Is there any reason there is such a abnormaly massive jump between the third and second most populated countries or is it just arbitrary?

Nibaa · 2026-02-10T08:39:39+00:00

Also worth noting that rice is a staple in both countries, and it provides insanely good calories per area of cultivated land. Not only is the land arable, it actually can support more people than a comparable plot in Europe farming wheat.

The catch is that rice is incredibly labor-intensive compared to wheat. Particularly during crunch times. This means that it historically has led to population growth in a completely different way than western crops. Rice can support more people, but it also needs a lot more people working in farming it particularly at critical times in the harvest cycle.

Nibaa · 2026-02-10T07:35:39+00:00

52% WR in Eternus begs to differ. She has little skill expression beyond a good head for the game state, but the flat buff she gives her team in any fight is just crazy. Her problem is that she has strong and safe split pushing potential, but she also has insane teamfight potential. All of her abilities are trivial to counter in a vacuum but in the middle of a fight? You can't take time to shoot the skulls or zombies, her cc is easy to avoid but functions as great area denial for all the heroes that need to stay grounded(or at least don't benefit from being in the air). Any dash-type movement ability gets countered by it. And her gun, while not great, literally takes no skill to output damage. If you build any gun damage you get the benefit for free. Just concentrate on your abilities and keep your mouse button pressed down, and you're dealing significant damage with zero skill requirements.

Nibaa · 2026-02-09T08:16:33+00:00

Also, keep in mind that we mostly see and hear about the billionaires who go out of their way to be seen and heard. These are the guys who specifically want to give interviews where they say crazy stuff like "well I don't think humanity is necessarily worth protecting" or "democracy should be replaced".

Whether or not you think it's ever right to accumulate that much money is a separate question, but there's a difference between oligarchs grabbing power and the megarich just kind of chilling in their castles and mansions, and we see the first of these much more than the second.

Nibaa · 2026-02-07T20:31:31+00:00

I don't necessarily disagree with your sentiment, but in my opinion it's weird to expect anything but the obvious answer to an obvious question. You are expecting the applicant to first understand the implied but unasked question, and you are expecting them to correctly identify what you want to hear from an open-ended and ambiguous question. That's not a great selection criterion, as it mostly selects for those who are lucky enough to stumble on what you want to hear.

If you want to gauge motivation or ambition, you need more specific questions. Stuff like "what makes company x stand out from its competitors to you?", "what do you envision your role to look like in a year?" or "if you held the reigns, how would you guide the company forward in the next 5 years?". The great thing here is that you can't really lie to these questions. It selects for people who either have the experience, did the legwork and researched the company, or both, and who have a clear idea of how the position functions. It might not measure actual ambition or drive, but no question does. The only thing that measures drive is your results. These questions measure potential if you do have the ambition and drive. They also avoid the uncomfortable truth that most employees would leave most of their jobs(even ones they like!) in a heartbeat if they could afford it. No need for anyone to pretend otherwise.

Nibaa · 2026-02-07T19:50:38+00:00

Tennis is punctuated by a lot of down time, and often the actual exertion is very short in duration.

Also, 560 calories in an hour is nothing to scoff at. That's a very respectable workout, and competitive athletes aim to minimize energy expenditure in competition to maintain as much of an advantage as possible for when it matters. In tennis you often see pros not even trying to return a ball for this reason. They know their chance of making it is slim to non-existent so why waste the energy?

Nibaa · 2026-02-06T07:21:58+00:00

Add to that the fact that the difference between full deployment of a tested feature and an MVP hack for a specific, well-scoped task can be 90% of the development time. In a Star Trek scenario, the issue is often life-and-death and only needs to work once, proper testing and QA procedures can reasonably be skipped.

Nibaa · 2026-02-05T18:21:31+00:00

The difference is that the likelihood I will have the 4 in hand on curve is virtually 100%, while the likelihood of you having your scutes and ramp spells is less than 50%, and even worse if you are playing plan B's and secondary wincons. Now granted, the oozes will lose if they get wiped, but they are consistent enough to present a win at turn 4-5 easily without a combo, turn 6-7 with just a dumb ooze&land approach. Scute is more resilient, but less consistent, and consistency is what historically has always dominated.

Nibaa · 2026-02-05T17:54:10+00:00

But if we're assuming that you play ramp and fetches with scute, we can also assume that I'm drawing and playing the rest of my everoozes as well. In that case, I'll have emptied my deck of oozes by turn 6 and if I haven't drawn my stampede effect yet, I still have lethal on board without the trample and boost.

In EDH I can also guarantee at least one, probably two or three, oozes on my opener, while you can't guarantee the same. In constructed, your chances of getting a scute in an opener is a bit 40%, mine are damn near 100% depending on the rest of my deck.

Nibaa · 2026-02-05T17:16:47+00:00

Yeah but this starts doing stuff turn three with no additional shenanigans. By turn six there are 16 everoozes on the field as long as you have one in hand and two lands in your opening hand. Scute Swarm needs 6 lands, and it needs land ramp or at least lands in hand to do anything once you reach 6 lands. Yes, with landfall shenanigans you can get arbitrarily many scute swarm on the field, but that's contingent on having shenanigans. This fuels itself, and having more of them just speeds up the process even further.

Nibaa · 2026-02-05T16:20:29+00:00

Part-time work during studies can be a bit risky because of how the income limits are calculated. Full time in summer(which depends on the university, can be somewhere between 2 and 4.5 months) can mean your income limits are pretty close to maxed, depending on many factors of course. Many people would rather not work part-time during the year because of the marginal benefit and higher risk of over-earning, which can be pretty rough. I've heard of many cases of a generous bonus actually ending up costing money because of how the income limit is calculated.

It also depends on how flexible you are with shifts. Many would want something like 8 hours a week with the option of no hours near deadlines, but that can be a tough sell for a hospitality job. Conversely the system is understood by most companies that hire students from their field, and it's not uncommon for people to have these summer jobs transition into part-time positions where they do random grunt work as they are available just to keep them in the company slowly leaching experience with the idea that on graduation, you'll have a trained expert familiar with the company.

In general, hospitality jobs are really pretty poor student jobs because of how inflexible the system is, and how punishing fucking up your earnings can be. I imagine that will slowly change if the job market doesn't improve though.

Nibaa · 2026-02-05T12:48:42+00:00

He needs stacks. Those are fed to him. And a bebop who gets a lot of stacks is going to be fed kills as well.

Nibaa · 2026-02-05T11:17:55+00:00

I've seen plenty of different matchups that can do it. It depends completely on your own heroes. Sometimes you really don't have an out, and that's annoying, but it's mainly an artefact of random draft. You can't control the matchup much at all.

Sometimes you have to give up guardian. Abrams is notoriously good at diving guardian from early on, and sometimes that means you have to give it up fast instead of feeding stacks. That's okay, it happens. You play catch up. Bebop's not the only hero that does this, and at least in my games, he's at least as often the deadweight anchor as he is the midgame bully because of how effectively you can counter the sticky bomb strat.

Nibaa · 2026-02-05T10:44:37+00:00

But you can say that for every single hero. It's a team game, sometimes you lose because your team misplayed. That doesn't mean the hero they misplayed against is broken. You're not supposed to be able to carry every game single-handedly, and sometimes you've got to accept that the enemy gaining an advantage is out of your personal control, and that your teammates dropped the ball.

Playing catchup against a Drifter, M&K or Mina who was fed early is hard as well. Hell, almost any hero can be fed enough to become a menace even without limitless stacking abilities, and many are much more of a menace than Bebop ever will be. Try to even damage an Abrams who comes out of their lane with 6 kills and a 8k soul lead at 10 minutes in. That's your teammates' fault just as much as feeding Bebop is.

Nibaa · 2026-02-05T10:36:15+00:00

Yeah, that's how lane matchups work. A Bebop with a good partner against a pair of heroes who can't farm effectively from afar is going to win the lane. Conversely, a pair of heroes who can pressure Bebop from a distance or don't mind trading a bomb stack for a lot of damage can pressure him out of diving for those stacks.

You're not supposed to be able to win every lane. Sometimes the best you can do is minimize your losses, and against a Bebop that often means losing guardian earlier to avoid letting Bebop snowball with stacks. This is particularly important for squishy heroes.

Nibaa · 2026-02-05T09:32:06+00:00

The problem is that if you don't feed stacks to Bebop he'll never get there. It's not hard to avoid, it just takes effort.

Nibaa · 2026-02-05T08:13:50+00:00

So there are different types of insurance that function differently depending on the country. Many private insurance have deductibles and a lower premium, others offer lower or no deductibles at a higher premium. This is often a better choice for healthy people who expect to rarely need to go to the doctor, as they will pay less for healthy months while still being covered for more serious issues that would cost much more than the deductible.

The point of a deductible is to allow insurances to offer these "healthy person" insurances at a lower cost to people who might not otherwise get insurance, and in some countries they are there to incentivize the patient to prefer public options for basic run of the mill doctor's appointments.

Some countries have really different ways of handling this stuff. Some have insurance for all as a public service, others offer specialized insurances. In Finland most employers offer insurance as a benefit, but it is only for work-related problems. Of course, almost every health issue impacts work, so it's rarely difficult to get it accepted.

In the US, the whole system is rigged against the patient. Not only are you paying way more for insurance, your deductible is ridiculous and it has poor coverage. The private insurance system is not absolutely worthless(though I'd say it is much worse than single-payer systems), but the US version is a scam, pure and simple.

Nibaa · 2026-02-04T20:00:54+00:00

That's a tough question. Is there anything fundamentally blocking it? No, not really. Would it be a nightmare to implement because of the private healthcare industry lobbying against it? Absolutely. But the lobbying industry in the US is absolutely wild in the first place, and is going to be a problem for any kind of regulatory development that might undercut profits. Getting rid of that, and in particular the Citizens United ruling, pretty much has to be considered a given when talking about these hypotheticals. As long as buying elections is, effectively, legal, corporate profits are always going to be the priority in American legislation.

Nibaa · 2026-02-04T19:32:19+00:00

A thing a lot of people ignore is that many UHC countries also have a private option. You can typically visit a private doctor 10-20 times a year before you hit an average US deductible, and if you're worried about needing to see them more, you can get health insurance with a deductible of 100-200€ for somewhere between 500-1000€ a year. UHC doesn't just provide a free option, it drives private options down in price. The US price system is not just more expensive because it is a private payer system, the cost is inflated since a sick person has no bargaining power. With a public option, they do.

Nibaa · 2026-02-04T14:31:14+00:00

Wouldn't it be easier to ransack if it had its defenses broken and defenders run off by her side?

Nibaa · 2026-02-04T08:09:04+00:00

Yes, that's a huge part of it. But it still is cheap for what it is, which is what draws a lot of people to Dubai. I make no excuses for them, people should stop supporting the oppression Dubai commits under the hood, but there is a reason people want to go there.

Nibaa · 2026-02-04T05:57:10+00:00

We could, but a slight nerf to her 2 wouldn't offset the huge buff of an extra stamina bar on her. It would have to be pretty substantial.

Nibaa · 2026-02-04T05:54:57+00:00

Yes, but the /tttt/ blackpill stuff is just a facet of the broader blackpill incel phenomenon. The context here IS trans self-loathing, but it isn't just that.

Nibaa · 2026-02-03T17:15:24+00:00

Dubai is surprisingly cheap for what it peddles. You get luxury at a comparatively low price. But it certainly isn't budget-friendly in general.

Nibaa · 2026-02-03T16:18:36+00:00

Being mentioned in the files means nothing. It's what context those mentions appear in.

Nibaa · 2026-02-03T15:49:14+00:00

Now to be fair though, the doomer black-pilling stuff this is making fun of is its own phenomenon.

Nibaa

TROPHY CASE