I know, right? It really sucks. They’re honestly one of the tastier bars I’d had. I’ve taken a bit of a step back from chocolate in general, these days. I probably got enough lead exposure as a kid… no need to add any more than is absolutely unavoidable.

Too bad about all the lead in them. They’re not as bad as some brands, though.

Not quite as simple as checkboxes, but the ability is there to some degree!

Cities: Skylines II Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords

For months, players have been complaining about the high rents in the city-building sim. This week, developer Colossal Order fixed the problem by doing something real cities can’t: removing landlords.

The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of living was too high in their burgeoning metropolises and complained there was no way to fix it. This week, the developer finally announced a solution: tossing the game’s landlords to the curb.

“First of all, we removed the virtual landlord so a building’s upkeep is now paid equally by all renters,” the developer posted in a blog on the game’s Steam page. “Second, we changed the way rent is calculated.” Now, Colossal Order says, it will be based on a household’s income: “Even if they currently don’t have enough money in their balance to pay rent, they won’t complain and will instead spend less money on resource consumption.”

The rent problem in the city sim is almost a little too on the nose. Over the last few years real-world rents have skyrocketed—in some cases, rising faster than wages. In cities like New York, advocates and tenants alike are fighting against the fees making housing less and less affordable; in the UK, rent is almost 10 percent higher than it was a year ago. From Hawaii to Berlin the cost of living is exorbitant. Landlords aren’t always to blame, but for renters they’re often the easiest targets.

From this perspective, perhaps Cities’ simulator is too good. Prior to this week’s fix, players found themselves getting tripped up on some of the same problems government officials and city planners are facing. “For the love of god I can not fix high rent,” wrote one player in April. “Anything I do re-zone, de-zone, more jobs, less jobs, taxes high or low, wait time in game. Increased education, decreased education. City services does nothing. It seems anything I try does nothing.”

On the game’s subreddit, players have also criticised “how the game’s logic around ‘high rent’ contrasts reality,” with one player conceding that centralized locations with amenities will inevitably have higher land values. “But this game makes the assumption of a hyper-capitalist hellscape where all land is owned by speculative rent-seeking landlord classes who automatically make every effort to make people homeless over provisioning housing as it is needed,” the player continued. “In the real world, socialised housing can exist centrally.”

This is true. It exists in Vienna, which the New York Times last year dubbed “a renters’ utopia.” Except, in Vienna the landlord is the city itself (it owns about 220,000 apartments). In Cities: Skylines II, the devs just got rid of landlords completely.

The change in-game will have “a transition period as the simulation adapts to the changes,” and the developer “can’t make any guarantees” with how it will impact games with mods. Although the update aims to fix most of the problems at hand, that doesn’t mean players should never expect to see rent complaints again. When household incomes are too low to pay, tenants will be loud about it. “Only when their income is too low to be able to pay rent will they complain about ‘High Rent’ and look for cheaper housing or move out of the city.” Maybe it’s time players had a few in-game tenant groups of their own.

The main difference is who owns the means of production. In communism, the government does. In socialism, the people do.

What would we call a hybrid system in which the government is made up of the people and owns the means of production? Direct Democratic Communism?

Edit to add:

A federation (also called a federal state) is an entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a federal government (federalism). In a federation, the self-governing status of the component states, as well as the division of power between them and the central government, is constitutionally entrenched and may not be altered by a unilateral decision, neither by the component states nor the federal political body without constitutional amendment.

Seems relevant considering “The Federation”.

This is some top tier mental gymnastics. Holy shit, I hope you’re a troll. You’re literally on the internet discussing your plans to commit fraud. Mensa-level shit, here.

People are going to buy CP one way or another… that means you should make it and sell it to them, right?

Grow the fuck up, and maybe train a LLM on ethics, you’re going to need some education on the subject if you hope to stay out of prison.

Say what you will, but this person absolutely knows what they’re about.

We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).

^{https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf}

Not to mention bumpers that fail right after the warranty expires! Can’t wait!

Worst $180 I ever spent. My Xbox Elite Series 2 controller’s bumper died a week after my warranty expired. I’d barely had time to use it that year, and didn’t abuse it in any way. I have controllers from 2002 that still work flawlessly after thousands of hours of service. Somehow Microsoft figured out how the make the least durable, most expensive controller ever. Never again, MS. Never again. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me… you can’t get fooled again.

Small Apartments - 30%

It seems like almost no one has even seen this movie. An ex-partner of mine rented it from RedBox one night. I thought it looked dumb, but I watched it anyway. It is rather dumb, but it’s also amazing. An incredibly dark comedy. My love of that movie has long outlasted that relationship.

Matt Lucas, James Marsden, Peter Stormare, Dolph Lundgren, Johnny Knoxville, James Caan, Billy Crystal, Juno Temple, Rebel Wilson, Saffron Burrows, Rosie Perez, and Amanda Plummer; An amazing, eclectic cast who deliver an idiosyncratic script expertly, managing to give us an ought-to-be cult classic that’s more than the sum of its parts.

When I first got my Ender 3 S1 Plus (same motherboard AFAIK), it would similarly freeze during the ABL. In my case, the issue was that I’d actually leveled the bed too low, and the machine was freaking out because it had to pass the software Z limit to home the printer. I loosened all the bed screws (raised the bed) by as many full turns as it took to have the bed’s screws just barely fully through the adjustment knobs, then releveled, reran the ABL routine, and finally all worked without a crash. This may or may not be your problem.

In any case, I do recommend checking to make sure you’re on the latest official factory firmware version, and if not update it with the latest firmware from here. The instructions are there, too.

Ultimately I got it working, but I ended up moving away from the janky stock firmware and putting Klipper on it instead after a few weeks.