The Guardian had a so-called Concrete Week[1] earlier this year when they published articles related to the concrete industry and its impact.
One of the articles [2] touched briefly on the corruption related to the building and concrete industry.
I assure you, these mafias exist in a lot of places. Odebrecht has entangled governments of Peru and Brazil with corruption here in South America. I would be interested where else has this happened.
Teh French cement company Lafarge did business with jihadis in Syria during the current civil war, including with the Islamic State [1]. That's corruption on a whole new level, as I'm 100% sure the decision to conduct this type of business was taken at the company's HQ in France.
I game with my 2700X/RTx2080 and it’s phenomenal, Battlefield 5 is gorgeous in 4K (though I have to drop to 1440 if I enable RT and ultra settings, that’s the GPU though not the cpu).
It’s so good I’m probably going to defer my upgrade for Zen 2 til Zen 2+ or whatever it’s called.
I game with a 2600x / 2080ti @ 1440p/165hz, on average I see 150 FPS in Apex Legends. Not an optimal setup, but not too shabby either. Planning on upgrading to the 3900x once it's released.
Not GP, but gaming on 2700x+1070ti w/ 144hz 1440p monitor. It's suboptimal, but usually I can play games on high/ultra settings ~60fps or full 144 on low-medium. Not having any problems with VR either.
I am doing that. I can play most games very well, including Battlefield, even though it isn't optimized for more than 6 overall threads. Never had a real issue so far.
What you are saying is no different than any other traditional sport. Take ice hockey goalies. In recent years they've become more athletic to the point that their bodies do things that non-goalies can't. How is that skill relevant or transferable outside of the game? Name a position in any sport and there will be close to zero relevance to the real world.
Even chess, what I consider to be very early precursor of eSports, depends on a narrow set of skills that you can't easily abstract into real life situations.
With hockey, or any other professional sport, it doesn't matter if the skills aren't transferable, as a good hockey player will be in demand for as long as hockey is around. There's a built in longevity to the game that there isn't in e-gaming.
If you dedicate years to honing your Starcraft 2 skills, but consumer interest shifts to Overwatch or Destiny, can you retrain fast enough to compete at a similarly high level?
In IRL sports, the rules of a specific game don't change. Neither does the size of the field, the goalposts, the ball itself. So as long as you're able to improve your physical/mental focus, you can improve your performance. That's not the case when multiple variables around the game itself are changing.
When a new game comes out everyone else is also starting at zero. As long as there's churn and new games are able to gain popularity, this isn't a huge issue.
Also, the skills are more transferable than they'd first appear - for example, several players have been competitive in more than one FPS game. Plus, streaming, analysis, coaching, and commentary are becoming quite lucrative.
I was a pretty active competitive player in Street Fighter 4 in my local scene. I spent a lot of time learning intricate things about the game. I knew so many different situations that could happen in the game, and due to my experience I was able to come up with appropriate responses. Those are the things that can't be learned from a video tutorial or a written guide, because they are simply too minute. As an example, some of the longer combos can have their later hits miss if you start out too far from the opponent. But the fine line between close enough and too far is very hard to gauge.
Then Street Fighter 5 came out, and all that accumulated knowledge had to be thrown away. That was one of the reasons I gave up on competitive playing, couldn't really deal with going at it again only for all my knowledge to get invalidated later on once more.
Based on my observations, the skills are solely transferable in same genre of games. I've seen great FPS players switching to different titles. I have never seen a great FPS player doing well in RTS and opposite.
I don't know about "many"? The only famously successful one I can think of off the top of my head is Bertrand Grospellier. And I guess Benger got some publicity when he made the WSOP main event.
Is there a whole host of ex e-sports players making a professional living off poker? Or are these guys outliers?
But even if that's true, who cares? Overwatch is not going to be a popular ESports title forever, but the FPS genre overall is probably going to be a component of ESports for an extremely long time. If your skills are transferable within an entire genre, that's good enough.
The odds of someone waking up some day in a world where competitive FPS ESports have vanished is probably roughly comparable to the odds that someone wakes up in a world where competitive hockey has vanished -- that is to say, unlikely enough that's it doesn't seem to be worth worrying about.
I mostly agree with that, but there are a handful of Dota 2 pros that used to play Starcraft 1/2 or Warcraft 3 at high levels. Like someone else mentioned I believe there are a few pros that moved to Overwatch from another type of game.
I think the teamplay and drive many of those players have
is transferable. You have to let the video game run your life, like any other sporting professional. The mouse movement, keyboard habits and reaction speed are also all mostly transferable. At the end of the day I think its mostly determination to switch and time.
I believe the initial argument is that "pivoting" of the players is inevitable, due to the relatively short shelf-life of a video game's popularity. Whereas a professional athlete in traditional sports can typically play one sport from childhood till retirement (be it 20, 30, 40, or 50), an e-sport professional may have to switch games after 3 years, and every 3 years, to remain relevant.
>With hockey, or any other professional sport, it doesn't matter if the skills aren't transferable,
Well, if you're making the argument that these pro gamers are worse off because they spent a large portion of their lives for skills that aren't transferable and won't result in a long term career, then if you accept that sports skills aren't transferable as well, same argument would apply to athletes given average NFL career is like 3 years. You could say they are better off because they make a lot more money for that short period of time, but you would also have to consider the odds and expected value of "trying to go pro" given average genetics.
The rules may not change frequently for IRL sports but style of play definitely changes and can have the same result.
Chris Carter was tied for the 6th most home runs in baseball from 2013-2016. If he was born 10 years earlier he would have been one of the highest paid players in the sport. Instead he was cut after the 2016 season, was only a part time player in 2017, and hasn't played in the majors since. He wasn't any worse as a baseball player, just the idea of what defined a "good baseball player" changed.
Similar things have also happened in other sports recently. Basketball has shifted to be faster paced and more about spreading to floor to shoot 3-pointers reducing the importance of traditional centers. Football has become more of a passing game reducing the importance of running backs and all but eliminating the position of fullback. I don't follow hockey, but I have heard that the enforcer role is on its way to disappearing from the game.
Many "good" hockey players never make it to a pro league and end up sitting behind a computer somewhere. Even if they do make it pro most sports performers have a prime age where they start to lose their edge. I am not sure that when one thinks of something that is in high demand hockey goalies comes to mind.
> With hockey, or any other professional sport, it doesn't matter if the skills aren't transferable, as a good hockey player will be in demand for as long as hockey is around.
This isnt even close to true. A, "good" hockey player is useless. The top 200 goalies in the world will have jobs. The top 25-50 will have well-paying jobs. The other hundreds or thousands of good goalies will never be paid to by a hockey player.
> In IRL sports, the rules of a specific game don't change. Neither does the size of the field, the goalposts, the ball itself. So as long as you're able to improve your physical/mental focus, you can improve your performance.
Also untrue. Many sports change over the years as one progresses. They are regular rule changes in many sports. There are specific rules based on location. I think you should learn more about IRL sports if you are going to draw comparisons to e-sports.
>There's a built in longevity to the game that there isn't in e-gaming.
Tetris came out 35 years ago and they're still holding world tournaments for it. Not to say that modern modern e-sports are the same as Tetris, but there doesn't seem to me any reason why LoL would be less likely to be around in 20 years than boxing.
Starcraft Broodwars is 20 years old and there are still professional tournaments being played in front of large live audiences (a large tournament recently ended and a new one is starting in about two weeks), and players are making a living out of streaming and playing these tournaments.
I'm so glad this people are finally having this conversation.
I will start by saying I'm not a developer of any kind. I'm learning Ruby and I've been doing that for a few months now. However, back in 2015 I got the itch to learn HTML/CSS/JS with the idea of changing careers. Long story short, I tapped out somewhere between 2016 and 2017. I still haven't changed careers. I was stressed and discouraged about how much I had to learn. I'm not saying this is everyone's experience but it was mine and I'm sure I'm not alone. It felt like trying to catch a train that is gaining more speed while crawling.
Hopefully there's a mindset shift after this, although it is my feeling that it will take another 5 years until there's a complete shift in tool set.
You're simply inexperienced and the time you've invested is pretty small. Every successful programmer spends years reading, learning and coding. You just have to keep going.
Unfortunately, I don't know. As I said, it's just the explanation I've seen most frequently when browsing HN, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to know where to find reliable sources. Sorry.
This may sound pretentious but from reading how this "experiment" was going to be I knew it was a bad idea.
I get the idea here: wanting to have a deeper familiarity with some albums you've only heard once (personally, I listen to albums/EPs before passing any judgement) maybe some of them by a band that has produced one of your "masterpiece" records.
But, on the other hand, I don't get why subjecting yourself strictly to some music would be good. I find it better to listen to new music or music I have not digested yet along with music that I love already.
Just make it part of your routine. Do you want to listen to that obscure album? Just put it between some other music you enjoy or make that one your first listen of the day. Making it part of your routine is a good idea but variety is good and, in the case of the author, unavoidable. Especially because the author is a record producer.
One of the articles [2] touched briefly on the corruption related to the building and concrete industry.
I assure you, these mafias exist in a lot of places. Odebrecht has entangled governments of Peru and Brazil with corruption here in South America. I would be interested where else has this happened.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/series/guardian-concrete-...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-...