Perfect example. Insurance is an entire industry of blood sucking middle men producing absolutely nothing.

Good luck to your friend. Sorry they have to support a useless leech corporation instead of, you know, paying that money to actual workers.

It’s really hard to generalize about leftist groups. The communists that feel this way have formed co-ops, or are cooperating with anarchists to do something like syndicalism (focused on unionizing existing businesses).

But the methods to start and grow businesses in a capitalist country inherently rely on acting like a capitalist. Getting loans requires a business plan that makes profit, acquiring facilities and other businesses requires capital. Local co-ops exist because they can attract members and customers that value their co-opness, but it’s very hard to scale that up to compete at a regional level. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard to view it as an engine for vast change.

Communists that focus on voting are delusional (in my opinion) but like all reformists they view the existing government as the mechanism to make widespread change.

I thought it was great, premise and execution.

Yeah, I was part of those arguments too. In a perfect world Linux would have enough market share to warrant native ports, but Proton getting Wine one-click integrated into Steam and easily targetable is a more realistic bridge to that scenario than holding out on principle. As it is Linux gaming is in the best shape it’s ever been in thanks to Proton.

I also think the argument held more weight 20 years ago, before we started packaging up end user apps in giant self-contained images regularly.

This is a non-issue. If you’re a gaming company in the era of Proton, it makes more sense to just focus on Windows issues than to open yourself to support requests from people running any brand of Linux. Proton is just so much easier to target than standalone Linux and you can serve the Linux community / Steam Deck users without needing any actual expertise.

Use the ‘scaled’ sort for your frontpage. Helps keep the smaller communities you sub to from getting totally drowned out by some of the larger ones.

It only looks that way if you’re dumb. There are only two types of society in this world: racist, and racist but trying to deal with it.

It’s why I have a lot of schadenfreude for Sweden/Scandinavia as well. Enlightened multicultural social democracy for everyone… Until migrants show up with the wrong race/religion then suddenly a fascist contingent of your population materializes and there’s a “security crisis”

Any billionaire would take this deal. The hit is in imaginary money (i.e. stock/corporate assets) that won’t affect their daily lives and in return they get unspecified favors from the (other) oligarchs.

Platoon is my favorite as well. Love the contrasting cultures of the soldiers, think it really reflects where America was at on the war (old school, liquor drinking “patriots” backing violence vs. pot smokers just trying to get home alive). Oliver Stone is also an actual Vietnam vet too, Charlie is basically a self insert if I remember correctly.

I agree. I have become more amenable to things like Flatpak or Podman/Docker to keep the base system from being cluttered up with weird dependencies, but for the most part it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge upside to going full atomic if you’re already comfortable.

Light speed is a “you must be this clever to participate” barrier to becoming an interstellar species, that’s all. Even if it’s not breakable, it just means you gotta be able to plan hundreds or thousands of years into the future.

Raised by Wolves had a great intro theme and art style.

I would list the great Star Trek opening themes, but honestly they are long and can be a bit much when you’re on your like eighth episode in a row.

Hell yeah, congrats! I get back into DCSS every few years but I have only escaped with the orb once, a lucky MiFi run. Just getting there is huge!

I use private trackers exclusively for content I want to “own” or want in the highest possible quality. Stremio/RD is great though for my wife to be able to search new media and potentially stream in okay quality without fucking with sonarr. Or popular TV you’re maybe not sold on but would try an episode. Or for old SD content, like tossing on a 90s show for a few episodes. To be honest, I live in a world of ad block and Stremio is sometimes the only way I even know something is out…

Anyway, they complement each other well.

Yep. If they somehow were left with only cis white men, they’d redefine cis, white, or man to divide the remaining people.

I will watch this, but only because I’m fairly certain Neuromancer is unadaptable to the screen. The thing that makes William Gibson great is the fantastic way he writes, leaving so much to the imagination but creating a definite vibe. When you have to fill out every single detail to render it on screen, it’s not going to be the same work. I’m sure It’ll share characters and plot points, but these are not the things that make Neuromancer such a classic.

Last I checked, Texas was literally the only red state that actually paid more into the federal government than it took out. The cold snap was just the usual idiocy, but it’s not like it couldn’t be handled, the state just stopped caring about weather proofing infrastructure.

And with the amount of natural resources and basically year round agriculture that happens in Texas, I have no doubt it could be self sufficient to some definition. I almost wish they would secede and tank the current electoral landscape. As long as I can move out first.

Yeah, I’ll be honest I’m pretty tuned out on the Dems, but the first time I heard about this was an unwanted donation solicitation that started like “I just got off the senate floor…” and it made it feel so transparent that right now, it’s performative bullshit.

Could be the start of something, but it won’t be until the Dems prove they’re effective at something other than fundraising to lose elections.

Tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises. Same with toads being frogs.

Wikipedia says from Portuguese, through Persian, back to Sanskrit, being the grand daddy of English, calling it “cina”, and/or it has to do with Qin Dynasty that unified China.

Probably better than whatever bullshit they would have gotten from Zhongguo if “Peking” was as good as they could do with “Beijing”