I went to an elephant sanctuary in Thailand. They explained that riding elephants is incredibly stressful for the elephant’s back, and that in order to train them to obey, torture is usually involved.
I’m against zoos as well. I know some do good work with rehabilitation and such (and we should support them), but a lot just capture animals for our enjoyment. Even if they’re not explicitly mistreated, it’s pretty cruel to just keep them in a cage for the rest of their lives.
This fine isn’t even punitive. It’s just the wages owed plus interest, which is the same as if they’d paid the wages properly the first time.
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Keep in mind that the “housing” cost includes either moving to a bigger property, or simply assigning part of your current mortgage costs to your child. If your house is sufficiently large, there won’t be any much additional cost here beyond an increase in utility usage.
Similarly, transportation downloads a lot of the cost of a vehicle to your child. Maybe you do need a bigger car, in which case that makes sense. But maybe your car is fine, so the only added expense is gas and maintenance for the extra mileage for children’s activities.
If you’re talking about the “Value” booster, your LGS probably won’t (and shouldn’t) stock those. That’s for grandmas to buy at dollar stores and Walmart checkout aisles. It’s an absolutely scummy product, but it shouldn’t cause SKU issues at your LGS.
MKM was less bomb-heavy than OTJ, so at least drafts seemed better. I missed the prerelease, so I don’t know how swingy it was in limited. I suspect quite a lot anyway - prereleases have always been swingy, and as long as rares are more powerful than commons, more rares in a pack will always make it swingier.
The good:
The bad:
Sometimes there just isn’t a pick 1 in your colors in packs 2 and 3 (on Arena). This is especially obvious in MH3 with the colorless theme, but it’s also possible in normal sets. I don’t know if this is different in arena vs. in paper.
Everything costs more. I’m in Canada, so draft prices were going up well before the switch, but this made it even more expensive.
Sealed is swingier. With a chance at opening up to 4 rares in a pack, those that do will have more bombs and more powerful cards in general. OTJ was very bomb heavy, so sealed was even more lopsided. This also affects drafts somewhat, but I think that can be fixed with design balancing once they get used to the changes. I don’t think sealed can be fixed with card design.
Ultimately, I think this is worse for players and better for businesses and way better for WotC. They can fix most of the problems, but price isn’t something they’re interested in fixing (and, to be fair, the price of a booster has stayed well below inflation). Unfortunately, this means that some people just can’t draft anymore or as often.
It’s also in the same carcinogen group as electromagnetic fields, aloe vera, nickel, and kimchi. Most of those things you listed are quite dangerous for other reasons, but cancer is not the primary concern with any of them.
IARC group 2B is where substances end up if a study manages to produce cancer at any dose. If you drink 50 cans of diet coke per day (which is the equivalent of the rat study that demonstrated that it’s possible for aspartame to cause cancer), then you might get cancer caused by the aspartame you just consumed.
Aspartame is not carcinogenic.
It’s Niccol. I was briefly confused and thought that I somehow missed Nichelle Nichols in Gattaca.
That said, is Gattaca forgotten? And what was wrong with his later works? I haven’t seen them all, but the ones I’ve seen have been pretty good. They’re all pretty much a bleak and dire warning about our future, and Gattaca may have done it best, but there’s nothing wrong with his other films.