Don’t forget leather conditioner, rust remover, engine degreaser, paint thinner, weed killer, barbecue charcoal starter, epoxy cure accelerator!
They might not have read Joyce but I can guarantee they were reading Steinbeck, Hemingway, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Vonnegut, Lee, Salinger, Frost.
All the novels and poetry in the American canon, the stuff high school students groan about having to read today, were once bestsellers in their day. You don’t get to be a bestseller back then by selling only to millionaires.
Investors buy on the rumours and sell on the news. They make money as long as the numbers go up when they’re long and down when they’re short.
I think John Deere is seen as a pretty dominant company in its industry. It locks in tons of farmers into its repair/service program.
I don’t know anything about the specifics of the layoffs but I’d imagine the reasoning was communicated to investors.
No, it’s also bad for shareholders. Shareholders need to see the numbers go up in order to get returns on their investment, either in the form of buybacks or dividends. A company that isn’t seen as worth investing in will show a decline in share price, causing shareholders to lose money.
Maybe they have plenty of guys but not enough spears? 6000 spearheads is a lot of work for 3 days. Ask any blacksmith!
No, it goes on the left so that you don’t need to put down your coffee to shoot the TV!
I think that has more to do with technology and the attention economy than anything else. Working class people used to read books a lot more than they do now. Then along came TV (aka the idiot box) to soak up those free hours. Now it’s all Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix.
Yes, these are Veblen goods. People buy them to signal status. The more expensive they are — and the more conspicuous they look — the stronger the signal they send.
Isn’t that how it was for the majority of history? Minus the AI crap anyway.
Still, the average person has incredible opportunity to see some of the very best art, as long as they live in or near a big city. Admission to most galleries or museums is not expensive at all.
Nonsense. My phone screen uses red, green, and blue to make up each pixel. The white pixels have their red component all the way at full brightness. Therefore there is a lot of red in the picture.
You could also see this by opening up the image and looking at the red channel which would not be completely black.
And building liquified natural gas terminals to receive shipments in the US after getting caught with their pants down by Putin. I’m pretty sure Putin’s propaganda machine had a lot to do with Germany’s pullback from nuclear.
Yes. Think of raw garlic like a spice but cooked garlic like a vegetable. Same thing works for onions!
Bermuda Triangle!
Nature, red in tooth and claw. The competitive drive is not uniquely human but it is human nature. Capitalism, for all its faults, tries to harness that nature for good. Every other system rests on an assumption of benevolence, either from the few (monarchies, dictatorships, oligarchies) or the many (communism, anarchies). History has shown that assumption to be a fatal mistake.
Yep! This is the secret to happiness in life. Helping other people! Plus it doesn’t take huge amounts of time either. A couple of hours per week can have carryover effects that last a long time.
Hobbies are also great. The big hobby I’m learning is gardening. Planting seeds, taking care of them, watching them grow: somehow this activity is just immensely satisfying for me. Plus I get to try some delicious food (which probably tastes even better due to the emotional investment). It’s also really cool because seeds are quite cheap and you can grow varieties that you’ll never see in a grocery store.
If you’re going to propose a communist paradise as an alternative to human-sacrificing Bronze Age god-kings, I’m going to call you out as being a little bit unrealistic. Government isn’t just an idea, it’s a technology, and it relies on other technologies (communication, record-keeping, organization) to function.
The kinship networks of pre-agrarian indigenous groups worked just fine when everyone knew each other. Where things started getting difficult is when agriculture paved the way for population explosions.
The U.S. can’t build like China does. Too many stakeholders to satisfy. Labour too expensive. Too many regulations. The high-speed rail line from San Francisco to LA is going to cost more than all of China’s high-speed rail projects combined!
Millions of deaths compared to what alternative? The difficulty with attributing causes in history is that we have no ability to conduct controlled experiments.
Did they test the soil and plant a control crop of corn only in nearby similar conditions?
When it comes to gardening I’ve heard countless stories of people trying some intervention and declaring “it works for me” without ever having tested the conditions or using a control. Those kinds of results can be safely ignored as unscientific.
Heck, one thing I’ve noticed with gardening is that even if you attempt to plant a bunch of crops under identical conditions (as best as you can manage) there’s so much variability that you get widely varying yields from one plant to another for completely unknown reasons.
I’d really be interested to see a comparison between the costs of electrifying the rail network vs using synthetic diesel for freight throughout the US.
Unlike cars or semi trucks, diesel-electric locomotives are extremely efficient. On the other hand, electrifying the many thousands of miles of track that run through large, unpopulated areas of the US seems like a monumental challenge that would yield far fewer benefits over electrifying cars.
Small Suggestion: Store Trinkets in Velvet Pouch
I love the variety and strategy trinkets are bringing to the game in 2.4! They do add to early game inventory pressure, which for me is the most frustrating part of the game (juggling a full inventory, throwing stuff down pits, running back and forth).
If trinkets were stored in the velvet pouch instead of the main inventory it would at least keep inventory pressure the same as it is now, without adding to it.