Lvxferre [he/him]

I’m still watching it as it’s a rather long video, but thank you for sharing that.

At those times you kind of get why Ninhelldo is suing Palworld. It is not about direct competition (Palworld plays a lot more like Ark than Pokemon); it’s because Palworld makes Pokémon look boring, uninspired, stale.

Tights/leggings

Touka approves this rank!

Sorry. I couldn’t resist. (The intro of this anime is such a banger that I still remember the MC’s obsession with leggings and tights.)

People like Musk rarely take into account the overall impact of this sort of tariff in the international chain.

I’ll give you an example. I live in Latin America. My processor is AMD, so made in USA with Taiwanese semiconductors.

But let’s pretend that I were to upgrade my processor today. AMD gets 25% tariffs over Taiwanese semiconductors, but it won’t “eat” the tariff, it simply relays it to the customers. So I’d pay more for the processor.

Would I? Fuck no. I’ve run a potato computer for years, might as well do it in the future. If some Taiwanese, Chinese or European alternative pops up, less unreasonably priced, I’d be willing to buy it. Taiwan still profits, so does the local market, but instead of a chunk of my money going to USA, it would go to one of those three.

Except that I’m not the only one. Others would do the same as me. Slow but sure and cumulatively, international trade swaps the middlemen in USA with middlemen elsewhere.

AMD is getting less sales, thus less profits. Investors hate it. Why bother investing in USA? They’ll invest in a booming tariff-free alternative. Vulture capital flies away in a flock, once the carcass is gone.

And it is not just CPUs; it’s also GPUs and everything else electronics. And it is not just AMD, but Intel and every other business relying on Taiwanese microchips.

With less money entering USA, the local customer market is slightly poorer. Now there’s less pressure to attend that market. In those situations, is it worth for AMD to keep itself in USA? Rename itself to “IMD”, set up base in Ireland, boom, done.

Musk is sinking the economy of his own banana republic maize dictatorship. And it’s getting amusing to see.

[And in case anyone is wondering why I’m saying “Musk” instead of “Trump”, it’s because I genuinely believe that the later is there because the former wants it, not the opposite. Trump is that sort of tiny useful idiot, easy to control, just call him “who’s a good boy? strong man? Yes, you are, Trump! Good boy! Strong man!” and he’ll bark in the desired direction.]

Their brains were already this sort of sludge. They never gave a bloody fuck about people, their shtick was always profits. But they were willing to pink-wash, black-wash, rainbow-wash their junk, as it was good advertisement.

Now that they feel like they have the back of some banana republic maize republic they’re going all out.

If we (people in general) do it, we’re being filthy thieves and the reason why everything is bad. But when it’s a megacorpo, it’s suddenly a-OK?

Screw this shit. Information should be like the air, free for everyone. Not free for the GAFAM chaste and paid for us untouchables.

Yup, it does sound like him. But I genuinely believe that his goal is manufactories beelining to USA, and that doesn’t seem too likely for me.

I’ll go further. My headcanon is that Trump didn’t come up with this idea; someone else did, and carefully led Trump to it. That person knows that the manufactories won’t go to USA, but they don’t really care - they benefit from USA being economical and politically isolated, perhaps even at its population having decreased living standards.

EDIT: or, summed up in a single picture.

Yes and this might hurt China a bit, but it’ll hurt USA even more. It’s like shitting your own pants to make someone else smell it.

They were supposed to force those manufacturing plants to go to USA, but as the article shows it is not working:

[AsRock] “As for the 10% tariff applied to other products like GPU cards, we need some time to transfer the manufacturing to other countries.” [emphasis on the plural]

We already saw signs of this late last year, when PC Partner decided to relocate its headquarters from China to Singapore

And they likely won’t move into USA territory because USA might create some tax against the governments they import raw materials from, labour costs are high, and all that talk about expelling illegal immigrants will make labour costs even higher (lower labour supply = higher prices).

Yup. You can craft leaves that grant you bonuses once equipped. In a game about blowing leaves out of your screen. (One of the achievements even pokes fun at this contradiction.)

The game is weird, to say the least, but actually fun. It reminds me Anti-Idle, as there are multiple mechanics that are barely associated with each other, except on making some numbers go up; except that those mechanics revolve around leaves as a common theme.

Picture related:

I’m a sucker for crafting and breeding systems that allow you to customise equipment and/or characters. But it’s really hard to find good implementations of the idea, most have some obvious flaw:

• Pokémon (breeding) - in early games RNG plays too much of a role, so it’s hard to get what you want. Late games don’t fix this, instead they allow you to skip the process altogether (see: hyper training).
• Niche - the breeding part of the game is actually really good, a shame that the rest of the game is a slop. For example gathering food gets a PITA once you got too many nichelings, and yet you want them to support your breeding pairs.
• RimWorld (Biotech; germline genes) - arbitrary restrictions that must be lifted through the usage of mods.
• RimWorld (crafting) - now we’re talking. If you pay close attention to which materials you’re using for which tasks, it pays off in the long run. There’s some luck involved, but you can get perfect (legendary) stuff fairly often if you know what you’re doing.
• Leaf Blower Revolution (leaf crafting) - the game encourages you to craft a lot of leaves and salvage most of them. That’s fine, it’s easy to get cheese anyway. The problem is the sheer amount of beer that you need to get the properties that you want in each leaf.
• Monster Breeder (old Flash game) - the game is a bugfest, and the lack of any sorting system makes you have a hard time even knowing which monster you should be breeding with which.
• Minecraft (tools and weapons) - vanilla has a really dumb system that doesn’t fit well in a game that encourages hoarding piles of materials into chests. The mod Tinkers’ Construct fixes this, and makes the system next to ideal.

Plus a lot more that I didn’t mention. Sorry for the wall of text.

As I mentioned in another thread, I don’t think that he’ll be able to attract chip makers to USA. Instead I think that he’ll kick every industry relying on those chips out of USA.

All those “explanations” babbling about Musk’s “intentions”… aaah, when will they cut off the crap???

Like. Let’s pretend for a moment that Musk was totally trying to convey “my heart goes out to you” or crap like that. It doesn’t bloody matter - regardless of his “intentions”, the gesture conveys support to Nazism, and it’s the only sensible way to interpret it within that context.

It’s the pot calling the kettle black.

Thanks!

I mentioned IPOs as an example of things making a company take a 180°, from “we luuuv customers!” to “customers are things to be milked, not humans to care about”. There are a thousand other possibilities - being bought by another (and more abusive) corporation, being inherited by arseholes and/or fools, or even a change in the mindset of its current owners.

There’s absolutely nothing preventing all those shitty outcomes. Nothing. And when one of them happens, the suckers who “buy” games through the platform - including myself, and probably you - will be shown a middle finger, and hear a moronic “ackshyually u didn’t buy the games lol you licensed them lmao”.

You can’t trust it.

Remember when Google’s motto was “don’t be evil”? Remember when Facebook was innovative? Remember when [insert any post-IPO platform] was privately owned?

Look at the past and future, not just the present. Corporations eventually go sour, and fight against the very users that they were supposed to serve. Give Steam/Valve enough power and it’ll do the same. We don’t need corporations serving us software; we need open systems.

That said Valve is situationally useful here because it’s eroding Microsoft’s power.

I hope that SteamOS finds more of its way into desktop computers. Sure, I don’t trust Valve; just like I don’t trust any other corporation. But it’s like fighting a big cancer with a smaller meta-cancer, if they hurt Windows/Microsoft I’m happy.

Plus its current relationship with GNU/Linux is symbiotic.

1. It’s morally good when people access information, culture, and entertainment.
2. It’s morally good when the author of a work gets rewarded by their work.

Piracy is morally justified when 1 is a more pressing matter than 2. As such, it’s justified in situations like this:

• If, in the absence of piracy, the pirate would still not pay for the goods - because #2 is set up to zero (the author of the work is not rewarded anyway).
• If it’s impossible to obtain the goods without piracy. For example, abandonware.
• If the author of the work would get breadcrumbs of the money used to access legally the goods, and the pirate compensates the author directly (e.g. donation).

I ended picking Miru (from another comment) up to watch anime, so I won’t automatise the system - I’ll use the RSS just to warn me when there are new episodes. That said, this extension (to allow transmission to download from rss) plus this site (to sift the RSS feed, so you don’t download e.g. individual episodes alongside batches) could help.