Yeah as if CoD hasn’t been literal propaganda for at least a decade. I mean, they literally present revisionist history as actual history in the games with no disclaimer or mention of it being entirely false. And no, I don’t mean when they make up events, I mean, they tell complete fabrications about real historical events designed to portray the US Military in a positive, or at least less negative than they deserve, way.
Probably. But I think the intention is to attract customers, not to push some kind of agenda. So instead of toning it down, I think it would be better to make it explicit and make games from different perspectives.
For example, make a WW2 game from the Soviet. Or perhaps Japan in the Russo-Japanese war of the early 1900s. Those could be as biased as they want because they’re telling the story from a certain perspective.
We know that the US Military contributes directly to Cll of Duty, both financially and through assets and non-tangibles. Whether or not the developers push an agenda purposefully, and I’m inclined to side with you that they aren’t trying to do so, that money and those assets come with strings attached that take the decisions out of the developers hands.
Hell, they put fucking Oliver North in their game, and made him look like a good guy. You can’t get any less contrary to reality if you tried.
The Wikipedia article on Oliver North says he advised on the Black OPs game, so it absolutely makes sense for them to throw him in the game in a positive light.
That said, I wonder how the US military would feel about Activision making a game set from another country’s perspective. It would probably have a similar appeal as a recruiting tool since it’s still a war game.
$348 Million just to plan seems completely fucking ridiculous. I write in ignorance as I know nothing of civil engineering, but holy crap does that number seem goofy.
Just for context the Seattle regional area is spending over $50 billion on expanding light rail with st3. I'm not sure what goes into planning but this whole endeavor isn't gonna be cheap.
Once you factor in the best fit route, including through both major cities, seismic and land surveys, figuring out and plotting of new bridges, figuring out who owns what and how to best double existing track with a new high speed track, getting land for a new yard.
I can see planning hitting that much, yeah.
Hell, if we're using the Amtrack stations it has to tunnel under modern Seattle, as well as figure out how its getting through to downtown Vancouver across at least one river crossing in a busy and populated area.
Also, consider how much the conservatives under Christy Clark spent to get the evergreen line built and the pre-build surveys cost well above the 10 million dollar range and were completely wrong and lead to massive cost overruns. Edit: The underground area in question was roughly 6 blocks long.
I was an operations director in a prior role and oversaw the design and construction of several buildings. The last building was about $70 million, and we spent around $6 million on the design and programming.
What most folks don't understand is the scale of minutiae. I've spent an entire day of meetings hashing out floor box standards between all parties (IT, facilities, design, construction). The amount of preliminary site studies, permit planning, etc, that goes into hundreds of miles of rail, plus stations, interesting into existing infrastructure etc... It's significant.
I've also overwhelmed fiber builds, and have seen costs range upwards of $500k-$1m per mile of new fiber depending on if poles exist, or of trenching, right of way, permits, etc.
And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg for what goes into these plans.
Right, essentially every single foot of this rail line needs analysis and design. Geotechnical, transportation, civil, electrical, environmental, mechanical, computer, engineers will all have their hands on it, then there’s coordination between municipal groups, which covers the whole spectrum because it’s international.
A bigger project might seem simpler to the public, but effort and complexity often increases disproportionally to the scale of the project for engineers.
Geotech analysis (this is an earthquake zone), multiple route options with associated costs (read: lots of math), the required community info sessions and feedback (repeat that a few times), route alterations from the politics, eventual route selection, then actual detailed design can begin on structures, electrical systems, etc (read: lots of math).
A previous state report speculated that construction may cost $42 billion in 2017 dollars. That sum should be considered low until proven otherwise, in light of the 0% engineering; the soaring costs for California’s high-speed rail program, whose ultimate San Francisco-Los Angeles network could reach $128 billion; and process delays in Seattle’s own Sound Transit 3, whose $11 billion Ballard-Sodo light-rail segment won’t complete preliminary engineering until 2026, a full decade after voters approved higher taxes.
If planning could help prevent mistakes and delays costing something on the order of years and billions of dollars, half a billion to plan (1% of a lower-end estimated cost) doesn’t seem so bad to me at all.
Coming from someone who very much endorses amtrak and passenger rail, I think someone is abusing our tax dollars to make six figure jobs for their friends or family. Just look how much money is going into repeatedly studying if the stampede pass would be a viable passenger rail line.
thaat's another rail line that needs to happen yesterday. hell, extend it into detroit and onto chicago. if I may dream for a moment, extend it from chicago to o'hare and have a system to transfer to and from rail and air travel painless, so you can connect onto and from international flights
that HSR line is a good idea. it should be planned to be compatible with California HSR from the jump so long term plans to connect them together can be done without much hassle. actually now is a good time to standardize non-maglev HSR infrastructure north america-wide
I think about half the remaining distance is cheap to build - farmland, etc. 200 mil seems really low though, especially for the land and infrastructure needed near portland and everett.
Or probably depends on what the plan encompasses. If we’re talking geotechnical surveys, elevations, etc for 316mi over mixed terrain and over an international border, then the planning stage could actually encompass a lot (and better planning could save a lot of money for the construction phase).
If it’s just a discussion of “how might we do this” with a few plastic models, not so much
This project is frustrating :( I would happily use this train if it magically existed today, but to me it feels like it’s eating up all of the oxygen. The trains we have are fine. I wish they were faster. But the core problem is the existing rail network is neglected, antiquated garbage and there aren’t enough passenger trains because there’s only room for freight. It would be a lot of work to improve those tracks and add more trains, but something tells me it would be a hell of a lot cheaper, faster, and more effective over time than a one-off megaproject that will never scale and whose timeline is competing with plate techtonics themselves.
It’s almost like their workers should form some sort of association so that they could collectively work to negotiate with Amazon on a more equal footing. Too bad that never happened ever in the history of the human workforce. Sure would be nice, though. Oh, wait…
A friend sent me a job there and I’m extremely trepidatious about their approach. The job is supposed to be remote, but my current job is guaranteed remote, even after the company went through a wave of forcing some people back in the office.
That said, for the right paycheck, I could be persuaded back in-office, but dang if these folks don’t make it difficult…
So take unsolicited internet advice with a grain of salt, but my understanding from friends who work at AWS and from my own time spent working with AWS folks is that most of this return to office policy is focusing on those positions that were in person before the pandemic. They still have remote only positions, and positions with enough travel that they report to be exempted from the badge metrics whole on travel status.
Whether AWS is a good place to work really hinges on the team you are on and the manager. Most teams at AWS have a lot of flexibility in their work, and aside from this return to office reset of work norms, I would expect that to continue. I also predict that the badge monitoring and policy will fade in a year or so as the new norms are established, and individual team managers will have more discretion on it again. This policy is the company trying to shift the current default and culture which takes some top down directives. Once that is done, they won't spend the effort on the detailed tracking I don't think.
Layoffs at a company like Amazon – which has a relatively low cash salary ceiling – is more of a way to steal employee pay, in the way of keeping unvested stocks that were part of a compensation package.
I never liked stocks as part of compensation packages purely from the point you don’t even know if you will actually vest and receive that stock because who knows what will happn in 3-5 years. Let alone what the stock price will be by then.
Amazon corporate employees get RSUs which are stocks, not options. After the new hire RSUs go away, you end up with two vest dates a year and new comp offerings start the following year (so in 2024 you’ll see new money in 2025 plus a small base salary bump that goes in effect that month).
Tech salaries are frequently stock based, but Amazon’s is unusual in that it’s only twice a year, and bumps start the following year, and they recently made the change to do 2 year offers instead of 3 years.
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