Starting the Butlerian Jihad just a bit early, aren't you?

I forgot to add: Nintendo hates the fact that we can legally sell a game cartridge to someone else once we have played a game. They want everyone to have to buy their own copy from Nintendo, without there ever being any kind of used game market. Obviously, they make more money that way!

So if their abusive access-denial policies have the side-effect of scaring people away from the used game market, that is a total win!

We need better consumer protection laws to shut down abuse like this. But getting them is an extreme uphill struggle, given how much political power these super-rich international businesses wind up having.

Apple is pretty bad about this, as per the recently-reported story of Apple revoking a user's access to literally all of his apple hardware and email account because he bought a gift card that someone else had compromised. That's quite a lot worse since people depend on their apple devices much more than on a simple game console.

Google is bad about this too. They will disable your email accounts based on their automated policy violation detection and even though they, in theory, give you a way to get human review, reported cases show that they are notorious for showing no mercy even when you did was innocent and legal (but just has the appearance of risk). They feel justified in this since their services are free to you, but people get very dependent on their emails and a ban can be very life-wrecking.

In the case of apple and Nintendo, they very deliberately protect themselves from criminal harm by deflecting victimization on to their own users instead. Like in the apple case: if you are the victim of fraud (buying a compromised gift card), Apple shuts YOU down, rather than eating the financial loss themselves. And with Nintendo, if you innocently bought a legit used game, but it turns out the previous owner illegally duplicated it, Nintendo shuts YOU down, rather than eating the cost of copyright infringement.

In the very specific case of hardware mods, I can see a justification of denying online use in order to protect players from OTHER players who cheat. Especially in PVP games, people obviously hate cheaters because they ruin the game for everyone, so they are happy to accept control measures that can detect cheaters and shut them down. HOWEVER, even in this case, a permanent account ban is WAY too heavy handed. The obvious reasonable balance is that you are banned so long as your device remains detectably compromised. Once you clean the device up, you should be allowed to play again. MAYBE a perma-ban from online games would be justified for repeat offenders, but only after they have received and acknowledged several warnings to this effect.

Shutting a player down the instant a copied key is detected is outright egregious, as it punishes the victim without proof of guilt (not to mention bypasses any pretension of legal due process). Nintendo doesn't care, of course, because their products are desirable enough (and there is too little competition in the industry realistically), that they can just get away with this. People will put up with this abuse to play Nintendo exclusives. Same for Apple.

The wealthy abuse us because we tolerate it and keep giving them our money. And also because there are too few big-tech companies, creating an effective cartel, leaving us with no-where else to turn (realistically, even if there are theoretical alternatives that come with unwanted sacrifice, cost, or risk, above-and-beyond).

In my mind you'd be buying a car without a battery and simultaneously subscribing to a battery service, but if you ever wanted to own a battery you could buy one. You'd get the battery delivered to the dealer (and/or they would work with one or more services directly and keep some on site) before you picked up the vehicle so it would be all the same to you as if it had come with it, and it would also come charged.

Moving them around without a battery at scrapping time is not a detriment, as vehicles to be scrapped are usually moved around with a fork lift anyway.

Watch for the AI bubble crash in 2026.

You could do battery swaps for NEVs in a scheme where you didn't own a battery at all, and instead just subscribed to one. You could also do it for heavy diesel truck equivalents, as big diesels typically have the fuel tanks hanging on the outside of the frame where they're nice and accessible anyway. But it doesn't make any sense for the vehicles in between that, i.e. the bulk of them...

MATE is outdated (but good for resource constrained systems) and GNOME is dumbed down and hard to get good results from, you need a whole bunch of add-ins just to get where KDE is. KDE was very bad in the past, but it's really come quite a long way. GNOME was really quite good in the past, but it's really gone the wrong way. I'm not against having a simple mode but I don't want oversimplification to infest everything.

Because the USA doesn't have the concept of absolute power, Donnie Dipshit's pet Catholic Court notwithstanding, and those files were sealed by a judge at the time. There are a lot of fundamental ways in which the two parties are up to the same bullshit, but Democrats tend to obey court orders.

Corrupt, yes.

Requirements, maybe. Meeting them, absolutely not. They aren't just reporting an amount spent on classified projects and therefore we can't have a breakdown, they're saying they can't figure out where an awful lot of money went at all.

Obama was more like the Republicans than they think. For example, he was fully behind the MIC, blowing people up without due process and so on. Obviously there is a big contrast, for example we know he did a lot of drone strikes because of his EO which gave us information on how many strikes were used and where, and Trump was doing about four times as many strikes per month when he rescinded that order so that we wouldn't know how many he's done since.

Even the ACA was a Republican health care plan, spruced up a little bit but still writing profit for insurance companies into the law. So no, the pendulum just wasn't pushed that far at all.

Revolution. The chances of us rewriting the constitution for that (which is what it would take) are roughly nil otherwise.

They were specifically chosen for their respective lacks of merit. They aren't DEI hires, they're anti-DEI hires, like matter vs. antimatter. And the purpose is to cause destruction when they come together.

To you, the centrist (pro-corporation, pro-authoritarianism, pro-incarceration, pro-MIC — based on voting records) policies of the Democrats are "too far to the left" when actual leftism includes far more liberal ideas. This is because you are too far to the right to even see the left from where you're standing.

It's a Thomas Jefferson quote, and he was talking about The People rebelling against a tyrant, not invading other countries.

I hope something even worse doesn't set in. It's not like capitalism and greed don't rule anywhere, only the degree differs. I guess we will find out.

Except of course for Peter Thiel