell in love with these games, there were many who gave up in frustration at their paradoxical constrictiveness.

Apparently, the size of the mobilisation will be 300k people, so this isn't going to be an overwhelmingly large force. The speculation I've seen is that this move is about 1) stopping the attrition of professional soldiers as their contracts expire and 2) providing manpower in logistics and controlling the occupied areas, so as to allow more rest and rotation of front-line soldiers.

The ultra-rich certainly have tax minimisation schemes in place, but by saying that middle-class bears the brunt of taxation, I suspect you're falling victim to the fallacy that rich people don't think of themselves as rich[1]. In the UK at least, the tax burden is fairly progressive:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

The top 1% of earners pay roughly 30% of all income tax. The top 10% pay roughly 50% of all income tax. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% pay roughly 10% of income tax.

That leaves to 50-90th percentile, who you might call "middle class" (although it's debatable whether someone in the 80-90 range is truly middle class) who pay approximately 30% of all income tax. So the whole middle class only pays as much tax in total as the 90-99 range, although their total of pre-tax income is double.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/most-millionaires-dont-think...

Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-optimised for user-interface and web design, at a time when most designers were paying exorbitant license fees to do such work painfully and slowly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Fireworks was cheap, powerful, and hugely ahead of its time. Many of the features and flows people love in Figma and Sketch were pioneered years earlier in Fireworks.

After the acquisition, Adobe starved Fireworks of resources and marketing. They broke things, left major bugs and performance regressions unfixed, and eventually discontinued it altogether. I'd argue this wasn't simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows.

As much as I hope otherwise, I believe the acquisition of Figma will go the same way. Once it's under the Adobe umbrella, the simple mathematics of profits from Photoshop and Illustrator vs. those from Figma will result in the latter being starved, stripped of functionality, and eventually left broken.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks