JohnBrownsBussy2 [she/her, they/them]

Looking at this International Crisis Group’s list of donors:

BP

Chevron

ENI

Open Society Foundation

Rockerfeller Brothers Trust

As well as various Western European & gulf state governments, billionaires and billionaire-founded NGOs. Of course they’re coping: their backers were hoping to get a piece of PDVSA.

I’m not saying it shouldn’t be legalized or that those other benefits aren’t present, I’m saying that cure-alls/panaceas don’t exist and that legalization advocates in the past have indulged in that sort of myth-making.

Hemp/cannabis certainly has benefits, but a lot of those benefits have been exaggerated to support decriminalization/legalization. When it comes to medicine, cannabis has benefits as a non-opioid analgesiac/painkiller, so that’s obviously a huge boon for chronic pain where the risk of opioid addiction and another side-effects are a major concern. However, I would be skeptical of claims of healing properties of cannabis or any other proposed panacea.

The proposal is for a globally-levied tax. Where exactly is capital going to fly to?

It’s been an absurd mishandling of the IP by Take Two. Will probably be permanently stuck in early access with only maintenance development at best.

A lot of people (myself included) had the update installed automatically by Steam with no option for rollback, so it caught people off guard.

It’s buried in the article, but yep it’s a Boeing.

It’s a hoax/transphobic rumor, allegedly from various unsubstantiated reports of schools keeping cat litter or litter boxes. The only case of this actually happening is keeping cat litter on hand to clean up large spills as an absorbant (specifically, it’d be used for cleaning up hazardous spills, like a chemical or blood.)

Either the banking crisis that’s been predicted over the past year due to high interest rates and bad debt, or perhaps there’s more that will come out about how JPMorgan Chase directly facilitated Jeffery Epstein’s operation in the Virgin Islands.

Wow, they discovered the copium index.

I hate how some people/reporters conflate maglev (with a technology that can work) with hyperloop/vacuum trains (which is a technology that doesn’t).

I agree that D&D will always exist, I am just personally uninterested in the direction the game is going with the OneD&D, and I think the source of this muddling path is do to the failure of the original business maneuver with the OGL revision. I don’t really see things getting better under Hasbro, so any major shakeup might be a good thing overall.

Kinda .

I don’t think Tencent would be a particularly great owner for the D&D brand, but they might have been more hands-off than Hasbro went it comes to mucking with the business model, and a major shakeup for D&D could be good. Honestly, WotC (or just D&D) could be doing better if it was an independent operation as opposed to subsidizing the Hasbro revenue sink.

Hasbro has no clue what to do with the game since their games-as-service, closed ecosystem plan went kaput after they backed down on the OGL revision (which would have been necessary to shut out other VTTs and ensure player & DM subscriptions). I think the recent lay offs of senior people in the D&D related teams suggests this as well. This article doesn’t seem well sourced at all, but a shake-up would be very interesting at this point.

Side-stepping some of the speculation and impact on the traditional market/fanbase, I am curious about the interest in D&D in China, as a Tencent acquisition would presumably make it much easier to market the game there. From the searching I’ve done, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of interest in D&D, and there’s no official translation into Mandarin. The movie didn’t do great at the Chinese box office, although Baldur’s Gate 3 did fine? Obviously, if Tencent does put together a subsidiary to design a version for the Chinese market, I’m not sure if they’d want to start by translating/adapting existing books or using the ruleset to design a bespoke version (either with a fantasy setting or based on relevant Chinese IP.)

Saw this post in my federate feed, so not a lemmygrad native but thought it was interesting. Depending on how confrontational you want to be:

• You could have the paper premise be on “both sides” of the conflict making claims. I.e., “both Ukrainian-aligned and Russian-aligned accuse each other of genocide during the 2014-present day conflict in Ukraine/Donbas. How do they justify those claims and how do those claims hold up against international law concerning genocide?”
• You could just make it more focused on the 2014-2022 period. “Did the violence in the Donbas in the post-Maidan, pre-invasion period rise to the level of genocide?”

IDK about your professor, but most professors should be accepting of such a research paper as long as you present a “neutral” outlook as opposed to a polemical one.

A third of working time for a bank executive? If you discount business meals and “golf course deals,” that’s like 4 hours a day total? ( so 1/3 of that = 1 hour a day)

No, annexation is illegal under the UN charter, of which Russia is a signatory, and wars of aggression are criminal in and of themselves. I’ll condemn the illegal annexations performed by Israel and other states, and Russia’s annexations fall under the same boat.

To be even more clear, I do think that Russia would have won fair referendums in Donetsk, Luhansk and certainly Crimea. I doubt that would have been the case for the other two oblasts. Still, all of those annexations were illegal. Just because the neo-cons have flouted the UN charter in favor of the ad hoc “rules-based order” doesn’t mean others should.

The annexations in Ukraine are illegal, but Russia annexing 5 oblasts and Ukraine being locked into a status as a neutral buffer state is not exactly a Hitlerian take-over of Europe.

OOOH. A link to wikipedia. The forbidden knowledge!

It’s so scarey.

But on the other hand, the tanks didn’t even run over that guy (CW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6F2AqzdXuI&pp=ygUhdXMgcG9saWNlIHJ1bm5pbmcgb3ZlciBwcm90ZXN0b3Jz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-W-7WPWfE4&t=18s https://www.youtube.com/shorts/L-pJTOzyEkI