France on Sunday took a step closer to delivering what was once seen as an unthinkable nightmare: a far-right government taking power in Paris for the first time.
Well… the first time in a while. And just as the last time was exiting living memory.
I’d vote for ToS era Pike over Trump. I’d vote for a candidate who only communicates via ouija board over Trump. I’d vote to not have a president for 4 years before I’d vote for Trump.
It’s crazy that Trump can get convicted of fraud, be found liable for sexual assault, promise to abuse presidential power to get revenge against those who cross him, actively undermine both national and global security, promise to round up millions and put them into camps, attempt to overthrow the election and refuse to not try it again, and so on, and his side is still so loyal they’ll wear solidarity diapers for him.
I was responding to someone else’s post which was discussing intergenerational blame. I’m sorry if this made you feel like you weren’t the center of attention for 2 seconds. But I’m sure if you keep being an asshole to random strangers on the internet you’ll eventually fill that void.
Everyone who is alive today is descended from slave owners, thieves, rapists, murderers, conquerors and oppressors. They are also all descended from people who were the victims of slavery, theft, rape, murder, conquest and oppression. If people are responsible for the actions of their ancestors, then we are all guilty of damn near everything, and it’s basically just original sin without all the Catholicism.
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.
What’s really clobbered Firefox has been the rise of smartphones, where Firefox has very limited uptake.
That’s fucking crazy, because Firefox has been far better than the default options for as long as I’ve had a smartphone. I only recently dumped chrome on desktop for Firefox, but I took one look at Chrome when I got an android and immediately dumped that shit.
Not for the Dominoes trip specifically, but they were paying for me to be there. I would assume that the local Dominoes got some kind of money out of it.
I’m not saying that the Chik-fil-a thing is something that would have interested me as a kid or that I would pay to send a kid to it. For one thing, the focus on customer service stuff does make it a bit weirder to me. Just pointing out that I had a similar experience and that it was something I enjoyed.
Some kids would probably love getting to see what happens in the kitchen, making something, and eating it. As long as it’s safe and age appropriate, and assuming they aren’t actually being used as labor, I don’t see how this is harmful.
When I was a kid a summer daycare program I was in took us to a Dominoes and I got to make my own pizza. It was awesome.
I guess Sony didn’t want my money after all.
The ten years of exclusive control is such a shitty idea. I was on a medication that actually had that period extended beyond 10 years, and I struggled to get the medication I needed pretty much from the day it hit the market until a generic was finally made available. And even that was only after the company resisted hard enough to get a class action suit filed against them.
It would be so simple to change the patent laws so that getting the patent requires them to allow other manufacturers to produce the drug as well, and instead of exclusivity, they can get a 10% cut. Still plenty of incentive to patent a new drug, but now that incentive is only raising prices by 10% instead of 10,000%.
Don’t worry, it might still bubble up to the surface in the hallucinations of an AI.
And that’s just the high level corruption. There’s more theft, bribery and fraud at every level. With each step in the procurement process, another chunk of that budget is negated.
Also, at least historically, a lot of Russia’s budget goes to things that aren’t playing a primary role in the fight for Ukraine, like their nuclear arsenal, a lot of their navy, and big R&D projects that produce little more than the appearance of a modern military.
Ukraine is a major global food supplier. The war has directly impacted food prices. And if Russia succeeds, it will only encourage more conflict of this kind. And that’s ignoring the possibility that this will escalate into an even larger conflict because Putin decides that NATO’s resolve is weak enough that article 5 is no longer a plausible threat.
Also, that stupid argument applies just as much to funding schools, cancer research, fighting climate change and basically all other functions of government that serve the public good. We should do more to address economic issues, but that doesn’t mean we should stop doing everything else.
My dad used to tell me “It’s a lot harder to carpet the world than it is to wear shoes.”
Ambitious redesigns of existing infrastructure are neat, but they are rarely more efficient or practical. Especially when you are overengineering to solve an issue that’s already been dealt with. A self cleaning room requires a lot of additional hardware, all of which has to be designed, built and installed, and has to be powered and run by software that needs to be programmed. It also needs to be maintained, and depending on how it’s cleaning things, it may also be dangerous, or at least capable of damaging property (ever have a motion activated light turnoff while in a bathroom stall? now imagine it triggers steam jets). Not to mention the potential hazards of water damage on a room if anything goes wrong.
Or, you can buy a mop for 0.1% of the price.
Humanoid robots can escape this problem because versatility adds value. The upfront cost may be tens of thousands of dollars, but for that price you’re getting something that solves many, many problems. They can potentially go from task to task, filling a multitude of roles, and ideally with minimal down time.
It also helps that we can use existing processes to train them. They can observe human workers performing a task, attempt to replicate that task, and use feedback to improve. And that’s critical because the hardware is the easier part, it’s software that’s the real challenge.
It’s easier to build a specialized robot for one task than to create a general purpose robot to handle that task. However, as the technology matures, I think it becomes much more practical to create a general purpose robot that’s capable of performing millions of tasks than to create millions of different specialized robots. Not only is that far less to design, source parts for, build and maintain, but it also makes it much easier to repurpose them as needs change. The same basic design can potentially be used for factory work, household chores, new construction, search and rescue operations, food service, vehicle maintenance, mining, caring for kids/elderly/pets, building and maintaining other robots, etc. We’re not there yet, but that’s where this kind of technology could potentially take us.
The advantage of a mostly humanoid robot is that it’s versatile and can use existing solutions built for people. Yes, you could replace the legs with wheels or treads, and you’d probably be just fine for most functions with a Johnny 5 type design, but there will still be exceptions. Being able to climb up or down a ladder for example means that you don’t have to engineer a solution to deal with getting onto a roof or down into a tunnel system. We’ve already spent thousands of years solving those problems for humans.
Babylon 5.
I rewatch it every few years, this time with the SO who finally caved and decided to watch it with me. Despite having seen the entire series half a dozen times I’m still finding things I never noticed before. And while it’s always been rather timeless, a lot of its themes are so much more applicable now than ever before. Cannot recommend it highly enough.
Other recent rewatches shared with the SO and found to have stood the test of time: Gargoyles, Batman TAS, Brisco County Jr, Daredevil, Star Trek TNG.
This assumes that they only ever have the names they have now. Call me crazy, but I suspect that immigration policies will probably shift a little at some point in the next 500 years.
Hell, I wouldn’t even be willing to bet that any given country would still be around in it’s current form by then, including Japan.
Competition usually isn’t bad. Unfortunately, Apple has a tendency to not only be terribly anti-consumer, but also tends to be a trendsetter. They do shitty things, and other companies learn from their example. Thus, the competition becomes a race to the bottom.
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.