There are also some Republicans that will state they don’t like the ruling but are also too afraid of the loss of their seat to actually do anything for the country the swore to protect.

Any Republican that supports impeaching a right wing Supreme Court justice (let alone 6 of them) is going to be committing career suicide. It would be handing vacancies to the Democrats to fill, and potentially locking in a left leaning court for decades.

Now, obviously they should be able to put the good of the country and the rule of law above things like partisan politics and their prospects for re-election. But we’ve already had several rounds of purges on the right that have wiped out anyone with principles or conscience since those things get in the way of being blindly loyal to Trump.

Steam isn’t a monopoly, I can get my games elsewhere (epic, gog, humble store, origin etc). But Steam is dominating the market because it does it better. It offers value and features that others don’t, and it generally hasn’t abused its dominant market position to squeeze the consumer or crush their competitors. The closest thing to enshittification we’ve seen from Steam was them allowing third party DRM and launchers, which isn’t something they wanted, it’s them backing down from a stand-off.

I want competition, but there’s good competition and bad competition. Good competition is what we see from Steam and gog, where they stand out by being good at what they do and giving customers what they want.

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

I think it’s easy to look at all the bullshit EA and Ubisoft and the like pull now, and imagine that same pattern from streaming playing out in gaming.

I Always thought Perkins was Jerkins

Creating massive penalties equal to the whole cost of a house for anyone that sells after less than 6-8 years would have devastating unintended consequences. It might make flipping impractical, but it would also hurt a lot of people who find themselves in a position where they need to sell, and would increase the risks associated with buying a house for lower income buyers.

It would help if you targeted the profit from the sale instead of the whole price. Flipping is about buying low, minimizing the cost of improvements, and then selling for a massively inflated amount. Without that profit it’s not worth it. For a normal person, being able to make money on the deal is nice, but at least recouping your costs can keep you economically stable and allow you to move on with your life.

I also think that you would want to combine this with some plan for helping low income buyers with the restoration of neglected properties that would normally be snatched up by flippers.

I also think the arbitrary age restriction on owning a rental property needs an exemption for inherited properties if nothing else. A 20ish year old who inherits a home or rental property when their parent(s) die is not abusing a loophole, and immediately hitting them with additional legal problems and forcing them to sell a house that has a tenant already in there is just unnecessary chaos for everyone involved.

I’m also curious how large apartment complexes fit into this plan. Are they also banned? Do you just need an owner to occupy a (potentially much nicer) apartment in the building? If you can still operate a huge apartment complex, I would expect the market to shift heavily towards those. If you can’t well, that raises it’s own issues around urban housing and population density.

Gonna make this the animal companion for my Drowid.

Taking preorders today. First unmanned set up mission to be launched in 18 months. First manned colony ship full of technicians to launch in 24 months. First luxury Starship™ to launch in 36 months.

12 years later

The first ship full of semi-functional robots and temporary shelters (engineered to nanometer level tolerances) blows up on launch pad.

Musk announces that it was a very successful test. During the next investor call, Musk explains that they are on track for the manned mission sometime next year. He says that preorders have slowed but not stopped, that the premium nonrefundable Space Marine™ and Starfighter™ packages have continued to increase revenues, and that they are in negotiations with Disney to offer Jedi™ packages that come in Padawan™, Knight™, and Master™ levels (the knight package will include simulated telekinesis on day one, while the master packages should be able to deliver ESP sometime after wave 1 of colonists reach X city on Planet X, formerly known as Mars).

Musk goes on to explain that the switch to only taking payment through the X app is actually saving them money. Musk’s line is “accidentally” muted while he is responding to a follow up question about X refusing to comply with investigations related to banking regulations that he claims it is exempt from.

Tesla stock plummets the next day, and yet, somehow, is still overvalued.

Arctic creature here. I wear a kilt and t-shirt all year round. Sandals too, unless snow is recent enough that it won’t have been cleared from wherever I’ll be walking.

Honestly, I’ve been thinking about switching to Linux with my next system since about a month after I built my current system, over 4 years ago. That’s how long it took for me to be sick of Microsoft’s bullshit in Windows 10.

That said, I’m not looking forward to figuring out how to get into Linux. It’s probably easier than I think, but having done 0 research (as I don’t need a new system yet), the impression I have is that there’s a ton of stuff I’m going to have to figure out before getting started.

Old.reddit is reddit from a time when it was designed with user experience in mind, rather than trend chasing and maximizing ad placement.

I’ve heard that the reason old.reddit is still supported is because new reddit can’t run without it. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if the developers of new reddit were pushed to rush something out to meet demands from higher up, and therefore didn’t make something clean and severable. I mean, we’re talking about a site whose video player wants to load every resolution at once on every video you scroll past in an infinite feed, my expectations aren’t terribly high.

I love all three and have no idea how I got here.

I can go with either extreme or anything in the middle, depending on what fits the story, tone and aesthetic.

At the same time, either one can look stupid when there’s no thought put into it. We don’t necessarily need to know how any futuristic stuff works, but it helps if the people designing it have some vague idea of why things are there and what they are supposed to do. It doesn’t have to be realistic, but it can help it stay internally consistent. And it helps avoid the pitfalls of lazy or obviously impractical designs that can plague sci-fi. It can be very distracting when the set is a bunch of random plastic tubes, half the contents of a Spencer’s Gifts, and recycled props that have been bouncing around for decades despite having no apparent function.