> It's interesting to note, that when Obama used the platform to get elected, no one minded. But, when the opposing party does it, everyone judges it negatively.
When history sandwiches you between two world leaders with an apparently combined IQ of 2, people might let some questionable things slip.
Parallax mapping will not benefit from this, since the limiting factor there is performing a raymarch on a heightfield to find an exact intersection. At every step along the ray you need to test wether you are inside or outside of the heightfield. This means offsetting the uv coordinate (xy position inside the texture) by the ray vector, and then using that coordinate to sample the texture again, to check whether or not you penetrated the heightfield. The amount of texture lookups quickly becomes the bottleneck, especially on large textures since they incur cache misses. To give you an idea: for every parallaxed pixel on the screen the heightmap texture might be looked up several dozens of times. You don’t nearly get to subpixel accuracy before performance grinds to a halt. Parallax mapping is view dependent, so roughness mapping, even if somehow applicable would need to be highly anisotropic for it to work, which means a huge storage cost.
You’re mixing up debts in foreign currencies and ones in national currency. The former is the issue. As long as the national currency is accepted and traded by the population (which they can effectively enforce upon them through taxation) then the state can simply sign a contract, flip some bits in the national accounting table and proceed that way. The problem here is that Venezuela has a very disfunctional market economy (it is bad enough under the champagne socialists, and the US being involved in geo-economic/imperialist opportunism there isnt helping them) and a large black market which is mostly denominated in US currency and to which the population is increasingly dependent upon. If the economy worsens, that could further undermine the national currency and weaken the central government. The US of course wants that to happen so they can install a puppet government and secure natural resources in the south american hemisphere. It’s really a mixture of corrupt centralized government making all the wrong policy decisions and nefarious outside influences.
My main problem with it isn’t that it’s unrealistic per se, just that it looks bad on static geometry. But SSAO is typically sold as a “realism” feature.
A problem that often gets overlooked are the (geo) political ramifications of differences in economic output. I’m not sure if this is an existing hypothesis, but it seems evident to me.
If one actor grabs the bigger share of economic growth that puts it in a position of power over others. Nation states that can grow their population, resource extraction and have export surplus can use those things to exert political power over others. This means that states have a strong incentive for growth.
Likewise, if a population is dependent on money for their necessities, and there exists a limited stock of it, those who command a large fraction of it have defacto leverage over those with little.