The judges need to get their act together. We all see the playbook, they all see the playbook. If the judicial branch wants to have any value in six months, it needs to issue Temporary Restraining Orders and lock up people who ignore them, and it needs to do this on the scale of days or weeks, not months.

Otherwise it’s the same bullshit outcome. The judges rule in favor of the fired employees but it’s too late to undo everything. As we always expected. Jesus fuck, sigh. What a legacy to leave behind.

Yes. They need to move quickly. Public opinion is already shifting against Trump and Musk, and right now they are vulnerable.

Let’s do some overly simplistic bad economics just for fun. Let’s suppose that the American car companies are not hurt by the tariffs because those only target foreign car companies. Now all the foreign cars are 25% more expensive. This raises the demand for domestic cars. If the domestic car companies are trying to make money, they will jack up their prices 24%. And what are we told? Something about how they have duty to their shareholders? … Donald is having fun living in his dream world.

I don’t think they are trying to sabotage their own products. It really is that they’re not smart enough to see where is the value is. And this is kind of understandable, right? The underlying software has been copied already. It’s out there. If that company has value it’s only the user base. But that puts management in the strange situation where everything they are doing to make money is making their own product worse. And they kind of know it, right? But they can’t admit it. They can’t think about it clear. Their own mental stability relies on ignoring the obvious truths that they see and read every day.

“risking”? No no no. “promising”

The data says it’s not enough. That’s the point. We’re talking about averages here, and children who have no choice, right?

Think about what you’re saying. The market value fluctuates over time. Right now US housing is artificially inflated because of monopolies and rampant real estate speculation. When it tanks, it could tank hard and fast, and it might never get back to current levels. Nobody knows. And that is the time when tens of millions of Americans would love to buy homes.

My friend, FOSS has been readily available for more than a decade. Whether it’s LibreOffice or the GIMP or VLC or whatever, these are very old pieces of software.

It’s not taking off now. It already did. But now you personally are noticing. :-)

Zotero is the tool you want. It works perfectly.

The formatting… The formatting that you can easily modify. Sigh. It takes two minutes, my friend.

Anyway, you do you.

How can they catch people who have produced unlocked epubs? There are plenty of ways if they have your device at some future date.

I suppose the easiest predictable thing other than having your device seized when you’re entering the country for example or when you get arrested for example is that back doors could be installed on Android or iPhone that look for unapproved media.

The technology is already good enough for that. It’s only a question of implementation.

It’s interesting when people are put to the choice. On the one hand they could purchase a book with DRM that they don’t actually own. On the other hand, they could look for alternative means by which to obtain the book. And the more the publishers f*** with you, the more you might be inclined to never give them a penny.

Sure sure but let’s not get too “American exceptionalism here” . Plenty of other countries are fucked up in somewhat different ways, too. That’s reality.

My friend, that’s not how the electoral college works. Most of those potential votes did not matter at all. Please don’t go around victim blaming carelessly. It’s not cool.

Or nukes, either one, my friend.

No. Old news, this is.

I’ve never had compatibility issues. Of course many people have, but a lot of the time people are blindly speculating about potential badness.

Of course there are alternatives to Excel. Anyone pretending otherwise has only worked at a few places and is generalizing with great but mistaken confidence.

But even if there weren’t, think about those companies living on the edge of one software breakdown. There’s a word for that: brittle. Meh, YOLO.

It is a joke and it is funny and it would also have serious consequences. This is a classic example of the lulz. Politics can be so dark and twisted real, and if you want to stay involved in it for decades, you have to appreciate the lulz and then still keep going.

Let’s compare it to, for example, the fact that Donald Trump has control over the US military and nuclear weapons. That’s shocking. He’s a complete moron and he’s kind of evil to boot. Many of his good buddies are evil racist pieces of s***, too. So that’s the starting point. That’s where most of us are already at. Does this current idea make things worse? Of course it does. But things were already bad. That’s why we’re not panicking anymore than we were yesterday or last month.

The deniers will deny. Jesus, just look at MAGA today if you need another reminder. More dead people just means they’ll alter the conspiracy theory.