> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel
There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.
Right, it's dystopian if they do it, but utopian if we do. If anything I'd trust Chinese surveillance more. It's accountable to the government not the whims of profit motive and private individuals.
We all know how much local PDs like collecting traffic fines, but I wish they would enforce the laws around yielding to pedestrians with the same enthusiasm as speed limits. I walk a lot and pretty much every day someone blows by in front of me while I'm in the crosswalk or takes a right on red into me because they're not looking. It'd be trivial to set up a sting for this sort of driving, just have one plain clothes officer cross back and forth with another cop parked on a side street ready to flash their lights.
CPI functions to obscure disproportionate price increases in essentials by lumping them in with cheapening commodities (e.g. electronics) that have a high demand elasticity. It's as much a choice to to use CPI to come to the conclusion things are fine, as it would be picking "arbitrary items" such as the essentials: food, shelter, medical care, and transportation that would paint a picture distinctly less fine.
I hear this all the time as a rationalization for why people don't go out anymore, but I don't buy it. You're afraid people on the internet might see you having fun? I've had people shove a phone in my face and take video while I was out dancing. It's rude, but it's not a big deal. The reason people don't go out is because Live Nation/Ticketmaster made live music outrageously expensive and strangled small venues.
Watches are the commodity of choice for corruption in some circles. I know people in jewelry and a significant portion of their transactions are watches to Chinese businessmen, formerly through Hong Kong, now through Singapore. They're high value items with razor thin margins.
> The question is whether we feel air travel is as essential to everyday life as busses and trains are.
Anywhere I can get to by train in the USA I can go faster and cheaper by plane. By bus I can go "cheaper" if I ignore the value of my time and the people offering me meth at the bus-stop.
> Specifically, for the least happy group, happiness rises with income until $100,000, then shows no further increase as income grows. For those in the middle range of emotional well-being, happiness increases linearly with income, and for the happiest group the association actually accelerates above $100,000.
Exactly. There are other things you can do to be happy and some personalities are simply miserable, but there's nobody who's better off with less money. I'd be curious to see if this holds in societies with better social safety nets for whom money isn't as directly tied to survival or options in how to live.
The state of the UK suggests to me that Orwell's writing was as much an expression of British post-colonial anxieties as it was an indictment of the USSR. His books are no doubt pushed in US education system for their nonpartisan anti-communism.
1984 was surprisingly prescient about automatically generated propaganda. The slop deluge we're going through certainly echoes the "Novel-Writing Machines".
A market economy is just as good if not better at denying "the agency to live their lives as they choose". Do you think the bum on the street or the poor family working paycheck to paycheck have more agency than someone with a decent job at a state owned enterprise and a social safety net? It's absurd.
There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.