Ouch.

This reminds me that Political Animals is currently on sale in GOG right now. Maybe it is the time to give it a try. The reviews are not bad. I wonder whether the game includes environmental issues?

Also, it was mentioned once before in the thread: for those interested in a complex (and humbling) game on global policy making concerning climate change, Fate of the World is the way to go. Sadly, not in GOG. Maybe one day?
Mmmm... Down in the mine or in an office... down in the mine or in an office... Mmm... This is hard, man! Come on, silicosis is all iconic and manly!

Wear a helmet, grow a moustache, arrive home all sweaty and dirty, then spit out your lungs in the WC. When men were men and miners dug deep. Yeah.

Although probably the moustache thing is optional (for women too).

It's been mainstream longer than that. At least as far back as the 1950s(Citation). It wasn't thee major topic of the time, but it was reaching the public.

As for jobs, well, alot of them are being outsourced, too. Something that's tied to the land and doesn't require a massive personal debt in addition to opportunity cost to make good money is always a positive.

I'm so desperate to find a good job right now, despite my programming background, I've been applying to work in things like corrections.

Oh god, we don't want to get started on outsourcing. :P

That sucks man... I know how that is. IT jobs in Canada are hard to come by unless you live in one of like 5 cities in the country. It took me a long time to get to where I am now, but sticking with it usually pays off.

It's funny actually because the lack of jobs outside the urban centers also creates a lack of skilled labour. It took me forever to find a job and then work my way up where I am now. I had to jump from crumby position to crumby position. Now I'm trying to hire IT professionals and I can't find anyone even remotely qualified.
That's not kicking the hornets nest. That's sticking you special bits right in there.

if Chandra tells me to cool it I will. If she tells me to edit the post I will.
I have no intention of replying to any berating I I incur from it, so that should keep it quiet enough. :P

There's the other kicker: my background is self-taught, because i was always told that you wouldn't need a degree if you could prove that you know something. Boomers and their advice, right? The market's so saturated, i get turned down even for corrections. There's plenty of talent out there, really, but you have to know how to find it. The method we've been using lately doesn't work: we have people with skills and no jobs, but we have jobs that can't find people with skills. It only makes sense, then, that the problem is the skill verification method. One of Trump's more downplayed initiatives was to get businesses to sign on to be willing to pay for the education of prospective employees, which businesses used to do a long time ago, when tuition and educational material costs were reasonable. Unfortunately, that seems to be too little. To raise the average wage organically (which would have the strongest long time effects than simply raising the minimum wage), you need to have a hail-mary approach so that businesses have a hard time finding workers, so they lower the requirements or start paying for education. If the free market could control cost of education without degree being required for factory work (which is starting to happen now), the cost of tuition will come down: 'cause if people can find jobs that pay the bills without going into thousands in debt, they wouldn't go thousands into debt, and tuition would either come down, or we'd find a new and better way to fill those positions.

Umm... Merkel talks about climate goal all day long if she must. What she does is protect the car industry, the coal industry and all the other big wigs who give a fuck about the world in fifty years.
IIRC in 2018 Germany hit the planned amount of CO2 emission for the year - in March. She had herself celebrated for "saving" 1 mio tons of CO2 by civil engagements which the German government did not much to support - that's a drop in the sea. At least this the amount of CO2 got released within a week when an army exercise with rocks set a moor aflame and they had nothing to put out the fire with (great idea, toying with rockets in a draught...).
No need to wait, this has already happened. The question is, how to deal with it - keep the pedal to the metal and close our eyes and pray?

My respects to Carradice for introducing such a complex and well-thought debate to the forums.

In my opinion, it would be great to see some games adding features aimed at enlightening (if only just a tiny bit) our minds regarding real-life issues. Games have a tremendous potential to make us question certain things but most of the time those questions are related to fiction (hello Dark Souls), that's why I love games such as One Night Stand, Night in the Woods, Where the Goats Are, or even Aviary Attorney, as they are fun but also still allow us a certain degree of simulation that ties to our realities and our problems.

I don't think controversial issues should be avoided, on the contrary, they could probably benefit the medium as a whole. Art has historically benefited and grown by tackling controversial issues right? In fact, if there's a space where controversy can be freely tackled that's been within the realm of the arts. Of course it should be justified to do so, if not it'll just be a shallow measure, but a global medium such as videogames touching on global problems that'd be great, why not? So far we've seen games such as Owlboy or Rakuen discussing disability and disease respectively, or a game like Lisa discussing abuse; a feature like climate change in Civilization or any other way to make us consider and empathise with any topic shouldn't be seen as a problem to avoid but as an opportunity to embrace.

Regarding climate change as a global issue I'm completely ignorant of any game that is built around that topic or approaches it, but most probably there're some "news-games" that do. It'd be nice if the debate could go a bit more mainstream with Civ but if not, there'll still be games out there willing to discuss it in their own way. On the other hand, if we are really concerned about climate change and its effects on our planet and our lives, we should act accordingly in real life, lobbying Sid Meier for a climate change feature won't change a thing, of that I'm sure.

That's a whole issue, too: if it's too late, what's the point? But i understand the reality of that argument: what if we were wrong about it being too late or what about at least not making it as bad kind of thing. But i go back to what i said earlier: if we're basically screwed in some ways, why aren't we at least trying to work out more guaranteed method to solve the problem? If we're having trouble keeping species alive in captivity (which would presumably be an ideal solution for preservation of animal species), why aren't we trying to solve that issue? If the land is going to be swallowed by water, why aren't we working on technology to build big boats that we can live on for thousands of years without fear of rust? Why aren't we working on trying to figure out how to maintain artificial habitats? Human beings have survived for as long as we have by adapting to nature, not trying to get nature to adapt to us. Now that we, theoretically, have become the force of nature that threatens ourselves, why are we expecting to change that course? A new problem should mean a new solution, not sitting around pointing fingers and saying "we're screwed, and you're making it worse!" We aren't going to reverse the damage or compensate for the damage by trying to extend the length of the fuse: all we're doing is putting off a proposed inevitable.

In Germany, and I think in Europe in general, good developers are desperately sought after. If you've got good projects experience under your belt, you can make a lot of money. And if you don't there's a good chance to get some, if you cut down on your wage expectations for a couple of years (you will still earn more than the average Joe in IT).

If English is your only language you could have good chances in Switzerland and Scandinavia, they have many international teams with English as office language, and they pay really well. In Germany there are some companies with international teams too. Don't know about the situation in Little Britain.

My experience is that "experience" means "professional experience," which turns into "you need a job to get experience, but you need a job to get experience, but you need experience to get a job..."

I've heard some interesting methods of getting experience, but at 29 i don't exactly have the time to wait doing odd jobs here and there to get 5 years of experience to get an unstable position in an unstable company. I needed to get started with that forever ago. And that's where the talent everyone wants is, "eh, i can't afford that. It's time to move out of mommy and daddy's, so i'll take the 14 an hour factory job, even if it means costing health, because moving on with my life is more important than having a rough chance at an equal (or slightly better) paying job that isn't very likely to pan out the way things are going."

They say the devs are desperately sought after in the US, too, but that's not the experience i keep seeing. What i find is that they seem desperate until you see the minimum requirements for employment application. What kills me is that i saw one company here that had "an immediate need" for laborers, but required X numbers of years of experience with a specific piece obscure machiner, which indicated why their need was suddenly "desperate."

Save for global nuclear war (which is frighteningly becoming a possibility again with the "good west" cornering Russia more and more, and China becoming more powerful with every year which will end up with them stepping on the toes of the "old powers") mankind in itself will survive, of course. The question is, how bad do we want the challenges of the future to be? There are regions in China where the climate has been nearly intolerable this year - too hot and humid so that sweating can't cool enough (see heat exhaustion: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/11/opinion/heat-humidity-killer-combination.html).
The problem is: 200 million people live in this region - they might become refugees one day.

Rising sea levels is the least of our problems - climate changes will become utterly unpredictable in many regions, for instance if the Gulf Stream stops, northern Europe might experience an ice age, although global average temperatures rise.

One things that will happen, and will be worse if we don't stop destroying this planet, is a huge migration period which will probably cost many lives as is, but it's in our hand to decide how badly fucked we're all are.

I think right now there are two things we - as individuals - can do:
1. Do what's possible to reduce protect the environment both in our daily life (ie. don't use the car if the bicycle could do it - also good for your health) and vote with your wallet (go for green energy etc.).
2. Learn to be nice to each other - this planet will get a whole more crowded, we all need to learn to get along.

Right, and there's a few ways of going about this overall: we could work on technologies to combat the problems we're predicting or we can simply expect them to happen and just hope that we're done making it worse, but make no progress otherwise. If this is going on, we should be doing something about it, especially if we might actually be wrong about how much human influence there is. The planet itself is not alive, so we're not killing it: we're actively developing it. I understand pollution is an issue, but CO2 isn't the only thing on the table, but is most certainly the least of our problems compared to other pollution, which some "green energy" companies are providing (wind turbines seem to be up there with water poisoning, bird killing, and ecological issues due to the noise they produce).

Well... you need to show something to prove you're worth it, right? I don't know what you're doing right now, but you could for instance also be a part of some cool open source project and commit good code there. If you have that a reference and can explain what you did and why to the tech lead in a company, chances are in my experience pretty good you get a chance.

I don't know how it is in the US, but my own company is desperately looking for reinforcements and at the same time headhunters are bashing my mailbox in to offer jobs and projects although I (tried to) unsubscribe(d) them two years ago. Of course I have 20 years of experience... but judging how we seek new employees that's not imperative.

Experience seems to be on the down low compared to certification (seems to be for liability reasons or something). And, yeah, you could contribute to a project, but the people you talk to usually aren't coders or something, so if i say that i've worked on my own os kernel from scratch, i've done this project, that project, and can produce the source code for all of it, you get laughed at, because it has to be something that requires minimal effort from them (usually HR people, whom are usually boomers on top of not being familiar with the position). Try to explain what you can do, and you're talking over their head, so dunning-kreuger effect takes over. Bring a piece of paper, now that's worth something.

i quit coding anything that wasn't first for my own personal needs: 'cause i got sick of supporting software when i can't keep up with the market by myself. One of these days i'll be bothered enough to finish project Amber (a universal assembler and compiler), but it's just not worth it anymore to code. Need to work on a project that's not entirely your own, like a major open source project? Better have that application ready.