Don't know much about SoT, but NMS is made by a company of only around 25 employees and made probably well over $100M in its first year even despite the horrible reception. Sean Murray and his company was/is swimming in cash. This let them focus on fixing and adding things to the game that should have been there on release even if it didn't improve the game's reputation and result in sales going forward. But, it did. From their last financial statement they had a profit of almost £33M in 2022 from £39M in game sales. That was helped by a £7M tax rebate. But in 2021 they still had a profit of £18M from £27M in sales.

Edit: Also, from all the money they've made they had £138M in straight up cash in the bank/on hand in 2022. Hello Games could run at its current expenses for many, many years without any additional profit if they wanted to.

Shit's going to fall apart completely at some point, but we were thinking this 30 years ago too and its still somehow kicking along. Is it enough to bank on for retirement? Absolutely not, but that's also sadly been true for quite a while.

None of your business? China is free to make charges public whenever they choose. I really don't get why you think it's so meaningful of a difference between not making charges and making charges that can then be dropped at any time. Your justice system doesn't have any more high ground.

I do think there's something positive about being the only species we know of with the intelligence and knowledge developed over generations to even realize these things and much such judgements. The plants that filled the atmosphere with oxygen killing almost everything couldn't know any better or do anything about it. Past species and humans before modern times changed their environments and caused extinctions without even knowing. And while we might not end up doing so, we do have the capabilities to do better.

The article says no such thing.

And I'm pretty sure your country has some form of investigative detention. If you're American that can last up to 48 hours. And it really doesn't matter because authorities there can just throw out charges, deny bail, blackmail people with absurd incarceration lengths into confessing their guilt, and detain them for years before a trial (or forever in some cases). And at any point in time those charges can be dropped.

And if you really want to go into the pros and cons between different justice systems, we can do that but it doesn't really have much to do with being a tankie or not.

Where did you get this information that no crime has been committed and they are just being detained for shits and giggles?

Am I supposed to think a government holding the people running businesses (apparently very poorly in this case) accountable for their actions is a bad thing?

We get it, you care as long as your selfish ass isn't inconvenienced. I so love a society that pretends to care oh so much about democracy and the average person supposedly being able to change things and then being so angry about then being the target of protests when they don't take the actions to change things.

I don't use much social media and have things set up to block most ads. So maybe I just don't get how bad it is out there. But in my experience with Youtube I've thought it generally does a decent job at recommending me videos based on what I've watched and who I'm subbed to. For example, if I stumble across some documentary about an aircraft accident, I'm not upset when it starts recommending me other similar videos from that channel or videos from other channels and their similar documentaries. I've found good videos I'd never have seen that way.

It can get frustrating if you accidentally end up watching a video about something you normally don't want to see, but the newer recommendations seem to fade away after a few days of not watching them. And I can certainly see how such a system can be gamed in nefarious ways. I never liked when I saw Reddit sub recommendations, but I mostly thought that was because their system didn't recommend me things I had any interest in.

He did concede at the end that he was broken and not only was going to say there were 5 lights, he even believed there were 5.