Detroit failed because of those policies that drove the tax base away. Yes, that is entirely the city's fault. No one has any moral obligation whatsoever to live in any given place. Quite the reverse: it's the city leadership's job to make the city inviting. But Detroit chose a different path.

Tax laws are a big part of what makes both people and businesses want to come or go, balanced by the degree to which those tax dollars actually make the city a better place (the absence of corruption). A city seeking prosperity needs to remember that. You can tax all the things, and give all the money to your friends - but not forever.

All of which you did when you downloaded the game in the first place.

Which is why I prefer GOG. But almost no one's willing to sell their games there, and Steam would be equally empty if it were the same as GOG. Steam does a great service in convincing many smaller studios that Steam is "enough DRM," no need for more. (EA can go fuck itself.) It's not like these guys would be on GOG if Steam vanished - they'd be a wilderness of homegrown distribution platforms with DRM licensed from one of the really evil companies.

Well, I use my CPU to transcode media files, so I might get one. But for gaming? When will CPU ever matter for gaming, unless your running some terribly-written Java game?

Of course you have to be online the first time you launch it, just like you have to be online to download the game. That's not actually a burden.

Steam offline mode has had issues over the years, and I still don't trust it, but having to be online the first time you ever launch a game is the least annoying copy protection possible. There's a freaking checkbox in Steam to launch a game as soon as the download is complete, for goodness sake, so you don't even need to babysit it to do that first launch.

He was laid off with all the QA guys. He got a nice severance package though.

Wikipedia's WikiProject Editor Retention has looked at the same problem, but from a retention point rather than the perspective of attracting new women. There were no real answers, just lots of speculation. Lots of people blame the culture, or say the place is too "rough and tumble" but I found that conclusion rather sexist, as it says that women can't compete for ideas in the same environment as men. There doesn't seems to be a difference in retention of men and women, they just aren't coming to Wikipedia to begin with.

And some people just want to have some sort of "right" to be an annoying SoB, and don't want to turn vegan just for that.

Now, now, now... that last example is at best black magic.

Global warming denial meets conspiracy theory.

I feel like in some weird, cheesy DC-Marvel crossover comic...

In all fairness, 200 years ago Americans were smart enough to not settle in the middle of the bloody desert.

There is exactly one surefire way to create rain, it works flawlessly every time:

Wash your car.

I sure hope it's not. Else it's trivial for a company to put another one under. Like, say, a company producing a mainboard with a well known fault. Buy a container of them, run them to failure then DEMAND them to be repaired instead of replaced.

You might want to notice that a damn lot has happened since WW2. Politicians ain't allowed to run countries anymore, they are too prone to wars.

Why couldn't they make a race track similar to a slot car track, although without the slot?