Decent affordable Bandai kits when…

In terms of pacing and stakes, it would have made much more sense for the PCs to have gone to Baldur’s Gate earlier in the game to do all the “adventurers faffing around” stuff, then revisited the city during the endgame. Though it would have clashed with their “each act is one set of maps” setup.

Instead, in the last act we have Gortash, supposed 5D chess player, centering all his plans on the PCs flipping to his side. Then he sits back and lets them wander all over the city, undermining him. Ultimately, when they don’t take up his offer, his backup plan is “whelp, guess I’ll die”.

Maybe the excuse is that the Elder Brain was making him stupid…

It was too long and had too much content.

Seriously, though. In the last act, Baldur’s Gate was so huge and took so long to explore that it destroyed the momentum of the overall story. (The evil army is invading! Oh wait, they are now hiding underground doing nothing, so that you can take your time exploring the city).

Over geologic time, the vast majority of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. It’s not particularly meaningful to try to divine the reasons for the extinction of any one particular species. Obviously, the subtext they are trying to convey here is “these were apes, and climate changes drove them to extinction; we are apes, so won’t anthropic climate change drive us to extinction?!1!?” But it doesn’t carry over like that.

The one time the CCP backs away from clamping down on the private sector, it’s over video game microtransactions and gacha. Go figure.

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Honestly, many of these reforms are urgently needed and long overdue, such as lifting export controls—it’s literally insane that a country facing a shortage of foreign exchange would deliberately crimp its own exports. For these parts, Milei has a pretty good justification for issuing an emergency decree.

The big gamble Milei is taking is to stuff the package with a bunch of lower-priority items that, while arguably needed, are hard to defend as emergency measures. (This is quite similar to what the US government has often done, see e.g. the Inflation Reduction Act.) This increases the risk of the package being voted down, which hasn’t happened before with his predecessors’ decrees.

Bad title. An entire army division (10,000 to 20,000) surrendering would be a spectacular event. Turns out the article is talking about “some (~180) soldiers from a division”, which is totally not the same thing.

After a century of Peronism, the current state of Argentina isn’t a case study about libertarianism. Quite the opposite.

These sanctions are marketed as being aimed at military applications, but the dirty little secret is that high-end semiconductors are irrelevant for military tech, which overwhelmingly uses previous-gen semiconductor tech.

These particular measures are dumb, though.

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Jailed for life? Guess they are getting soft.

The Federation’s ban on AI and GE also has tinges of authoritarianism that run counter to the liberal ideal it’s supposed to represent. Say some planet in the Federation takes a different view of these issues, and wants to create a race of super-Datas and give them equal rights, are we expected to believe that the rest of the Federation will show up to bust down their doors, like some kind of space-DEA?

It’s in bad taste, sure. But if the end result is all important, why worry about the taste? As Winston Churchill said, “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Moreover, the Rs are asking for just increasing funding for something Biden says he agrees with, border security; it’s not like they are asking to dismantle Obamacare or something like that.

These are sham elections where every candidate even mildly critical of the government has been disqualified. Your criticism is groundless and uninformed.

If Ukraine aid is all-important, why not agree to the Republican demands on increasing border control spending? Doesn’t seem like a deal breaker.

They’re LARPing as imperialists, maybe, but realistically as soon as they try anything, they will get stomped harder than Saddam Hussein during Gulf War 1.

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