Because I don’t think it’s worth it to pay $650 Canadian for a console based only on a few Mario/Zelda/Metroid games?

Because your previous comment conflated exclusives with first party exclusives.

I can remember when the SNES had countless 3rd party exclusives. Now we can’t expect any?

The value prop of the Switch 2 is not compelling to me.

Because everything else can be played on a Steam deck!

How many exclusives is the Switch 2 going to have besides the usual Nintendo first party stuff?

They don’t. Until June 2024, Ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim) were exempt from military services under an arrangement known as Torato Umanuto. Furthermore the draft only applies to male and female Jews, male Druze, and male Circassians in the first place. All other ethnic groups are excluded.

Haredim have historically been very active on the far right of Israeli politics. They’ve made up a significant portion of settlers and have been major proponents of the expansion of settlements. Their loss of draft exemption last year was met with widespread protests but some are hopeful it will eventually contribute to political change. Policies like this are slow to take effect though, and generational prejudices don’t disappear overnight.

I don’t want to be drafted either but I think there do seem to be cultural benefits to universal conscription and mandatory military service. These countries seem to be much less willing to go to war than countries where only certain classes or groups of people are represented in the military.

Three of the worst offenders, the US, Russia, and Israel, are examples of the latter. The people making the decisions to go to war tend to be in the class or group that avoids military service.

They don’t replace each other. Aircraft carriers didn’t replace battleships. It simply made battleships non-viable without a replacement.

What it led to was smaller ships such as corvettes, destroyers, and cruisers taking over the role of battleships but still never replacing them in raw firepower.

That’s what APCs and lighter infantry vehicles are for. They’re not going away. It’s main battle tanks (the ones that cost millions of dollars) that are going away.

Moving troops around in safety is going to be extremely challenging but that’s because of enemy drones, not enemy tanks. Drones can fly recon around a moving personnel carrier just as easily as planes fly recon around an aircraft carrier.

For the price of one tank with cope cages you could buy thousands of drones instead. Tanks are not cost effective anymore. They’re the land equivalent of battleships in an era of aircraft carriers.

The land equivalent of an aircraft carrier is a soldier with a couple of drones in a backpack.

Blowing up Putin would be nice but it’s not a guarantee the war would end. It would lead to a power struggle in the Kremlin, no doubt, but there are loads of hawks in that regime and many are much more extreme than even Putin.

Of course, a more extreme war hawk might end up benefitting Ukraine by hastening the collapse of Russia. Or it might lead to nuclear war. It’s really hard to predict exactly what will happen.

That’s them being diplomatic. The truth is that they’re intimidated. Their speech is being chilled.

No villain to fight? How about the orange demon and his Nazi-Apartheid emerald mine nepo baby henchman?

With friends like these…

Like seriously, you can’t make this stuff up, folks! The schoolyard bully who beats you up after class and continues to insist that he’s your best friend! Not only that, he tells all the teachers that actually he’s the victim and you’re the bully!

How many of you out there knew someone like that? Made you count down the days until you were outta there for good so you’d never have to see his face again! I wish we (Canadians) could get the hell out of this toxic high school we’ve suddenly found ourselves in…

Used to be the opposite! These things seem to go in cycles.

If you’re revisiting BG1 via the Enhanced Edition it’s actually been changed a lot from the original game. One of the biggest differences is that summoning spells don’t scale in the number of minions you get the way they did in the original. I remember summoning great big walls of skeletons with Animate Dead and just having my entire party pelt the enemy with slings and arrows from relative safety. Can’t do that anymore!

I actually prefer walls of text these days. I find myself too impatient to sit through long, voice-acted diatribes. I can read 10 times faster than the voice actor can speak, so I just end up turning on subtitles and skipping most of the voice acting anyway.

I also just find that voice acting tends to compromise the amount of writing. They just won’t have the VA read a wall of text and instead they’ll cut it right down, removing tons of nuance. Voice also similarly compromises the amount of dialogue options available to the character. I have yet to see a voice acted game with the sheer breadth and depth of dialogue option choices as games like Planescape Torment or Fallout 2.

Yeah. It turns out there are much nastier heads of state out there than good ol Charles III.

The issue with “easy mode” is that it can be disabled. Scammers can and will find ways to trick grandma into disabling easy mode on her devices and then get her to install malware.

The technical problems are likely the most solvable ones, except for the skilled trades shortage. That problem is very difficult to solve because most people don’t want to do the work and the people who don’t have any other options tend to have personal / mental health problems that make them very unreliable as workers.

I have several friends who work in the skilled trades (drywall taping and finishing). It’s extremely tiring work that leads to chronic joint pain later in life. You’re also exposed to large amounts of dust so you’re wearing a lot of PPE which is quite sweaty and uncomfortable. Many of the other people they encounter in the trade have severe problems with alcoholism, drug addiction, and are very unreliable as workers.

You might suggest that these trades should pay more in order to attract higher quality workers but that means the cost of building housing goes up even more! Ultimately, the problem for skilled trades is the Baumol effect. The labour productivity of construction work has not risen to match the productivity of other industries (notably the tech industry). This problem has affected many industries in our society. It’s the hidden cost we all pay for the convenience of technology.

The political problem is even more difficult to solve. The issue there is that the middle class has grown rich on the back of their home. The rise in real estate value for people’s single family houses has been the main contributor to the wealth of the middle class. Building on this, the two main political parties in Canada (Liberals and Conservatives) target the middle class as their voting base. Thus they are both extremely reluctant to do anything that would lower the demand for housing which would cause real estate prices to fall, destroying the wealth of their voting base.

Milton Friedman has called this problem “middle class welfare.” Political parties target the middle income 51% of the population with social programs and policies that benefit them, not the bottom 51% as we might expect. The most obvious of these programs is government-supported higher education (which benefits the middle class at the expense of the working class), but that’s another discussion entirely.

I believe that the Liberal government’s pursuit of aggressive immigration policies was done deliberately to increase demand for housing (making the middle class rich) and to provide more working class taxpayers to support the education of the middle class.