Interesting how Latin American leaders are pushing back firmly against Trump’s trash talk, whereas Canada and Europe have been almost totally spineless.

Thanks. It would be really interesting to know what’s going on behind the scenes. My understanding is that once a live service game makes it to the big leagues, like D2, resources aren’t a problem if they get reinvested into development. For example, Genshin gets an annual budget of around $200m (basically one AAA a year), and pushes updates on a 6 week cycle. These big income earning projects all ought to be capable of doing crazy stuff that other studios can’t match.

What sometimes happens is that the company milks the game to fund other stuff, so not enough is reinvested (like FFXIV). But it’s so strange to see it happening to Bungie, because the whole point of the Sony acquisition was to have a healthy ongoing live service game.

Thanks. That sounds remarkably like the same slump FFXIV is currently in, actually. You’d think professional writers would be able to see this problem coming a long way away, and find a way to pivot smoothly to the next storyline. Especially with so much $$ at stake in a live service game.

Out of the loop. Why is Destiny 2 sinking? Didn’t the game use to print money? Did the money not get reinvested back into the live service (like how FFXIV funds get vacuumed away to prop up the rest of Square Enix), or did Bungie make some bad artistic choices, or what?

Leafing through the latest issue, here’s a random article:

The Biden administration pursued a mistaken policy on LNG exports.

This is not a leader, but in the news section. In the contents:

Despite her reassuring tone, this was a sharp-elbowed effort to place an obstacle in the way of the incoming Trump administration… Mr Biden bowed to election-year pressure from the subset of environmentalists hostile to LNG… As for the claim that increasing American lng would help China, it is politically clever, playing as it does on anti-China sentiment in Washington, dc, but energetically dumb…

Look, again, I’m not castigating The Economist here. They have a particular way to present news, and their readership knows it. But they definitely do not try to be “neutral” in the way other outlets do.

The Economist mixes snarky comments and snippets of opinion into their coverage to a much greater extent than other media outlets. Their “opinion” pieces (leaders) are sometimes just a truncated version of the longer “news” article later in the issue.

Not saying it’s a bad thing; they’re pretty open about it and that’s how they’ve always been.

The Economist isn’t neutral. Quite the opposite: they pride themselves on being opinionated. They might seem neutral only because those opinions regularly cross the traditional US left/right divide (e.g., they were one of the mainstream news outlets talking about Biden’s diminishing faculties long before his meltdown).

The original quote is: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” – Henry Kissinger

Not much analysis in this poll, but I would not be surprised if the US support for recent Israel actions is a huge part of the story. Not only does it directly sow animosity to the US among the Malay Muslim population, but it also raises doubts about the US-led narrative on Muslim Uighurs in China. Kind of hard to sustain the “China is doing genocide in Xinjiang” narrative when you’re doing everything you can to deny genocide in Gaza.

It’s worth bearing in mind that opposite chirality is not inherently dangerous. Whether an individual mirror molecule poses a problem depends on the specific biochemical context. While there have been famous situations where a chiral enantiomer proved toxic, for every one of these there’s been plenty more instances where biology shrugs and doesn’t gaf.

Does this mean we shouldn’t worry? Obviously not, but it just means we should do more to manage the general risks of molecular engineering for microbes. Chirality is only one of many, many routes through which risks can come, so there’s no point fixating on that.

I mean, there’s plenty of mediocre/bad IRL engineering too.

It’s like the term “social scientist”. People always like to quibble, but eh… whatever…

Assad should try declaring martial law. That’s a good trick.

Agreed, though the software part is a bit mystifying to me. It’s not like Europe doesn’t have good software engineers, so the fact that so many of Europe’s carmakers are having so many problems competing on software is jarring. It has to be some kind of institutional/cultural clash within these organizations.

For the vast majority of military applications, including missiles, you do not want to use bleeding edge chip tech. You use 50nm or higher, anything with smaller feature sizes is not robust enough for a military environment.

See, this was always the problem with Chinese efforts to indigenize their semiconductor industry. Each individual Chinese firm had no incentive to use Chinese suppliers, rather than their more established Western competitors. Well, guess what, the US Government has solved that coordination problem for them. Just about every Chinese company, up and down the supply chain, now has an excellent reason to buy Chinese. Sure, they’ll take years to work out the kinks, and there will be lots of chances to point and laugh in the meantime. But in the long run, the Sullivan-Blinken strategy of squeezing the Chinese chip industry might end up being one of the most counterproductive geostrategic ideas of all time.

It’s not (or at least not just) about subsidies, cheap Chinese labor, etc. It’s a fairly classic tech disruption story. Globally, the established carmakers know the future is electric, but they’ve got existing plants, workers who are trained to build ICEs, long established suppliers who make ICE parts, and so forth. You can argue that executives are being paid big bucks to solve such issues, which is true, but it’s truly a hard problem. Especially when these are real factories and workers and industrial equipment you’re dealing with.

But why did the disrupters come from China? Everyone is pointing to state support and existing strengths in battery tech, which are supply side factors, but there are also reasons on the demand side. Chinese people have relatively few cars (300 cars per capita, versus 850 per Capita in the US or 603 in the UK). As people get richer and start buying cars, there’s a chance for EV makers to get in the door. This, by the way, is why it makes sense that the Chinese EVs are entering on the cheap end of the market, whereas Tesla, which started out selling to western consumers, entered on the premium end.

China has its own ICE carmakers, but they aren’t established enough (and politically connected enough) to really push back against the onslaught of EV firms. (China can hardly impose tariffs on itself…) And at this point, the smarter ones like Geely have decided to go with the flow.

The problem is that the main American(*) EV maker, Tesla, is politically toxic to the save-the-planet camp. Whereas the favored US carmakers are incompetent.

(*) Looked at another way, Tesla is part of the Chinese EV wave, not in opposition to it. More than 50 percent of its manufacturing capacity and profits are from its Shanghai plant.

Unfortunately, his opinion on this matter is essentially irrelevant, except possibly as a PR exercise. As things stand, it’s up to the US and Russia to hash out a deal, and Ukraine will have to accept whatever terms they come up with. Such is life when your country is a geostrategic playing field.

In practice, authoritarian countries that you’re friendly with are treated as honorary democracies, and democracies you have a spat with become honorary dictatorships.