Antiscientific vandalism – Quillette
To understand how biomedical scientists feel as they watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk aim their bazookas at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recall how you felt when the Taliban aimed their bazookas at the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. “Senseless” may be one word that springs to mind. “Permanent” might be another.
In a cost-cutting initiative by Leeds City Council, the local authority is aiming to save £106.4million in its budget over the 2025/26 financial term in a bid to a support the rising costs of social care services. As part of the iniative, the council is reviewing whether the city’s children’s centres run by schools should instead be operated directly by the local authority. A decision has not yet been made on closures or whether any redundancies will be necessary.
Billion-dollar video game: is this the most expensive piece of entertainment ever made? – The Guardian
British-American video game developer Chris Roberts – famed for his 1990s Wing Commander spaceship fighting series – launched Star Citizen as a crowdfunded project in 2012, promising to create a digital universe so huge yet still so detailed that players would “forget it’s a game”. He raised its first $2m on Kickstarter and it has been growing ever since, fuelled by fans willing to put their money into a plan so ambitious in scope that no profit and deadline-focused publisher would consider the risk of making it. […]
As time goes on, satisfying the community becomes increasingly important. Many fans have now given large sums of their money, including through a controversial money-making scheme in which CIG pre-sells spaceships online that they intend to make in the future. Some so-called “superbackers” have spent well over $10,000. […]
CIG describes Star Citizen as “the largest scale open development game in existence” but that ambition has also meant the game has now been in development for well over a decade, with repeated, frustrating delays. In a 2012 interview with Roberts, the Guardian reported the plan was to release the game two years later, in 2014. Fan forums regularly question if the game will ever be properly released.
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