The collapse was due to local coal mining no longer being viable, but it still demonstrates how it looks like when a city goes from 107000 people in 1960 to 5600 in 2025.
Large empty areas where homes and factories used to be, old billboards for stuff that no longer exists, whole school buildings and gymnasiums out of use and overgrown. Most shops closed or hardly open & few remaining occupied buildings in the middle of it.
Was a really special experience & the local coal mining museum was super interesting - just wondering for how long it can continue going...
The question really is - how does an abandoned town hurt us? Sure, there may be some sympathy and loss for "what once was" (same as the pictures of the abandoned classrooms in Prypiat).
The US has had similar things happen but the spread out population has given it some resiliency (many towns that "collapsed" when the mill/factory/whatever shut down continue in a strange afterlife as a suburb of a nearby city).
One general side effect is harder access to affected regions - with less people to serve public transport gets reduced or even abandoned entirely (affect rail lines the most, due to the necessary maintenance needed for safe operation). IIRC there are numerous rural lines scheduled to be closed in the near future in Hokkaido for example (and of course a bunch of them got abolished in the Yubari area).
Is this a problem ? I guess not really & it might actually help the nature regenerate in those areas.
Where it can be a bigger problem is various small islands - where the islands being inhabited makes a big difference in territorial claims & is a very important thing in regards to what China has been doing (building artificial islands, etc.). For that reason I suspect the Japanese government subsidizes island communities quite heavily to keep them going & keeping suverenity over those islands and the surrounding sea.
Cancun has one of the highest murder rates in the world. But I guess we shouldn't care about it because thousands of Americans fly there for vacation every day.
Or are you joking? I hope so, because it takes a certain kind of stupid to not understand the very very bad things that a shrinking population would cause.
Indeed. There's a Star Wars movie out right now - the first for seven years - and quite rightly, no one cares. Only Andor and Rogue one were good since the Disney purchase and the reign of Katherine Kennedy, which is a below-random success rate.
Indeed - I was very excited for TFA, and even during a reasonable amount of it.
Rey was fine, though a bit boring, but the camaraderie between Finn and Poe was good, when it was allowed onscreen, and Finn in particular would've been such a great character - imagine a real treatment of a Force-sensitive warrior brought up in a fascist regime and the real conflict and change that would be required in them over three movies.
This is how I learn that they shutdown the awards for Kiro usage.
But more seriously, while this is worded as a result of abuse, it had been up for more than a year at this point as a way to push people to use Kiro (you get badges for each "level" basically). Once you reach a point where everyone is using those tools, it makes no sense to keep it around.
Also it was not related to any performance metric, it was a pure vanity thing of getting virtual awards to display.
Yes. I've seen the AI usage patterns from people at the top of these kind of leaderboards, they understand that they are not doing things that they expect to produce commensurate value. At best they've inferred (sometimes correctly!) that the existence of the leaderboard means leadership has decided it's OK to burn prodigous amounts of token on any experimental thing one can imagine that might be useful.
> Do you think ai usage will decrease due to this change ?
Frivolous usage sure, internally at Amazon there is a subculture (if you can call it that) of award chasers. Using Kiro for mundane task to burn tokens does not sound that far-fetched.
Overall usage though no I don't think so, these tools have some pretty wide adoption at this point and not by people chasing awards.
Perhaps not a monster, but in "It takes two", there is a particular scene where you have to murder a friendly stuffed elephant to get your in-game daughter to cry.
I have been playing video games for decades at this point but that one really shook me up. You pretty much execute a toy begging for its life. As soon as that scene was over it genuinely took me a few days to come back to it.
Long time gamer here too and this also really got me. I'm not sure exactly what it was; perhaps a turn to a darker tone where I wasn't expecting it. For all the interpersonal disagreements the game is generally 'whimsical.' It was the desperation of the elephant that really got me ... the bargaining, the confusion.
I find that as I get older I respond more to media like this. I'm not sure if it's emotional intelligence, being more present, or something else.
I’m apparently a heartless monster or something, but that elicited less than zero for me. I wanted it to end because the squeeky annoying voice and over the top cuteness was for effect.
I’m happy for you that you felt that was dark. Well, IDK, maybe I’m happy for you, hard to say.
As a child in the 1970s I visited family there and my memory is that it seemed like every adult and older teen smoked. Often filterless. So it's quite a change in a few decades.
Perhaps that's location dependent. I was just there and was taken aback by how many more people I saw smoking than where I live in the US. Still not as much as southern or eastern Europe, but more than the large US city nearest me.
Maybe, but I have trouble with the framing. Referendum votes are >50%. If a foreign nation can get >50% of the Albertans to agree to something, that's still democracy.
Yes it feels wrong for the US to be giving money to influencers to influence the vote, but it's not like those voters are being coerced. In their opinion, Alberta would be better as a separate country.
Whether that opinion is enlightened or not has no bearing on it being democratic or not.
A foreign adversary only has to convince or “add” the difference needed to reach 50%. It never starts at 0.
I can’t blanket agree that “it’s their opinion after all” because fraud works the same way. The victim willingly triggers their own loss but after being deceived. Brexit shows the works, almost half the supporters feel like they got the bait and switch, being promised one thing and then getting another. But this fraud you’ll never be able to punish and deter because the foreign party is not under your control. So why allow any avenue for it to make a difference?
> The victim willingly triggers their own loss but after being deceived
So wrapping up the process in another layer of "informed individuals" is another form of government that is even easier to manipulate, because there are fewer of them.
There is no self-protection or those who are incidentally manipulated by forgoing their own responsibility. ie Manufactured Consent. This sentiment (albeit articulated differently) is why wealth inequality has become such a hot topic in the US. It's blatant that if it's many or few, it makes little difference within US politics. Billionaires can afford the influence to make the decisions. That's the game.
There will always be undue influence but you have to draw the line somewhere. Foreign influence is generally inarguably worse, the foreign party has absolutely no duty whatsoever to your country or your people, maybe benefits if everyone is worse off. And when it’s a major power it’s also fully shielded from real consequences.
If you are going to draw that line, foreign vs. domestic is a good place to do it.
Alternatively you give everyone a free mulligan and if they decide to start with <3 lands in their hand or no mana ramp that's on them.
My issue with guaranteed lands is that they remove the randomness of some lands. I am not guaranteed to get my "no maximum hand size" land and my rogue passage to make my creature unblockable in a typical game of commander. I have to plan for it by using stuff like expedition map.
Drafting last Friday, my first hand was zero lands, my second hand was one land, my third hand (bottoming two) had three lands. However, I then kept drawing four-drop spells and no more lands for 8 turns.
So is it "on me?" Or is it just that the game just is high variance?
Free mulligan means on your third hand you would only bottom 1, not 2.
Besides, with a 37 lands commander deck, the chances that in 4 hands (if your limit is bottoming 2, 5 cards in hand) starts getting low. Around 1 in 10 and that's ignoring mana rocks (2 lands + 1 mana rock) which probably brings it much closer to 1 in 14+.
If you add the chances of more than 4 lands (also fairly undesirable) your odds of a bad forced hand climb to 1 in 7, which is still pretty far from the 50% chance the original post is talking about.
Without the free mulligan you would be at 1 in 4, which is why I said free mulligan is the way to go.
> selling this at $15/hour/user??? That math does not math. A quick google says there are between 1.5 and 4.4 million developers in the US alone, let's say it's 5 million, to be generous, and each of them is subbed to this for 8 hours per day, continuously. That's 600 million per year in revenue
That math is not mathing. $15/hour/user, with 5M devs, 8hrs and 240 working days per year that is 144B in revenue.
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