They bought out Rare and did nothing with them for 15 years. Now they are just “The Sea of Thieves” devs.

Imagine a timeline where they became a 2nd party Nintendo studio instead.

You’d think they’d understand tech at the bare minimum. But slashing your team of highly technical people who made engines for almost 30 years sure disproves that notion.

Because there’s literally nothing to gain and everything to lose. Not even “jobs” as the common narrative is for company tax breaks.

So yeah, it’s the pinnacle of how this isn’t a partisan war, but a class war. And the tech industry has done a shift job with PR trying to convince otherwise; the left are disillusioned and the right never trusted big tech coastal elites to begin with.

I think it’s funnier that they felt unsafe around a prop. Let the symbolism sink in.

It doesn’t mention anywhere that the guillotine was not functional.

I just looked at the social media post. It’s a tiny scale guillotine. It’d struggle to slice anything larger than a carrot. The blade probably isn’t even real, nor made to come down.

It’s not astroturfig. That’s the way a lot of local elections (and 1-2 statewide elections) work. It’s a system that has precedent, so it gets the most support.

But yes, there’s more than one way to shear a sheep. I’m open to any variety of choices not based on winner-take-all.

there isn’t a situation where voting for someone you want increases odds for someone you don’t.

RCV barely increases the odds for someone you don’t want. The whole idea is that it rewards moderate views so that “everyone’s 2nd choice” is better than a radical first choice. The Spoiler effect will almost always be there, but Nothing is worse than FPTP for that effect. Especially with Score based voting that can (and given experience with internet ratings, will) degenerate to “0 or max score”. Score based voting works best with high information electorate, and the US… hell, pretty much all global politics aren’t full of people laser focused on every little law.

I like Approval based voting, though. The issue lies more in excessive runoffs when we get the most popular candidates (or the worst case where none of the candidate are approved enough).

It’s not in the constitution, but the power of voting lies in the states. So we’d need state to slowly change their voting systems for this to happen properly.

The electoral college for nationals is a whole different ballpark. Also not in the constitution, but I think that still lies with states?

It’s a snowball’s chance in hell of actually happening, but this would be the best time for this to happen if it lead to proper new policy that changes how voted are counted.

Now I see what you mean about the idea of a big Left state splitting its electoral votes. Which would be bad in 2028. But the snowball’s chance is most/all states shifting to a non FPTP voting system and making a 3rd party viable.

Probably because “radial left” has no real leg to stand on right now and the big talking points of what the GOP call “radical left” are just this. Exhibit A.

We can theorize about radical left. Meanwhile, radical right is happening in real time.

a video shared on social media showed him having sex with a 17-year-old girl.

Even if he just turned 18 (and there are Romeo and Juliet laws protecting that), that is such a profoundly stupid idea. It’s already crass sharing it with a few friends, but you posted it online? Idiot.

A bit hard to say. Since there’s two major types of contractors

1. the “basically employees” contractors are ones who do everything expected of an employee but aren’t granted the status of an employee. This is a “simple” matter in enforcing that they be actual employees under the law, either through courts or with a definition of duties that keep them from skirting that line (though employers will always try). Basically make the definition relatively lax so they can’t do stuff like “work 38 hours a week” to avoid it.

2. The “truly contractors” who essentially set their own hours and get paid for work provided. Basically stuff in the gig economy . These are pay as you go so I’m not sure you can enforce vacation time into this model.

What Bernie proposed is starting from a low place to appease people who are genuinely greedy and apathetic to the point of being evil. You can’t do that.

Without leverage, we have to do it this way. They just shut it down if it’s the slightest bit “radical”. Make it in a way that even the most rabid MAGA diehard can’t disagree with the idea.

Contractors are difficult because they tend to be hourly, and hourly employees lose out when there is time off. My first studio would do typical 2 week shutdownns around Christmas time, but they stopped doing it because workers complained about lost pay.

They should definitely be added. But I think getting a foot in the door is more important while we still have this current administration.

Yeah, there’s 3 different lenses here. Preservation, ownership, and piracy.

It’s a bit of a hot take, but I don’t value “preservation” in the way most gamers do. I prefer it instead of not, but my lens here is as simple as “piracy will always be the true preservation mechanism”. The ability to back up your games is legal and technically that game lying on my computer is “preservation”. But preservation without distribution is gatekeeping in a way. Distribution is what ensures true preservation, but we cross into piracy.

What I do value is ownership and as you said, Game Key Cards give you all the benefits of ownership at the cost of preservation. It can theoretically be useless one day, and when that happens I see it as free game to pirate. But technically I believe even online Wii games you own can still be downloaded, despite not being able to buy on the store anymore. So we’ll see how long that lasts.

I just post this everytime:

The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you.
They are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor.
They don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct.
Unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy.
Unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare.
Unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike.
They allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.
You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone.
They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn."

-Methodist Pastor David Barnhart

In my eyes, any shred of legitimacy about pro-life in the US disappeared when the GOP told voters to forget about the Epstein Files and they collectively went along with it.

He really just said “the only legal abortion is my abortion” out loud. I bet he also complains about his healthcare too, huh?

Well. If 90% of the market ends up game streaming, that’s what the vast majority of game devs will target, even indies.

That kind of marketshare implies that Steam gives up the idea of local games. And if that happens we’ve already lost the fight. I don’t think it’ll go that far for a very long time.

Besides, developers still need hardware to develop games. So the idea of them ceasing to make consumer GPUs seem far fetched. They are needed for a lot more than just playing the biggest games.

Like we can go back to the usenet days when the internet was a niche.

Well we’re here aren’t we? It’s not the 90’s, but we also came here because we refused to let adslop become our future of forums and disusccion. We don’t need 90% adoption to foster a community. If we could get to .1% we’d already be in a very good place.

Unless you are willing to find a new hobby, there will always be a game you will compromise on if you have these sort of values, and millions of people that just don’t care enough.

Sure. A few games here and there built upon decades of investment. Not every single AAA game ever. I don’t think it will be sustainable for any attempts to make new IPs or anything that isn’t already making hundreds of millions per year.

I don’t have the answers

Probably indies for a lot of enthusiasts who aren’t stuck in a specific AAA moat.

Now that’s weird. Is a ps5 disc digital because you need to download the data day one anyway? I don’t think the packing and manufacturing companies would agree with this

The term “weed” has no formal scientific status at all,

Sure it does. It’s not astrophysics precise (because biology in general is a “soft science” in many regards), but it has a meaning when you talk about it in the domain.

In botany, a weed is a general term for any plant growing where it is not wanted. Weeds interfere with human activities and compete with crop plants for water, light, and nutrients.

Some weeds can later be found to have previously unknown benefits and be removed from the category, while other cultivated plants can be transplanted to new climates, escape cultivation, and become weeds or invasive species. Thus, the category of weeds is ever-changing, making the term relative.

The general term for the first sentence is what everyone uses colloquially. But the reasoning for it being unwanted is not “because it looks weird”. an otherwise “attractive” plant (like grass) can be a weed in some other context if it’s taking nutrients from more ecologically valuable plants.

It’s ethics and morality applied to a specific situation.

And I agree. But I also agree there is no morality to a polar bear eating your face. That’s just nature. There are lines, I don’t know your specific context.

For me, I was raised removing tumbleweeds. One of the most tenacious and invasive weeds out there. I don’t even think they are native to my country. But I sure hold no remorse pulling them up the same way I would a dandelion (even if me blowing on one is technically spreading it out).

If I was standing there with a gun to your head because I’ve decided you’re offensive to my garden you wouldn’t genuinely believe it’s fine for me to kill you simply because you can’t do anything to stop it.

Sure. Then a man with a bigger gun will at best arrest you and you’d be thrown in jail. We realized human on human violence needs to be regulated to make it as close to zero as possible. The police have a monopoly on unchecked violence, so our options without consequences are limited and discouraged.

There’s a clear and obvious distinction between taking another life as a necessity because you need to eat in order to survive, and killing on a whim because you decide you don’t like how one form of life looks.

Yup.

I’d certainly pay money to watch a bear chasing you down and eating you so that I could witness how much you’re definitely not talking out your ass when saying that you wouldn’t complain about it, because bears needs food.

I’d run. I’d try to defend myself. I’d do my best to preserve my life. But trying to shame a bear seems like a useless endeavor. Thtat’s all I’m trying to get across with my metaphor.