Frankly, these are really bad laws. It is a good thing that he appears not to be inclined to even try to take advantage, but those laws explicitly encourage remaining at war in order to maintain power, so a worse person would definitely be trying to maintain a forever war situation.
It would mean that whatever the US might hope to gain from invading Canada would be dwarfed by what the US would lose in the conflict.
The problem is this is already the case. Nuclear weapons may make it even more lopsided, but the country is already losing more than it stands to gain from an invasion purely on the economic results.
Hey, hey. Elon Musk purchased the US fair and square, we’ve known that for like 3 months now, no need to go acting all surprised!
Remember when people were posting articles on how stupid and ridiculous DOGE is because it wouldn’t have the authority to do anything?
Well, in essence and at its purest level the difference in thinking between Leftwing and Rightwing is the difference between “I want people to have a better life” and “I want to have a better life”.
Not even that. The difference is between “I want people to have a better life (objectively speaking).” and “I want to have a better life (as compared to those people).” As long as their lives are better when compared to those people, the conservatives are satisfied. Even if everyone’s lives, including their own, get objectively worse.
Something I’ve been thinking a lot lately is that democracy is a process. It is a means by which we attempt to ensure a just and fair government for all. It’s not an end in itself; we don’t want democracy because democracy, at least not once people really think about it.
Which leads me to a saying. “The ends do not justify the means.” This is a commonly held statement. However, it also works the other way:
The means do not justify the ends.
That means it doesn’t matter if something was done by the rules, using the process, it doesn’t matter if we voted for it, it doesn’t matter what process was used to achieve it. If the ends are wrong, going “well, it’s what was decided democratically” isn’t an excuse.
If one person or a few people have a definition wrong, that’s a thing that can be corrected.
If the majority of people think that’s the definition, and it’s been that way for decades, then you have the definition wrong.
That is how it works as long as no one does anything to stop it.
Same as how Trump is not eligible to be President by the constitution, but that didn’t stop him.
Not even that, it’s just a matter of what’s really important. They threw out the filibuster on supreme Court appointments the instant it might’ve blocked them from appointing those who would give them more power.
So as soon as something comes up that they consider genuinely important rather than performative, it’s gone.
It’s sad that in a country of over 300 million people, only one of us is both marginally competent enough to take successful action against these people, and not a chicken shit coward unwilling to put themselves on the line. And yeah, at least for now, I too am among the chicken shit cowards.
I used to think that way. Indeed, one of my favorite quotes is from D&D, where an Arcanaloth, a being who is literally the physical manifestation of neutral evil, says “My friend, do you truly believe we consider ourselves evil? No, we seek only good. It’s just that our definitions don’t quite match.”
But more and more in the real world I have come to believe these people know that what they are doing is wrong…and they don’t care.
I might have been on epic’s side if they had delivered a storefront/launcher at least as good as Steam, then found they still weren’t able to compete and only then decided to try the exclusivity crap.
They did not. They have a launcher/store that is far worse than Steam or even GOG (which is an accomplishment; GOG’s isn’t all that good and yet they manage to be worse by a large margin), and they didn’t even attempt to provide a better product/service. Instead they just started throwing money in order to secure exclusivity.
It shows all they want is to muscle into the market, not provide anything better for people.
We just need a general rule: no company may offer more in compensation to any person than one hundred times the value the company paid in compensation to its lowest paid worker.
Add in words and details to make sure there aren’t any loopholes, of course, and the problem will be largely solved across the board.
It’d be hilarious if one of the people negotiating one of those military contracts went “well, apparently your company can’t even handle scaling up a video game made by your own company, so we no longer have the confidence to rely on your product. We might offer a chance at the contract again in ten years, if no other incidents shake our confidence again.”
I really hope the media loses these hard, honestly. At this point I don’t even mind if Trump benefits some, I just want to see the media that sanewashed Trump and pretended there was anything reasonable about him returning as a presidential candidate get what they deserve.
It was actually a majority this time, don’t forget. Over half of Americans chose Trump.
Upside is the cult of personality is attached to Trump, and no one else has been able to pull it off him. Trump is only effective because somehow, for some insane reason, he, personally, has a lot of devoted followers.
It doesn’t need anyone to convince devs to implement it. I can do it whenever I run an emulator of old console games already, and devs of those games never implemented it.
If Sony wants to add it as a hardware feature they can.
As far as the patent, hopefully it’ll get denied but I doubt it. Once they have it it’ll cost someone time and money to challenge it, even though it should be a slam dunk that it is neither a new idea nor innovative and novel. This is how a lot of these egregious parents continue to stand - the cost of challenging them is high, especially if some blistering idiot of a judge ruled in a farcical manner.
Maybe Valve needs to stop pushing updates for things they certified working until they certify the update won’t break them.
Never understood why Steam forces updates, but this would be a very good reason for them to do a 180 on it and let customers choose the version they want instead of forcing an update to the latest.
One problem is people can’t keep secrets. This involves too many people who would have to keep the secret. And when it comes out that it’s just a marketing ploy, some portion of the customers would be even more upset.