Piracy is still alive and well, especially in the Pacific and around nations with less powerful naval defenses. It’s probably to push back against piracy, especially with much the rest of the world turning towards “me first” attitudes and an island nation’s heavy reliance on trade for prosperity. It may also be that the agreement to purchase an aircraft carrier might extend the willingness of other nations to continue helping to protect the trade routes: like it’s a show of good faith that they’re helping too and not putting all the burden on other countries.

I don’t think it needs banned, but I would be completely unfussed if it got banned. And I wholeheartedly support just downvoting the beans out of anything sourced from there in the meantime.

See the problem with this though, is that if everything’s just pretend and made up, then I can’t get mad about Elon Musk’s “Nazi Salute”. And yet, there are abundant red flags showing a rise in fascism, that if ignored, may very well permanently alter the world order and our standard of living. In the past 48 hours there was a significant chance the supply of coffee that drives most of my economic output could be disrupted or tariffed.

And, that’s because a lot of this comes back to the connotation of the word, “pretend”. Replace it with the word, “Idea”, and you get sort of the same concept, but suddenly the non-existent thing sounds much more powerful.

Lol. They were trying their damndest to get me and my family to install that. I’m like… there’s a bit of a conflict of interest there. I can see some value in having location data of your family, who’s driving too fast, if someone’s in an accident. I will absolutely not be sharing that data with the company that earns money for its shareholders by outperforming the statistical likelihood of paying me money, by finding every way possible to not pay me money.

On a guy who boldly claimed he could get away with murder, no less.

I could see where it might set a bad precedent. But the week I spent in Vegas, there was a constant sign running an ad that you could bet on the Presidency, and I can’t think of a single good argument about how betting on a trial is more dangerous than betting on the office that can undo any federal crime with a pen stroke.

NGL, when I first saw Warner making a public fuss over this, I had a bit of a reaction. Like, no one comes after my boy steam, I like my games and I like my platform. And maybe it’s because I don’t engage in many public multiplayer games these days, but I just haven’t really come across this extremist content frequently enough to feel Congress needs to get involved.

But…

I can see from the comments, my anecdotal experiences aren’t the whole picture. And I do get that sometimes in an otherwise free market, regulation is necessary to prevent a situation where a company does the right thing and then suffers financially from the backlash/boycott that ensues. Better to let the government be the ones to take the heat by those that get upset by the moderation.

But I also kind of agree with the sentiment, Congress needs to clean up its own hate speech and ethics, before further legislating what everyone else should be doing.

Restaurant guy: one of your employees probably taking a little smoke break.

I never used to understand the people that just left a poop bag alongside the road, but suddenly now I feel like I understand exactly what exchange led to that choice.

It’s in a bag, though, right? I mean, if old lady is just naked hand fisting shit into the trash can there’s bigger problems to tackle there.

The most complex object in the universe … according to the brain.

Judging by the stock price decline that didn’t start last week, but rather has been ongoing for monthsyears, you’re spot on. This is exactly what the market was expecting.

DEI has at least some roots in holding a positive connotation, a lot of companies that value an image/brand of diversity will have a DEI department/team. It’s not just an acronym they made up, though it’s definitely been co-opted by reactionaries as a way to describe someone they feel only got the job/promotion/attention because of a compulsion to raise up minority voices (a “DEI” hire is their way of saying the person wasn’t qualified for the job, but got it because they were black/a woman".

My initial take on the rant was to simply ignore it, but now I’m wondering if there’s maybe something to the idea that specifically in the shooter genre, the market is different enough that I don’t really know the space. Like BG3 was about as DEI a game as you could get, and no one’s arguing that game’s success. But I do know a couple conservatives that were specifically kind of turned off by games like cyberpunk and BG3. Apparently they couldn’t handle tasteful sidedick. Maybe for a shooter to be successful it’s got to coddle what the gun enthusiast crowd is demanding? I don’t know. Despite their popularity, I just don’t play that many shooters.

In many states, if you have a gun anywhere in possession while committing a drug crime, even selling weed, it adds years of mandatory sentence onto the charges, often way more than the drug crime itself. I would be extremely weary of anyone mentioning anything about a gun and drugs together in a communication the cops can pin on you … because while they may be the nicest dealer you ever met, they are not the smartest.

(side note, I might have fudged the data a little and just made up that I checked with anyone else)

It’s ok, I checked myself by asking the person in my life most likely to agree with me. We’ve agreed the association with red vs blue politics in the US is your responsibility for making an analogy that could be easily construed that way, not ours for fitting what you said into the context of current cultural norms. Therefore in conclusion: everyone thinks you messed up with that analogy.

It’s fair to continue to consider them in competition with other store fronts. Don’t be fooled into thinking it will always be a great way to get cheap games, though. That brand, is EXACTLY what IGN paid for when they bought them: for the faith they built up in people like yourself, that they are and will always continue to be a trusted company. And part of the amortization of that purchase, is converting that belief into money, by enshittifying it. By taking advantage that they can make less valuable offers, raise prices, and fail to keep up with competitors innovations, on the backs of people remembering the good experiences they had with the company based on its original ownership.

Correct - this was always going to be the case the moment IGN bought humble bundle. Any delay in getting to this point was a conscious decision about how fast to boil the frog - but IGN didn’t buy Humble Bundle because they believed in the mission of helping charities and indie game developers, they bought it because they believed they could make more money than they spent on it.

Maybe not in some countries. It’s certainly a way that term gets used in the US. See also, reduction in force (RIF), downsize, reorg, shifting priorities, etc. The way labor laws are written, companies are encouraged to do this, because it circumvents protections against firing someone on leave, pregnant, or in a minority. When an individual is let go, there’s risk of litigation or claims that it’s because of some protected status: and correct or not, we’re a very litigious country with a lot of lawyers looking for a payday. So more and more, companies have normalized layoffs even when they’re doing very well, because its a way to “clean out” the company of less productive employees with much less risk of getting sued: and they can always rehire or shift exceptional employees they want to keep.

I always assumed there was some tradition to cutting your hair short before going to war, because long hair would present numerous liabilities - more maintenance, potential visibility issues, potential to foil cover/disguise, and potential vulnerability in hand to hand combat. And there is a lot of military tradition to a short haircut, though I’m not sure how much is based on the above reasoning. But I’m not a historian so maybe this is just a bad interpretation of Mulan or a random teacher passing on low quality education.