Obviously things cost money, you patronising jackass, but pining all your hopes on CEOs and the ultra-wealthy to cut in to their own profit margins for the sake of humanity makes you more braindead than I am. It’s scientific innovation that drives discovery, cost reduction, and economic growth, not profit-hoarding conglomerates.

A large portion of our discoveries and inventions in the past fifty years or more are building on top of innovations made during the 60s, 70s, and 80s by NASA’s launches. Electrical engineering, structural engineering, communications and data, materials sciences, all needed to be advanced for space travel. Handing this responsibility off to SpaceX just leads to all the data, discoveries, innovations, and corollaries being patented, trademarked, and locked away to make sure no competitor can take advantage of it.

Shell knew climate change was going to devastate the planet over 50 years ago. Did they capitalise on that opportunity to develop green and renewable energy first and completely dominate that market for the betterment of themselves and the planet? No. They locked down that information, spread misinformation for decades, and made short term profiteering decisions to advance their own individual careers. Now we’re watching the planet slowly burn. So sure, let’s trust the corporate pigs.

This is a horrible take. Absolutely awful, ultra-capitalist drivel. Why does every action or accomplishment have to be viewed through the lense of economic benefit? Not even holistic or utilitarian, just stakeholders and making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier… Who gives a fuck about space tourism? What the hell does that give us as a species?

The original comment about the importance of aerospace and space exploration is absolutely correct, but the idea that the end goal is space tourism is more than enough to make me turn against it also. The end goal is exploration, technological advancements, and a greater understanding of how our universe works. We should be taxing the ever-loving shit out of sociopaths like Musk and Bezos and feeding some of that in to NASA, and ESA, so scientists can make discoveries for us all, rather than businessmen making discoveries so they can exploit, gatekeep, and profit off it.

It would be massively more simple, and more profitable to government, to simply levy a colossal tax on property owners who leave their rental properties empty for more than six months or so.

It seems like their economy is reliant on a series of short term fixes, and as each one winds down another bigger one needs to take its place.

12% interest is another example of this, it will improve things in the short term but has no effect on the underlying problems, meaning that in a couple of months or so something even more drastic will be needed.

And the rest of the developed world is going to follow close behind as long as the wealth inequality stays as ridiculously broken as it is.

The lizardpeople living in the sewers of NYC were performing updates, so their control signals couldn’t get through…

What could be a more fundamental part of the American Dream than the “tired, poor, huddled masses” trying to give their children a better future through naturalization.

This is just another Republican nail in the coffin of that dream, killing everything that made others envious of America while they shout more and more shrilly that America is still the best country on the planet.

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Blue checkmark and gold checkmark are different things.

But a massive amount of them are. Small and solo creators on Youtube or Twitch need to conform to the rules of Google and Amazon, and even medium size creators are influenced and coerced by the precedents and market trends set by the much larger corporations.

And it doesn’t matter if not all content is provided by large corporations, those large corporations employ the most people, and dictate in a lot of ways, the rules of the employment market. It’s due to their habits and practices that wages are artificially low and expenses are inflated for record profits.

Until corporate greed is managed properly, consumers will always struggle to have enough expendable income to pay content creators, and therefore will always be searching for free content.

They are absolutely not separate issues. How can I be expected to shell out $15 per month for 10 different content subscriptions if I can only just afford to put food on my table?

Surely you can reverse that and point out corporations whining and moaning about people expecting free content when they’re barely paying their employees enough to afford to pay their bills.

The problem starts with corporate greed, hoarding revenue by keeping employee’s salaries to the minimum acceptable, providing as little functionality as possible to reduce overheads, double dipping by selling a product/subscription and then selling their customer’s data, and then complaining they aren’t getting more money for what little they are doing.

Then inevitably a little guy like Kbin comes along and suffers because the internet is filled with soulless, ultra-capitalist corpo scumbags.

RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.

All are good choices.

But the other side of that is no political accountability. There’s no risk of punishment, so why should they care? Insider trading, corruption, nepotism, general lying, acting in bad faith, and intentionally misrepresenting facts to disrupt useful debate.

Politicians get away with all of that and more, and get paid massive amounts of money, above and below the table, while they do it.

It’s so weird to me, what do they expect to happen to the economy of their state when their workforce has such a poor education?

I think perhaps we can come to some middle ground between those two sentiments though! The nerfs were a bit heavy, but the game is still new, no one should really be so upset at major changes dropping before the start of the first season. People acting like Blizzard stole their money and slept with their mother… The game isn’t even unplayable.

Steal this.

I don’t think so, the ARPG I have in mind wouldn’t be open world, would have no campaign and much less focus on story overall, a much more detailed crafting system akin to Path Of Exile but perhaps less punishing, and much more focus on stacking up as many extra modifiers as possible rather than being limited, push your team to get the best rewards.

No timegating, no daily/weekly quests you must log in for, the only limitation is your skill.

I’ve been thinking about an ARPG based around World of Warcraft’s mythic dungeons.

Scalable, multi-player, enhanceable instances where completion of more difficult versions of the instance rewards in better gear and crafting options.

The idea is that the content is created for a 5-man party (1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps) but you can try solo it, or bring up to 20 people to massively increase the difficulty and the rewards. Instances would follow WoW dungeon’s formula of trash mobs (which drop crafting materials and have rare drop chances for certain gear) pathing you towards a succession of bosses with very different, complex mechanics with stages, signaled abilities, and skill requirements.

This would include a character levelling system to unlock new class abilities and mechanisms, a party finder system, certain dungeons locked behind character level and the completion of other dungeons at a certain difficulty level. Perhaps you could extend it to add in “world bosses”, massive 200-man bosses with a chance at particularly unique loot, but of course that would require a certain level of infrastructure and a game population making it justifiable.

To provide a different perspective to everyone else, I would say that it’s not the right time if you want everything to “just work”.

I tried out Ubuntu 22.04 just a couple of months ago, and only one game of the several I tried “just worked”. Everything else either didn’t work at all, or required hours of searching and troubleshooting and problem solving, with mixed success. And I’m not a technophobe, I’m a software developer with experience in system support.

People keep saying there’s lots of guides out there for most things, and that’s true. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the guide will work for you. I tried multiple “guides” to get my games working and most of them didn’t help. Either they were too old, or there was a step that I couldn’t complete, or I completed the guide and there was an error that isn’t mentioned in the guide. Or any number of other problems.

Regardless of what people say, it may not be as simple as “switch to Proton and install Lutris”. In the end I just got frustrated with having to work so hard to get my own computer to do the things I wanted it to do, and so I reverted back to Windows and had all my software working as expected within a couple of hours.

Policies like that are about treating the addicts, not the distributors. I absolutely agree on that practice with regards to addicts, but we still need to go after the distributors of these lethal, destructive drugs.