38 minutes of "brilliant analysis" later and wind power still requires subsidies and unbalances grids while nuclear power needs only more concentrated investment capital and long term government guarantees.

Building wind turbines is a good investment because they scale well and have political backing including subsidies. Nuclear power is a long term investment in a volatile sector.

Once the whole planet is run by banks and all continents are politically united, connected by a network of thick cables, wind and solar will have a chance to dominate. Right now you need backups for all those windless nights, safety valves for windy Sundays, and new transmission lines to be safe from crazy neighboring countries.

So much non-final stuff that never shipped!

@9:43 he is talking about Steven Polge who worked on AI for Valve. Steve is know for his Quake 1 bot, the Reaper Bot. This thing was a real challenge to play against.

http://easttown.co.uk/quake/reaper.html

I actually knew a few of the people involved. DigiPen (where the students who designed Portal went) was just up the road (and my second choice for a CGI school) from where I got my education in computer animation. I used to hang out with Ben Morris who built level design tools for Doom and Quake back in the day and went on to build the level design tool for Valve that they used on Halflife and Portal.

I also worked on Navy Seals, the project Gooseman did before Counter Strike.

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and keep collaborating with some of those folks instead of finding a different path (animating for TV shows).

This is why you only hire licensed and bonded plumbers. Sure they can sue him...but for what? A shop vac?
$150 to turn off the water? It's simple, use a wrench to turn the valve...why pay?

I always have Steam powered up but I haven't thought about Valve as Valve in a while and though I liked both Portal's I almost never considered them Valve games, just games they bought the rights to and plopped the developers in their offices .

But, it seems like Valve are done with games. They're a software platform & hardware developers now. What is sad about that is I don't give two shits about any of their hardware products: HTC Vive, Steam controller, Steam machines.... it's all rubbish.

Go back to making good games!!

I guess the only reason daddy had a son was to make this video some day to emotionally blackmail Valve.

Evil genius.

Kinda hit the nail on the head with that.

I would love to see Valve blow everyone's minds with a genre redefining masterpiece that changed gaming forever.

But at this stage, I'd be happy with a reasonably produced machining that just finished the damn story!!

There are systems other than democracy which have the kind of cheques and a balances you are referring to.

Just that not all of them place that power indiscriminately in the hands of the demos. e.g. a Meritocratic system expects its voters to earn their votes by demonstrating competence in a given field (those qualified in healthcare can vote to choose administrators of health etc.)

Democracy as we know it is a deeply unsophisticated way of attending to the problems you describe. There are alternatives that may well prove better, were we to actually try them.

It's pretty clear actual unlimited democracy doesn't work as no country in the modern world uses it. So it appears it's only the recourse to peaceful regime change that's important here, not necessarily the means by which it is achieved.

But even then, that blow off valve is usually defined in pretty narrow parameters and the political landscape carefully maintained by societies elites. Were it not, the aforementioned repeal of the death penalty and such would likely have doomed the ruling regime to be replaced by something more representative of the demos's backwards attitudes.

Hell I could even conceive of ways to just apply enough of that same veneer of democratic accountability to Sophocracy, technocracy and Noocracy, without resorting to a full blown meritocracy or oligarchy. One need only define the parameters that limit the demos in a way which demands leadership candidates have requisite qualities/qualifications.

It really could be very similar to what we have now, but with the parameters shifted to define a different sort of viable candidate.

It's already a hybrid of elite and demos, just redefine the elite and let the demos keep the blow off valve within the new parameters.

And then one day in the future perhaps, leaders will not always have to be emotionally flawed humans?

Ah, I remember when QuakeWorld was released and how awesome it was playing it on my US Robotics 56k modem (or might have been a 14.4), though it wasn't until Quake 2 Rocket Arena 2 (and to a lesser extent QCTF/threewave) that I really got my FPS addiction on. I even recall the day I got my first cable modem and became one of the few LPBs on Canadian servers - this was way before the big three (id, Epic, Valve) started tweaking their netcode to "even" the playing field between HPBs/LPBs. Ah those were the days.

Even though I don't have much time for games anymore, I might have to give this a try for the sake of nostalgia.

The only issue I have is that they need to realize that you can't ship a multiplayer versus game without anti-cheat capability. Doom shipped without it, doesn't even support VAC (valve's shoddy anti-cheat), and it is riddled with people using aimbots.

I mean, this is 2016. Shipping a multiplayer game without anti-cheat, the ability to host servers, no server browser, no way to pre-check latency until you are in the match, and fairly shoddy network code is ludicrous.

I wouldn't be worried that they would do it for Quake Champions other than the fact that they know about these issues from the playerbase and yet they chose to not fix them. Instead they released a 15 dollar DLC expansion for MP.

The media's role isn't really to report on things performing according to expectations. We don't need headlines about non-corrupt politicians, planes landing safely, or cops doing their jobs, because that's where the bar is already set. The media should be a safety valve that alerts us when the systems we all agree to keep in place (our government, the police, the free market, etc.) are going haywire.

If a cop does his/her job in accordance with their training with the expected outcome, I don't need the media to tell me about it - that's what I was expecting when I agreed with society to have and fund and submit to a police force. If the outcomes are horrific, that's when I need media to step in, to give me a heads up that this thing I agreed to is going off the rails. I either need to change the kind of police I have, my funding of the police, or in a worst case scenario, my submission to the police.

I know it's Colbert's shtick and I never really got into it, but still...

"I have friends who live and work in London. They said "don't worry,we're very sensible people."

What's sensible for people in London might not be sensible for people in Salford. Or Boston. Or Wolverhampton. London, or the South-East in general, is as representative of the UK as the East/West Coast is of the US.

The hinterland has been drained at the expense of the center, on both a global and a national scale. If you live and work in the City of London, things might look quite ok, and whatever issues there are only need some reforms to no longer be an issue. But if your factory, the factory that provided jobs for the people in your home town, closed down ten, twenty years ago and now the best you can get is zero-hour contracts, then no, things are not ok.

People up top keep telling you that the economy is growing, that everyone's gonna be better off, that it's ok for multinational corporations and rich individuals to optimise their taxes, while they cut your welfare. Banks get a bailout, you get to pay the bedroom tax.

So no, your sensible friends, if they exist, live in a different universe than many of their countrymen. That's the disconnect we've been talking about.

-----
"The British economy is tanking. The pound has plunged to its lowest level since 1985... The Dow lost 611 points."

Again, so what? If the economy is growing and it has no effect on you, why should you give a jar of cold piss about the value of the pound or the stock exchange? Arguably, a drop in the exchange rate of the pound makes it easier for you to export your goods and raises the prices for imports, thereby encouraging you to produce the shit yourself. The UK does have a sovereign currency, unlike the Spanish, the Greeks, the Portuguese or the Italians who have to suffer internal devaluations, because Wolfgang Schäuble says so.

"Equity losses over $2 trillion"

Why should that matter? QE has pushed up stock prices beyond any resonable level, so what meaning do these book values hold? Not to mention that a lot of people made a shitload of money by shorting these stocks, including George Soros against Deutsche.

"There'll be no more money"

QE never trickled down anyway, makes no difference. Corbyn's people call their version "QE for the People" and "Green QE" for a reason: the previous version was only meant to prop up banks and stock values.

--------------

On a more general note, the hatred, the racism, the xenophobia... in most cases, it's a pressure valve. You leash out against someone else, you need someone to blame. The narrative is that we're living in a meritocracy, which makes it your fault that you didn't inherit an investment portfolio. So you start blaming yourself. You're a fuck-up. You worked hard and not only didn't climb the ladder, you actually went down. There's depression for ya. Guess what happens if someone, a person of perceived authority, then comes along and tells you it's not your fault, it's the fault of the immigrants. That narrative is very appealing if history is any indication. Even the supposedly most prosperous country in the EU, Germany, has the very same issue in the eastern parts, where there is no hope for a meaningful job.

People need work, meaningful work. Wanna guess how many of those "xenophobes" would be out in the street protesting against immigrants if they had a meaningful job with decent pay? Not to many would be my guess.

So the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are providing the narrative. But the lack of social cohesion is a result of market fundamentalism, of Thatcherism, of Third Way social-democrats leaving the lower half of the income distribution to the wolves. You can't exclude large swaths of the population from the benefits of increased productivity, etc. Social dividend, they called it. It's what keeps the torches and pitchforks locked away in the barn.

Oh god... this is what it will sound like when cars start doing ads to sell themselves.

"Downtown Chicago at rush hour was always bad, but nowadays it's worse than ever... however, with my enhanced 3.5-liter DOHC 24-valve V6, rated at 300 horsepower, I am extraordinarily equipped to handle whatever is thrown at me. Of course, if things go sideways, I'm more than ready to get right in there - I can activate my predictive forward collision warning and forward emergency braking for a stealth approach, or trust in my shadowy master to take action with my driver attention alert... or maybe I should make a statement, and test the limits of my extruded aluminum roof crossmember and additional frame crossmember. If some jumped up elitist pedestrians want to get in the way, I'm more than willing to go all in, as I roll through like a... well, like a car. The only certainty, is that my driver will get to Baby Parkour to pick up Karen at exactly 4.30."

The main advantage, power to weight...this one is HUGE for performance vehicles. Also in it's favor; reduced vibration (over piston engines), only two moving parts, no valve train, and the fact that it's 'exotic'.

EDIT: Cons: terrible mileage, bad emissions, loud (it's can't handle much back pressure, so you can't put on much of a muffler, and the unburnt fuel 'pops' loudly as it leaves the exhaust), hard to replace Teflon seals requiring a full teardown to replace, hard to find a mechanic that can work on them (especially if you need machining done), hard to find period (they're quite 'rare' compared to piston engines)....I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting or don't know.

I actually kind of agree with you there. Valve put a lot of effort in the original design to make each class easily and quickly identifiable by their silhouettes* and the hats kinda ruined that.

* wow, can't believe I actually spelled that correctly!.