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[McTraveller]

Stellantis (the company that includes what was formerly known as Chrysler) is apparently going to cut their US salaried staff by 50%, first by offering buyouts.

This is beyond "cost cutting" - this is "eh, we're exiting markets" territory, or "eh, we're pulling all R&D into the EU" territory.

I can't imagine how you'd keep developing products if you cut 50% of staff - there's no way you're going to have any kind of morale after that, even if you managed to cut exactly the worst-performing folks, which you're not going to get when you offer buyouts, because "high performers" are going to take those buyouts.

[pisskop]

Ford has already decided to cripple its own electric vehicle budget.  Stellantis got less press that I saw but were equally affected by the UAW strike.

All the money they now have to pay their staff, both up front in wages and over time in benefits and further staggered wage increases, is coming from somewhere.  Its possible that they might opt to go all in on electric and start murdering their conventional vehicles, and thats where the majority of reduction will come from.

People seem to think that the UAW is going to go after names like Tesla eventually, and if they do theyll have a real fight.  Tesla is valued at more than every other us automaker combined,

[McTraveller]

Tesla is arguably not a car company though; Tesla is arguably a lithium battery and energy infrastructure company.  In that view, they just happen to sell cars as accessories for their energy networks.

It will be interesting to see if the UAW can make inroads into the non-union auto companies. Especially in the US southeast which is historically vehemently anti-union.

[Rolan7]

So is it true or not?

I loaded up a copy but I'm not sure I'll be able to confirm or deny the bug, as Ghandi immediately started massing forces around my city as soon as possible.  Every so often he performs a sneak attack, it fails because I'm on Easiest, and a couple turns later he asks for a new peace treaty.  I'm not sure what higher aggression would even look like.

I could keep playing until he finally attains Democracy and see if he gets worse but, ugh, Civ 1's interface is bad:

Right click moves a unit *1 tile* or loads a civpedia article on the terrain.  You can give longer move orders but you have to hit G first.  And I'm almost positive the pathfinding got lost in Italy once by running into the water.

There's no build queue, fair enough.  There's also no autobuild, fair enough but tedious.  But if you build something, then fail to change the project, it'll... keep trying to build that same thing again?  I'm not sure it ever finishes, just keeps building up shields.
Clicking on most of the screen will close out the screen, leaving the city in that state.
The City Advisor will helpfully tell you what the city is working on, but not that the work is useless.  Or let you jump to the city.  And I don't think there's a "next city" button.  If you get a city in this state (heh) you gotta find and click that MF on the world map and fix it

Roads you gotta build tile by tile though.
With *settlers*, which is weird to me but I'm used to SMAC (a game whose interface scares many, but feels like an answer to so many prayers right now)

Caravans aren't explained by the civpedia at all and seem very important, because upkeep greatly exceeds income without them (even if you redirect income to taxes rather than research).  Apparently each city can have three active trade routes before inferior ones are overwritten.  These are not shown on the city screen.  They are also not shown by the Trade Advisor.

The game keeps telling me to manually assign tax collectors.  I will not be doing that, ffs.  I'd rather run out of money, which simply scraps a random improvement, which I can just rebuild.  I'm having to do ALL the building manually anyway so no big deal.  This essentially means a portion of city production is going to cash, like the Trade Goods option in MoM or MoO, which otherwise doesn't exist yet.

Wonders show up for building even when they're obsolete.  I don't know if that's to deny them to other empires (is obsolescence not global??) or to grind endgame score.  They DO have a little asterisk to denote that they're useless.

I get that this was a prototype for greater things, but there's an impressive amount of design fluff in elements like the evolving advisor portraits and the gradually customizable palace.  The actual gameplay needs some work... but I guess the micro is hypnotizing in a way that helped launch the One More Turn genre.

after all, gods help you if you try to resume a game and figure out wtf you were doing.  Gotta juggle everything in short term memory.

[Lord Shonus]

Tesla is valued at more than every other us automaker combined,

While having only a portion of the actual assets of any of them. Tesla's valuation is entirely built around the "Elon Musk is a genius" cult, and has no connection to reality whatsoever.

[MCreeper]

So is it true or not?

There's no build queue, fair enough.  There's also no autobuild, fair enough but tedious.  But if you build something, then fail to change the project, it'll... keep trying to build that same thing again?  I'm not sure it ever finishes, just keeps building up shields.
Clicking on most of the screen will close out the screen, leaving the city in that state.
The City Advisor will helpfully tell you what the city is working on, but not that the work is useless.

Nah, not entirely useless. Accumulated shields are moved to whatever you choose to build next. 

[Rolan7]

Nah, not entirely useless. Accumulated shields are moved to whatever you choose to build next. 

I've discovered that active trade routes *are* shown on the city screen.  But each city can only have 1 trade route each with three other cities.  The game will *happily* let you re-establish an existing trade route, wasting the caravan for 0 benefit.  But you could, for example, see that Minsk has no route with Delhi, and then direct that caravan to go to Delhi.

If the caravan paths into a (distant enough) friendly city you'll get an option to establish that trade route instead, which might be a waste or a literal waste, but sure is tempting.

Much more likely is that the caravan paths into water and forgets its plan entirely, leaving you to check its home city again or just glare at the game.  The pathing is as bad as I thought- it will snag on coasts at the slightest opportunity.  It also paths SE first even if the destination is EEEESE, which leads to particularly stupid-looking snags.

anyway the game finally crashed while saving so fuckit.
I did finally figure out that specialists are assigned by unassigning pops from tiles.  Cool.  bad game don't care lol

[Putnam]

I always thought it was a integer (byte really) underflow. Basically the same thing, but in the opposite direction.

Basically, what I heard was thus:

Reaching a particular governmental regime (democracy, I believe) would lower an AI's agression value by 2.
India, under Ghandi, had agression value of 1.
When India reached democracy, it would count 1-2=255 and Ghandi would become super-agressive.

I never played far into Civ I, nor do I have the source code, so I do not know how true this is.

They didn't use unsigned integers, so there couldn't be an underflow unless they'd gone past -127

[lemon10]

Was on reddit reading a post on the isreal conflict. Glanced at the subreddit was on... and it was on r/anime_titties.
WTF? And all the posts there was world politics stuff.

Answer: from what I’ve read, the mods on r/worldpolitics won’t moderate anything so people figured out they could post their breasts without their post being deleted. So, in retaliation the people who were mad about this created r/anime_titties so they could actually discuss world politics.

After giving it a ten second googling apparently r/worldpolitics is not filled with animetitties because they switched places. But still, WTF?

[Great Order]

Yeah, it was a whole thing.

r/anime_titties is one of the better places for finding general non-American news on Reddit just because they ban exclusively American news (Stuff involving America is fine, so long as it's relevant to another country/ies as well)

'Course it's still generally biased, but that's standard for any news subreddit.

[Loud Whispers]

internet self-regulates how it does. It's like how ppl use sc2 global chat to talk about american politics instead of setting up games

[Great Order]

Found a legitimate (By certain metrics, they give you what they say it seems) site about working overseas during summer. But you don't get paid, in fact it's the opposite. You get "free" accommodation and "free" food, otherwise you have to pay embassy fees, flights, police checks, admin fees, then an extra fee is paid straight to the summer camp for the sheer privilege of being allowed to spend summer helping kids at all hours of the day.

Like I said, it seems to give you what it says it will but the whole "Pay us so you can work here!" deal is so skeevy that it's automatically setting off my mental scam alarms.

[Il Palazzo]

Yeah. From what I understand the 'voluntourism' is a huge business that's shady as fuck.
As a rule of thumb, if you're supposed to volunteer for work that you wouldn't be qualified/paid for at home, then you're a tourist and the goal is to make money off of you.

[Loud Whispers]

When I look for overseas work I just make sure that the company is real, has a track record of paying staff salaries and isn't a front for human trafficking or organ harvesting

Never heard of paying to work before. That one might be a global trend... First you're an intern paid in exposure, then you're paying for the privilege of making them money

[Great Order]

I think the idea is you're paying them for a summer holiday abroad. It's just that you have to work on said holiday.

I dunno, maybe some people find the idea of working at a kid's summer camp across the Atlantic appealing enough to pay a few hundred and receive board and food. Personally it just feels super scammy.