What is toxic and non toxic waste? - FindAnyAnswer.com

Alright, SW Universe fans. This is for you.
Just comment down below what your favorite candy (NON-CHOCOLATE) is, and I'll tell you what Jedi or Sith you are. I'll even include a picture of them.
Yes, you can even be a certain citizen. Yes, characters from the ST will be assigned, including Finn.
Let me show you an example.
Me? My favorite candy is Toxic Waste.
My character is Kreia/Darth Traya, because anyone who likes to consume a lot of Toxic Waste is literally trying to kill God.
I'm going to get to as many as I can tonight, but I may have to do some tomorrow.

The Omnitrix - The Omnitrix is the most advanced piece of nanotechnology to have ever been created, used for flash-converting the wearer’s entire biological makeup into a different recorded genetic template. The omnitrix ejects a swarm of nanobots into the host, with certain “flocks” serving different functions; some supply power to the rest, some are large and motile and carry smaller swarms, some are equipped with sensory equipment, etc. The massive numbers of nanobots acting in concert for different purposes. Because nanobots are too small and numerous to be controlled individually, they are usually directed in swarms. Each swarm is composed of trillions of nanobots. In a sense, it comprises an extended superbot, much as an insect swarm represents an extended superorganism (in fact, nanobot swarming seems to mirror insect swarms). The watch itself houses a sophisticated nanocomputer that directs the swarm through a combination of concentrated and distributed intelligence. Once initially bonded, the bots spread across the host’s body, forming a large net that lies dormant in a “passive mode” under the skin until a transformation is initiated. From there, the distributed bots immediately work with the new swarm ejected from the watch, making the full-body biochemical shift near-instantaneous. This alteration builds up considerable waste heat; for this reason, the swarm constructs sophisticated phase array projections that convert the heat into light, usually taking the form of a blinding flash of green light. If the watch is removed from the host, the dormant bots will self-destruct.
Heatblast - Pyronites are a unique species in that they evolved on a sun. Pyros, their home planet, is a brown dwarf star, and the inhabitants have an alternative biology composed of silicon, thermophiles, and plasma. A pyronite’s cellular metabolism creates energy from plentiful elements like hydrogen through a process called “biological transmutation.” This fusion process generates higher energy quantities, converted into a high-efficiency plasma that ignites on air contact. Meanwhile, the body of a pyronite is mainly composed of minerals and organosilicon compounds. Colonies of symbiotic thermophilic and chemosynthetic bacteria maintain their biological functions, the bacteria that reside in the lungs that allow them to respirate in highly foreign environments with no ill effect. A digestive cavity that houses endosymbiotic bacteria allows them to consume any material and take in necessary minerals to replenish any lost crust.
Four Arms - The Tetramand species hail from the perilous planet of Khoros, known for its harsh environment that can barely support life, scarce resources, and an overabundance of predators. However, the tetramands soon evolved to survive but thrive in these extreme conditions, eventually filling the niche of apex predators. A tetramand is a veritable powerhouse of physical abilities, with nearly unparalleled strength, natural fire-proof armor plating, and considerable mass. Standing around 10 - 12 feet tall on average, their strength is only matched by their surprising speed and agility, being able to leap several stories in the air under baseline gravity and land safely. Their body possesses primary, secondary, and even tertiary organs and backups (including several capillary-rich lungs), even going so far as to have a redundant nervous system, their primary one being a system of electrically conductive fluid rather than a nervous one. Capable of cellular regeneration unseen in most races, tetramands are resilient warriors. Their four eyes are another sign of their hunter ancestry -- the two pairs are all geared toward tracking down and predicting prey’s movements. Sophisticated and keenly developed sensitivity to movement and light has made them masters at reading body language, regardless of species. Their most distinctive feature is their four arms -- two dominant arms above an extra set of a smaller pair. As a consequence, the tetramands are amazingly coordinated and possess a strong sense of balance. They can keep track of each arm with great dexterity and motor receptors for synchronized and unsynchronized movements, making them talented multitaskers. Due to their extra appendages, much of their body mass is concentrated in their upper torso. Hence, they evolved strong back muscles, a second spinal cord for added support, and powerful legs, which have cancellous bones in place of medullary cavities, thus strengthening the bones while still allowing hematopoiesis. On top of this, his entire skeleton is lined with air-sacs connected to his respiratory system, making his bones lighter without sacrificing strength. These sacs also act as a cooling system, help reduce rotational inertia, and lower his center of gravity. The leg bones are structured on top of each other to help distribute weight, and their large feet are flat with no arch that is lined with soft tissue that acts as cushion pads. In walking, the legs act more like pendulums, that require their hips and shoulders to move opposingly to create momentum. Due to the amount of stress placed on the joints, their bodies produces an extremely viscous fluid that reduces friction and shock during movement, which is fortunate because their steps measure on the Richter scale. The fluid is an ultrafiltrate from plasma and contains proteins derived from the blood plasma and proteins produced by cells within the joint tissue.
Ripjaws - Originating from the water-world of Piscciss, the Piscciss Volann are a species that live almost entirely in the ocean. Evolving as opportunistic predators, they exhibit many traits useful in the myriad of underwater environments of their homeworld; they possess a bioluminescent antenna on their head to lure in prey, a massive jaw lined with sharp teeth that can unhinge for a larger bite, tough skin scales made of dermal denticles, and a semi-flexible “pouch” that closes around their legs to create a tail for better movement in the water. One of their most extraordinary traits is their specialized respiratory system, which contains both gills and lungs. A distinctive characteristic of the volann is a single dorsal lung, used to supplement the oxygen supply through the gills. During times of excessive activity, drought, or high temperatures (when water becomes deoxygenated), or when prevailing conditions inhibit the gills’ normal functioning, the lungfish can rise to the surface and swallow air into its lung. Though they can’t survive out of water for long, as a combination of dehydration and their diaphragms, not being accustomed to non-buoyant environments will cause them to suffocate. They also appear to be euryhaline organisms, meaning they can survive in salt and fresh water with no ill-effects. They can survive under astonishing levels of oceanic pressure. High pressures change the uptake of gas in the body. Increasing pressure shrinks the air in the lungs, and by 200 meters deep, the lungs would collapse from the strain. It’s not fully understood how they accomplish this as they are at risk of their body tissues becoming heavily saturated with harmful levels of nitrogen. Still, one theory is that volanns collapse their lungs in a way that forces air away from the alveoli, the tiny air sacs in the lungs that transfer gasses like oxygen and nitrogen into the blood. This would solve the problem of nitrogen bubble formation leading to decompression sickness. Volann bodies also seem specially adapted to store oxygen in their blood and muscles, instead of keeping it in their lungs like humans do, using extraordinarily high levels of proteins called hemoglobin and myoglobin, which store oxygen in the blood and muscles. This also makes their muscles and blood a very dark red, almost black color. Alongside these adaptations in terms of their dive response, they assume a torpedo-like shape. Their streamlined body shape helps them swim, and often to glide, with minimal effort and extend their oxygen stores for as long as possible.
XLR8 - The planet of Kinet orbits around its sun at such a speed that days can elapse in minutes, and as such, Kinecelerans live in a society of constant flux. Evolving in an environment where everything operated at breakneck speed, the kinecelerans had to develop their biology in many unique ways not to be left behind. Adapting primarily for speed, they have a light build, long thin legs, and a long tail. Their light, streamlined bodies make them well-suited for explosive bursts of speed, rapid acceleration, and an ability to execute extreme changes in direction while moving at high speed. While in motion, in addition to having uniquely constructed feet, kinecelerans use their tail as a rudder-like means of steering that enables them to make sharp turns, necessary to outflank prey, which often changes direction to escape during a chase. Their skin is composed of specialized friction-proof superhydrophobic scales, the surface of which form a complex topography of rounded scales carpeted with tiny hairs, or ‘spinules’. Spaced less than one-thousandth of a millimeter apart, these hairs form a microscopic bed of nails that repel water. The micro and nanostructure of the scales also provide friction reduction to them as they move. Being extremely resistant to wear and debris, particularly in environments that are dry and dusty or sandy. Their “helmet” is actually a hard shell that’s part of their skull, with the faceplate being able to peel back and sheath itself. The plate also has a semi-transparent lens that compensates for the red and blueshift caused by their speed. Finally, their control of friction and static allows them to use the spherical “wheels'' at the end of their feet. These wheels move omnidirectionally and can begin spinning near-instantaneously, gripping any surface (baring mud and ice) and getting traction effortlessly, thus allowing them to even run up walls.
Stinkfly - Lepidopterrans, the insectoid race of Lepidoterra, evolved in a swamp planet with a very specialized ecosystem. Fulfilling the pollinators’ niche, lepidopterrans live in complex hives that maintain the megaflora that provide for their community. As children, with their exoskeletons not fully developed, they are at their most vulnerable. To compensate, they release a highly noxious odorous gas as a defense mechanism. This gas is actually so potent that it can make plants wilt and decay with its stench. This odor-weapon eventually atrophies as their neutral armor and claws grow into shape. The infamous “stink” is the last remnant of this ability, coming from the oils they secrete to keep their tough-yet-light exoskeleton joints moving. Lepidopterran's exoskeleton comes to very sharp points on certain sections, such as their claws or a stinger-like black tail that can tear and rend through steel almost effortlessly. Because exoskeletons are rigid, the insectoids need to molt as they grow, shedding the old skin and growing a new one. This vulnerable time puts a ceiling on size: Larger animals, particularly those without protective skeletons, would make for more attractive meals to a predator. To compensate, lepidopterrans are equipped with a powerful set of wings that help them move and escape predators. Unlike Earth insects, lepidopterrans have a closed circulatory system, where blood and bodily fluids are pumped through veins, arteries, and vessels. It also possesses an intricate lung system that helps them breathe and functions to keep them buoyant during flight. Lepidopterrans can also excrete high-pressure streams of liquid from the pollen ducts located inside their eyestalks and mouth. These liquids can be both a flammable toxic or an immobilizing adhesive, instinctively choosing what type of slime it can be. This is most likely used as construction material in making their hives, similar to beeswax.
Wildmutt - Vulpin is a planet at the edge of the galaxy that is mainly used as a dumping ground for waste from other civilizations. Due to the rampant pollution, greenhouse gasses trap in enough heat that the otherwise pitch-black planet can support life that can survive amongst the toxic environment. The native Vulpimancers have evolved for complete darkness; their eyes (if they had any, to begin with) have atrophied into nothing. Instead, they utilize their other senses for navigation. Their primary sensory organs, located in specialized gills on either side of the head, boasts more than 25,000 minute sensory receptors that can detect even the slightest in environmental pressure, constructing a high-acuity sensory system: subdivide the sensory surface into a large, lower-resolution periphery for scanning a wide range of stimuli, and a small, high-resolution area that can be focused on objects of importance, giving it 360-degree “vision.” A vulpimancer’s brain can decide an action based on available information in approximately 8 milliseconds -- this speed is at the limit of neurons’ speed. Beyond that, they’ve had to adapt to surroundings covered with unstable garbage piles, and therefore possess remarkable agility and endurance. Walking on all-fours, the vulpimancers are strong and dexterous enough to climb over and around obstacles with ease, despite their weight. On average, a vulpimancer weighs anyway between 700 to 2,000 pounds, but with bodies mainly composed of strong fast-twitch muscles, dense bones, a large heart and lungs, they can run at approximately 30 mph. They are strong enough to compensate for their body mass easily. Their higher muscle mass means they needed more nutrition but had a definite disadvantage in hunting. Therefore, Vulpimancers are generally omnivorous and eat whatever they can find. A Vulpimancers' quills, or spines, take on various forms, but are all modified hairs coated with thick keratin plates and embedded in the skin musculature, which can be pulled out and thrown if needed.
Ghostfreak - The Ectonurites come from the Anur star system, which is infamous for its high radiation levels, exploding stars, dark and phantom matter saturation. A sentient form of protoplasm, they possess a unique decentralized intelligence; their consciousness can reconfigure from even a few strands of genetic code. However, their most interesting aspect is their molecular structure, being only slightly composed of conventional matter, existing in an unconventional balance of natural and unnatural matter known as “harmonium.” They generally have a protective outer skin that shields them from disruptive radiation, such as ultraviolet rays. However, under the skin, they have the appearance of a desiccated corpse, with sharp teeth and claws, exposed bones in certain places, and sinister-looking skulls. Their molecular structure is such that they can hover by altering their mass and phase through walls by manipulating their own macroscopic quantum wave function (increasing their tunneling probability to near 100 percent at will). This allows them to move to the other side of barriers almost instantaneously. As a bonus, this process can also allow photons to pass through them, turning invisible.
Grey Matter - The Galvans of Galvan Prime are renowned for their unparalleled inventive genius that can intuitively understand and construct complex machines and devices with little or no training. To compensate for their small stature their brains can adapt to obstacles by editing the gene expressions of their neural tissue. Their transposon genes edit the RNA of their brain matter without affecting the underlying DNA, which gives them the vast array of ever-evolving mental arsenal geared more towards problem-solving. They can edit and adapt their brain matter to automatically visualize and solve complex engineering projects, working out the theoretical principles behind them subconsciously. However, this process of invention does not equal intellect. The edits made in response to the problem are usually “jettisoned” and returned to a more manageable baseline later, meaning that even a typical galvan isn’t entirely aware of exactly how they figured out the logical steps of their conclusions.
Upgrade - The Galvanic Mechamorphs come from Galvan B, the moon of Galvan Prime. They are a race of gel-based nanotechnology known as “utility fluid,” which was accidentally created from an ill-advised experiment by the Galvans. An average mechamorph looks like a puddle or pond in its dormant state and has the rough consistency of pudding or thick soup. This self-repairing technology withdraws into a 'feeding' reservoir where its energy needs are cared for when not needed. Properly designed, utility liquid carries with it a fluid matrix which acts as a coolant as well as an energy conduit; the outermost layer of utility liquid is capable of forming a membrane, similar to surface tension, although this layer can be dissipated quickly if necessary, or reinforced to form a rigid shell. Fibril-like microbots arrange themselves in the liquid giving it a pseudo-solid state thanks to the extreme surface tension. Adjusting their shape and configuration can adjust the apparent movement and viscosity of the fluid. At lower viscosities, the less control the fibrils have over the fluid. Generally, Galvanic Mechamorphs have a large singular eye in the center of their face, while bipedal mechamorphs can be slim, fat, or muscular, and their bodies are covered entirely in a circuitry pattern that can vary between individuals. Mechamorphs, due to not being completely solid, the nanites in their bodies allow them to reshape and move like a liquid even though they are solid beings. Their physiology also makes them extremely flexible, reshaping themselves to seep through and merge with any technology by encasing themselves over and inside it. The device’s size is not significant, and they control it as naturally as they would their own body. When they merge, they upgrade the technology, making the technology they possess far more advanced and futuristic, causing new features. After they separate from a machine, it returns to normal. Possessing technology allows Galvanic Mechamorphs to transform it with seemingly no limit.
Diamondhead - The race of crystalline humanoid known as Petrosapians from the geode-like planet, Petropia. Orbiting a massive supergiant star, their planet’s tidal forces created massive pressure near the core. This resulted in the perfect crucible for silicon-based biochemistry to emerge, composed of Organosilicon compounds, diatom cells, and siloxane chains. A petrosapian’s “skin,” for example, is made out of fully functioning inorganic cells - made out of metal atoms such as aluminum oxide, iron, titanium, chromium, vanadium, or magnesium - which are constructed from large polyoxometalate membranes that select and separate necessary chemicals. This construction even reaches down to the “bones,” which can be best described as “porous sapphire.” Petrosapians communicate by utilizing a phenomenon known as piezoelectricity - in which physical pressure or vibration of the crystal in a certain direction will result in an electrical voltage across the crystal and vice-versa. This has the bonus of encouraging growth in certain sections of their physiology. Using precise piezo-stimulation, they can alter their bodies to make various weapons, such as clubs or blades, and even launch shards rapidly. They can even stimulate these shards’ growth from a distance using themselves as a kind of radio tower. Due to their natural hardiness, they can withstand a tremendous amount of blunt-force trauma, as well as exert an incredible amount of strength.
[Author’s Note: this post was suggested by a user named Ill_Visual918. If you believe I have made any errors, please feel free to offer corrections]

We havent spoken to her in two months because shes so toxic. We had our first baby (only grandbaby on both sides of the family) five months ago.
To cut a long story short, they told me husband they loved their dog as much as him/our son. That was the final straw im a very long line of mis steps.
Anyways, two months later she gets a tattoo that says love on her wrist. Can you believe instead of picking up the phone/telling her son shes sorry or regrets what she said his mum has gotten a tattoo at the ripe age of 65 that says love on her wrist. His dad commented on the photo practically saying something like hopefully the others get the hint or something. How fucked are you in the head to think its easier to get a tattoo, post it on FB, get your husband who is sitting next to you to post a comment so we get the message that she 'loves' us. Imagine being that dysfunctional.
Please share your thoughts.
edit for further context: Me and my husband have been together for almost ten years. We met when we were 19 and he was still living at home. To give you some background on the family dynamic my husband is the youngest of three brothers. His mother rules the home and his father just sits back/does EVERY THING she wants. He actually left his 5 year old son in Scotland to migrate to Australia because my husbands mum wanted to move. (She actually admitted to me that one of the reasons they migrated was because she had trouble accepting that her husband had a 'whole marriage and life before her). No one in the family stands up for themselves against her. What she says goes.
To give you some background on me, I practically raised my self from the age of 14 - 19. I had no reliable family, I starved and worked multiple jobs while studying to get where I am today. Im massively downplaying how hard Ive hard to work right now because that would be whole other thread on its own. I practically had to lie to child protective services so I didnt get taken into foster care.
Anyways from the very moment I came into the family they have always disliked me for no apparent reason. At first his mother appeared to be loving/accommodating etc but there was always underlying hostility and snide comments about our relationship, what we were doing and how much time we spent with eachother etc. It got to a point where I stopped going over the house because his mum obviously didnt want me around. This led to my husband not being home as much. This led to my MIL having a cry every few weeks that she never saw her son.
It all came to a head when my husband wanted to buy a car. He had his eye on something but his mum said that it wasnt fuel efficient/expensive etc. My husband just sat and listened to her opinion but said he still wanted the car. This exploded into 'you do everything she says', 'you dont care about my opinion anymore', 'you just think your a big man now that you've got a gf etc'. Mind you I didnt encourage my husband to want a nice car, they grabbed onto this because I was a car enthusiast. Mind you he wasnt asking for money to buy this car. He'd saved. She kicked him out of home. Literally threw all his belongings on the porch.
My husband left and stayed out of the home despite her begging him to come home. His oldest brother messaged him telling him he had abandoned the family and his mother. His dad tried to get him to come home but he refused. Now every single time he does something that she does not like she gets resentful and blames him for not returning to the home, even years later. She trash talks my husband saying he 'thinks hes done everything by himself', 'his family arent important to him' and hes 'unempathic'. My husband is such a push over from having this women for a mum. He gets bullied everywhere he goes and doesnt know how to stand up for himself in social situations.
A few years pass, we are abit distant from them but we attend all family functions because were not allowed to say no. We cop all kinds of remarks about our diet, weight, my husband being under the thumb, where we like to live/holiday, spend our money. You name it, they have a comment on it. In the ten years Ive been in the family not one person has asked at dinner 'how are you', 'how are things going', 'whats new'. Instead MIL will find out what each person is doing and pass on the information to everyone else. This causes massive conflict between everyone, because shes gossiping about each other. No one has anything nice to say about each other, ever. Not once have they ever offered any kind of supportive words, they just tell you what they would do instead and practically that what your doing is a waste. The whole family does this to each other and family dinners are painful.
His parents decide to move away but his dad doesn't retire and decides to work in the city while MIL lives in a coastal town. We offer FIL to stay with us for a year so he can retire the following year. Despite things being not great with his family I honeslty do my best to accommodate them. The year goes fine, she does betray oue trust a few times by going to the other brothers and bitching about what we do in our houee behind our backs but were used to it by this stage.
A few years ago at dinner (after FIL moves out) she told everyone at the dinner table that 'young people dont know a hard days work, look at x (me) shes talking about working a 4 day week'. She literally used me as an example of a young generation who cant work hard. When I told her this upset me, she got angry. Aggressively got in my face, dismissed my feelings then refused to apologise. We didnt talk to her for months. She gave a weak apology that she took back a few weeks before I gave birth claiming to not know what the big deal is.
Fast forward a few more years. His parents moved away and then like three years later bought a dog. They had an argument with their other son who they used to stay with all the time. Because we have cats we werent able to accommodate them with the dog so they had to stop staying with us. Before getting the dog they stayed with us heaps, like almost every weekend. But cause we have cats they stopped. It got to a point were we never saw them. Because she fought with her other son and couldnt stay there so we hardly saw them
When i was pregnant we told them we would try locking the cats away in the back room so they could stay. We did this for a bit. But eventually just said it would be too hard with their dog, our cats and a newborn. We asked them if they wanted to stay with us could they find an alternative for their dog.
They said yes they would. This conversation happened when i was like 25 weeks pregnant. When my son was born they kept bringing the dog to the house. We never said anything. One of the days she asked if the dog could come in as they tied it to a pillar outside. My husband being stressed said yes. When i came out from my shower I was like wtf? So the next day they did the same thing. When she asked again my husband said no. She no joke packs up her dinner and leaves.
Doesnt contact us for 2 weeks. We actually had to call them. Anyways to cut a long story short. When we stayed with them that she told her son that she loved the dog as much, hes as important to her as him and her grandson. My husband lost it. Ive never seen him so angry. We left at the crack of dawn the next morning and have barely spoken with them since.
This only a huge slight because of the way shes gone about things. I know she doesnt care as much about her dog as her sons. She feels abandoned and wants to guilt us into dropping a boundary.
Other things she does: - makes comments about how my husband likes my family more, always makes comments about my husband spending more time with my family - plays the victim when shes told not to do something - scapegoats my husband and blames him for things. Etc 'i kicked him out of home because hes lazy'. He was doing a double degree and working 40 hour weeks, sorry he wanted to see his gf on his days off. - compares brothers, always saying why cant he be like the other two. - will talk non stop shit about my sister in law, literally makes stuff up that isnt true - self sabotages then makes it everyone one elses problem. Eg. Moves three hours away then gets sad we dont have the time to visit, but doesnt ever call us - always denies she says things when she did. Literally she will down a bottle of wine, say something to upset someone then deny it while playing the victim. - smugly violates boundaries. Her other son has asked her to let her know when shes coming down for the weekend, she never does. Will call him on the afternoon she wants to see him then feel sorry for herself that he doesnt have the time for her. - complains that her family isnt close but will consistently engage in behaviour that is harmful. Eg. My husband never says anything he shouldnt to anyone, he keeps out of everyones decisions however over the years we have been criticised so much, due to this he has started to tell them less and less. But hes always the bad guy for not contacting his brothers. They never contact him either. Its just easy to blame my husband because he bends the least to what his mum wants.

RoyalRoad
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Second chapter I released today. Make sure to check the previous chapter if you missed it!
I'm a new writer trying to improve. As always, feedback about the story or my writing are all very welcome, and I read every one of them.
As Zoron waited for refueling, she took notice of the growing economy that has popped up inside the Livermore spaceport itself. There were several very nice restaurants for human tourists who wanted to come eat and watch spaceships take off and land right next to them. There were also a number of duty free shops for expensive goods.
Few aliens could really afford to indulge in these luxuries, Zoron included, but for them, it was as fun to shop as it was for the tourists to gawk at aliens.
The ubiquitous advertising billboards occasionally caught her eye. Advertising preceded ink and paper in human society, and the galaxy was not unfamiliar with its use or effects. What fascinated Zoron was the amazing amount of consumer goods that were being sold, some of them she hadn't even seen before. She would have to remember to ask the human sellers about their prices and see if she could get a sample for her next shipment.
Today, she noticed a new billboard put up by some company named Terra Corp. What they were advertising, however, was not new to her, and she was very, very interested.
Terra Corp was a successful aerospace defense contractor before the aliens arrived. They made propulsion systems, and had clients in militaries and government agencies like NASA, who wanted them to make parts for anything from missiles to satellites.
The market was very lucrative. On their assembly lines, Terra Corp made the most efficient engines for light years around, and rocket launch costs on Earth were lowered into the tens of millions.
Then, the aliens came.
When the government started buying up alien ships, some of them fell into NASA's laps. As a publicly funded agency, NASA couldn't keep many secrets, both practically and legally. Their reverse engineering studies on the alien ships were quickly posted or leaked onto the Internet, depending on which day of the week it was.
Refusing to die, Terra Corp pivoted: they started adapting alien designs into their products. Terra still had several advantages over the many startups that had cropped up eyeing their business: their supply chains and talent. They invested their large cash hoard, and decided to cut their previous clients out of the loop entirely.
After a few months, they had designed the galaxy's first human galactic trade ship. They called it Terra One.
Zoron did not have a phone, but there appeared to be nothing on Earth that can't be negotiated for a small fee. A human vendor had agreed to rent her a phone for a bit. She fiddled a bit with her universal translator and started dialing.
"Terra Corp, how can I help you?" The pleasant voice of the woman on the other end.
"Hi, I was looking at a billboard for a spaceship called Terra One and was wondering if I could buy one."
"Of course, let me transfer you to our customer inquiry department."
There were a few short seconds of some strange but not unpleasant music, and a voice replied, a man this time.
"Hello, my name is Noah, sales representative for Terra. I heard you were asking about our Terra One spaceship line?"
"Yes, yes. How many credits would it cost to buy one?"
"Credits? I'm sorry, may I have the pleasure of knowing who I'm speaking with?"
"My name is Zoron. Nice to meet you, Noah," she said, and as she did, she heard some scrambling on the other end of the phone.
"Uh, Zoron, I'm going to direct you to our VP of Sales. Please hold on for just one moment."
Some more music, then a woman picked up a phone.
"Hello Zoron, I'm Erin. Welcome to Earth. How are you doing today?"
Erin was in Seattle, but she immediately agreed to fly down to Livermore to talk to Zoron.
Zoron had her spaceship moved off the landing pad into a hangar so she would not be blocking the pad for other traders.
For a small fee, of course.
Erin was in her 50s. She'd had a long career at Terra's headquarters in Seattle, right next to where Boeing assembled their rockets and planes, interrupted only by a short marriage and the birth of her only child.
She was in a meeting when an intern ran into the conference room. He took a terrified look at the dozen middle and upper management execs seated at the table, who each made his total net worth in salary every hour, now all staring at him.
The intern decided that this was probably important enough and blurted out, "there's an alien trying to buy our spaceship on the phone!"
That proved very favorable for the future career of the intern.
The flight from Sea-Tac Spaceport to Livermore only took 15 minutes. She met Zoron at the hangar. This was the first alien Erin had ever talked to.
After somewhat awkward introductions, she got down to business, "Terra One actually just entered the production phase, and the first models are scheduled to roll off the line in eight months. So far we have a lot of interest, but you're the first non-human that's called us about it. Is this your spaceship by the way? It's absolutely gorgeous!"
"Yes," Zoron said proudly, "it's been in my family for fourteen generations. I can give you a tour."
"Oh, yes. Please." And what a tour it was. Erin asked a lot of questions about various components in it as Zoron described their function. She was very knowledgeable. It was nice to talk shop with an enthusiast. Occasionally, Erin would ask a question about the internal performance of this part or that and Zoron would not know how to answer, but she did not seem bothered by that and quickly moved on.
"Wow, this is a very impressive spaceship. Wow."
Then Erin switched tracks, "as I was saying, our own Terra Ones will be ready to fly in eight months. We expect the performance specifications for sublight speed and range to be similar to what you already have, but we also boast a few features that I'm sure you've noticed on our ads."
There, she pulled out a tablet and started giving the well practiced sales pitch.
"Our FTL range is expected to be about 6-7 times longer than average alien made spacecraft due to the more efficient fuel injection, and we have a slightly bigger fuel tank. You will likely save more than 50% on reactor fuel costs alone."
There she flipped to a slide with a captivating video showing the differences between the human and alien reactor modules burning side by side.
"Because our reactor has been miniaturized, we have more space for cargo or passengers. Our passenger liner model can carry up to 92 people, or fitted with a more luxurious interior. Our cargo hauler model comes with the standard pallet rail and can carry… well, as much mass as you want. Unlike most other trader ships on the market, as long as you can fit it into the hold, it will fly no problem unless you're hauling something much heavier than tungsten composites. It has a total size restriction of about 120 cubic meters, not including the pilot cabin."
Here she flipped to a picture showing a beautiful white interior of the pilot cabin, with two comfortable looking reclining seats made of memory foam, a triple pane reinforced glass cockpit, digital touchscreen displays, HOTAS controls, and a pull out bunk.
Zoron had to close her mouth to stop from drooling all over the tablet.
"So… um… how much would the basic model cost?" Zoron had learned enough about human consumer goods to know about the add-on business model.
"The Terra One basic package is the cargo hauler. It's going to come out to seventeen million Dollars, or credits, not including taxes and fees. Your blink away cost should come to within two million of that," Erin replied automatically.
Zoron tried to keep the disappointment out of her face but was only partially successful. She was one of the wealthier traders in the galaxy, but her entire bank account had not even crossed the one million mark. Indeed, the only alien trader to become a millionaire was another Zeepil whose entry into what the humans called the "two comma club" was celebrated as a major event on Traders Only.
Seeing her expression, Erin reassured, "we also have several loan options, if you're open to those?"
Zoron shook her head. Debt = bad. She said, "thank you for the introduction. I'm sorry to have wasted your time today."
Erin was not a woman who took no for an answer, figuratively speaking. You don't get to be where she was in life that way. "Ok, what about a trade in for a pre-order? You hand us your ship, stay on Earth for a few months. We'll pay for your expenses. And when your Terra One is ready, we'll give you a significant discount. Consider it… a loan from you to us."
Up to this point, Terra had not managed to buy any alien trade ships yet. They weren't unaffordable for a corporation, but traders often did not want to end up grounded on Earth. This could be an exciting opportunity for them to inspect a live one.
"How much would the discount be," sniffed Zoron. She was skeptical about this reverse loan. This Erin human was evidently very competent and Zoron knew that whenever you felt like you were taking advantage of someone smart, you were the mark. But… Erin had a point. It's not like she could fly two spaceships at once, and she did want the new ship.
"Well, we'll have to figure that part out. I'll have my engineers come down here to take a look and we'll get you sorted."
Over the next few days, Erin and Zoron haggled over the financial details. Zoron was a good businessbeing, and Erin was a professional. In this case though, it was a classic case of a win-win. Terra Corp wanted the alien spacecraft to inspect and do research over; it was worth more to them than a single production craft. Zoron wanted the straight upgrade.
They ended up agreeing to do a like-for-like trade, Zoron's original spacecraft for a new Terra Corp production.
Also known as a barter. Irony is not dead.
They flew Zoron up to Seattle and settled her into a rented single family home in a middle class suburbia near Northgate.
She was a novelty to her neighbors for a while, and Terra took a while to finally navigate her visa through USCIS. But she settled in and got used to it.
She decided this was where she was going to retire to when she grew old and her bones started aching.
Everyone at Livermore had heard about the trade-in.
It's not that someone dug up her tax forms or someone did their due diligence on Terra Corp.
It's not that they saw Terra Corp engineers take apart her spacecraft piece by piece into carefully labelled crates and flew them around the country.
Nah, she bragged about it on Traders Only, which had a several hundred pages long thread about Zoron's proud pictures in front of her new under construction Terra One. Moderators had to restrict it after numerous unpleasant comments against Zoron and her species.
"This is a good sign, right?" Sarah said, remarking on the trade, "it's… barter but aliens are upgrading their ships to human ones." She said "barter" with a disgust on her face, as if it were a crime.
"Yes, and no," ah, it's another complicated answer from Dr Stearns, "it's great for Zoron. Looking at the deal she claimed she got on Traders Only, she sold it well above the market price. Terra just wanted to take a look at the insides. No other trader would get a trade-in value like that."
"The bad thing is, as I've started to realize and think about these past few months after the Gak disaster," he continued, "the aliens have been bleeding their economies into Earth."
"Hypothetically speaking, if you plop down a rich city into a poor area today, what would immediately happen to the poor area is very bad. The people in the city would have so much money and goods that they would start sucking up all the economy in the area like a vacuum cleaner. Say you're a farmer in the poor area, you can bring food to the city, which they don't make, but literally everyone else in the area is doing the same, so they don't have to pay you that much, and you can't buy that much stuff from the city because everything is expensive. That's the best case scenario."
"You could be… I dunno… a construction worker. You can't compete with the hundreds of people in the city who all already have contacts and experience working in the city. They're also going to come out into the poor area with their fancy machines and concrete trucks and put you out of business. Your only chance would be to move into the city to find work as well. Not ideal for everyone, but bearable."
"If you're unlucky, you're a businessman. You're immediately put out of business by people in the city because you can't compete with their scale and efficiency. In fact, the big corporate franchises in the city can easily drive most businesses in the surrounding areas into bankruptcy. Wealth and people flow one-way into the city. So while it's normally a good idea to be near a big market, the poor area doesn't always improve when there's a sudden change in their surrounding area. Sometimes, it might. It would all depend," Stearns wavered here trying to think about whether to elaborate on the cases and conditions.
"I see your analogy, but the aliens have been improving! Gak is now affording goods and food with a little bit of stimulus and aid, and some of their farms are now able to use late 19th century human farming utilities! Other worlds are industrializing too," Sarah said. She was proud of what they'd achieved so far and was not about to let Stearns' negative nancy attitude piss all over it.
"Yes," Stearns said, and sighed coming to his conclusion, "but we've been doing that at the expense of draining the technological reserves, so to speak, of the aliens. What Zoron sold Terra Corp was six, maybe seven centuries of wealth accumulation from a whole family, and if it weren't an R and D opportunity for them, it would be… oh maybe a quarter of the worth of a new Terra One."
"Imagine someone from the 1400s with the biggest shop in… say London. Imagine their children inherited it. Imagine they made all the right plays, invested in all the right things. They went all in on the tulip trade at the right time, and sold right before the bubble popped. In the 20th century, they had stocks in IBM, Microsoft, Apple at all the right times. They become the top ten richest families of their species. That's Zoron's family."
"She's the literal point oh oh oh oh one percent of the galaxy, if not her planet. And she just traded in her entire wealth for something Terra Corp is probably going to make obsolete with another version in a year because there are thousands of multi-millionaires in just America that won't mind a new space yacht. Don't get me wrong, it was the right financial move: if she hadn't traded hers in, it would be obsolete too. But you see where I'm going with this? Pretty soon, the aliens are going to run out of new technology that we want to copy."
"And our economy is going to crash too?" Sarah asked in horror.
"Oh heavens no, we'll be filthy rich, like the city in the story. I mean… probably. I'm an economist, not a fortune teller," Stearns replied, "but I'm bullish because our economy is booming from all this new alien tech. On the other hand, the aliens can't make all the stuff we're introducing because they literally don't have the infrastructure yet. Selling spaceships was the sound of a domino falling, one that we'd been hearing about for a while."
"What happened on Gak a year ago, it's going to start happening everywhere."
"Not this again, what do we do?" Wailed Jen.
"I think we caught it in time, this time. A friend of mine caught up with me last week. Apparently last year, someone wrote an article describing this exact scenario in one of the journals, and he found it while doing some research on capital flow. Anyway," Stearns went on, "we can mitigate a lot of these effects, here's what we do…"
Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration
Hearing on Alien Refugees and Migrant Workers
"Please! Please! May we have order?... Thank you." The open room was packed with people, and a few faces of unfamiliar species in the gallery too.
"I'll make this brief. We are holding this hearing today on the one year anniversary of the Great Gak Spacelift…"
"... a celebration of our values and our common interest with the galactic community..."
"... greatest gift of all, life and the pursuit of opportunity…"
"... brave men and women from all around the world stepped head first into this challenge…"
This was not brief. At all.
"... beacon of light, we strive to be a shining city on a hill for the galaxy…"
Eyes were rolling, c'mon let's get this going Senator.
"... which brings us to the purpose of this hearing: The laws of the land have remained in limbo for months, and we have debated and delayed, but the business of governance can wait no longer. We have no doubt that the rights we hold sacred, the ones enshrined in our Constitution: they apply to all sentient beings, but the question remains of how the remainder of our customs and regulations, our hundreds of years of precedence, how they will affect our relationship with our visitors from outer space."
"We will now hear testimony from several experts. Ladies and gentlemen," the Chairwoman beckoned to her colleagues on the bench, "call your witnesses."
There was a long line of experts and leaders from academia, from corporations, from unions, from colleges, from special interest groups, from every industry that would be affected by whatever came of this, including the payment company that started it all.
"Ms. Miller, your company benefits from alien labor, does it not?"
"Yes, Senator, as we are all aware," Sarah answered unsure where this line of questions were going, "we consider our payment of credits to space truckers to facilitate the Great Gak Spacelift to be a donation to the cause of sentinency."
"That's not what I'm referring to," the honorable Senator said, putting up a number of documents onto the projector, "we have records that your company has hired representatives of other species, on other worlds, in order to sell Offworld Trading Terminals. You benefit from cheap alien labor, do you not? Is that not why you are here, lobbying to allow galactic aliens to legally enter and remain in the United States for work and refuge?"
"Yes," Sarah sighed, this was going to be a long hearing, "as you know very well, Senator, our interests lie in both the galactic community and our country. Galactic Credits are the grease for the gears of galactic commerce that enable trade with the aliens and feed into our booming economy. A rising tide lifts all boats..."
Stearns beamed proudly at his boss, student, and now friend from one of the VIP seats in the galley.
You might expect that the biggest destination for galactic alien visas and green cards into America would be California, being the most populous state with the most temperate climate and all. Or maybe Texas, with the fastest growing population. Or maybe even Florida or Hawaii, for their year-round sunny beach weather. You could even be forgiven for guessing Alaska, because some aliens sure love the cold tundra.
You would be mistaken. Weather has a big effect on migration, but the number one factor is and will always be: opportunity.
A year after Gak, for a while, it was West Virginia.
West Virginia had a large mining economy. Specifically coal mining. The restrictions of which had just been lifted with the nullification of climate change. Even with the ever decreasing price of cleaner sources of energy, it was still cheaper to burn coal… if you didn't care what you were doing to the environment around you and the lungs of your children. In terms of making energy, things really didn't get much cheaper than setting rocks on fire.
For the workers who did the job, one of the most unfortunate effects of coal mining was pneumoconiosis. Also known among coal miners as black lung. Modern technology and medicine had reduced some of its risks and effects, but not all.
See… some aliens, unlike fragile humans, don't have picky lungs. Especially species from Bohor and other polluted planets that had adapted to the toxic fumes that their homeworld called an atmosphere. Companies paid for the meager cost of transporting them en masse onto Earth and put them to work. Save a little here on ventilators, a little there on masks.
A lot of the aliens don't get too picky about the amount of credits they're being paid either.

Hey dad,
I made a human friend and she let me use her phone to send this message to the trader mail office at home. My life here is great, and I am making many friends.
The air in the mines is clean and crisp compared to the ones at home. We aren't allowed to work more than 8 hours a day, but the human inspectors can't tell our faces apart, so sometimes we sneak in with a different name to work two shifts a day.
They have a sign on the wall that shows the number of days since the last accident. It is at 130 today. Can you imagine such a sign in a Gak mine? They would just never change it from zero. Do not worry about me. I am very careful. I even sometimes wear the silly looking hats they give us.
On some days, they do not let us work the mines, so I learned to drive a vehicle and deliver people to places, like a fancy security guard. This doesn't pay as much as the mines, but I meet many new people. I have even met other non-humans!
Even though my human language skills are not very good, I am learning. The mine boss has a translator, so he can help me with them.
Please stay healthy. I will send you another 300 GC this month. I miss you. Say hello to all my brothers and sisters for me.
Love, Gromor

Gromor,
Harvest is very good this year. The soil is rich with water, and the new seeds we bought at the market made so much we may not be able to collect them all before the winter sets in!
Do not worry about me or your siblings. We are all still alive. Did you find the people I was talking to you about? It is very important that you do.
Dad

"Money they send home is quickly becoming a major portion of these economies. This allows the people on those planets to buy investments into their own business. Agricultural output is up, despite the fact that less people are working in agriculture and most are moving into industrial work. Some planets are even producing materials that Earth corporations are importing in bulk, and many of them are building a multiplanetary supply chain."
"Furthermore, a large alien population has rapidly scaled the demand for a large amount of consumer goods," Stearns continued, "they can send home all they want but they still need to eat, sleep, and consume while they are on Earth. Many previously rusting towns, especially in rural areas with a lot of space and cheap cost of living are booming back up. Many of them are restarting their old factories to mass produce cheap late 19th and early 20th century machinery and consumer goods, and these are selling especially well in the better developed alien trade ports."
"So does that mean our strategy is working?" Jen asked impatiently.
"In a word, yes," Stearns summarized, "there have been massive improvements to many of the poorest economies that are now feeding their populations to richer planets, and from those to planets to Earth. We are single handedly dragging the galaxy into industrializing, though the long term effects are uncertain. If our own economy ever got into trouble, I imagine very bad things will happen to all of them."
"Ok, we'll take things one step at a time. How are our own people handling it?" Sarah asked.
"Fairly well, all things considered. There have been a few interspecies conflicts, but those are generally confined to areas where there are very few of them. I hear they make good neighbors and it's hard for people who know them to get angry at teddy bears and otters from outer space. Also, it helps that many of the jobs they have been taking are the ones that are so shitty that even the Indians and Nigerians don't want to do them."
"That's good to hear," Sarah replied, breathing a sigh of relief.
"Yup. Earth is getting richer. And this time, some of the aliens' are too."
Louisa plopped down at the couch as she got home, and started scrolling through her phone. She couldn't wait for her boyfriend to get home. He was supposed to cook today, and Gary is an excellent chef.
She noticed a new message:

Hey Louisa and Gary,
One of my sons has finally found you. We are all very good. We have a lot of food now.
I hope you are doing well. If you ever come to Gakrek again, you are welcome to stay at our house. Our roof does not leak any more.
I named two of my children after you. I hope you do not mind. I asked the trader office to attach a picture of them to send to you.
Gordorker

The migration of people and their remittances may be the most controversial topic to be discussed in the story, but unavoidable.
The examples I looked at were economic studies of remittances in Armenia, which has a significant portion of its economy being money sent back from migrant workers in Russia and Azerbaijan. Families with emigrant laborers were more likely to have bank accounts and savings, to own businesses, to make domestic investments...etc. Despite major security concerns and regional instability, Armenia's economic growth in the past 30 years have generally been decent, in good years even mirroring the growth rate of the four Asian Tigers in the 60s-90s.
There is no conclusive economic evidence that higher remittances and dependence on it lead to overall greater or lesser economic growth in the long run, only that it can pull underdeveloped countries out of the gutter, which is essentially what the alien economies in the story are.
I am trying out something new in the next chapter. The working title is: Last Resort
RoyalRoad
First
Previous
Next

This might seem like A LOT of preamble and fluff before getting to the main event but I think it's sadly necessary because of the state this sub and the broader conversation around this game. It's very toxic, it's very divided, it's very silly. I'm saying all this stuff to establish context and to show you, dear reader, that I am aware of myself and not pretending to objectivity. This is not a hate post. It's a post-mortem on my personal thoughts and issues with the game. You don't have to read it.
Anyway. There will be spoilers.
The Deets
I played the game on PC with I'd say mid-tier hardware. A ryzen 3600, a GTX 970, an SSD, and a non-4k monitor. I used a controller to play the game. The good news (for me) is that I didn't have many serious bugs of the kind you'd see in crowbcat's video, for example. I can leave most of that stuff out since it's both been exhaustively covered and is the stuff most likely to be fixed as CDPR try to recover or obscure the hit their reputation has taken.
I sympathize a lot with you console players who did endure some of these bugs and issues. I find the trolling of you guys embarrassing for all of us. Just because you bought a game they said would work, on hardware they said it would work on, does not mean you're somehow at fault for what you got. Other people made decisions you could not control and being disappointed about it isn't a failing. It'd be like blaming people for getting cold food because of where they sat in a restaurant. It's asinine and we should all ignore people who think and talk that way.
I wanted to get this out before 1.1 drops since none of us know how much of this is likely to change and I want this here as a record of where the game was at before whatever happens next. I do this because there is already a natural movement toward revising the narrative around C77 to one of "bad bugs, bad launch, good game, good CDPR" and I think the situation is far more complex and troubling than that. When you see melodramatic demonstrations of loyalty in this subreddit, you KNOW the situation is more complex than that. It's complex because there's a lot to say about this game, it's a major moment in gaming not least of which because it's the biggest and highest profile instance in a series of overhyped AAA release disasters. Only a handful of which ever recover more than a small but ardent fanbase of players. I expect C77 is going to stay relevant and stay widely played. I expect that in a year, with the game patched to a better state, people are going to re-evaluate it and see more of what the game does well. This is a normal part of the process and people trying to rush you through it are doing you both a disservice. Later will be the time to reassess C77 and write about how much the game has improved and how much faith in CDPR that restores for you. For now, it's the time to criticize, hold feet to fires, and try to at least protest the practices that led to this mess. And since others are doing that, I'll record a list of things I think the game does poorly which are not a matter of hype or bugs. I mean, I'm not setting out to create or reflect meme fodder here. I'm not even trying to be especially snarky.
The above said, I'll be pleased but not satisfied if many of my issues are addressed in 1.1 or 1.2 or whatever. I think it's a shame that C77 released this way even if they do manage to fix a lot or most of it later. Respect that because I'm not someone who's gonna be convinced that companies get a pass to treat gamers like outsourced QA.
This article or essay or list or whatever is subjective. It's personal. It's about what I think. It is not about me telling YOU what to think so you're free to disagree (in good faith) or plain not read it. I don't, and I can't stress this enough, care about objectivity or telling people what to think. If this helps anyone, cool, but I'm writing it for me. I'm expressing my view on a public forum. That's all, nothing more and nothing less. If you don't like what I have to say, be respectful about it and I'll engage you in discussion if that's what you want.
Some of the below will seem like nitpicks or stuff that's likely to be fixed. And that's okay. I'm not living or dying on any of the opinions expressed here and I didn't much distinguish between which issues on this list are nitpicks and which are things that really bothered me a lot. The difference is only a matter of degree and that difference is subjective. It'll depend on how YOU want to see it. What I think matters here is that even if you avoided a problem, didn't see a bug, or played such a way that certain mechanics weren't an issue for you, it doesn't mean any of these issues aren't in the game. That logic seems imply that we should all be playing a certain way or is just that classic gamer deflection of "it didn't happen to me, so where's the issue?".
Not here for that shit.
I accept that C77 is more like The Witcher series than anyone probably expected. Especially people who are new to CDPR's games. I have a lot of the same criticisms for that series and I'm not alone. Never was a CDPR fanboy but like many, I respected them before this. The honest truth as I see it is that C77 carries over many of the same design flaws that were present in their earlier games. CDPR have always been pretty bad at combat balance, itemization, UI/menus, etc. They sometimes fix some of this, but they often don't. There seems to be a bit of a (in design terms) conservative or traditionalist CRPG streak in their design team, is my theory. But C77 is not a CRPG any more than the Witcher games were. So I think these are mistakes. I didn't have overinflated expectations about this game and you won't hear me use the word "promise" except right now. I don't believe in the idea that marketing equates to "promises" and I don't feel personally put out when marketing claims aren't met in reality. I've been playing video games for decades and this is normal bullshit everybody hates then forgets. Marketing is out of control in general and if I have issues with this element of C77's release, it goes way beyond CDPR itself. Not that they get a pass. CDPR notoriously spent more on marketing than the game and it sure as shit shows.
That all said, I am totally interested in replies that (respectfully) correct me on any of these points. I may have missed things! I also get it if you're reading this hoping to see me mention a specific thing and I didn't, feel free to sound off. There's a lot of stuff I didn't really cover because it's been covered elsewhere plenty or I didn't care about it. That doesn't mean you shouldn't care about it, either. I bet whatever you like or dislike about this game is perfectly valid for you. This is also why the "things I like" list is relatively short, because right now I care more about the stuff that "doesn't work" which isn't a result of expectations or obvious bugs. Other people can complain from those positions if they want.
To me, this is what I have to say right now but I reserve the right to change my mind. Hell, I might even be talked into a more negative outlook on the game rather than more positive. Who knows.

TL;DR Your Fucking Essay:
COOL. Did you post to tell me that though? C'mon. Don't be surprised if you're confused about the content, then. Mostly it's just me writing an introduction of sorts, like any good essayist would. Though the below isn't formatted like an essay, it's pretty much a deconstructed essay and should be read that way if I at all know what I'm doing (Narrator: he doesn't).
This is only this long because I've been jotting these down since I started playing. After 100+ hours, would you expect a weekend grocery list?

The Biz: The Buggy, The Bad, The Baffling
If you made it this far, buckle up. Things about to get specific. The following is broken down by broad category of gameplay. These are my subjective categories and they might be messy and overlap sometimes. Not gonna debate about this since the only purpose of these categories is this piece. If you can't get your head around that, oh well.

We'll start with CRAFTING, ITEMS and GEAR because it's the stuff I think they fucked up that most affected my enjoyment of the base game mechanics:

• Legendary Gear seems designed to promote save scumming. Slots are randomized and critical for item progression and keeping gear relevant as the game RNGs you junk.
• Armadillo mechanics are a great example of this. The reliance on this modification and its scaling seems bizarre and unintended as it trivializes most gear. If this is intentional, it's an eccentric mechanic that seems stuck in there at the last minute as a patch on item progression issues.
• The above mechanics are responsible for a lot of the complaints people had early on about feeling forced to use patchwork gear with aesthetics they didn't like for mechanical reasons. How relevant this actually is in the game is immaterial because the game leads you to believe Armor stat is relevant.
• Incomplete, random, and arbitrary craftable clothing list. Same for loot tables, vendor stock, and availability of clothing/armor in general. Lots of repetitive hand-placed gear that is bizarre and useless. How many Arasaka Hazmat Suits did YOU pick up in your run?
• Items show up on HUD/scan as lootable but aren't. The terrain, clipping, and physics problems cause some of this (enemy drops getting trapped in debris). Some of these are placed like lootable junk, you can see that it's a pack of cards or w/e, and it shows up on scan, but you still can't pick it up. Probably buggy, but most of this doesn't even need to be in the game in the first place...
• ...because who even likes "junk" systems in games? I dunno why CDPR insists on this, the Witcher games had it too. If there wasn't so much other loot, I could see the crafting argument, but the junk you do find is baffling. Staplers? It all seems like an afterthought.
• Overabundance of consumables, particularly healing items, makes healing tedious and almost meaningless. You can buy and craft the best healing items very early with extremely cheap prices and recipes. Maybe unintended. Baffling anyway.
• Buffing is limited to a handful of non-scaling, core stat buffs that are extremely powerful throughout the game and make things like carrying capacity redundant and meaningless. Again, you can craft most of these.
• I think the above is the result of "drugs" being cut out of the game for whatever reason, as it seems clear from their marketing that this was one of their planned ways for buffs. This seemed like a good idea, one of the elements I think most people can agree works well in Bethesda's Fallout series, but it's gone. Drugstores and street dealers sell supplements and medicine.
• Buffing in C77 didn't have to be as intricate and fiddly as in the Witcher games, but this implementation really makes me nostalgic for the immersion and variety of options in TW3 and the previous games.
• Skill Shards do not appear consistently across the game. I am not sure what mechanic determines which gigs and NCPD stuff drop these as rewards but I never saw any until the second half of my run, when I was doing more content in the "lower" districts of NC. Maybe this is just my bad luck. Maybe not.
• Armor and damage values of many items, especially quest rewards, are not leveled so it's luck of the draw based on what order you do things in. Which is arbitrary in a game this dynamic. Johnny's Gun is a great example as most people will get this late in the game and its stats will be too disappointing for most to use.
• Many of the Gear mods don't work or don't work as intended. This includes most or possibly all of the "Legendary" mods with hidden stat limits on things like crit chance and crit damage. Someday, someone might work out the mechanics behind all this but right now it's mostly meaningless numbers and head-scratching UI discrepancies. More on that later.
• A lot of weapons and armor (individual pieces and broader categories) are vanishingly rare, potentially because of RNG or, again, the path a given player takes through the game. I don't think this is intended in most cases.
• It's so weird that there's only one LMG in the game and that it has a barrel slot that does nothing.
• Backpacker mod is useful only in the early parts of the game where you may not have the Capacity buff (50% increase every time is optimal to other methods).
• The mods you can craft and at what tier make no sense. Mods don't follow the tier rules of other equipment types and there's no distinction made in game. This kind of info is left to player discovery but represents weird implementation, not clever design.
• No mass-crafting means CDPR expects you to just hold down that button/key over and over and for fun, there's also a progress bar. I imagine they thought it would keep players from accidentally crafting the wrong thing. There are simply better ways to do this.
• Recipe requirements for upgrades and SOME crafting are nonsensical, wildly imbalanced, random, and arbitrary. Why is Johnny's gear so much more expensive than others? It's only the best gear if you get lucky with slots or force it by reloading or spending A LOT of resources on recrafting from the earlier tier that the game for some reason forces you to carry. Probably so you could recraft it as you progress in the game. The reason this is baffling is because iconic weapons don't work the same way. Why have a separate system just for Johnny's gear?
• Speaking of which, why are some Iconics craftable and others not? These mechanics being inconsistent and poorly explained is the reason a lot of people accidentally disassemble iconics, thinking they can recraft at a higher tier later. The game only lets you do that for some items and either you have the recipe or it's Johnny's Gear or River's Gun (Crash). There may be other gear affected by this but I'd love to hear a reason behind why x gear works one way and y gear works another way. I can't see there being a good one.
• Several crafting perks are useless or cause more problems than they are worth. Auto-dissassembing of "junk" also gets rid of valuable sellable junk (the very little that's in the game). Up-cycling materials is weirdly implemented as well, almost like we're missing a perk for the Upgrade portion. With components being available in bulk in most stores and the up-cycle costs being too expensive (people have done math on this one) and unrewarding, this perk is a waste.

Now for the MENUS, UI, and BASIC MECHANICS:

• Incorrect stats in various UI windows. Eg: Weapons will report random DPS changes in UI. It's unclear how much this is being affected by perks, but you can slide over the same weapon in the crafting menu and it'll change stats. Crafting it with different numbers seems to actually change the outcome stats SOME of the time. Again, figuring this out is left to player discovery rather than explained in game. That's bad.
• Many tooltips are incorrect. Some are clearly from a previous version of the game and were never rewritten or updated. The clearest example of this is in cyberware, particularly the "arm" upgrades.
• A LOT of perks don't work. A lot of em. Not just the crafting ones. There are lists on this sub and elsewhere.
• Numbers in the game are misleading, unresponsive to perks or mods, or flat out incorrect. Resistances, crit stats, etc are either misunderstood or just buggy/unfinished/poorly thought out. Again. Unclear.
• Endless list of shards separated by tabs but with no other sorting and a Menu system that can't decide whether to remember your place or not each time you go in the menu. In my run, I had two blank tabs, several blank shards, etc by the end. I didn't read a lot of these because it was a pain in the ass to go through them.
• The "hold" button mechanic and mouse-like floating cursor suck and have always sucked. For controllers. This'll be one of the things others will consider a nitpick or just flat disagree with and you know what? I'm okay with that. I hate this shit and if I'm honest, I suspect no one actually prefers it, they just tolerate it in otherwise good games.
• Odd item behavior in menu like items failing to disassemble, Johnny Gear (and River's Gun for some reason) duplicating, etc. Could be a bug but I have a theory above on what they could have been going for if this is intentional.
• Many perks are redundant with cyberware and this can be difficult to spot. Tooltips can be misleading because the same ability might be worded differently from menu to menu. Some handgun perks are especially good examples of this.
• All of the inventory management UI is subpar. Difficult to work with, follows design principles of games like Destiny which aren't well suited here, etc. For example, why is the crafting menu a huge unsortable list of item icons in a block configuration? The game doesn't use space for encumbrance like a Resident Evil game. It uses weight. Why implement the representation this way?
• Item tabs are nice to see but they feel like they were afterthoughts. The game remembers which tab you're using inconsistently and stuff like DPS has its own tab, even for armor. My own google docs are better indexed than this.
• Many items don't belong to any particular tab and are only visible if you look at ALL items, which again is a mess to look at. Some items are blanks or duplicates or have no actual in-game effect with no indicators either way.
• Some scannable things in environments retain the "yellow" scanning icon for no discernible reason, or are already grayed out before you look. Why is Joss Ward scannable every time I see her? This is probably a bug but I found the scanning mechanics, outside of combat situations, to be unevenly implemented and often feeling like afterthoughts.
• The minimap is mostly bad. I didn't hate it as much as some but I agree with the criticisms. It's another feature that feels like an afterthought or like someone wrote the code for it 10 years ago and hasn't played a single open world game since.
• Vehicles appear as full fledged side missions for no reason. They clutter up the map and in game language, are displayed as urgent objectives. The psychology behind this is intentional -- developers and UI designers use bright colors and symbols like exclamation points to draw a player's attention. Anyone can ignore this, but the intent is clear. Question then is... why?
• Variety of shops, bars, etc isn't really bad, but that they are unnamed adds a sense that they are all generic points of interest. The bars especially have a lot of personality but it's easy to lose track of which one is where. If they can have names pop up over quests, they could have had names pop up over other locations. Why make it harder for players to find specific things they are looking for?
• Police System is notoriously bad and undercooked. A tacked on afterthought or a buggy mess. Either way, no fun for anyone.
• Why is there a blank Attribute category? And don't say DLC because the question is really, why is it there and unexplained? The DLC explanation is make believe for now, no one really knows. That I know of.
• What do the three progression meters at the top of the menu even mean? It seems like it's based on what priorities you have as aggregate of all the choices you make? We're supposed to just figure it out?
• Stashes are not shared except for in vehicles. This makes the few additional "quarters" V gets useless. Can't sleep in 'em either so why are they in the game? Bug?

There isn't much I can add to the issues already well established with CONTROLS and DRIVING, so it's a short list:

• Pace of driving is bizarrely slow especially with how fast most vehicles accelerate.
• Brakes are bad and it's difficult to stop suddenly (in most vehicles) -- which leads to accidents which leads to NPC deaths which leads to dealing with the bad cop mechanics
• Bikes show stashes but not one I used actually had a stash. It's just broken.
• The driving AI and road mechanics are notoriously bad.
• Button remapping is limited or nonexistent (especially on controller)
• No alternate layouts.
• The default control layout is a mess. Everyone hates the crouch/dodge bit and in general, the functionality of the "B" or "O" button is a mess.

I have a bit less to say about COMBAT than other fields, even though it is one of the primary pillars of the gameplay. This is because I mostly liked the combat, or at least didn't think it was much worse than many other Open World games. Still, there were some things that stood out to me:

• Enemy AI is notoriously bad. Get behind their cover and see.
• Most combat scenarios are shooting galleries. You have almost full control over entering and exiting combat (enemies won't even chase you most of the time).
• Netrunning trivializes stealth and vice versa. They seem set up to synergize well, but the combo is both seductive (it's cool, dammit) and destabilizing to the thin veneer of balance the game already has. Bad balancing in a game like this is hard to avoid, but with the perks system being broken the way it is... there's a lot to fix here. Lots of people have pointed this out but for some, this kind of thing is fun and I don't wanna take that from anyone. Tricky one.
• Grenades are mostly useless (maaaybe depending on build) because of their physics. It is difficult to use them "tactically" though I feel like they represent some interesting utility. Homing grenades don't seem to work right, but other types do. It's just hard to throw them to the right place, the game seems to be pretty finnicky about the spread and I've hit enemies on the face with grenades that did no damage to them (and they didn't have resistances to em soooo). The "quick throw" with just a light press of the button seems to work better than aiming your throw in my experience. It should be... the opposite?

This next part is really hard to pin down. Questions of IMMERSION, FLOW, and PACING are even more subjective than other categories of the list.

• Quests with downtime between phases are nearly all set at 12 or 24 hrs. Kerry Eurodyne's quests were the one exception where it felt like I needed to wait a reasonable amount of time between phases. In other cases, it's way too fast and discourages freeplay. It suggested to me that I should stick to questlines until completion, and sometimes this feels narratively appropriate, but I wish they stretched these out or let us approach the quest-givers ourselves like in most Open World games. Even the ones with phones usually work this way for a reason.
• The phone system here is a mess in terms of pacing and flow. Fixers and story characters call on top of each other because of conditions that trigger the calls. Everyone has missed dialogue in the game because of this stuff. This can even cause a bad bug that breaks phone calls and rewards from fixers (I know how to fix this at least).
• Fixer texts about missions are overwritten and all sound like they are mostly written by the same person in the same voice. It's a weird choice to even offer this very redundant information after the phone call sections, which are arguably more immersive anyway.
• Fixer calls tumbling over each other in the early and mid-game add a Preston Garvey feel of being badgered by the game. No one likes this.
• Texts for cars can occur basically all at once after you get your first call from a fixer. This is dependent on what order you play the game in and how early or often you branch out to new districts so YMMV.
• The relic malfunctions were a bad idea and occur so frequently it feels like the game is trolling me. I half-expected to find out that Johnny was doing it to test your defenses or by accident. Nah, it's just one of those annoying "forced immersion" things that wastes your time, reminds you that eating noodles and buying clothes makes no sense when you're about to die (for in-game weeks and months, but I digress). These malfunctions are completely unnecessary outside the handful of scripted moments where they feel appropriate. The ludonarrative dissonance here is jarring and would have been easy to fix.
• The game's progression is a bit messed up thanks to the Street Cred system, which might be my least favorite novel mechanic in the game. It's responsible for many of the knock-on effects described above and elsewhere. If you level up this stat fast, which you almost certainly will, it contributes to almost all the pacing issues in the game. More open gigs means more calls from fixers as you wander around. I had 20+ Street Cred by the time I left Watson and I couldn't get 3 steps down the street without calls and texts. Choosing not to do these jobs right away meant forgetting the context hours later when I returned to them. I am sure I'm not the only one who felt overwhelmed by this.
• Game, in general, doesn't have enough progression to fit its massive amount of content. If you do the side stuff, you're going to hit max SC fast. You're going to run through the gear progression fast (without crafting), etc. You can choose to avoid side stuff, sure, but it's still in the game the way it is.
• General debris and junk on the ground is a waste of resources outside of aesthetic clutter which is often buggy (floating in the air and shit) anyway. See: the whole junkyard area.
• Characters are often missing items they are holding or using. Misty's Tarot Cards only showed up during a reading in the final scene. NPCs have guns, food, and cigarettes disappear or float in the air. Almost every time I had a Johnny Smoking bit, his cigarette would stay in the air while he zapped around. Probably a bug. Still really annoying.
• The game has notoriously thin customization options for an Open World RPG (it is an RPG, part of a subgenre that used to be called "Action RPG" but now everyone thinks RPG means whatever they want it to, smh). The appearance options are limited in ways that are arbitrary and uneven. Why have two digits worth of options for ears and almost none for other categories? Why show us a plethora of interesting cybernetics but allow us to have none of it? We hardly even see a change in V based on the cyberware we CAN install. Devs also still can't seem to get hair to clip with heads in a realistic way (where the hair doesn't float off the head) yet manage to get everything else on your avatar to clip in the bad way. Never ceases to amaze me.

The NARRATIVE and story elements are the strongest part of this game, no surprise with CDPR. I don't agree with people who say the story is bad, but there are certainly issues:

• Text convos present texts in the wrong order in many cases and don't always alert for every new text. They also typically come all at once even before you respond. You should have more control over this, or the game should have had a slower-paced, more realistic flow for this. Probably a bug in some cases, but in general the button controls and UI for texts don't feel great either. Try finding them in the menu.
• Shards are mostly not worth reading and there are way too many. They provide shallow context for shallow in-game activities. They are cheesy, over the top, and written in the NC street vernacular that falls flat without good voice actors to sell it. I'm sure there are hidden gems, even found a few, but overall I think it's baffling.
• A lot of dialogue is choppy and disjointed because characters will gormlessly repeat back info or questions that the other character just finished saying -- screams that there was lackluster quality control for this and VOs recorded lines in a vacuum with flow being arranged in the edit, and often not very well. Lots of scenes where the inflection and volume changes are inappropriate and weird. V growling one line and then the next he's yelling cheerfully. It doesn't happen all the time, but it's noticeable. Probably unavoidable in a game like this but can be improved on.
• The core relationship with Johnny is inconsistent and oddly paced. You'll be friends one minute and enemies the next and the game doesn't respond well to previous choices you've made which reflect your attitude toward Johnny and his role in the story. Some of this is down to "order of play" but there are cases like the Johnny-focused missions that have to be done right before the end of the game. Your relationship with Johnny can veer wildly and inorganically from scene to scene in what is a largely linear quest chain with predictable patterns.
• There are occasional broken triggers and NPC locations, for example my Judy was still in her apartment while she was texting me pics from Oregon and so on (she left the city in my run) -- probably a bug but par for course, right?
• The game treats sex like a reward and personally, I'm tired of seeing that. It corresponds too much with naive and ignorant attitudes about sex in real life and caters specifically to young (and underage, ffs) players who don't have a mature perspective on sex or relationships. That the relationships in this game are so well done, only to lead to a perfunctory "final reward" sex scene adds a level of gamification to sex that I could forgive on its own if C77's whole approach to sexual content wasn't so warped, backward and forward, and poorly conceived/designed to be faux-edgy, inconsistent, and patronizing to pretty much everyone. The game treats its extreme violence more responsibly than it treats sex. It treats drinking a beer in a cutscene with more sensitivity. This subject is complex, though, and probably deserves its own lengthy post. I'll spare you guys for now.

TL;DR Your Fucking List:
I did say it was exhaustive.

You made it this far (or skipped here) and since before was the tea, here's the cookie:
I liked a lot about C77. I have played through it only the one time, but I did play through all the lifepath intros. I went with Street Kid in the end. I think C77 has a good game lost somewhere under the poor decisions, bad bugs, and incomplete features. I think, in the end, that C77 will be a game I enjoy more as I became more aware of these flaws and their place in the game. I think that's often the case for most flawed games: you stick with it and you learn to live with the problems. C77 is like that. The people claiming it's a perfect game are just signaling brand loyalty or lying through their teeth. This doesn't at all mean that people don't or can't like the game. Of course they can! We all like flawed stuff. It's only recently that trolls have made it all about such extreme loyalty and fan tribalism that they feel like they are personally attacked when something they liked is criticized. Criticism is not an attack, it's an evaluation. All things are worthy of criticism if they're worthy of attention at all.

Anyway. Here are things I liked about the game, mostly small things I thought went largely overlooked, in no certain order:

• I liked the V graffiti that shows up in some districts. I wasn't sure if this was showing up more as I played or is just random or pre-placed. I liked the idea that V was getting known and chose to see it that way. Immersion is more than half what you make up in your own head, after all.
• I liked that players always had a choice to drink or not drink, except in some Johnny scenes. I thought this was a nice touch for people who want to play sober Vs. Why not?
• Sometimes NPCs will respond to V in a way that gives players something they always ask for in games like this: a certain amount of responsiveness to who the character is throughout. They did a good job with this in the Witcher games as well.
• I thought the vast majority of the beefier missions were well-written, well-conceived, and obviously given a lot of attention and love. They obviously worked hard on these and they must have been in the game from an early state.
• I loved that many of the missions were just hangouts and dialogue scenes to deepen relationships between V and other characters. Again, this is something CDPR are great at. It's all here in C77 in spite of the issues.
• I liked the side chatter you could have with vendors, even though a lot of is out of place and disjointed. Asking about the good drugs a medicine vendor has only to find... supplements. Still, this is a nice little touch.
• I like the variance of NPCs on the street and how many of them deliver information via their appearance, where in the city they are, etc. They can tell a story if you can get over the duplicating, weird pathing/movement routes, and bad AI. A lot of them also have funny, antagonistic shit to say when you talk to them. It does get old, but I'm glad it's there.
• Like in some of the better Open World games, there are a ton of ambient conversations V can overhear and many of these are well-written and occasionally even touching -- if they don't bug out.
• I'm not sure I'll like all the endings, but I really like that they are each their own ending SEQUENCE. This is better than other games that offer a static ending choice, some cutscenes, and then credits. C77 offers an hour or more of gameplay for each of 4-5 ending sequences. I only played Panam's so far.
• The romantic relationships in the game are as well done as the friendships. They are well written, believable, and sidestep some of the problems in relationships like this in games by allowing you to spend some downtime, not making it too obviously easy to game the result you want, and so on. The Panam sex scene weirded me out, but I appreciate that each sex scene in the game has its own gimmicks and aren't as generic as ones you see in other games.
• The FRIENDSHIPS THOUGH. I thought this game did an excellent job with giving the player a lot of side characters you could form attachments to. Even the fixers all have distinct personalities (if you ignore their texts) and different attitudes toward V. The ones that come into play in the endgame are also a nice surprise. I didn't get any calls from them during the credits, but I wish I had because characters like Regina, Padre, Okada, and Dakota all made an impact on me.
• The Nomads earned my preference for their ending. It was not an arbitrary or "gamed" choice. I thought that the Rogue path made more sense for my V in some ways, but I couldn't forget the Nomads and particularly Panam (even if I hadn't romanced her, I think she'd be hard to turn your back on). So I went with them and I'm glad I did, it was a satisfying ending (and I hear the best one). I'm probably gonna save all the other endings for other playthroughs or future experiments because I thought this ending made my V feel complete for now.
• Cyberpunk is my favorite genre of fiction for a lot of reasons. I grew up reading William Gibson and I was an early adopter of new technology. I stayed a technological optimist for most of my 20s and have become more pessimistic and cynical since. I have watched Cyberpunk become more or less real, killing the genre for years before our current "ironic cyberpunk" phase. Outside of the themes and philosophical shit, I love the aesthtic of classic 80s Cyberpunk which C77 delivers in spades. The single greatest achievement in this game is its aesthetics. From the city design to the clothes and weapon skins, a lot of love went into at least how things LOOK. That's not the only thing that matters, but it's not nothing.

PHEW. THAT WAS A LOT.
If you read all that, thanks. Even if you hated every second of it, you're still my hero. I feel seen. The tears and the hate that'll no doubt come streaming down atop me if this post gets attention will be worth it if even one person read all this and was like "yeah, I get some of that".
See ya, Night City.

I posted something similar in a different thread. I guess Im just wondering is the situation with the dog a massive overreaction considering whats been happening in the last few years? If so, how do we come back from this? I feel like im keeping my son away from his inlaw. Well they havent tried to contact us but still.
We havent spoken to MIL in two months because shes so toxic. We had our first baby (only grandbaby on both sides of the family) five months ago.
Me and my husband have been together for almost ten years. We met when we were 19 and he was still living at home. To give you some background on the family dynamic my husband is the youngest of three brothers. His mother rules the home and his father just sits back/does EVERY THING she wants. He actually left his 5 year old son in Scotland to migrate to Australia because my husbands mum wanted to move. (She actually admitted to me that one of the reasons they migrated was because she had trouble accepting that her husband had a 'whole marriage and life before her). No one in the family stands up for themselves against her. What she says goes.
To give you some background on me, I practically raised my self from the age of 14 - 19. I had no reliable family, I starved and worked multiple jobs while studying to get where I am today. Im massively downplaying how hard Ive hard to work right now because that would be whole other thread on its own. I practically had to lie to child protective services so I didnt get taken into foster care.
Anyways from the very moment I came into the family they have always disliked me for no apparent reason. At first his mother appeared to be loving/accommodating etc but there was always underlying hostility and snide comments about our relationship, what we were doing and how much time we spent with eachother etc. It got to a point where I stopped going over the house because his mum obviously didnt want me around. This led to my husband not being home as much. This led to my MIL having a cry every few weeks that she never saw her son.
It all came to a head when my husband wanted to buy a car. He had his eye on something but his mum said that it wasnt fuel efficient/expensive etc. My husband just sat and listened to her opinion but said he still wanted the car. This exploded into 'you do everything she says', 'you dont care about my opinion anymore', 'you just think your a big man now that you've got a gf etc'. Mind you I didnt encourage my husband to want a nice car, they grabbed onto this because I was a car enthusiast. Mind you he wasnt asking for money to buy this car. He'd saved. She kicked him out of home. Literally threw all his belongings on the porch.
My husband left and stayed out of the home despite her begging him to come home. His oldest brother messaged him telling him he had abandoned the family and his mother. His dad tried to get him to come home but he refused. Now every single time he does something that she does not like she gets resentful and blames him for not returning to the home, even years later. She trash talks my husband saying he 'thinks hes done everything by himself', 'his family arent important to him' and hes 'unempathic'. My husband is such a push over from having this women for a mum. He gets bullied everywhere he goes and doesnt know how to stand up for himself in social situations.
A few years pass, we are abit distant from them but we attend all family functions because were not allowed to say no. We cop all kinds of remarks about our diet, weight, my husband being under the thumb, where we like to live/holiday, spend our money. You name it, they have a comment on it. In the ten years Ive been in the family not one person has asked at dinner 'how are you', 'how are things going', 'whats new'. Instead MIL will find out what each person is doing and pass on the information to everyone else. This causes massive conflict between everyone, because shes gossiping about each other. No one has anything nice to say about each other, ever. Not once have they ever offered any kind of supportive words, they just tell you what they would do instead and practically that what your doing is a waste. The whole family does this to each other and family dinners are painful.
His parents decide to move away but his dad doesn't retire and decides to work in the city while MIL lives in a coastal town. We offer FIL to stay with us for a year so he can retire the following year. Despite things being not great with his family I honeslty do my best to accommodate them. The year goes fine, she does betray oue trust a few times by going to the other brothers and bitching about what we do in our houee behind our backs but were used to it by this stage.
A few years ago at dinner (after FIL moves out) she told everyone at the dinner table that 'young people dont know a hard days work, look at x (me) shes talking about working a 4 day week'. She literally used me as an example of a young generation who cant work hard. When I told her this upset me, she got angry. Aggressively got in my face, dismissed my feelings then refused to apologise. We didnt talk to her for months. She gave a weak apology that she took back a few weeks before I gave birth claiming to not know what the big deal is.
Fast forward a few more years. His parents moved away and then like three years later bought a dog. They had an argument with their other son who they used to stay with all the time. Because we have cats we werent able to accommodate them with the dog so they had to stop staying with us. Before getting the dog they stayed with us heaps, like almost every weekend. But cause we have cats they stopped. It got to a point were we never saw them. Because she fought with her other son and couldnt stay there so we hardly saw them
When i was pregnant we told them we would try locking the cats away in the back room so they could stay. We did this for a bit. But eventually just said it would be too hard with their dog, our cats and a newborn. We asked them if they wanted to stay with us could they find an alternative for their dog.
They said yes they would. This conversation happened when i was like 25 weeks pregnant. When my son was born they kept bringing the dog to the house. We never said anything. One of the days she asked if the dog could come in as they tied it to a pillar outside. My husband being stressed said yes. When i came out from my shower I was like wtf? So the next day they did the same thing. When she asked again my husband said no. She no joke packs up her dinner and leaves.
Doesnt contact us for 2 weeks. Our baby was born premature and we are first time parents. We actually had to call them. Anyways to cut a long story short. When we stayed with them that she told her son that she loved the dog as much, hes as important to her as him and her grandson. My husband lost it. Ive never seen him so angry. We left at the crack of dawn the next morning and have barely spoken with them since. Anyways, two months later she gets a tattoo that says love on her wrist. Can you believe instead of picking up the phone/telling her son shes sorry or regrets what she said his mum has gotten a tattoo at the ripe age of 65 that says love on her wrist. His dad commented on the photo practically saying something like hopefully the others get the hint or something. What is happening in her head to think its easier to get a tattoo, post it on FB, get your husband who is sitting next to you to post a comment so we get the message that she 'loves' us.
Other things she does: - makes comments about how my husband likes my family more, always makes comments about my husband spending more time with my family - plays the victim when shes told not to do something - Plays favourites with her kids based on who is the most obedient. All last year she didnt want to stay with my BIL and SIL because they 'didnt feel welcome', and also used that as an excuse to make us feel bad their dog isnt welcome. Now that were not talking to them they are close again. Honestly im happy they have repaired the relationship but why did we have to fall out with them for that to be repaired? - scapegoats my husband and blames him for things. Etc 'i kicked him out of home because hes lazy'. He was doing a double degree and working 30 hour weeks, sorry he wanted to see his gf on his days off. - compares brothers, always saying why cant he be like the other two. - will talk non stop shit about my sister in law, literally makes stuff up that isnt true - self sabotages then makes it everyone one elses problem. Eg. Moves three hours away then gets sad we dont have the time to visit, but doesnt ever call us - always denies she says things when she did. Literally she will down a bottle of wine, say something to upset someone then deny it while playing the victim. - smugly violates boundaries. Her other son has asked her to let her know when shes coming down for the weekend, she never does. Will call him on the afternoon she wants to see him then feel sorry for herself that he doesnt have the time for her. - complains that her family isnt close but will consistently engage in behaviour that is harmful. Eg. My husband never says anything he shouldnt to anyone, he keeps out of everyones decisions however over the years we have been criticised so much, due to this he has started to tell them less and less. But hes always the bad guy for not contacting his brothers. They never contact him either. Its just easy to blame my husband because he bends the least to what his mum wants. - always guilting everyone, 'i love x the dog because hes been there for me'. Anything less than codependency she is upset with.
I cant fucking survive in this family anymore.

...And it's #1 on the Amazon sales list for Tibetan Buddhism!
It's entitled Take Back Your Mind: Buddhist Advice for Anxious Times. You know what makes people anxious? Seeing their rapist publishing books of Buddhist advice. You know what people would like to take back? The time that they wasted being abused by this asshole.
Imagine having been sexually assaulted or harassed or bullied by this guy, imagine having watched people you thought you once respected promote him for years (including your own vajra guru), and then imagine having bared your heart and soul publicly to warn folks that this guy is a predator (like this brave woman did) only to see that he keeps at it. He keeps writing and selling books! And people . . . do not know? do not care? that they are receiving the holy Buddhadharma from a lying rapist? Do people think that he has redeemed himself? Where? When?
Another important point to note is that historically, he has USED THIS VERY dharma as part of his predation. The predatory behavior was bolstered by his access to the dharma. Period. They are connected. He preyed upon students, younger or less "advanced" practitioners, and used his position as a teacher close to the "Sakyong" to gain their trust. That was his whole schtick. This is why he should not be teaching the dharma - and why it's important that his efforts to build a new student following be held in check.
Not only that, but Sharon Salzberg and Susan Piver have blurbed the book! Do they not believe that Lodro raped, manipulated, and abused people? Do they not . . . care? I would love to hear their justification. I would love to see them retract their support. I would love to hear that their students and acolytes hold them accountable for their continued support for this serial predator.
I don't know what to do about this except to continue to tell people that he's a rapist, that people in power in Shambhala KNEW ABOUT THIS FOR YEARS and did nothing, and that people—vulnerable anxious people looking for help and meaning in this shitty world—should be protected from him. There's no accreditation board for spiritual guidance, so of course anyone can self-publish a shitty book (it appears that his is the publisher's only book? Maybe dharmaclub is his new grift - it's a very strange website! I guess getting kicked out of MNDFL means he needs a new grift!).
There is space for redemption in this cruel world, but I have stated this again and again: there are *other* careers besides self-styled cornball meditation/lifestyle guru available to people. And conversely, there are plenty of NON-RAPISTS who can teach you the dharma if that's what you need.
I guess it would be great if, below, people could share strategies for countering the scourge of folks like Lodro Rinzler. Write to his publisher (which appears to be him? since he's so toxic and was dropped by his last publisher)? Write to Salzberg and Piver? Also Kilung Rinpoche - who blurbed it. Attend Lodro's black-tie launch party (RSVP here!) and hold him accountable? Write reviews of the book on Amazon? He is wily and deft and will delete comments immediately on Instagram - he goes to great lengths to scrub his internet footprint and even recently succeeded at getting his incriminating Wikipedia page deleted. Maybe someone with some Wikipedia skills could write it again? It seems like someone with seven books and a #1 best-seller would meet their "notability" requirements?
I mean, I do not wish him harm, but I do not think he should be let off the hook so easily. I wish that he could find a career path that would be less triggering for his victims (TO WHOM HE HAS NEVER APOLOGIZED) and less harmful to vulnerable people. And for the record for people who do not know him, he is a manipulative liar - he has never copped to his abuse publicly or otherwise, and he has doubled down on denial, blaming the victims and every other nasty trick in the book. He deserves *no* pity. I wish his former allies would come clean about what they know - their silence is abject complicity and we all know who they are.
Also as an example of his manipulative ways: he is donating all the "proceeds" from this book to charities. I'm CERTAIN that this will be wielded against any critics. Guaranteed. His supporters/ignorant followers will see this as an act of noble charity (see the comments on Instagram); his victims will see through it as the ploy that it is. I'm glad he won't be getting rich off this book, but . . . this is pretty transparent. He writes in his Instagram post that he is donating proceeds because "access to mental health care and having enough food on the table can go a long way toward easing anxiety". You know what would help ease anxiety? Knowing that rapists are not out there making a career off of being pretend Buddhist gurus. You know what will help the mental health of his victims? Accountability. If he cared about mental health and anxiety, he would probably COME CLEAN and take responsibility for his past.

ABML is basically a startup that was largely created when ex-Tesla Ryan Melsert joined as CTO in late 2019. He was a superstar at Tesla, winning top 1% employee award. Here's a list of his patents - Ryan Melsert Inventions, Patents and Patent Applications - Justia Patents Search
When he joined he also brought along August Meng (PhD, ex-Tesla) with him, Chuck Leber (construction manager for Tesla's Nevada Gigafactory), and now more recently ex-Tesla Kris Gustafson to lead procurement. The entire team is basically ex-Tesla. Their COO is also ex-Facebook
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv-ls3MGCoI&feature=emb_title
I've heard that a lot of the recycling initiatives at Tesla directly stem from this team.
I know there's a lot of Redwood Materials fans here just because of "JB", but I encourage to look deeper than brand name association (i.e. QuantumScape). Watch people like "The Limiting Factor" talk about the skepticism in Redwood. Redwood Materials uses "smelting", which is basically burning batteries in a toxic manner. In addition to it being terrible for the environment, it also creates low yield rates as much of the raw materials are destroyed in the melting process. This is a similar process used for melting lots of other materials such as steel. It's quite archaic. In contrast, ABML is using a water-based hydrometallurgical process.
And unlike other companies in the same (Li-Cycle, American Maganese), ABML has claimed a "closed loop" process that basically recycles much of the reagents and water used in the recycling process. Not only is this environmentally friendly, it's also super high margin. Look at ABML's team compared to the other recycling companies. What makes ABML stand out is that its team is used to high volume processes while at Tesla, so they're designing battery recycling to be done at a high volume with high efficiency. That's the UNIQUE job experience you get from being an ex-Tesla employee held to those standards (and we remember the Panasonic horror stories of battery manufacturing waste).
Now you can say "well they're just claiming that how do I know it's real?" And that's true. It's still a super nascent space, and one Tesla isn't even taking that seriously yet by their limited job postings in this area. With that said, they won a global battery recycling challenge hosted by BASF, one of the leading cathode suppliers in the world. BASF has also basically funded ABML's research the past year in its Greentown Labs in Boston. So there's obviously something compelling there.
Ultimately ABML is a VC play. It's strange that this company is even publicly traded, and that's because ABML pre-Ryan was sort of a failed mining company. Instead of doing a completely new startup, Ryan wanted access to the lithium claims. If you check their 10-k they talk about the same "lithium clay" extraction process Tesla talked about in Battery Day (LINK - https://sec.report/Document/0001078782-20-000720/). No one knows for certain, but there's certainly a compelling reason for Ryan to take on all the debt and baggage of ABML vs. launching a new startup.
As a longtime Tesla investor, I know there's a HUGE demand for battery materials. We're literally going to run out of materials to make electric battery cars by 2025. It takes up to two years to turn mined materials to battery-grade materials such as lithium and magnesium through "brine pools." For example, if you look at the major lithium producers (Albemarele, Ganfeng Lithium, Livent, SQM, Tianoi Lithium) you'll see they've ALL fallen short of 2020 production goals (SOURCE - https://i.imgur.com/fGelif7.png). It's really friggen tough to make battery-grade quality materials. And because of that, you have the problems below:
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On September 2020, the European Union declared a need for 18x more lithium to be produced by 2030
On September 2020, Tesla stated a need for 9x more lithium than the entire world’s 2019 output of lithium just to meet its own 2030 company production targets
Benchmark Minerals forecasts lithium demand to reach 2.2m tons by 2030 but with lithium supply (LCE) only set to reach 1.67m, leaving a huge structural deficit.

​
ABML is this weirdly ambitious play on a closed loop battery material supply chain that encompasses extraction & recycling. You can't fit it in a box. But neither could Tesla.
While this run-up is quite crazy, I don't see this as a "pump and dump." Far from that. This could be a company that is a critical part of our supply chain future. When you look at the list of of "essential minerals" from the "Green New Deal" you'll notice it's the EXACT same list as Trump's executive order in September. Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, etc. When was the last time the Democats & Republicans agreed on anything?
That's because China controls 51% of the global total of chemical lithium, 62% of chemical cobalt and 100% of spherical graphite, some of the major components of lithium-ion batteries. If you thought China had us by the balls with PPE equipment, wait until they start cutting off essential minerals. While this may not be as big an issue for Tesla, for everyone else in the US this is quite an existential threat.
And with that, I stress that I am not invested in ABML for a "future partnership" with Tesla. I see the entire space as being SO. DAMN. BIG. that a rising tide will lift all boats for anyone who can profitably recycle batteries in 2030. It's as Elon Musk said in Battery Day, most of the future batteries will be made from recycled parts. Even if ABML has a 20% chance of success, that's worth well beyond this market cap now.
Finally, here's a video of Ryan speaking about ABML (the company is changing its name to ABTC) -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W68VRWhGglY&feature=emb_title
I highly, highly recommend people watch the vid.
I'm a SpaceX investor. I'm part of Galli's Hyperguap. I love startup, high-risk investments. Which is what this is. It's just amazing that such an asymmetrical investment opportunity like this exists for the non-accredited investor. And I fully expect this company to be giving $1 dividends by 2030.

With miners under fire again for contributing to the price increase and lack of availability of graphics cards (admittedly, for good reason) as another crypto boom emerges, it's no surprise that the act of mining itself has been heavily scrutinized and frowned upon by the community. I've seen countless posts with vastly misinformed advice throughout the past few weeks, and my aim is to address these points of misinformation, as well as present some of my own opinions on the "ethics" behind mining.
I'm going to start with why you should mine on your gaming PC, since that's probably the most important point of this post.
Why you should mine - profitability (figures are in USD, but profit is the same in any country)
There is a common misconception that you need dirt cheap electric rates and a huge mining farm to be profitable. This is not the case. I will use an RTX 3080 as an example here; I understand these are extremely difficult to get, but using the same methodology it is easy to see how this applies to nearly any graphics card you may have.
If you're worried about killing your card by mining, I'll address that below as well.
An RTX 3080 can do Ethash (the algorithm for mining EtheETH/Ethereum) at ~98-101 Mh/s while consuming around 260 W of power (at the wall). Maybe add an extra 40-80 W for the rest of the computer - you should easily be able to get your electricity consumption at around 300-340 W on a gaming PC.
Using whattomine.com, we can see that at CURRENT rates, this nets you around $14 a day in revenue. Yes, this figure is EXTREMELY volatile, and I will get into this later, but it has been above ~$10/day for a while now. This is before electric costs, so let's factor that in. And perhaps arbitrarily, we'll say that you purchased the 3080 for $1000 USD - somewhere in between scalped prices and MSRP.
At the national average household electric price in the US (may not be accurate, got it from a quick Google search, but it's a good metric), around $0.13/kWh, that's $12.86 profit a day. It pays itself off in less than three months (again, this is assuming everything stays constant, which is impossible. But like I already said, I will address this later).
At the state average electric price in Hawaii, which has the most expensive electricity in the country, at an average of, say, $0.34/kWh, you make $11.15 profit a day. It pays itself off in 3 months.
If you're living on the Solomon Islands, which according to worldatlas.com has the most expensive energy in the world at $0.99/kWh, profit goes down to $5.92 a day. 5-6 month break-even.
Using a 3060 Ti or 3070, which both do around 60 Mh/s @ 130 W (actually more efficient than the 3080), purchased at $700 (again, an amount in between MSRP and scalped prices), we get similar break-even times.
Using whattomine.com, you can play around by entering your graphics card type(s) and quantity for an EXTREMELY conservative estimate of what hashrate you can expect to get. It's easy to find how your card performs by searching "[your graphics card] ETH hashrate".
Now, as all of you probably know, crypto is extremely volatile, and so is the mining profitability. I can't say for certain that ETH price won't drop by half tomorrow. I can't say for certain that the network difficulty (the amount of work required to find a block) won't shoot up tomorrow, making the same hashrate yield less profit. I can't say for certain that the transaction fees (which are specified by users, go to miners, and currently make up more than half of profit) will stay sky-high, as they have been in the past month or so. Further, there are proposed changes to ETH, namely EIP 1559 and ETH 2.0 with the optimistic ETA of late 2021-2022 (although there has been a history of missing deadlines by years), that will drastically cut mining profits and completely end mining, respectively.
However, as I said already, the mining profitability has been sky-high since the recent crypto boom, and it's only increased in the past couple weeks. It is important for me to note that I am not encouraging people to go and buy a bunch of graphics cards and set up a mining rig, promising 3-4 month break-even. I am saying that CURRENTLY, there is really no reason not to mine. If profitability stays anywhere near where it is for a few months, you would've paid off your card, and maybe even your whole PC. And if it suddenly crashes, you can always stop mining, at least have made off with the profit you've already made, assuming you sell it as you go.
Another thing - if you're really eyeing that marked-up 30 series card, you might be able to rest easier buying it, since mining for just a few weeks at current rates would likely bring your effective cost down to MSRP - you get to have your card earlier, and you might enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that whoever scalped it ended up scamming themselves by trying to take advantage of you rather than using it to mine.
If you're sold, please check out EtherMining, gpumining, whattomine.com, etc. - there's plenty of useful information to help you get started. I'm happy to help as well.
Why (responsible) mining doesn't kill your card
Since the first mining boom, there have been people that believe mining ruins your graphics card - making it die faster, making it perform worse, etc. This is simply not true, but it's easily propagated with reinforcement bias. For example, as an arbitrary figure, if 1% of all used graphics cards are faulty, and you purchase a used mining card that happens to be in this 1%, it's not unreasonable to think, "I've heard that mining ruins cards, and this mining card I purchased is dead. Therefore mining ruins cards. I'm going to warn everyone I see thinking about buying a mining card now, since 100% of the mining cards I purchased were faulty." What people don't realize is that for every mining card that dies, there are a bunch of gaming cards that also died.
Mining does not kill your card. What does "kill" your card is high temperatures and voltages on key components. Even so, when I say "kill", I mean "possibly cause a non-negligible increase in the speed at which it dies." Here are a couple videos: video 1 and video 2 from GN that explain the topic quite holistically. If you don't trust GN, I'm sure you could look elsewhere and find that nearly any unbiased credible source will tell you something along those lines.
Of course, it is possible that mining can cause high temperatures and voltages. However, when done correctly, it doesn't. To get the maximum profitability, you reduce the power target (and thus also voltage) of graphics cards as much as possible. Most of the time, this ends up being 50-75% of stock power. This reduced power consumption leads to reduced temperatures, especially when compared to overclocked cards used for gaming. Most 30 series cards won't have their core go over 60 C when properly cooled, whereas 75-80 C under an above-100% power target + OC gaming load is commonplace.
On top of all this: any reputable graphics card manufacturer puts at least a 3-year warranty on their cards. Obviously, the card isn't gonna let you kill it without modifications, even if you tried. RMAs cost manufacturers money, and they're going to make sure their cards aren't dying left and right, even if the user decided he liked to run Furmark 24/7.
So if you buy a new graphics card and mine on it for three years, what are the chances that it dies in year 4? If it had any manufacturing defects, it would've probably died long before, so you would've been able to RMA it. And if temperatures were too high and a cap popped due to overheating for too long, it would've happened before three years, and you would've again been able to RMA it.
And finally, as an example. Google still rents out Tesla K80s that launched more than 6 years ago. And being a cloud service, they would do well to keep them as busy as possible. I doubt they're run underclocked as well, since many GPU compute workloads do benefit from a 100% power target. So you probably have these running at much higher temperatures, pulling double the power of mining cards. If they started dropping like flies, they would've been taken out of commission years ago.
Why mining/crypto isn't ethically wrong (my opinion)
There's a lot of hate for mining, and crypto in general. But I think it's heavily biased. Like I already said, people dislike miners for reducing graphics card availability. Naturally, the mining and cryptocurrency is also going to be disliked as a result. Here are some common things I see from people hating on it.
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Cryptocurrency is useless

Well, you could argue this. If I had 1 Bitcoin in my wallet, I wouldn't be able to take out a physical copy and touch it. It doesn't do anything by itself.
However, its usefulness is contained in its name. It's a currency. Useless by itself, but can easily be exchanged for goods that are more "useful," like food, hardware, etc. And when you can't directly exchange it for goods, you can exchange it to a different medium of exchange that can be exchanged for goods. If I had 1 Bitcoin, I could easily exchange it either on a centralized platform like Coinbase or peer-to-peer for nearly any fiat currency, say $37000 USD, and then buy a car. Similarly to how if I wanted to purchase sushi in Japan, I would exchange my USD for JPY, then purchase the sushi with that. Calling cryptocurrency useless is like calling any currency useless.
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Cryptocurrency is bad for the environment, and a waste of electricity

I frequently see mining being compared to "using the power of [insert small country here]." But I think that figure is significant only when you're already looking for reasons to criticize it. Even though cryptocurrency is border-free and affects people from nearly all countries, it uses an extremely small fraction of power when comparing to the rest of the world. If all mining - massive ASIC farms included - suddenly stopped today, we'd still see an overall yearly increase in power consumption this year vs. last year.
Think about the countless other industries that actually destroy the environment. Take gold mining, for example. You can think of cryptocurrency as a digital gold - a medium of exchange that isn't bound to a specific group or country. But the difference is, cryptocurrency isn't mined with slavery and child labor. It doesn't displace huge amounts of people and wildlife from their homes, because crypto mining rigs search for digital gold in a digital Internet. It doesn't generate toxic waste.
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Graphics cards were made for gaming, and buying them to mine with is wrong because gamers don't get them

First of all, this post is primarily targeted at people who already have a nice graphics card in their gaming PC, not people looking to buy 100 3080s and start a home mining farm. And it's great because you can use your graphics card to mine while you're not gaming. It's not taking cards away from anyone.
In the current market you can pick up a 3070/2080 Ti for ~$700-800. Compare it to last generation, where the 2080 Ti started at $1200. Nobody needs a 3080, or a 3090, to game. I mean, a 3080 is, what, like 20-30% better than a 2080 Ti? It's already grossly overkill, anyways. The vast majority of people run much older cards, and really don't have issues. What I'm saying is, even in this far-from-ideal situation, there are plenty of viable options for people who want to play games.
On the other hand, compare a 2080 Ti to a 3070 for mining. A 2080 Ti fetches, roughly, 55-60 Mh/s at 220 W. Compare this to the 3070, which does more than 60 Mh/s at 130 W. Their gaming performance is nearly the same. Like it or not, the new graphics cards are a huge boost in efficiency to miners, while being not so significant for gaming performance.
Sure, graphics cards are marketed towards gamers, but I believe that mining is an equally if not more legitimate way to use the latest releases - they generate significant income while supporting a global decentralized currency/application platform, as opposed to driving a hardly-noticeable FPS increase in a rig that's most likely being used for games that run just fine on 5-year old cards, anyway.

Jared Diamond TED2003
Why do societies collapse - Ted Talk by Jared Diamond
Why do societies collapse?
00:04
I think all of us have been interested, at one time or another, in the romantic mysteries of all those societies that collapsed, such as the classic Maya in the Yucatan, the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, Fertile Crescent society, Angor Wat, Great Zimbabwe and so on. And within the last decade or two, archaeologists have shown us that there were environmental problems underlying many of these past collapses. But there were also plenty of places in the world where societies have been developing for thousands of years without any sign of a major collapse, such as Japan, Java, Tonga and Tikopea. So evidently, societies in some areas are more fragile than in other areas. How can we understand what makes some societies more fragile than other societies? The problem is obviously relevant to our situation today, because today as well, there are some societies that have already collapsed, such as Somalia and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. There are also societies today that may be close to collapse, such as Nepal, Indonesia and Columbia.
01:13
What about ourselves? What is there that we can learn from the past that would help us avoid declining or collapsing in the way that so many past societies have? Obviously the answer to this question is not going to be a single factor. If anyone tells you that there is a single-factor explanation for societal collapses, you know right away that they're an idiot. This is a complex subject. But how can we make sense out of the complexities of this subject? In analyzing societal collapses, I've arrived at a five-point framework -- a checklist of things that I go through to try and understand collapses. And I'll illustrate that five-point framework by the extinction of the Greenland Norse society. This is a European society with literate records, so we know a good deal about the people and their motivation. In AD 984 Vikings went out to Greenland, settled Greenland, and around 1450 they died out -- the society collapsed, and every one of them ended up dead.
02:18
Why did they all end up dead? Well, in my five-point framework, the first item on the framework is to look for human impacts on the environment: people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend. And in the case of the Viking Norse, the Vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation, which was a particular problem for them because they required forests to make charcoal, to make iron. So they ended up an Iron Age European society, virtually unable to make their own iron. A second item on my checklist is climate change. Climate can get warmer or colder or dryer or wetter. In the case of the Vikings -- in Greenland, the climate got colder in the late 1300s, and especially in the 1400s. But a cold climate isn't necessarily fatal, because the Inuit -- the Eskimos inhabiting Greenland at the same time -- did better, rather than worse, with cold climates. So why didn't the Greenland Norse as well?
03:19
The third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society. And if that friendly support is pulled away, that may make a society more likely to collapse. In the case of the Greenland Norse, they had trade with the mother country -- Norway -- and that trade dwindled: partly because Norway got weaker, partly because of sea ice between Greenland and Norway.
03:45
The fourth item on my checklist is relations with hostile societies. In the case of Norse Greenland, the hostiles were the Inuit -- the Eskimos sharing Greenland -- with whom the Norse got off to bad relationships. And we know that the Inuit killed the Norse and, probably of greater importance, may have blocked access to the outer fjords, on which the Norse depended for seals at a critical time of the year.
04:13
And then finally, the fifth item on my checklist is the political, economic, social and cultural factors in the society that make it more or less likely that the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems. In the case of the Greenland Norse, cultural factors that made it difficult for them to solve their problems were: their commitments to a Christian society investing heavily in cathedrals; their being a competitive-ranked chiefly society; and their scorn for the Inuit, from whom they refused to learn. So that's how the five-part framework is relevant to the collapse and eventual extinction of the Greenland Norse.
04:53
What about a society today? For the past five years, I've been taking my wife and kids to Southwestern Montana, where I worked as a teenager on the hay harvest. And Montana, at first sight, seems like the most pristine environment in the United States. But scratch the surface, and Montana suffers from serious problems. Going through the same checklist: human environmental impacts? Yes, acute in Montana. Toxic problems from mine waste have caused damage of billions of dollars. Problems from weeds, weed control, cost Montana nearly 200 million dollars a year. Montana has lost agricultural areas from salinization, problems of forest management, problems of forest fires. Second item on my checklist: climate change. Yes -- the climate in Montana is getting warmer and drier, but Montana agriculture depends especially on irrigation from the snow pack, and as the snow is melting -- for example, as the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing -- that's bad news for Montana irrigation agriculture.
06:00
Third thing on my checklist: relations with friendlies that can sustain the society. In Montana today, more than half of the income of Montana is not earned within Montana, but is derived from out of state: transfer payments from social security, investments and so on -- which makes Montana vulnerable to the rest of the United States.
06:20
Fourth: relations with hostiles. Montanans have the same problems as do all Americans, in being sensitive to problems created by hostiles overseas affecting our oil supplies, and terrorist attacks. And finally, last item on my checklist: question of how political, economic, social, cultural attitudes play into this. Montanans have long-held values, which today seem to be getting in the way of their solving their own problems. Long-held devotion to logging and to mines and to agriculture, and to no government regulation; values that worked well in the past, but they don't seem to be working well today.
07:01
So, I'm looking at these issues of collapses for a lot of past societies and for many present societies. Are there any general conclusions that arise? In a way, just like Tolstoy's statement about every unhappy marriage being different, every collapsed or endangered society is different -- they all have different details. But nevertheless, there are certain common threads that emerge from these comparisons of past societies that did or did not collapse and threatened societies today. One interesting common thread has to do with, in many cases, the rapidity of collapse after a society reaches its peak. There are many societies that don't wind down gradually, but they build up -- get richer and more powerful -- and then within a short time, within a few decades after their peak, they collapse. For example, the classic lowland Maya of the Yucatan began to collapse in the early 800s -- literally a few decades after the Maya were building their biggest monuments, and Maya population was greatest.
08:06
Or again, the collapse of the Soviet Union took place within a couple of decades, maybe within a decade, of the time when the Soviet Union was at its greatest power. An analogue would be the growth of bacteria in a petri dish. These rapid collapses are especially likely where there's a mismatch between available resources and resource consumption, or a mismatch between economic outlays and economic potential. In a petri dish, bacteria grow. Say they double every generation, and five generations before the end the petri dish is 15/16ths empty, and then the next generation's 3/4ths empty, and the next generation half empty. Within one generation after the petri dish still being half empty, it is full. There's no more food and the bacteria have collapsed. So, this is a frequent theme: societies collapse very soon after reaching their peak in power.
09:02
What it means to put it mathematically is that, if you're concerned about a society today, you should be looking not at the value of the mathematical function -- the wealth itself -- but you should be looking at the first derivative and the second derivatives of the function. That's one general theme. A second general theme is that there are many, often subtle environmental factors that make some societies more fragile than others. Many of those factors are not well understood. For example, why is it that in the Pacific, of those hundreds of Pacific islands, why did Easter Island end up as the most devastating case of complete deforestation? It turns out that there were about nine different environmental factors -- some, rather subtle ones -- that were working against the Easter Islanders, and they involve fallout of volcanic tephra, latitude, rainfall. Perhaps the most subtle of them is that it turns out that a major input of nutrients which protects island environments in the Pacific is from the fallout of continental dust from central Asia. Easter, of all Pacific islands, has the least input of dust from Asia restoring the fertility of its soils. But that's a factor that we didn't even appreciate until 1999.
10:19
So, some societies, for subtle environmental reasons, are more fragile than others. And then finally, another generalization. I'm now teaching a course at UCLA, to UCLA undergraduates, on these collapses of societies. What really bugs my UCLA undergraduate students is, how on earth did these societies not see what they were doing? How could the Easter Islanders have deforested their environment? What did they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree? Didn't they see what they were doing? How could societies not perceive their impacts on the environments and stop in time? And I would expect that, if our human civilization carries on, then maybe in the next century people will be asking, why on earth did these people today in the year 2003 not see the obvious things that they were doing and take corrective action? It seems incredible in the past. In the future, it'll seem incredible what we are doing today. And so I've been trying to develop a hierarchical set of considerations about why societies fail to solve their problems -- why they fail to perceive the problems or, if they perceive them, why they fail to tackle them. Or, if they tackle them, why do they fail to succeed in solving them?
11:33
I'll just mention two generalizations in this area. One blueprint for trouble, making collapse likely, is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Where what's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole, there's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run. For example, among the Greenland Norse -- a competitive rank society -- what the chiefs really wanted is more followers and more sheep and more resources to outcompete the neighboring chiefs. And that led the chiefs to do what's called flogging the land: overstocking the land, forcing tenant farmers into dependency. And that made the chiefs powerful in the short run, but led to the society's collapse in the long run.
12:31
Those same issues of conflicts of interest are acute in the United States today. Especially because the decision makers in the United States are frequently able to insulate themselves from consequences by living in gated compounds, by drinking bottled water and so on. And within the last couple of years, it's been obvious that the elite in the business world correctly perceive that they can advance their short-term interest by doing things that are good for them but bad for society as a whole, such as draining a few billion dollars out of Enron and other businesses. They are quite correct that these things are good for them in the short term, although bad for society in the long term. So, that's one general conclusion about why societies make bad decisions: conflicts of interest.
13:21
And the other generalization that I want to mention is that it's particularly hard for a society to make quote-unquote good decisions when there is a conflict involving strongly held values that are good in many circumstances but are poor in other circumstances. For example, the Greenland Norse, in this difficult environment, were held together for four-and-a-half centuries by their shared commitment to religion, and by their strong social cohesion. But those two things -- commitment to religion and strong social cohesion -- also made it difficult for them to change at the end and to learn from the Inuit. Or today -- Australia. One of the things that enabled Australia to survive in this remote outpost of European civilization for 250 years has been their British identity. But today, their commitment to a British identity is serving Australians poorly in their need to adapt to their situation in Asia. So it's particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that are also the source of your strength.
14:32
What's going to be the outcome today? Well, all of us know the dozen sorts of ticking time bombs going on in the modern world, time bombs that have fuses of a few decades to -- all of them, not more than 50 years, and any one of which can do us in; the time bombs of water, of soil, of climate change, invasive species, the photosynthetic ceiling, population problems, toxics, etc., etc. -- listing about 12 of them. And while these time bombs -- none of them has a fuse beyond 50 years, and most of them have fuses of a few decades -- some of them, in some places, have much shorter fuses. At the rate at which we're going now, the Philippines will lose all its accessible loggable forest within five years. And the Solomon Islands are only one year away from losing their loggable forest, which is their major export. And that's going to be spectacular for the economy of the Solomons. People often ask me, Jared, what's the most important thing that we need to do about the world's environmental problems? And my answer is, the most important thing we need to do is to forget about there being any single thing that is the most important thing we need to do. Instead, there are a dozen things, any one of which could do us in. And we've got to get them all right, because if we solve 11, we fail to solve the 12th -- we're in trouble. For example, if we solve our problems of water and soil and population, but don't solve our problems of toxics, then we are in trouble.
16:03
The fact is that our present course is a non-sustainable course, which means, by definition, that it cannot be maintained. And the outcome is going to get resolved within a few decades. That means that those of us in this room who are less than 50 or 60 years old will see how these paradoxes are resolved, and those of us who are over the age of 60 may not see the resolution, but our children and grandchildren certainly will. The resolution is going to achieve either of two forms: either we will resolve these non-sustainable time-fuses in pleasant ways of our own choice by taking remedial action, or else these conflicts are going to get settled in unpleasant ways not of our choice -- namely, by war, disease or starvation. But what's for sure is that our non-sustainable course will get resolved in one way or another in a few decades. In other words, since the theme of this session is choices, we have a choice. Does that mean that we should get pessimistic and overwhelmed? I draw the reverse conclusion.
17:13
The big problems facing the world today are not at all things beyond our control. Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. And since we made the problems, we can also solve the problems. That then means that it's entirely in our power to deal with these problems. In particular, what can all of us do? For those of you who are interested in these choices, there are lots of things you can do. There's a lot that we don't understand, and that we need to understand. And there's a lot that we already do understand, but aren't doing, and that we need to be doing. Thank you. (Applause)

Hello Travellers, I hope y'all have a great day and a good time in Genshin Impact.
Me and my friend have been playing this game lately and have a very fun experience.
Expect one of mine friend that refuse to play. He lost interest instantly because it looks to similar to BOTW, is what he said. Can't blame him on that one. Haha.
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Anyway, i'm just gonna stop beating around the bushes and telling what i concern about this game instead of praising it. It's not because i hate it, but praising the game, won't help the game become better since the current game state is filled with horrible system.
Before i start to explain why, I want to say that, this is an experience coming from players that reach AR35. And you don't need to become AR35 to felt this problem.
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The first 20-30 hours in GI is without a doubt very enjoyable, you explore the world, unlocking tower like most ubisoft game, lol, solving puzzle, and making elemental combos. All that is good, but became useless and stale once you reach AR30.
Once you reach AR30, you will notice that materials become harder to get, tons of domain appeared but the Resin are not enough to cover it all. You farm artifact on Stormterror domain but get awful drop, even Wolf run is also bad drop, yet Mihoyo decide to limit it with weekly timer.
What i'm saying is, as someone who play this game, and invest in it, I'm pretty much lose interest to put more time in it, since the endgame are non-existent. Or more accurately, SLOWED-down by the RESIN system.
I'm aware that mihoyo previous game is HI3, and they intend to put some of mechanic in here. In this case is Resin and Gacha. But heed my word Mihoyo.
If you intent to keep PC players like us. That rarely play mobile game or gacha game, because we know how toxic it was. How time-gating it is when it comes to progression. With the current resin system, we will leave the game without a doubt.
Also keep in mind that we're not freeloaders, we spent your shop even it have an awful rates because we enjoy when we have things to do. But when the game progression need resin, but resin are limited. We lose motivation to keep going because the game just don't want us to progress unless we paid resin with primogem. (seriously. lol).
From what i see right now, Genshin still have things to do, for us, as a gamers that play PC games a lot. But it's unplayable due to resin system. We don't need tons of skipping dialog quest, what we need is the feeling of "freedom", able to progress what we want, when we want.
IMO resin system is really unacceptable in this game, it's an open world, but you can't progress without resin, so why bother explore the world then?
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So what's the solution?
You either make the resin regen faster, so you can still monetize it.
Or give us 3-4 daily resin regen item, so you can still monetize it. (what a greed).
Or remove it completely, since it's not a system that brings JOY to players at all. It just a limitation that leads player to frustration. Thus quiting your game and you have 1 less player to make profit of.
Please, Mihoyo, Just reduce your greed man. Haha.. it's not that hard.
This game have 10M players registration. Just imagine 8M of them buy Monthly pass.
That alone already made 40Million! And we're not covering the gacha for whale, battle pass, and upcoming skin yet.
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The 2nd problem in this game had is the gacha system and poor monetization.
Currently i've put 500 USD in this game for battle pass, monthly subs, and wishes.
And let me tell you, i regretted it. Supporting the dev is a must, but when the wishes pull is awful.
I can't say i'm happy putting my money in there.
I know whales put more money than me, 500 USD is nothing in gacha.
But i rarely gambling, it's not easy to make me become an addict.
That's why, spending 500 USD just to get a 1-2 five star character is really stupid for myself.
And please stop saying that they need GACHA, since it's F2P.
There's a lot of F2p that thriving till today without gacha system.
Valorant, Path of Exile, Warframe, etc.
And what's even worse, Genshin Impact monetize the heck out of this game, from SKIN (future), battle pass, Gacha, Monthly subs, and even RESIN they MTX it. God damn. I didn't realize that Mihoyo are trying to surpass EA. or Maybe they already did.
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Third problem i had is MAXED Constellation character.
The fact that we can get MAXED Constellation character in wishes, is a joke.
And what do we get from that? A 5 piece of token that can be exchange for an item, or buy another pieces of wishes.
This system is really2 bad. I can't see myself sticking this game for a long time if this mechanic remain the same. Maxed Constellation shouldn't be a thing other than making your spender suffer more.
Solution? Every dupe character will become an item to constellation other character. Simple right?
If we have 5 bottle of 4* constellation thing, allow us to combine it and become a single bottle of constellation that can be used for 5 star. The fact that that mihoyo chose the block constellation on wishes only, and maxed constl still appear in wishes. Is a proof of how greedy and unfriendly it's towards their customer.
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For those who will reply this thread by saying it's a mobile game, so accept it or duh...
Well, broh... it's not. This game is trying to appeal to massive gamers, that's why it release on PC, Switch, and PS4. They even introduce this game as an open world and inviting us to explore their world. That is not a gacha mobile game. Unless they intend to normalize this culture, where open world are filled with this awful progression and monetization design.
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There are still some point that i want to express how awful it's like chest, enemy design, awful BP design, and coop. But i'm just to lazy to type right now. Even with those 3 points alone, i can already see tons of hate is coming towards me since most game reddit thread are always, and will be, filled with fans that can't take criticism.
I know people didn't like their beloved game getting trashed on, but i'm not a freeloader, i'm not a player that only play 10 min and rage. I have played tons of hours and spent more than a casual players. I want this game to be better, that's why i voice my concern. Denying us, Yelling at us, angry at us, will not stop, nor change the awful part of this beautifully crafted world.. cough cough botw.
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So yeah, i enjoy the game thoroughly. But changes are need if this game want PC gamers keep playing the game. Otherwise, only mobile gamers that tolerate such awful system will be the one remain in this game, they will be the one that Mihoyo can profit from. Thus, Rendering your promotion for bigger audience become a big waste.
P.S. : I saw a lot of people saying that "even if they remove the resin system, I will still complain for the lack of content."
For that, i will say that it's really not OK to make own assumption without knowing each other in real life.
Suppose that resin system is really removed from the game.
Well then, we'll be happy once we MAX out all of our character. :D
For example, me and my friend play Monster Hunter World.
Once we reach the top gear, we just wander around the world, helping newbie.
We understand that creating new content tooks time, that's why we didn't mad or sad once we reach it.
What we do after that is just asking more friend to join and play together while helping and teaching them at the same time.
Maybe it's because we play a lot of non-time-gated games, games that usually let us do whatever we want. That's why when we first play GI, we get annoyed so much because we literally can't progress unless put some cash on the resin. And that for us, is not fun. There's thing to do, but the system, restrict us.
Also, remember that the layers of GEAR RNG on ARTIFACT in this game is very heavy.
Even if you we get berserker set, there's no guaranteed that the attributes will be ATK or CRIT DMG.
So, the grind itself will be very long since chasing a perfect gear is very hard.
Which means, removing the resin system will add a big chunk of hours for all of us.
I hope you guys can understand my point.
P.S. : I'm truly speechless reading reply like "cuz it's gacha." Like, why do you support such bad design. :(
I guess, i found the answer for this one. And it's truly sad.
FadedFace : it's because they already bought into the system. They spent a ton into these kinds of games already, so the only way for them to not feel stupid about themselves is to convince themselves and the rest of the world that this is the correct way of doing thing. Otherwise, if the system change, their thousand of dollar sunk cost would go poof in smoke and they are left realizing that they didn't have to do any of that shit to begin with, and all they had to do was vote with their wallet, and they would have gotten the same experience for much less. Meanwhile, they keep feeding the sharks, so these companies see no reason to change the system to begin with, and the cycle continue.
The one argument I can't stand is the "well they have to make money somehow". Like the gaming industry wasn't already a billions dollar colossus before these gacha systems come into existence. There are ways that far more player friendly to make money, that have been in places way before this, but the kids somehow thought that these companies will go bankrupt if they didn't spend their retirement saving. Give me a fucking break.
P.S. : For those who say removing Resin will allow us blitz through content which is not good?
Well, i found one best answer for that from : u/julchiar
Games like diablo 2, path of exile and many more literally live through this and people spend thousands of hours trying to find the perfect gear, all without artificial limits like resin.
Since other games are able to pull it off, i don't see why GI can't do the same other than trying to monetize it all, including resin. And that's greedy.
P.S. : For those who said the games still young, thus give it time.
Sure, absolutely, but does not mean Criticism shouldn't exist.
I found couple of reply that serve as best answer for those statement :
Shakkyun : If people doesn't state the problems now, they'll take way too long to react tho. Epic Seven had some really bad issues, they took half a year to talk with the players and change things, and they did it when they got review bombed on the store, so better complain early than late tbh
Dutycalls406 : On a sidenote, the taptap reviews for Genshin are not looking very well at the moment (4.7/10). Chinese players are way ahead of us in pointing out what's wrong with the game. They have been doing it since beta testing. Meanwhile the Google play store reviews are a nearly perfect score.
Shakkyun : Once again, asia is saving us by being realistic in the long run, Korean saved us on Epic Seven with their reviews and complain, while the global was just mocking them as people who complain, but once everything changed everyone was actually thankful
Dutycalls406 : I noticed this behaviour in this subreddit too. A lot of times people would tell you "stop playing if you don't like it" or "it's a gacha game what did you expect?". Instead of thinking for a moment and understand what all this means for the game in the long run.
P.S : One last note for this post, i just want to say that for those defend the stamina system :
Do you guys realize that my intention is on this post, is asking for changes that will IMPROVE most player experience, not trashing the game.
Which is baffling for me to see people actually defending this predatory system.
Fun fact : Genshin Impact currently are sititng on 4.7 out of 10 in China Taptap review.
https://www.taptap.com/app/168332/review?score=1
What are they complain about? The resin, the gacha, the trash chest, etc.
It seems like china players are more aware of the problem than global.