With the implementation of Patch v0.5.5 this week, we must make yet another compromise. From this patch onward, gliding will be performed using a glider rather than with Pals. Pals in the player’s team will still provide passive buffs to gliding, but players will now need to have a glider in their inventory in order to glide.
How lame. Japan needs to fix its patent laws, it’s ridiculous Nintendo owns the simple concept of using an animal to fly.
R&D for many companies is taking the research done by underpaid graduate and PhD students and using that to create some sort of product or buying out the startups those students created and building from that.
We already live in a system where the majority of costs are publicly subsidized (and that’s not mentioning the myriad of direct subsidies these companies receive, for an especially egregious example look at the amount Pfizer got paid to develop the Covid vaccine) and then the result is patented and privatized.
They usually get grants, and frequently the student will get hired to follow up on that research. A lot of the research ends up unusable to the company as well, at least on its own.
I think that’s a bit extreme, but I’ll give you that a lot of R&D is subsidized. The COVID example, however, is an outlier, since the funding was to accelerate ending the pandemic, which was critical for the economy as a whole.