You’re also missing a big piece… You can’t fucking trust the reviews any more. Steam reviews are great, and game reviewers have been trying to insist “no, this trash game is actually great, don’t trust your fellow gamers” for years now

At this point, it’s blatantly obvious you can pay for good critic reviews, and there’s no walking that back… Especially since there’s better, more honest, options

Same reason everything is bad… Constantly demanding more from less workers, and because the priorities of the company owners is not quality

Central planning is terrible… Bernie isn’t about that, he’s dialed in on next steps

Decentralized planning is better - don’t control from on high, support it being done as local as possible. Cast a wide net, Foster competition while forcing them to share their answers

Repair, smuggle, Jerry rig

Ok I did… Someone else told me

You sell something for 20€, you put on VAT to that and that’s the total price paid by the buyer.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, I’m not even opposed to the idea of a VAT or a country incentivizing local production, but I feel like I’m being led in circles trying to understand what it actually is

But like… Don’t you think the home country(ies) taxed the production themselves at every stage themselves? And now it’s coming into your country, and it’s all taxed again. If it was made in your country, it would have been theoretically taxed at the final value once

So the lower value the import coming into the country, the lower the taxes on it. It’s essentially a tax break for manufacturing in the country, no?

Wait… What? You say it has no implications for international trade, but you just said things produced in-country are taxed less…

It’s doesn’t sound like it’s just perception, it’s incentivizing production within the country. You’re taxing imports fully, but making sure to tax the value added in county only once, which is huge

I’m not opposed to such a thing, I’m all about producing as locally as possible, but that seems like it’s in the same ballpark as a tarrif. Am I missing something?

Okay, but like… What does that mean? What are the implications? I feel like I have to be missing something

Like, we do something similar with write-offs - that $12 you spent to buy the thing is subtracted from your tax burden

And the way we do taxes sucks. It’s terrible and VAT sounds cleaner… But I don’t see where that has any implications for international trade

I mean… Everything is, really. I don’t think it’s a problem with cloud, I think corporations are slashing their workforce so hard they can’t keep up the quality

Probably because we don’t really ever hear it explained

I consider myself pretty well read and I think I know what it means, but I’m making some assumptions. Could you explain it, and why it’s a good solution here?

I thought you didn’t get the joke, so I made it more obvious… Even in asking for clarification you seemed to be playing along

I don’t know what to tell you… This is my favorite form of humor, and even if people don’t get it I normally just let them think I’m an idiot and move on

But since you put time into your response, I put in time to explain how to spot this in the future

You know, people are regularly un-deported, right? Well at least they used to be… This is a thing that happens

Also, El Salvador isn’t refusing… The Trump admin is refusing to ask. We’re literally paying them for this service - can the state say “sorry, we can’t release this person because they’re in a private prison, and that’s against our contract with them”. No, the contract can be invalidated and the state can be compelled to take reasonable action to fix it

You can’t do a shell game to avoid court orders, and that’s exactly what the Trump admin is attempting

Nah, it’s not… The framers of the constitution put in multiple reset buttons, with the warning that this is for when their systems fail - not if. The question is, can we shake off the rust on one of the methods before we hit the final one

The pax Americana is over, the world no longer trusts us or respects us. They hate us, fear us, pity us… But for a generation to come, they won’t trust us

Shit is going to get rough, but it’s far from over. The question is will we see the other side of this in our lifetime

Saying someone is doing a 5d chess move is an over-exaggeration of saying they did a 3d chess move, which means to do something that seems incomprehensible at a glance but makes total sense to someone who understands the rules.

The joke is to insist that if you understood the reasoning, it’s actually a brilliant move. But it’s 5d chess, a game that doesn’t exist (and 5d chess with multiversal time travel isn’t really 5d chess, despite the name)

What good is a rainy day fund if the dollar becomes worthless?

If you’re sure it’s about to crash, the smart thing to do is spend it all beforehand

Or maybe it’s a 5D play. If the economy collapses in that time, their state will be in a better position

I found it super cool. It’s dreamlike… There’s no enemies so it didn’t feel like a nightmare, just like playing a game in a dream

Cheap doesn’t mean fake, just like expensive doesn’t mean quality… Not anymore

My top pick right now is fedora silverblue, I’m running it on my test bed/server and I’ve been impressed

I’m running bazzite on my main one, which is related but geared towards steam and maximizing game support, it’s pretty good and closer to “just works” for any kind of gaming device, it’s less polished but it’s still pretty good

Steam runs natively and uses proton for game compatibility, similar idea to wine but it’s geared for games

It’s pretty good. Most games will run, sometimes with a little jiggling to get it to work, although performance isn’t quite as good (some games are particularly rough)

I’m technically dual booting, but I haven’t launched Windows in almost a year, and there’s only been a handful of games I passed on primarily because of support