It’s hardly a one-time thing. Kehoe came up through a rich Catholic School, owned an auto dealership, became a bagman within the State Senate, and eventually climbed up to the governor’s mansion by iteratively taking bribes and doing favors over the last 30 years.

Where do you think he raised the $13M war chest to run for governor in the first place? He’ll never stop supporting these reactionaries because he never wants them to stop shoveling money into his pockets. And if he wants to continue climbing? (And every governor secretly has an eye on the White House) He’s going to need those millions to become billions. That means he’s got to prove his loyalty. Go above and beyond. Really stand out as the kind of guy who will shove a few thousand babies into a wood chipper if his bosses demand it of him.

…made in 2018 by a Russian team. Way before the whole Ukraine war thing, you understand

Flipping through a history book on Russian/Ukrainian relations in the 21st century

Closing the book, putting it back on the shelf, whistling, and walking away

More seriously, I’ll never understand folks who hear “So-and-so is from Nationality X, so now I must/must not purchase products from them because of their bloodline.”

I am a professional encoder and I always put all my codes in a single big file marked EXE for faster execution.

A cunt who is getting crazy kickbacks from the Chamber of Commerce.

Business groups lobbied heavily to overturn the measure passed by 58% of voters, arguing it would cost jobs. The bill also repeals annual inflation adjustments for the minimum wage, in effect since 2006.

The action followed a pattern established over the past 15 years where conservative Republicans have used their majorities in the legislature to roll back or repeal measures that became law through initiatives pushed to the ballot by progressive groups.

…

In a news release Thursday, Kara Corches, president and CEO of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry, called the mandated paid sick leave a “job killer.”

“Missouri employers value their employees and recognize the importance of offering competitive wages and benefits, but one-size-fits-all mandates threaten growth,” Corches said in the release.

…

The action on sick leave is similar to a bill in 2011 weakening provisions of a ballot measure from 2010 called the “Puppy Mill Cruelty and Prevention Act,” that specified appropriate living conditions for breeding operations and including action this year to overturn the abortion rights amendment approved in November.

Incidentally, Missouri’s abysmal animal rights laws had, up until that ballot measure passed, made it the national leader in breeding (and killing of surplus) designer puppies.

Worse ways to get rolled.

Really says more about the disdain for western public transportation.

I’ll take coach seats on the Shinkansen over the driver’s seat of a Ferrari.

chinese companies are notorious for stealing IP

American companies sell the ip to China in exchange for access to capital and labor, then claim they’ve been robbed when the Chinese firms innovate and expand on the patents they’ve acquired.

The end result is a car company that produces better vehicles than anything an American or Japanese or German company can manage.

Curiously, these superior vehicles are “stolen” while the Teslas keep exploding under home grown technology.

Holy shit, are we still on Grey’s Anatomy?

The difference between “believable” and “logical” is as wide as a cardboard box with a cat in it.

I’ve yet to see evidence to this effect

A lot of these subsidies (both in the US and China) are implicit. Chinese state rail networks operate at cost, allowing cheap transportation of materials and labor. American borrowing is heavily subsidized through the Fed Credit Window, which keeps rates in the low single digits while corporate bonds and consumer loans can be 2x-30x as high. Both countries cut corners on environmental enforcement and subsidize waste management. Both countries subsidize education and incentive R&D through their university systems.

The real benefit BYD enjoys - even above its Chinese peers - is vertical integration. They own everything from mining interests to technology patents to dealerships. This is a deliberate consequence of Chinese trade policy, which requires foreign investors to partner with Chinese nationals in order to own and operate capital. Consequently, Berkshire Hathaway - a large early investor in BYD - cannot dictate Chinese vehicle manufacturing policy from a private office in Omaha. Chinese locals benefit from the innovation, the domestic capital, the experienced labor force (which can migrate to local competitors), and the increased economic activity it produces.

China is insourcing it’s wealth aggregation, which has a cyclical compound benefit over time.

Yes, but all of these are bound by fundamental physical laws. Cause and effect. You are a deterministic machine.

You are a meat mech that operates on congruent biological principles. Therefore, everything you do is de facto “logical”.

you just really want me to be racist

I don’t think you’re racist. I think you’re clinging to this idea of the Transatlantic slave trade as some kind of necessary evil.

It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.

Cultural traditions have cross-pollunated without mass migrations on plenty of prior occasions. The Silk Road didn’t need to move legions of displaced people in order to bring food, clothing, and music into the Mediterranean. Neither did Dutch traders need to flood into Japan in order to convey their art and technology.

The idea that you need a mass resettlement in order to mix musical traditions doesn’t bare out in practice.

Cool, I never made that claim.

How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?

They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it

Brits didn’t need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.

single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games

True, but they are still very lucrative. You can make them, release them, generate a healthy surplus, and roll that into making the next game with plenty of cash to spare.

Also, you don’t have half your dev team stuck supporting a legacy release, constantly fixated on juicing engagement and monetization. There’s a lot less overhead involved in a single-iteration.

Fortnite

Call of duty

World of Warcraft

Apex legends

Had truly phenomenal marketing budgets. It’s the same thing with AAA movies. 25-50% of the budget goes to marketing, on a title that eats up hundreds of millions to produce and support.

You didn’t need $100M to make BG3. You didn’t need an extra $25-50M to get people to notice it and pony up. These bigger titles have invested billions in their PR. And that’s paid out well in the end. But it also requires huge lines of credit, lots of mass media connections, and a lot of risk in the face of a flop.

For studios that can’t fling around nine figures to shout “Look At Me!” during the Super Bowl, there’s no reason to follow this model of development.

I mean, MMOs were supposed to be continuously supported and developed during the enrollment period. Earlier iterations of the model had live DMs running encounters, active continuous releases to expand the game world and advance the storyline, and robust customer support to address the bugs and defects. Also, just maintaining the servers necessary to support that much data processing was hella-expensive on its face.

Games as a service don’t need to be a scam.

But eventually, the studios figured out they can do the MMO business model on any game. Justifying a fee for Everquest was a lot more reasonable than justifying it for a glorified Team Fortress knock off. Or a freaking platformer.

there’s little chance that immigration wouldn’t have been involved somehow in your scenario(s)

Immigrants approaching the US from a position of common interest, a la French foreign investors or Chinese manufacturing interests or Saudi oil companies. You won’t just have people crossing the Atlantic to (be made to) make music, you’d have them coming over to distribute it under home-grown record labels and on contractual terms that favored their domestic interests.

They might have invented interesting musical genres, but I really doubt any of them would have invented something that closely resembles 1950s-1960s era black music.

Maybe they’d have made something just as compelling, but different. Maybe they’d have made something better. It’s very hard to say. But the claim that you have to whip people and chain them up to synthesize European folk melodies with African base rhythms seems at once absurd and sadistic.

If music history has proven anything, it is that great art flourishes when people have more leisure and more material resources. The Blues and Jazz traditions that eventually gave birth to modern Rock were the consequence of a rapidly expanding middle class. And that came out of unionization, urbanization, the modern entertainment industry, and the eight-hour work day.

Absent prior centuries of pre-industrial slavery and emiseration, we may have achieved this musical tradition sooner and developed it more fully, before the 21st century flattened and assembly-lined its production.

I don’t think that logically follows.

Music genres that came out of poor black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta could have just as easily come from middle class black manufacturing workers in Congo or Nigeria, if the continent had been integrated with the industrial west back in the 19th century rather than raided and plundered for 400 years.

Hell, maybe it would have come from middle class American Natives in the Mississippi Delta. Or Chinese rice farmers in a country not ravaged by opium. Or Iranians not ground under by the Shah’s dictatorship. Or Austro-Hungarians who weren’t cannibalized to fight the Napoleonic Wars or the 30 Years War that caused the Caucasian Exodus across the Atlantic.

The Peace Dividend reaped across the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West that gave us modern western music could have been collected anywhere.

You should have really looked into it while the 30% fed discount existed. I

The real return on renewables is in the industrial facilities. Your house isn’t going to have the location or the hardware to optimize sunlight collection like a multi million dollar facility.

Economies of scale can get the price of generating solar down into the low single digits. And then there’s industrial batteries/transmission.

That’s what is boosting utility. Not home units.

Same thing happened in Texas. ERCOT’s sky high wholesale electricity rate cap was an enormous windfall for gas power, but also for Wind and Solar which just got to draft behind.

And since there’s not variable cost to Solar/Wind and you can just keep rolling your profits into new capital, we get more and more infrastructure rolled out year after year.