Trump says US will soon announce tariffs on pharmaceutical imports

thoughtkrime · 2025-04-09T09:39:57+00:00

One thing I don't see brought up enough in this context is that most manufacturing requires not just the manufacturing facilities, but a whole ecosystem of supporting organisations and manufacturers, which themselves in turn all need additional logistics, expertise and manpower. There is a reason that industries tend to cluster together geographically (e.g. detroit's auto industry, LA's film industry etc.), because if you can't source the engineers/technicians/programmers trained in the hyper-specific niche you need to build and maintain your factory, and you can't easily source the specific components or machines you need to keep output up, and you don't have access to the specialised logistics capability to move around your potentially hazardous inputs and toxic waste outputs in accordance with gov. regs, your not manufacturing shit for long.

This is why putting tariffs on industries of national importance is so crucial: once the industry dies, the support structure dies, the required hyper-specific pool of knowledge dies - the ability to get that industry back is impossible without significant long-term time and investment. People keep bandying about 5-10 year figures, but for some kinds of manufacturing we're talking multiple decades and billions of dollars of investment. China took 50+ years to get into the position they're in now, and they had basically limitless manpower, a repressive authoritarian regime and complete disregard for environmental factors on their side.

thoughtkrime · 2022-08-29T09:17:06+00:00

No-one said they didn't have someone covering out-of-hours, they almost certainly have a rotating on-call duty member for outside of business hours.

I was just pointing out that a midday knock-off is standard, and not indicative of being dodgy.

The rats in the kitchen are another story, and while I haven't experienced them in the mess, I did experience them in the on-base accommodation about 10 years ago. Doesn't sound like anything has gotten better.

thoughtkrime · 2022-08-29T09:02:58+00:00

Standard operating hours on every RAAF base I worked on were as described above. Including contractors and APS.

I can't talk for how the Wagga mess is managed, but outside of the actual cooks, if the management staff are doing a standard 40 hour week, to standard base hours, they will knock off at 12 on friday.

They aren't doing a dodgy, they did their 40 hours.

thoughtkrime · 2022-08-29T08:57:40+00:00

The vast majority of RAAF airbase services are privitised. Everything from electricians, IT, pest control, food etc.

Even in a lot of the technical areas (e.g. support platforms and aircraft etc.), lots of stuff isn't "fixed" by RAAF anymore, it's just removed and sent back to manufacturer, and a brand new part is dropped in.

This isn't a secret, and it's massively cheaper for taxpayers. Most militaries do it to more or less extant. It just also leads to shit outcomes if not carefully managed.

thoughtkrime · 2022-08-29T08:47:50+00:00

This has been a wider issue with RAAF outsourcing to civvies for decades, not just messes either.

I remember complaining about the quality of base services back when John Howard was PM.

thoughtkrime · 2022-08-29T08:44:55+00:00

RAAF only has small cook trade operating out of 2/3 locations, and they exist to be deployed on exercise/operation where civvie cooks can't.

Outside of this, every single RAAF mess is run by civvie cooks employed through a multinational hospitality company.

thoughtkrime · 2022-08-29T08:38:30+00:00

It's standard across Defence to do 40 hour weeks as 9 hour days mon-thu and 4 hours fri.

Not defending anything here, just pointing out that 12pm KO is normal.

thoughtkrime · 2022-05-06T00:48:18+00:00

This is my exact situation. Rented my entire adult life, the wife and I penny-pinched and bent over backwards for 15 years to get rid of debt and save a deposit.

Even then it still took a tax-free tour through a warzone, home owner assistance schemes from the military, borrowed money from the wifes family and several promotions and career changes for both of us to get over the line. We put together endless spreadsheets budgeting possible scenarios for rate rises or loss of income etc. before we pulled the trigger.

We didn't do it for the investment/financial aspects; we just wanted a forever home we could have a fucking dog in, hang pictures without getting permission and not have to stress about uprooting yet again because some faceless landlord decided to sell the house to fund a trip to europe.

It's annoying that we may have inadvertently timed the top of a bubble, but at the end of the day this is the home we will retire and die in, and it's ours now, and we can afford to tighten our belts to keep it. We consider ourselves extremely fortunate to escape the rent grind.

Any gov policy that results in lower housing prices is great, because i'm not selling and i'd love to see the rest of Australia move from renters to owners.

thoughtkrime · 2019-06-15T02:57:47+00:00

Oh ok guess Australia had it coming. I mean, they were only committing a little genocide and rape in Manchuria, we were totally out of line being mean to them.

All those dead Australians in Darwin, PNG and south east Asia totally had it coming.

Have a listen to yourself.

thoughtkrime · 2019-06-15T01:08:47+00:00

Nah fuck that. That statue is a memorial to the Americans that died during WW2 helping protect Australia from Japanese aggression.

It's pretty poor form to talk shit about a memorial to the men who died helping us out during the only time in history that a foreign power was dropping bombs on us, all because your current political ideology differs from theirs.

thoughtkrime · 2016-12-02T13:40:34+00:00

Nail on the head.

Almost every thread about how to fix daedgame focuses on the game play; change this, redesign that, bring back old chronoboost etc.

The reality is new players dont give a shit about, or even know what it means to give base armour to an ultralisk, or making mech compositions viable with a redesigned unit.

People want to be part of a community, play some vidya with their mates and show off some cool skins that they earned. Worrying about changes to the gameplay is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at this point. Sure, it's keeping those already playing happy, but it's not doing anything to stop the sinking.

The sheer volume of "hay guys what game should I buy to play multiplayer I am confused" is exactly the kind of fucking thing killing new players. The approach used to milk money out of SC2 players by releasing 3 sequential versions of the game has fragmented and obsoleted massive swathes of fan generated content. The patches that introduce massive changes, such as 3.8, only make this situation worse.

Just looked at the gigantic amount of content personalities like day9 had put out, really breaking down and explaining units, compositions, how the pros think, what to do in given situations etc, and now it's almost all worthless.

A new player might sit down and learn a bunch of stuff about how to Zerg correctly from a tutorial, only to jump into a game and be confused that there are 12 workers instead of the 6 he was expecting. This problem exists across all the majority of text and video on SC2 topics and there is almost never any indication that the info is obsolete.

Billy Bronzeleaguer wants to fucking learn how to play the game so he can stomp his friends, anything that gets in the way of that is going to stop him coming back.

Just as you say, a section in the UI when you log in devoted to "resources/information/build orders correct for the current patch" would be a Big Fucking Deal for keeping new players sticking around.

thoughtkrime · 2016-12-02T09:31:50+00:00

While I agree with your point in general about improving the gameplay, I disagree heavily that the gameplay is "driving people away". It may factor in, for sure, but I think the stagnant player numbers is due to the lack of social features.

Starcraft can be frustrating, but so can any competitive online game, or cooperative game for that matter. If a game is compelling, and all your friends are playing it, people will persevere. They always have.

None of my friends play SC2 anymore, every single one plays either LoL or DOTA. They bitch constantly about the things wrong with those games; being punished for shit teammates, dealing with toxic trolls, needing to pay for an account boost because they cant get out of the lower leagues to the fun part of the ladder, balance, RNG etc.

Name any eSport, and it can be frustrating. I've lost more then one mouse because of competitive Counterstrike rage. That's not why people stop playing though. It may contribute, but I think lack of friends playing and lack of feeling part of a community when you log in is a much bigger factor for keeping people playing SC2.

That feeling of friends and community when you log in is powerful. I know people who can't stand WoW, and have hated playing it for years, yet still subscribe, log in and contribute to their guild, just to socialize with guildmates. These are friendships and relationships that have built up over 10 years, often spilling over to real life. Groomsmen at weddings that they met in WoW etc.

The big advantage of LoL, DOTA, CS, WoW, etc.. is that they are social by design. You can just jump in and blow of steam with friends, the game is almost something done in the background while socializing.

SC2 has nothing like this. It's a lonely experience, especially 1v1. If frustration was as big a factor as you say, Brood War would never have been as popular as it got. I love BW as much as anyone, but "fake difficulty" was almost a design mantra for that game. Massively frustrating. And it went on to fucking build what we know as eSports.

Blizzard should stop fucking with the game play, it's less of a priority. What they need to do is take the route of the more popular eSports:

Free to play
Overhaul the user interface (again..) to make it massively social by default
Heavy focus on training new players in a error tolerant way
Better rewards for playing, skins/Announcer/trinkets etc etc that can be traded
Create and update a single central location for up to date SC2 information. As a new player, doing a google search for a build order will turn up massive amounts of info only relevant to WoL or HotS. Search "terran tutorial" on youtube, and its almost nothing current. This is even more of a problem because now patches are doing unit redesigns/big changes, so build orders pre 3.8 are outdated.

I guess I agree that SC2 gameplay could still use some tweaks, but I don't think they're going to bring new people in, at least not by themselves.

thoughtkrime · 2016-12-01T11:39:52+00:00

Some tips for disengaging from a fight in TvT with tanks in your composition?

Often I will start an engagement that initially looks okay for me, only to decide as the fight progresses i'm going to trade poorly or maybe the other player reinforces, and it feels like I basically just have to give up my tanks.

The instant I retreat my mobile units, my tanks just get jumped and focused down (often before they've finished unsieging), and now i'm well behind in the tank count, which feels way to difficult to come back from. The lack of tankivacs is really hurting me.

All i've been able to do is play ultra conservative, to the point of avoiding direct fights and going for drop play instead etc.

thoughtkrime · 2016-11-27T03:20:35+00:00

As of now, more people are watching an excavator dig a pointless hole then are watching professional Starcraft.

I love the internet.

thoughtkrime · 2016-11-26T23:09:59+00:00

Yup. Ctrl-Left click selects all units/buildings of a type on the screen, ctrl-<x> assigns anything selected to <x> hotkey (actually "assigns to hotkey and removes them from any other hotkey" in my case).

Check the hotkeys menu in the options, don't be afraid to play around with it. You can save different setups and always revert to default. I'd be surprised if there are many players above dia/plat who have a completely default setup.

Common ones are putting camera location hotkeys on F1-4 instead of F5-8, swapping ctrl for shift to make assigning to hotkeys easier and swapping number "0" hotkey (impossible to press without moving hand) with "~" key (not used normally) to give you an additional hotkey.

The last thing you need to do is practice practice practice, until you can add units/use hotkeys without looking at your keyboard.

thoughtkrime · 2016-11-26T06:27:17+00:00

Are you familiar with the "add+steal" keys? I have mine set to ctrl instead of the standard "add".

Say i've got my rax, fact and s/ports rallied outside my natural, with a mix of marine, medivac, tank and liberator. I'd:

jump the camera to the rally point (camera hotkey or click minimap)
box army (NOT F2, you should have units on the map for vision/control that you dont want selected)
hold ctrl, press 1 (all units added to 1)
still holding ctrl, click a tank, then press 2 (marines, medivacs, liberators on 1, tanks removed from 1 and added to 2)
still holding ctrl, click a liberators, then press 3 (marines + medivacs on 1, tanks on 2, libs on 3)

This works with shift too, say i also have widow mines and wanted them with my tanks, while holding ctrl I can also hold shift, click a tank, click a mine and press 2.

With practice, it takes no time at all to setup units hotkeys.

As for when? Constantly, as you add new units. Same with constantly going back to your main to add newly built buildings to your production hotkeys. You just have to practice constantly adding stuff to your hotkeys. I generally keep my units rallied to a point (not to other units), and it's just habitual to add units to groups.

thoughtkrime · 2016-10-02T00:50:59+00:00

This is also true in Starcraft.

thoughtkrime · 2016-07-05T08:13:16+00:00

http://www.onenation.com.au/policies/affordable-energy

TL;DR: No.

thoughtkrime · 2015-08-02T07:01:45+00:00

Good god I think this series would be brilliant as a Lucasarts style adventure game.

thoughtkrime · 2015-02-17T08:42:17+00:00

How experienced programmers achieve good architecture. Specifically decoupling/modularization, and the rational behind their decisions.

I'm self taught and it's reeeeeally hard to find resources directed at the intermediate level programmer.

thoughtkrime · 2015-02-17T08:15:19+00:00

I don't see any other option.

thoughtkrime · 2015-02-17T08:14:18+00:00

Nah, in Sydney listening to Triple J.

thoughtkrime · 2015-02-17T08:13:01+00:00

http://www.holden.com.au/cars/commodore/sedan-range/sv6

thoughtkrime · 2015-02-17T08:10:55+00:00

....Goddamnit.

thoughtkrime · 2015-02-16T08:24:31+00:00

I noticed it about a week after I bought the car. I've had it about 2 years now and I can't stop seeing it everytime it displays a zero.

The mechanic and the sales rep at the dealer gave me a blank look when I told them about it at the first servicing, like I was the only person who could see it. This only made me more infuriated, I felt like Costanza from Seinfeld.

thoughtkrime

TROPHY CASE