From what I understand, a lot of that is due to a combination of factors from bugs and spaghetti code from prior to purchase, to the necessity to not change too much too quickly, which might cause a community uproar, to simply just trying to recoup the cost of the IP purchase in the first place by developing projects around the IP, which the main game (java edition) doesn't see any progress from.
Much of the popularity of the game has a lot to do with the modding community as well, which is where you go when simply building in the vanilla game is no longer interesting. Any change to the vanilla game can have major ripple effects on the modding community.
Lastly, I'd say that one huge development they recently fixed in the code base was the block ID limit. Now that the ID system is name based rather than number based with a hard coded limit, the number of blocks that can be added to the game isn't limited by anything other than the direction of the creative team and new mechanics.
So private equity buys a sports publication and see that they're not publishing anything related to sports, so they tell them "hey, please publish sports related articles" whereby the staff whines, quits, and is replaced? And this is a bad thing, how?
"[...] According to [Deadspin's] analytics department, since the start of the year, non-sports posts have on average double the traffic of sports posts."
Well, it kinda helps that they were the first good search engine. Their name is synonymous with performing a search, much in the way people say "let me grab a kleenex" with regard to tissues,or "I used a q-tip to clean my ear, doctors and their advice be damned" with regard to whatever the hell q-tips are called without referencing a brand name.
Granted, as a result of that in Google's case, their market dominance is kind of self-perpetuating, because that higher usage leads to better results, since our brains think very similarly, so that thing you were thinking of has already been searched for, and thus their algorithm has already filtered the results down to what you likely want before you even know that you need to search for something.
Take a new video game for instance where you want to search for the map or walkthrough for a particular level.
You'll get better results using Google, because most other people are already using Google to search for that exact same thing, whereas when I do the same with duckduckgo, it's hit or miss on the results.
Just mix determinist beliefs, sloppy models, and a dangerous overestimation of one's own intelligence--then things are pretty much guaranteed to end the same way old Julien did.
Naive Question: Wouldn't a multivitamin be a cheaper and safer solution to counter a broad range of vitamin deficiencies?
If not, why would growing crops be a cheaper solution? What is the opportunity cost of growing golden rice to feed your vitamin deficient family vs. growing something else to sell on a broader market?
It's easier to piggyback on an existing behavior (keep on eating rice, but use this different kind of rice) than creating a new behavior (eat this vitamin pill).
On the consumer side, one can explain that the new golden rice is better and keeps your family healthier than regular rice. It's simple enough to be understood by people with low levels of education that the yellow one is better, and can easily be communicated to other members of the family who may not be able to read. There might be issues with counterfeit rice (dyed yellow instead of being actual golden rice), but that would be a separate problem.
In the cases where new behaviors are wanted, it helps to root them in culturally specific ways. For example, for iron supplementation, one way to increase the amount of iron consumed is to use a few drops of acid (such as citrus juice) combined with an iron ingot. This was done to alleviate iron deficiency in South East Asia.
Obviously, this was a very foreign behavior with low compliance, until they reshaped the ingots to be fish shaped, leading to the "lucky iron fish." Explaining to people that if they cook with the lucky fish in their pot, the fish will bring them good luck and health. This has led to much better compliance and outcomes.
Vitamin A supplements are a cheap and effective solution, and one that groups like the WHO have focused on[1]. They almost never come up when golden rice is discussed, because discussions of golden rice seem to be more about pushing on particular kind of tech than about discussing the best way to solve the problem.
The vitamins in multivitamins have to come from somewhere. It's much cheaper & easier to engineer an organism to provide these vitamins all in one go, rather than having a whole suite of plants and animals that produce these different things.
Also with diabetes and certain other illness, some nutrients can't be taken at a required level from natural sources due the amount of other nutrients, e.g. carbohydrates.
Making vitamins taste like candy increases compliance (good), but you can overdose on fat-soluble vitamins like A (bad). "Just take a pill" is not a great solution.
Or just make them taste like taking a pill which isn't supposed to be chewed or overconsumed. I never said anything about making vitamins taste good, nor do I think outliers like the case study discussed in the video are relevant to the general population, especially when the situation discussed in the video is a "fish out of water" scenario and not something relevant to a 3rd world resident living in the 3rd world where the native languages are being used.
Also, since when do we need "compliance" with regard to offering a cheap solution to a common problem that isn't infectious? People are intelligent enough to know what they should do. Let them have the free will to take the solution or not. We don't need to force or seek "compliance". That just sounds kind of dystopian or authoritarian.
These countries are riddled with corruption at all levels. Any enriching agent would be taken by the person tasked with enrichment and sold, the poor would get nothing and suffer the deficiences.
This way the color tells the tale. Greenpeace, Bryce and all his cronies need to be tossed into a pit full of mambas.
Audit Greenpeace very throughly, remove their deductions and track the officers and strip all the other lairs of these crooks
Yeah, this is the reason why I don’t donate even a cent to charities that ‘claims’ to help Africans and North Koreans.
I’d rather give a dollar to the local homeless shelter and watch them burn fuel with it at night, than my cent going straight to corrupt governments and militias.
Now imagine a discussion with your wife, "Am I driving on the right side of the road", and ...
Given the consequences of crossing the border, and the expense they went through to install border cameras you'd THINK they'd put up a small fence, or at least SOME marker.
Hell, would Border Patrol object if I drove over there with a 24-pack and some buddies and at least put some cones or reflective posts or something down? Maybe tie them together with lengths of rope or twine? Or rocks? Or shrubberies? Or little signs with the Canadian flag facing the US side and the US flag facing the Canadian side?
Looks like there are even power poles there already. Maybe hang flags off the power lines (or maybe an extra non-powered line or rope below the power lines)? Or banners that say "INTERNATIONAL BORDER"?
Ooooo, or we could paint the US road blue with white stars all over it, and the Canada road white with red maple leaves all over it.
That road is crazy, especially for an international border. Mind you, it's not as bad as the Irish border, as the only way to determine you've crossed that is that Google maps changes its units.
I am on mobile, if I open your URL and hit "street view" I am looking in the opposite direction from the marker, I need to turn 180 to see it from that point. If I scroll the street view next to the marker it shows the address "256 E Boundary road".
The silent component of the disgust behind what's happening in articles like this is the fear that medical professionals will see greater profit from letting you die than from saving your life.
I bet there are already cases like this, either in the US, or in the dystopia that is China.
Fuck, I mean, there's already people out there who drug people and harvest their kidneys in a bathtub of some dirty motel somewhere. If there are people doing this shit on the black market, then there's definitely sociopaths that would do this shit in the hospitals if they thought they could get away with it, which is just what the organ donor checkbox opens the door to.
Yes, the incentives are very perverse. What an average person considers 'dead' and what the organ harvesters consider dead are two completely different things [1].
Organ-carving doctors are desensitized to death. They don't care if you live or die, but they do care if they get to harvest your organs because those are worth a ton of money. I'm sure there's 100's if not 1000's of people getting carved up every year that could have been saved, but the incentives are to let the person die to harvest their organs.
