Tag: email_newsletter

“It’s almost as if an entire generation suddenly realized that France actually has a large city directly on the seaside, a place with pristine rocky coves and restaurants on the water serving grilled fish. The result has been a 5 percent increase in real estate prices, with the popular 13th Arrondissement seeing a 15 percent boost. Many of the newcomers are modern nomads: people with jobs in Paris who work from home in Marseille and can board a TGV to be in the capital in three hours”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/the-marseille-experiment-macron-attempts-to-save-a-city-overtaken-by-drug-violence-a-bade2006-b7d7-433c-abf1-f053d56680aa

“IM activists also work in the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament in Berlin. Mario Müller, a tattooed offender who has been convicted of attacks on a plainclothes police officer and on a left-wing activist, has roots in the neo-Nazi scene and he helped establish the first Identitarian housing project in Halle. Today, he works for AfD parliamentarian Jan Wenzel Schmidt. Members of parliament from other parties find it concerning that right-wing extremists have access to the protected Bundestag buildings”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/right-wing-extremism-german-identitarians-are-trying-to-make-a-comeback-a-1fa09809-4097-4ab7-b397-7c29f3f9a33d

“You might think: who cares? What’s 5m PS2s between friends? And it’s true that I find this lack of transparency particularly annoying because I am a journalist, and I like to have answers. But the absence of reported sales figures allows companies to spin narratives that don’t line up with reality, to please the markets and their shareholders. They can claim success on whichever metric best backs up that story”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/apr/03/pushing-buttons-video-game-console-sales

“Some players have reacted with dismay to this game’s inflexibility, but I respect Dragon’s Dogma 2’s willingness to ruin your day from time to time. It doesn’t bend to your will; you have to work around its rules – even when, at the beginning, you don’t necessarily know what they are. At first you might be frustrated that, for instance, characters often tell you about intriguing legends and rumours, but the game never marks these things down on your map to tell you where you might find them. Then, as the hours go by, you might find yourself caught out in the wilds at night without a camping kit, and seek shelter in a cavern that turns out to lead to a crumbling mountain shrine, where you find an actual sphinx. You realise that if someone had marked its location on your map, you’d never have felt so awed when you first spied its glowing eyes in the dark”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/mar/27/pushing-buttons-dragons-dogma-2

“In its better moments, the House of Lords is a kind of council of elders, where the polished word and cogent argument have a home in a place where politics is more than an exercise of slavish obedience in the interest of climbing the career political ladder. It is a bulwark against populism, which is also flourishing in Britain – as seen in recent days with the government essentially suspending the right to asylum.

In its worse moments, the House of Lords is derelict ruin occupied by upstarts, party donors and lobbyists for whom nothing is further from their minds than true democratic rule. And in the already divided kingdom, the worse moments of late have heavily outweighed the better ones”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/haunted-house-on-the-thames-behind-the-scenes-in-the-house-of-lords-a-a85dc866-8843-414a-91b7-850487e41891

“Senior civil servants are “who you dream of, if you’re a vendor”; they may be exceptionally bright people with Oxbridge firsts who have completed their training at the Major Projects Leadership Academy, but in practice they have never worked in the industry with which they are negotiating. More fundamentally, civil servants do not understand that the other side is designing its bid to arrive at what project managers call the OFM (Oh, F**k Moment), when a new set of costs suddenly appears. The engineers have found that they’ll have to drill through granite to build the tunnel, or the data scientists have found errors in the old system. “As long as you can find things which weren’t covered in the original contract,” they told me, “you’ve opened the door to expanding the scope and demanding more money.”

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2024/01/the-rotten-state

“Since 2010, councils have had 60 per cent of their spending power cut by central government, which aggressively reduced funding in a bid to reduce Britain’s budget deficit after the 2008 financial crash. (In 2009-10, the deficit reached 10 per cent of GDP, and the national debt was at 67 per cent by May 2010.) Government ministers encouraged councils to be more entrepreneurial and raise their own funds through commercial investment, and in 2015 abolished the Audit Commission, which had kept a check on their finances. Council officers became prime targets for dubious investment propositions”

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2024/03/bust-britain

“MAGMA aims to change that, at least in Gramatneusiedl. The long-term unemployed in the town are guaranteed a job: That’s the program’s promise. Nobody is forced to work, but those willing to do so are paid the minimum wage and work either at a workshop belonging to the project or in a company that receives support from the state. And the whole thing is to cost the AMS less than long-term unemployment already does – around 30,000 euros per year. The hope is that the program will improve people’s lives, that they will reintegrate into the labor market, and that the work they perform as part of the MAGMA program will boost the local economy”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/a-model-ignored-uncertain-future-for-successful-austrian-employment-program-a-0fde0a32-f7a3-4f04-9f65-368564b1a308

“The three men played a critical role in the industry that enabled the production of atomic weapons, but instead of optimizing production to benefit the Americans, British, or Canadians, they knowingly slowed down activities for personal gain. If the Nazis had been quicker in their nuclear research, this embezzling might have had far-reaching consequences”

https://thewalrus.ca/unearthing-a-nuclear-scandal/

“To hit the graphical fidelity of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth required an exponentially larger team, where engineers and artists have specialized roles and couldn’t just get their hands on everything the way Kitase could in the 1990s.

“Now, if I want something to be created, I need to document my thoughts and ideas, communicate what I’m envisioning to someone who has the skills,” Kitase said”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-03-01/-final-fantasy-vii-rebirth-director-on-supersizing-a-mythical-universe