Addfwyn

It's super common like ComradeSalad said, but it works and it makes for super easy PR messaging too. Add some unpopular bill into a totally unrelated one. Oh you want to vote against the Ukraine war? Well, we put it in the same bill as a package for supplies for US military troops, so if you vote against it you will be comitting political suicide.

"Senator Pumpanddump voted against the America Loves Our Troops Act. Does this mean he hates our troops, you decide!"

The practice should be illegal, but so should half the things the US government does.

God a WeChat ban would be absolutely crippling, I can't imagine that has any real traction.
I work in hospitality, and a very large percentage of our guests at all properties globally are Chinese (about 40% of all of the guests at mine). Consequently we support transactions with WeChat, and have always heard from our guests that they appreciate we support the platform and that is a big reason they use us.

Now I am not in the US, but my chain originates there. It would absolutely cripple us if WeChat were banned. I wouldn't put it past the government to try, but I have to think that corporations wouldn't let them.

Obviously you haven't considered that the ban is a wonderful thing because China Bad. Therefore any other argument is moot.

I have actually seen a few people saying that only American social media companies should be allowed to operate in the US. Yet somehow China is the dystopia.

On one hand, we have a well documented campaign of murdreing civilians and trying to drive them out of their territory permanently, with constant video and photographic evidence to back it up.

On the other hand, we have some questionable anecdotes and blurry satellite photos of some schools and governmental facilities in a country with over a billion people walking around with video cameras in their pockets.

Guess which one the US considers a clear genocide.

My undergrad was...I think 50k/year? At the time, I think it is closer to 70-80k/year now. My graduate degreee (which was not in the US) was like...5k/year, and that was at one of the more expensive private unis in my country.

I don't regret my time in uni, it was extremely valuable to me besides the piece of paper I got at the end (which I do not use in my current career at all anyway). The cost is absolutely ridiculous though, I was in an extremely privileged position to be able to go and would not recommend many people do the same when they could make much better career choices.

Which is depressing. Education should not need to be a luxury.

What did you think of Millenia? Honestly I like it more than most, there are a lot of basic design choices that I think are cool, but it definitely needs more time in balancing. It feels more like an EA game than a 1.0 release honestly. I did a couple playthroughs and will probably come back to it again after it [hopefully] gets some updates.

I liked Forbidden West way more than I expected to.

I loved Zero Dawn, but a lot of what I loved about that game was the discovery of finding out what happened in the events that led up to the game. The sequel obviously didn't have that, so I was very skeptical about it. I was thankfully quite wrong.

Subnautica is a fantastic game that either helped me discover I had thalassophobia or gave it to me. My playtime probably got inflated by ten hours as I spent so much time sprucing up my base instead of progressing to the end of the story.

It balances the curated story elements so well with the open world survivalbox type gameplay. Not many games hit that balance so well.

I have been playing the Anomaly DLC of Rimworld (which remains my favourite game of all time).

It's pretty good, it captures the "Cabin in the Woods" / SPC vibe very well. However, I think Rimworld DLCs are the best when they provide frameworks that let modders go crazy. Anomaly seems more like a content dlc that I will sometimes use and sometimes disable. I could definitely see myself disabling Anomaly after I do a couple games with it turned on.

Favourite Genres: JRPGs, Factory/Automation Games, Colony Builders.

I am pretty excited on the factory game front for this year. We have the expansion for Factorio, v 1.0 release of Satisfactory, and there are pretty good odds we get another big Dyson Sphere Program update this year. Of those, Dyson Sphere Program remains my favourite by far.

Stellaris is the one Paradox game I actually keep coming back to, as a fan of SF I appreciate that it just hits on nearly every SF trope out there. I thought about trying Endless Space 2 again with the Awakening rework, but I think I would honestly just rather play stellaris.

I still very rarely finish stellaris games though, as much as I like the early game the late-mid to late game just really drags.

"Okay kids, today we are going to learn about how freedom defeated the horrible authoritarian ideals of communism. But first, please stand and pledge your undying alliance to this flag."

Aa yes. Argentina, famously located in the North Atlantic, seems like an obvious candidate for NATO membership.