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Latest Comments by F.Ultra
Microsoft Windows kernel changes don't suddenly mean big things for Linux gaming
16 September 2024 at 2:45 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Woodlandor
Quoting: ShmerlAnd Tim Sweeney can move to Canada and get lost.

If you do that we will send you Justin Bieber!
I'm starting to see the possibilities here. Can we throw in Pierre Poilievre?

I can prepare a place at that bottom of the Baltic Sea for him, IF as payment we would get Skinny Puppy and Front Line Asembly.

Deadlock from Valve no longer a secret - store page is up and we can finally talk about it
26 August 2024 at 12:40 pm UTC

Quoting: Mountain Man
Quoting: kuhpunkt
Quoting: Mountain ManSo no Half-Life 3.

Why not? They can work on multiple games at the same time. Remember the Orange Box?

There were rumors that Valve was working on a new game. Everybody was hoping it was Half-Life 3, but apparently it was this instead.

No the rumor was that they besides Deadlock also was working on something that internally was refereed to as Project White Sands. And since that is the name of a park in New Mexico where Black Mesa was...

Kyle Crane returns in Dying Light: The Beast
26 August 2024 at 12:35 pm UTC

Quoting: Klaas
Quoting: F.UltraIn essence I'm still kinda pissed that they killed him off
I think that all three endings of The Following are bad, since they all destroy everything that you've worked for in the base game. I'm not sure what they were thinking, since this is clearly the worst thing that they could have done. Making the player feel that everything that happened before was pointless.

The game's writing is generally confused and rather bad which isn't that surprising when you read about the development process.

Kyle is weird – who would burn important medicine because a (crazy) person on the outside gives that order via radio!?

Kadir Suleiman is so over the top that he's basically a psychopathic parody of a parody of a psychopath. He kills his minions for fun although it is obvious that he will never be able to get replacements, which is unbelievably stupid even for someone that does not have any empathy.

yes that initial "burn the medicine" confused me as well. Why bother when it is via radio and you not only know that you are going to need it but also can use it as a viable resource to trade inside the quarantine zone.

Deadlock from Valve no longer a secret - store page is up and we can finally talk about it
24 August 2024 at 5:04 pm UTC

Quoting: TheSHEEEPA ... team shooter. Yawn.

*goes back to sleep*

agreed, but it is where all the money is right now so financially it is a perfect move. But some day this fad will die out.

Kyle Crane returns in Dying Light: The Beast
24 August 2024 at 5:02 pm UTC

Quoting: pb
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: pb
Quoting: F.UltraBut Kyle died at the end of The Following no matter which choice you did, but now he have just been caged for 10 years?

The non-nuke ending had him turned (started turning) into a zombie/volatile and escape Harran, so I guess that's what they built upon.

Him turning zombie is him dying IMHO.

Apparently you can be dead but still a playable character. ;-)

Well I must have misunderstood what they meant then, I though that you played him as a human. In essence I'm still kinda pissed that they killed him off, was a way more interesting character than e.g Aiden.

Kyle Crane returns in Dying Light: The Beast
24 August 2024 at 1:21 am UTC

Quoting: pb
Quoting: F.UltraBut Kyle died at the end of The Following no matter which choice you did, but now he have just been caged for 10 years?

The non-nuke ending had him turned (started turning) into a zombie/volatile and escape Harran, so I guess that's what they built upon.

Him turning zombie is him dying IMHO.

Kyle Crane returns in Dying Light: The Beast
21 August 2024 at 9:22 pm UTC

But Kyle died at the end of The Following no matter which choice you did, but now he have just been caged for 10 years?

AMD Ryzen 9000 Series processors dates and prices revealed
7 August 2024 at 11:34 pm UTC

Quoting: croxisI'm still running a 1700 and never bothered upgrading because I never really ran into significant gaming bottlenecks from the CPU. I'm probably going to wait for the fancy 3D cache version. I've read those chips are significant upgrades for gaming.

Yes they are significant indeed, went myself from a 1600x to a 5800x3d one year ago and oboy was that an upgrade.

Valve working on a new game that could be Half-Life 3
7 August 2024 at 11:29 pm UTC

Quoting: EhvisThere is only one thing we know for sure. It won't be called "Half-Life 3".

And turns out to be a remake of HL: Decay.

Intel to lay off around 15,000 staff as they try make $10 billion in savings
4 August 2024 at 4:34 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: damarrin
Quoting: ZlopezI'm not sure why companies are taking growth for granted. Why they won't rather work with what they made the current year and expect that the next year will be the same or maybe save some of the money for bad times if you are making more than you expected, so you have some reserves.
The stock market doesn’t work that way. It’s cool and useful or sometimes necessary, but it is also cancer.

Yep, major source of these issues are the shift from long term investment where people invested in companies and held on to them for years on end (and got rich on the constant but stable dividends) to the more modern "lets buy and sell the same share within a few milliseconds" that drives the demand for infinite growth.
Short-termism is a big problem, but I actually think it's not the millisecond thing that's the biggest. It's the this-quarter thing, where the big objective is to hand out lots of dividends and share buybacks right now. CEOs have a lot of stock themselves, not to mention a lot of options, and they're fairly footloose, so they tend to be motivated to goose the price in the short term, not grow in the long. Plus, shareholding tends to be more concentrated, so you get "activist shareholders" (read: Blackrock) exerting a lot of power and wanting the money now. In the end, after all the dividends and these days especially buybacks, there isn't much left for investing in the business. Some big corporations actually borrow money to spend on share buybacks.

I think a big reason actually is low taxes--particularly low corporate taxes, but also of course low taxes on capital gains for rich people with loopholes available. No, I know the corporate types whine on and on about how high corporate taxes would depress investment, but if you look at the actual mechanisms I don't think it works that way. Remember that corporate taxes are on profits, not revenue. So, say I've got this big corporation, and it made a billion dollars after normal expenses.
Scenario A: It pays no tax on that billion, so if it wants to it can pass the whole thing, untaxed, to the shareholders. Well then why not do it?
Scenario B: It pays 50% tax on that billion. Well now, suddenly it might make a bit more sense, rather than passing only half a billion to the shareholders, instead invest a lot of that billion in the business instead of paying tax on it--upgrade capital equipment, do some R&D and so on. With that high tax on profits, shareholders might in the end get a better return on investment by reducing the declared profits by investing in the business, because that way you get to invest all the money rather than just the after tax money.

I added the millisecond part to make it the other extreme from the long term type of investments where people tended to hold on to their shares for life (like say Warren Buffet) but ofc the situation is far more complex and diverse then just a simple matter of the hold time. E.g even such a thing as share buybacks is not really something negative, but then you have those companies that abuse them, even the leveraged buybacks (aka when you use debt to perform the buyback) is not normally really negative but companies have abused them to the brink of now having to actually borrow money to perform them. So what is really missing here is regulation to allow things like this to happen when it's good and prohibit it when it is being abused.

And you are 100% correct on the tax thing, ofc they will always complain that the tax is too high but then they would do that even if the tax rate was 0%. And increasing taxation on buybacks and dividends would be part of the "we need more regulation".

But then our entire current capitalist system is built as if growth is infinite, e.g on how money is created in banks when people lend money which leads to the situation that there will always be more total debt than total amount of money so the cycle have to continue in perpetuum or it collapses.