And to prove your point even further: my friends and I went go-karting for someone’s stag do a couple of weeks ago and it was £50 per person for two fifteen-minute sessions. And that’s even more entry level than autocross, I’d argue!

We had to get there early, too, and get registered, get changed into overalls and helmet, etc. We had to go through an idiot-proof safety briefing. We had to wait for the previous group to finish their session. We had a break between our two sessions for drinks and to cool down / recover, and another session ran during that time, so ~twenty minutes there. All in all, our half-hour of driving probably came with around an hour and a half of downtime, which I think lowers the value proposition even more.

(Plus I got heatstroke during it and got increasingly ill as the day went on - and was unable to really eat during our restaurant meal or drink at the bars later in the day - which lowered the value proposition even more for me, ha!)

£100/hour of actual go-karting, versus £1/hour for most AAA games these days. I don’t tend to like AAA games that much, for the most part, but even with all their bloat, recycled content, open-world downtime, etc, they still seem like better value per money per time than anything motorsports-related.

Yep. LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off, and for getting “soft answers”, but no-one should ever be looking for factual answers from them.

To be honest, I think your position is short-sighted, naïve and lacking in pragmatism.

Right now, in most constituencies, your choice is between Labour/Lib Dem and Tory/Reform. And anyone who thinks Labour getting into government wouldn’t be an improvement over the Tories hasn’t been paying attention for the last decade. Even if Labour had the exact same political stance as the Tories - which they don’t - the fact that they’re not nearly as likely to be corrupt, self-serving slime balls makes them an improvement by itself.

Labour needs to appeal to moderate, swing voters. There’s no steadfast left-wing voter base in the UK; if Labour can’t win over the swing voters they won’t get elected - it’s that simple. That doesn’t mean they’re sat there asking themselves how they can be more like the Tories, it just means they need to take positions that have broad appeal and don’t just go full-socialism. As much as socialism appeals to me, I’d rather see Labour actually get elected. There’s zero chance we go from our current government to a socialist government overnight.

And if I think about where I’d like to see our country in ten or fifteen years, Labour winning this election is the most realistic way for us to get there. Spoiling your ballot, not voting at all, or voting for some candidate who’s going to get <3% of the vote isn’t going to achieve anything other than a short-lived sense of self-satisfaction. The best thing any of us can do is to pick the least bad of the realistic options. I don’t like that that’s the system, but it’s the system we’ve got and we either have to work within it or have it imposed on us anyway.

I don’t think the Labour Party is perfect by any means. They have some ideas I like, and I’m hopeful they’ll unveil more policies I like in the next few weeks. And, of course, there are things I dislike about them. They’re certainly not my dream party. But I also think it’s important not to let perfect be the enemy of good. We have a chance to improve things, and squandering that chance just because things aren’t going to be perfect is fucking stupid.

I believe the thinking is that three days is (hopefully) enough time for whatever issues to be resolved, or for you to look for other sources of supplies. You’re not expected to stockpile enough to live on for months!

I don’t disagree, but gaming laptops are always overpriced. You’re paying a premium for the small form factor. (And I assume they also have the much less powerful RTX 4070 Mobile, which makes the value proposition even worse for laptops.)

Let me know what you think when you’ve listened!

Their song “Shut Up And Let Me Go” was fairly successful, too, so they weren’t quite a one-hit wonder.

I actually quite enjoy their 2018 album “The Black Light”, even if it wasn’t that well received. It’s kind of a stripped back indie dance record, and it’s fine. But they did an alternate version called the “Manchester Version” that had a much more raw, indie rock sound to it that I dig. It’s no masterpiece by any means, but it’s something I’m happy to put on every now and then.

I saw an article on the Torygraph titled something like “I voted for Israel in Eurovision to spite the woke”, and there were people in the comments talking about how they’d sent in 20 votes for Israel. And others talking about how “the left” are relentless bullies for making the Israeli singer cry, etc.

I’m wouldn’t be surprised if Israel did try to influence the votes, but I think there are plenty of right-wingers willing do do it for free, too.

I’m definitely a little confused about Tango - I’m hoping we’ll at least get more details come out about why Microsoft shuttered them. I mean, Ghostwire Tokyo was… whatever, and I could understand Microsoft not wanting to have them working on that kind of scale again any time soon. It wasn’t bad by any means, but it was fairly expensive and perhaps didn’t do as well as they hoped. But I’m surprised they didn’t want to just downsize the studio and aim for another HI-FI Rush-esque game (or sequel).

But Arkane Austin being closed definitely makes sense. Not only was Redfall a disaster, but by the time Redfall released, 70% of the people who’d worked on Prey had left the studio. (Largely because the studio’s president had left the studio just after Prey, I believe, rather than because of the Microsoft acquisition of Bethesda.) All that was really left was the name.

I installed uBlock for someone recently. They complained about all the empty space where the ads used to be. So I removed the empty space by blocking that element with uBlock, which increased the width of the main body of the website, and they then complained that the website was too wide…

Some people are beyond help.

Those and reducing the requirements for the early blinds definitely stand out to me, yeah. Reducing the early blinds is a very good change - I think most of my early losses aren’t necessarily because I’ve played badly, but rather because it’s too early in the run to have found something to build around or to put any combos together. This change makes you less beholden to RNG in the early game, and also allows you to think a little more about your endgame strategy rather than focusing on surviving right now.

It certainly is a lot, although it’s the sort of thing where, when you really think about it, you’d kinda hope it’s something the government is willing to spend money on. You don’t want all the best and brightest just going to private companies because they can earn 3x as much as the government is willing to pay. (Whether the current SPADs are the best and brightest, I don’t know… If they are, it’s certainly not reflected in the government’s decision-making! But I think the point still stands that there needs to be a financial motivation for talented people to work in government rather than private businesses.)

Yeah, the diversity looks pretty bad…

I’d assume we’d have to wait until he was an actual government advisor before we got any figures (if at all). And yeah, advisors can do pretty well for themselves, although how much they get paid depends on how involved they are. Advisory roles can range from full-time consulting roles and helping with policy creation to “hey, can you just spend a couple of hours reading through these documents and give us your thoughts?” once every few months.

You can see the pay for the government’s special advisors (ie, the top tier of advisors) here if you’re interested. Bear in mind those are in the top, top tier of advisors so most aren’t necessarily going to be paid that much.

It’s worth noting he’s standing down at the general election:

He said he would not seek re-election to the House of Commons at the next general election. But, writing in the Observer, he says he envisages a role advising the Labour party on its policies on mental health while focusing more on his NHS work.

This one feels a little different. He stated previously that he was going to stand down at the next election, which is reiterated in the article:

He said he would not seek re-election to the House of Commons at the next general election. But, writing in the Observer, he says he envisages a role advising the Labour party on its policies on mental health while focusing more on his NHS work.

Defecting - and especially co-ordinating with Labour for months to time his defection and pre-arrange him joining Labour - isn’t just fleeing the sinking ship so much as hanging around a little longer and deliberately trying to make it sink faster. It represents something rather than just being about saving his own skin.

I don’t think it’s that, considering he’s standing down at the next election anyway:

He said he would not seek re-election to the House of Commons at the next general election. But, writing in the Observer, he says he envisages a role advising the Labour party on its policies on mental health while focusing more on his NHS work.

Whether that advisory role would be paid or not, I don’t know, but it certainly wouldn’t be to the tune of £90K!

As much as I disliked Cameron’s government at the time, I don’t think it was close to the levels of nationalism and right-wing ideals we see from today’s Conservative party. I rarely agreed with their approach, but I could at least understand that there were genuinely good-faith Tory MPs back then who simply had a different approach to things than what I would have wanted to see. Maybe they were just better at hiding it, but they did feel less sleazy and corrupt, and more like they actually wanted to work towards changing things for the better rather than just tearing everything down and lining their own pockets.

Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg and the BBC, Dr. Poulter said:

“I found it increasingly difficult to look my NHS colleagues in the eye and my patients in the eye and my constituents in the eye with good conscience.

“And I feel that the NHS deserves better than it has at the moment in terms of how it’s run and governed.

“The party I was elected into valued public services, it had a compassionate view about supporting the more disadvantaged in society. I think the Conservative Party today is in a very different place. Its focus is not on delivering or supporting high-quality public services.”

I don’t think the Steam Workshop is the issue here. I’m glad it exists, and direct downloads or snv links are still a reasonable alternative for mods that can’t be hosted on the Workshop for whatever reason.

It’s okay; I appreciate the apology! :)

I think it’s important to look for the nuance in situations and not treat everything as zero-sum. Both sides can have good points and be open to criticism at the same time (this isn’t an “enlightened centrist” take, I promise!). I think a lot of discussion online does tend to strip away nuance and take the position that if you show any empathy with one side then it means you must hate the other - I do my best to avoid that!