Month: March 2021

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  Magnamalo is Monster Hunter Rise's box-art monster, but while it's a hard fight, that doesn't make it the worst thing you'll face in this epic game. [credit: Capcom ]

Since its 2004 launch on PlayStation 2, the Monster Hunter series has stomped in bold-yet-unsteady fashion—like one of its titular beasts—toward legitimacy in the West. I've always found that peculiar, because as a bullet-point list, MH sounds like the ultimate in hardcore Western gamer catnip: deliberate slow-and-powerful combat (Dark Souls); teaming up with friends for epic PvE battles to amass loot (Diablo); deliriously tough and crazy-looking monsters and insane weapon variety to match (Borderlands).

But the series mostly thrived in Japan on PSP—in a nation much better poised to support "local wireless co-op adventuring," one of the PSP's flagship features. (I'm not sure I ever saw four people in the States playing a PSP in public, let alone doing so in a closely huddled group.) It wasn't until the series landed on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows in 2018 with Monster Hunter World that Capcom corrected some key series stumbles, mainly mid-mission loading times and truly working online multiplayer. As a result, uptake in the West exploded, and MHW became Capcom's biggest-selling video game of all time.

These days, Western gamers are finally embracing a powerful, portable console in droves, and Capcom has responded in unbelievable fashion. Behold: Monster Hunter Rise, the series' best game yet and likely the tipping point for anyone who has yet to sharpen their blade on its whetstones.

Enlarge (credit: Getty| NurPhoto)

Update 4 pm EDT: The board of experts monitoring the clinical trial of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine determined that the vaccine is actually between 69 percent and 74 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease—not 79 percent effective, as AstraZeneca announced Monday.

According to a report by The Washington Post, the trial’s Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) had been in meetings with the company through February and March and saw data that indicated the 69-to-74 percent efficacy range. The board “strongly recommended” that the latest information be included in the company’s Monday press release.

However, the press release Monday only stated an efficacy of 79 percent and, in a second press release Tuesday, the company noted that they had used a data cut-off of February 17.

Enlarge (credit: Ina Fassbender/Getty Images)

Arguments about our shift to renewable power often focus on the raw economics of the change—the cost of the power itself and, in some cases, the cost of managing its intermittency. Those factors are often compared to the costs of producing electricity with fossil fuels. But that calculation ignores one of the major reasons we're switching to renewables in the first place, namely that they help us avoid environmental costs.

Burning fossil fuels exacts a number of costs on society as a whole. These include a growing collection of costs associated with climate change. But there are other forms of environmental damage from mining and waste left behind when coal is burned, and particulates and toxic materials in the exhaust cause significant health damages. These factors are termed "externalized costs," or simply externalities, since they are a cost of doing business which is not internalized into the cost of doing business.

While people have calculated the magnitude of these externalized costs, Yale's Matthew Kotchen has now gone through and figured out what they mean for the companies in the fossil fuel market. And the results are substantial, with the externalized costs acting as a $62 billion subsidy each year in the US. In fact, Kotchen finds that much of the coal industry might go completely bust if it weren't for this subsidy.