Funny thing is, no matter how you arrange to do that it becomes a de-facto death ray. Stick a terawatt of solar panels in space, use the power to shine a laser/maser down to earth, then build a station to turn the laser power back to electricity? Great, until some hacker figures out how to control where the laser is pointed. Then you get Dr. Evil holding the world for ransom.

Thanks for the correction. I remembered seeing that number but didn’t analyze it in any depth. A more detailed analysis of the market, by Freddie Mac, concluded that there were four main drivers for the recent surge in prices, and investors weren’t on the list.

1. record low mortgage rates in 2020 and 2021, and the race to beat future rate increases;
2. limited supply from underbuilding and below average distressed sales;
3. an increase in first-time homebuyers due to favorable age demographics; and
4. increased migration from high-cost cities to areas that already had a housing shortage.

Institutional investors apparently even reduced their purchases in 23 - some of them were even net sellers - because of prices and interest rates. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still villians in this scenario. I don’t think big investors should own single family homes at all. But still they aren’t as big a force as my previous comment indicated.

In support of your argument.

Report: 44% of all Single-Family Home Purchases were from Private Investors in 2023

edit: see corrections below

“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior.” Stephen Covey

Surprised I haven’t seen Quantum Break in here. It’s a pretty good shooter with some magic powers thrown in for fun. You don’t get much say in the story, but it still kept my interest all the way through. And it has an interesting take on time travel, woven into the story quite well. It was made by Remedy Entertainment, before Control but after Alan Wake. Also I liked how they cast real actors in the game and made them recognizable. I picked out Courtney Hope in the game from seeing her in Control, even though her character is different in QB.

He’s referring to the fact that the Effective Altruism / Less Wrong crowd seems to be focused almost entirely on preventing an AI apocalypse at some point in the future, and they use a lot of obscure math and logic to explain why it’s much more important than dealing with war, homelessness, climate change, or any of the other issues that are causing actual humans to suffer today or are 100% certain to cause suffering in the near future.

As a kid, probably Lode Runner. It ran on my pc. Some arcade games were fun. I enjoyed Asteroids. Colossal Cave, and the Infocom games like Planetfall were fun too. Though what really hooked me was Doom. It was the first real 3d FPS game and it blew my mind. It’s been my favorite genre ever since.

Just finished Breathedge. Subnautica in space? Sort of, but with a ‘ha, aren’t we game developers funny’ kind of humor. Portal is an immersive game that’s really funny. The humor in Breathedge, however, insures you can never really settle in to the game. Even so, It’s most impressive what such a small team was able to accomplish.

Just started Plague Tale: Innocence. Stealth survival with hordes of rats - a little creepy and I’m not really expecting an uplifting ending, but we’ll see how it goes.

Which is an issue if those artists want to copyright their work. So far the US has maintained that AI generated art is not subject to copyright protection.

The issue with quests in RDR2 is that they give you no autonomy. Most games set a quest objective and give you a dozen ways to achieve it. RDR2 forces you to follow the exact path through the quest that the game wants you to take. If you deviate it either fails to progress or simply fails the quest. It felt more to me like an interactive movie than a game in that respect, though you get full freedom outside of quests.

14 years. The reddit protest was a great way to exit an unhealthy relationship with a site that was devouring way too much of my time. But now lemmy is slowly starting to draw me in more and more…