Orange juice? Disease due to climate change.

That’s very recent.

A more historical look at orange production - particularly in Florida - shows it peaked in the early '00s at 250M boxes, then plunged to 12M boxes thanks to disease, hurricanes, and real estate development.

But the root reason is that orange surpluses were thinning profits. Drastic reduction in production pushed up unit prices without materially increasing costs.

Orange agribusiness is doing fine. It’s the retail purchases who are eating shit

Remember olive oil going up in price? Crop failure due to bad weather.

The destruction of historical olive groves has been a major Israeli tool for displacing native Arab peoples.

This isn’t just bad weather. It’s manufactured poverty through ethnic cleansing.

We’re seeing similar events in Central Africa, Ukraine, the Kashmir region of India, and now the US military campaign against Venezuelan fishermen.

I have massive issues with how the game awards runs itself, but the solution isn’t to artificially restrict what a game can win.

It’s an awards show. Everything about it is artificial

Are you trying to say that any game that gets funding of any kind is automatically not worthy of winning?

??? How did you get here?

If a game does the best in multiple categories should it be skipped over just to highlight another game?

It’s all subjective. If you make Balatro and I make BG3, there’s no objective way to evaluate “Best Game” between the two. You’ve got to make some subjective judgement (or just put your hand out and collect bribes).

Giving one of them a full stack of awards doesn’t signal quality, it signals bias.

If an indie studio’s first game wins best indie game how can it not also be the best debut indie game

E33 wasn’t the studio’s first game. So it shouldn’t be winning the “award for debut games” on the ground alone.

But yes, if you’re winning the “indie game” (which E33’s budget shouldn’t have qualified it for anyway) spotlight another game under “debut” even if you’re predisposed to favor turn based RPGs over platformers or puzzle games or simulators. In fact, especially then.

This isn’t just recognizing the game, it’s recognizing the actors.

It’s recognizing the budget more often than not.

I don’t think e33 is unreasonable.

For any individual award, sure. It’s an arbitrary decision of taste and people can agree to disagree.

When you’re stacking up all the awards on a single game, you’re effectively ignoring the rest of the releases for the year.

The only issue I have is sandfall shouldn’t count as an independent game

I’m more disgusted with giving “Best Indie” and “Best Debut Indie” to the same title. Why even have two categories at this point? It isn’t even the studio’s debut title.

Similarly, three “Best Performance” nominees to the same title. You know what you’re doing and it’s not evaluation or recognition, it’s just promotion.

But then these awards gave Pretty Derby the Best Mobile Game and FFT: Ivalice Chronicles (a thirty year old remaster!) Best Strategy, so whatchagonna do?

Game awards have always been glorified ads.

Whether you go to the Silksong, KCD2, Death Stranding, Dispatch, Arc Raiders, or any other games subreddit that was nominated for any award about half the comments saying E33 is trash, overhyped, and their game deserved to win instead.

Nine awards is a lot. And this is after they swept Golden Joystick. It’s a fine game. It’s just not the only game.

“We’ve picked one game and we’re giving every award to that game because it’s the best game at everything and have you played the game yet? You should it’s so good it’s just the best at everything.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_Interactive

Kepler Interactive was founded in September 2021 at the initiative of former Ubisoft employee and French entrepreneur Alexis Garavayan, who had previously co-founded the video game investment fund Kowloon Nights. Self-described as a “super developer” publishing group, Kepler was born out of an alliance between seven independent studios to “pool their resources and knowledge”:

Hedge Fund ass publisher. Come on, guys. The Gaming Awards have always just been sponsored content and you’re getting hoodwinked because you don’t recognize the sponsor this time around.

“His erect member throbbed, red chaff lines glowing with the heat of his passion, in the dim light of the monitors glow. ‘Why yes, I would like to learn more about Horny MILFs in my area’ he growled, before clicking the large pop-up banner and snuggling his succulent ass cheeks into the gaming chair”

Naming my main character “Alexander” and every time I visit a city I tell the DM to refer to it as “Alexandria” going forward.

It was called “Earth” because we needed to distinguish it from Sky and Water, which were totally different things.

Authoritarian governments do not like the anonymity the internet affords it’s citizens.

The internet has never properly afforded anonymity. Advertisers are constantly trying to tag and track people inside and between websites, apps, and platforms. What we’re seeing isn’t a new iteration of the surveillance state, but a weaponization of existing tracking tools.

won’t someone think of the children?

I mean, this cuts both ways. Because there is really, legitimately, and seriously a crisis of predation by commercial vendors and individual exploiters alike that’s laser-targeted to the most vulnerable end-users of the internet. That’s not exclusively children. Plenty of these scammers and creepers target the elderly, the mentally disabled, and the gullible. And the fact that our federal and state institutions seem cavalier to the degree of fraud and malicious practices on the internet, when they claim to be so obsessed with protecting us from migrants, terrorists, evil drug dealers, and domestic radicals really speaks to their uselessness relative to their stated purpose.

But on the other hand, yeah. All of this paranoia around kids using the internet does seem to be a backdoor to harass minority groups and dissidents. I might be more concerned about this except - per the above - they’ve clearly demonstrated vanishingly little technical savvy or procedural competency to date.

Seems like we’re going to continue to get the same Big Punishments For Minor Infractions fear-inducing policing we’ve come to expect from the War on Drugs/Crime/Terrorism of the last sixty years.

Mamdani is a pretty good example of the left doing things right

He ran at the right time, the stars aligned and gave him some truly wretched losers for opposition, and national media tripped over a dozen billionaire’s dicks trying to insert itself into municipal politics.

But I don’t think Mamdani would have been successful against a Guliani, a Bloomberg, or a DeBlasio. And if a Republican had won over a fractured Liberal/Left field, I suspect we’d be getting an earful about how Radical Islamists cost the Democratic Party the election.

There’s thousands of Mamdani’s in modern American politics. You can find them in every DSA chapter in America. He’s not simply the product of The Left Doing Things Right. He’s a product of the liberals and conservatives finally running out of gas, then tangling themselves in a knot trying to block an alternative.

The fact that I don’t fall over myself to agree with whatever the leftist opinion-du-jour is?

Getting strong Know-Nothing vibes of this whole thread. No real ideological thesis or central position. Just a bunch of hollow “I’m a free thinker because I hate you” reactionary slop.

Reminds me of the old joke about the conservative being whatever the opposite of a liberal is, updated daily.

These are all largely arguments over organizing a working class majority in control of it’s own lands and capital. None in these groups objects to the central thesis of worker self-government.

By contrast, centrist/right groups favor narrow hierarchies of elite oligarchs, them bicker over exactly which one of their kingpins should get the big chair.

if you don’t explicitly agree with everything we say, you are other and therefore evil

“Vote Blue No Matter Who”

(Except Mamdani)

Opposing fascism is illegal, and centrists have a fetish for Law And Order. That shoves a lot of people leftward by default.

Okay but the Far Left is antisemitic because they don’t support Israeli genocide freedom and democracy. So they’re even worse than MAGA.

There’s a real trend in advanced alternative (primarily solar and wind) energy production that’s had legs for over a decade and proven a more profitable and stable model of electricity production than fossil fuel imports. And electrification as a measure of economic growth has been a benchmark for over a century.

The continued growth of emissions overall is still a huge problem. But this shift in development patterns has a second-order impact on public policy. As states recognize they need more energy but don’t need more coal/gas to modernize, they can and will shift their public spending practices accordingly.

Particularly for the BRICS, this is a big deal. You’re talking about billions of future energy consumers who are no longer equating a higher quality of life with a larger carbon footprint.