The future of renewable energy is very promising. It's easy to miss how fast it can turn around when growth it grows so much year-to-year but starts at a small place. Keep this kind of growth up and the grid will be clean a lot faster than seems possible.
Beyond solar I'm also very hopeful about offshore wind efforts in the US.
Gotta look at it the other way to trigger them. A vasectomy is an automated instantaneous abortion. You're so pro-abortion that you're causing them every single time you have sex!
I agree, it's just strange from a business perspective too. Obviously the people in charge of AMD feel that this is the correct course of action, but they've been losing ground for years and years in the GPU space. At least as an outside observer this approach is not serving them well for GPU. Pricing more aggressively today will hurt their margins temporarily but with such a mindshare dominated market they need to start to grow their marketshare early. They need people to use their shit and realize it's fine. They did it with CPUs...
GPU prices being affordable is definitely not a priority of AMD's. They price everything to be barely competitive with the Nvidia equivalent. 10-15% cheaper for comparable raster performance but far worse RT performance and no DLSS.
Which is odd because back when AMD was in a similar performance deficit on the CPU front (Zen 1, Zen+, and Zen 2), AMD had absolutely no qualms or (public) reservations about pricing their CPUs where they needed to be. They were the value kings on that front, which is exactly what they needed to be at the time. They need that with GPUs and just refuse to go there. They follow Nvidia's pricing lead.
Not surprising.
Bioware has spent over a decade chasing mass appeal for their games, to the detriment of what they're good at. They made that work as they shifted from 2D to 3D to action-3D. That stopped working as they went too far, abandoning their core strengths. Bioware hasn't had an unmitigated success since... ME2 in 2010? That's 13 years of them floundering, with the very mitigated successes of ME3 and DA:I early on in that.
That kind of floundering is going to filter down to everyone working there. It's hard to bounce back from that. They know Dreadwolf needs to hit it out of the park if they hope to continue on. Easy situation to end up in development hell with delay after delay...
Aviation is one of the smallest contributions to greenhouse gas emissions as-is: in 2016 it was 1.9% of global emissions.
The danger the rich pose to the planet isn't being first in line for the second generation of supersonic transoceanic flights.
The danger the rich pose to the planet is them keeping coal and natural gas plants open longer because they personally profit from it. It's them keeping their taxes low, reducing our ability to fund renewable energy. It's them fighting tooth and nail against any new energy efficiency regulation (remember the incandescent lightbulb ban fight?) because it "hurts profits." It's them fighting against public transportation.
This? This isn't even in the top 50 of their ills against the climate. The hate for the rich is well placed. Applying that hate to basic science is dangerously misplaced. The rich love when people push-back on funding science efforts.
Faster transportation is quality of life too. Just like cars were, or railroads before them. Yeah, this one is currently worthless for anyone that isn't rich. But if it proves successful it will become useful for more of us. Like you say, there's also just the material and other sciences being done to make it possible that will filter out elsewhere. So much of early space exploration was Cold War dick waving, and now think about how much we rely on satellites. I couldn't navigate anywhere without GPS, personally...
People here take their hate of the rich (which is well placed) and aim it at all the wrong things. Don't like the rich? Tax 'em more. That's what I want. Higher income taxes and even a wealth tax on the top. And way more meaningful inheritance taxes. Instead they're bitching about investments in science.
Technology filters down. Once upon a time only the rich could afford corrective lenses, but that wasn't a waste of resources. How many of non-wealthy people will read this comment and wear glasses or contacts? I do. BEVs were limited to the wealthy at first too, and now are solidly affordable to much of the middle class: dependent more on their access to charging and their driving requirements than on their budget. The first residential fridges cost more than a brand new Model T when they came out: the inflation adjusted 1922 price was ~$13,000 today. Was inventing fridges worthless?
It's NASA developing new technologies. New stuff starts off more expensive, which means it will start off limited to the wealthy. If you don't want any new tech to come out that starts with rich people being the primary users, then you should go find your local luddite club to join.
Almost certainly still stuck with their fork of gamebryo. On the bright side, the footage I've seen of Starfield suggests that they've actually gotten around to implementing a better animation system.
I'm not sure on the specifics of how animations work at the engine level (I know there's stuff about animation rigs, but not much beyond that) but all their games up until now have had the same system of character animations and it consistently looked ancient. Straight from the late 90s levels.
Consoles still have physical storage as an option, at least partially.
For PC: the vast majority of PCs don't have a blu ray drive. So that's a $50-100 expense. Or a 1 TB SSD is under $100. Going with physical media makes no sense here, even ignoring the other glaring problems, like game updates and loading times.
Cost of production of a blu ray disc will be cheap. Packaging and shipping it slightly less cheap. Dealing with a retail store exceptionally less cheap. A digital copy sold will see >95% of revenue kept (first party sales — some amount lost to transaction fees), or ~70% kept (sold on third party digital platforms). A physical sale will see closer to 50%. It's a huge difference.
I wouldn't be surprised by that at all either. Which is why I recommended waiting!
As I understand it, most disc copies of games today aren't viable in the first place. Either all of the game data is not on the disc and some needs to be downloaded anyway, or the game copy on the disc is in such a shit state that you wouldn't want to play that specific copy.
Discs don't really protect us in the sense of ownership. It's still reliant on the same backend to enable it in most practical senses.