Saying fucking asshole things. They're tired of having to pay skilled labour what it's worth, and AI isn't going to actually take the jobs, so they have to make everyone scared by saying things like this and laying off hundreds of people at a time.

Funny how such easy to predict actions aren't being threatened with being replaced. As more than one other person has said here, CEOs are ripe for replacing; nobody would even notice the difference.

Only thing doggie proved is that Peelon will roll all over the carpet after shitting it.

Like a dog.

I mean, it sounds like you have bad neighbours. I live in a townhouse, and my neighbours (co-owners, really) are great. We help each other out. I can ride my bike for a few minutes in any direction and be out on a beautiful trail or out by the lake. Don't get me wrong, I've very deliberately selected a city to live in where access to nature is trivial. That was a priority. But I'd be happy enough to live in an apartment here if I needed to, the only thing that stopped me in the first place is the rules/laws surrounding pet ownership (I had 3 cats at the time, 4 now).

I'm much more in favour of being communally rich. Whole forests and lakes are available to me, not just a yard and a backyard pool or whatever. There are lots of ways to have peace and quiet and beauty, and only a few of them are living out in a field, isolated from everyone else. I'm a pretty introverted person, but when the park is big enough, you don't have to talk to anyone to enjoy it.

I think to be fair, it has both a problem with not enough taxes and bad priorities. Unless one of the priorities you're talking about is corporate welfare and low taxes on the rich. Certainly it is the case that they (and Canada) could raise enough money if they would actually just enforce their tax laws and implement wealth taxes on the ultra-rich.

If your microphone is active, it should at least show an indicator light and a top-row icon, I'm pretty sure.

I don't know about your food banks, but here in Canada, they're not run by the government. They're charities. I'm ALREADY paying taxes to try to make sure our government takes care of less fortunate people, and they've failed by foisting that off onto food banks, which are run on shoestring budgets, charity, and luck. What happens when people can't afford to give to the food bank, like when there's a recession?

If it were a government agency that was guaranteed to have affordable/free food so that anyone could at least cover their basic dietary requirements, I'd definitely be agreeing with you here. But it's not. We need to understand that the government is failing us at the most basic level.

This is, remarkably, one of the worst takes I have ever seen.

Everything is politics. Especially art. Narrative and storytelling is always going to be political. There are games about war between actual countries on this earth and you think games aren't political? Maybe candy crush isn't and that's all you play. But there are political choices made throughout the development of a game, and they can and should be scrutinized through that lens.

Some games are more political than others, definitely. That's fine. But any game with more than a facile narrative better be something we can talk politics about or it's a huge waste of time.

Even this discussion of whether politics belongs/is possible to remove from games is a political topic. Polygon was a good site that often had interesting takes. Iâ(TM)ll be sad to see it turned to AI slop.

Cuba would be in a much different and likely better position if the USA wasn't embargoing them and doing whatever they can to make sure the country never succeeds.

Local ordinances? Lack of subsidies? I live in the Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada. Everyone here has a heat pump. It's getting less and less common to see furnaces of any kind. But the government has been working hard to switch people over where they can, providing subsidies and showing how much lower your bills tend to be.

I greatly suspect Norway has also done something like that, considering the penetration of EVs there as well.

My heating/cooling bills are slightly higher in the winter than in the summer, but not meaningfully so, and we get temperatures down to -20C here occasionally. The heat pump is much slower at heating the house below -20C, but it's not too bad. (In actual fact, the reason why the bills are higher in the winter is because the cats still want to go out onto the catio and that means the door is often left propped open for long stretches of time. They want to do that in the summer as well, but the delta between room temperature and the outside temperature is smaller in the summer than in the winter.)

IN PRACTICE, the reality is that a normal heat pump will be better for your heating and cooling and your bills almost all of the time. If you live even further north than me, like in my old home town of Edmonton, you might invest in a failover heating system. But if you're buying from a reputable local installer, they'll set you up properly.