This is yet another predictable side effect of people misunderstanding the stimulus and response reflex of capitalism: Apply dollars, make things happen more.

I have played a handful of FTP games and put a not insignificant amount of time into them... but never any money. If I don't get to own the thing, defined by being able to use it (not even "as I see fit", just at all — but on my schedule) then I won't pay more for the thing than it's worth to me right now, like going to see a movie. If I don't get the server, or if there's DRM which requires activation, that severely reduces what I'll pay.

LLMs invent invalid moves. It is somewhat miraculous that they can sometimes generate valid ones, but the real miracle is that people think there is intelligence there. It's a miracle for the people selling "AI" anyway.

It's very common for mechanics to be required to provide their own tools.

It's California law that you cannot require an employee to provide their own tools, unless you are paying them at least twice the minimum wage. This is true in general, not just for auto shops. I worked in an RV shop. I had to provide my tools. I got in a wage dispute over it. I received a settlement.

Only the low-end guys in the shop don't typically have to provide tools.

The real problem is we can't return to being a key chip manufacturing nation overnight. You have to fall down to learn how to walk.

"No. That is a rare skillset."

It's less rare now than ever before, and becoming less rare thanks to howtos and cheap equipment.

LOL.... They actually modded your rage post up to +4 as Informative. This is the Slashdot I know and love... I tell you what....

But this is too amusing not to have some more fun with it, so allow me to piss you off a bit further with some facts!

First? I didn't vote for Trump the first time around but I actually held my nose and voted for him this time. Why? Because the entire thing is such a shit-show regardless of which idiot is in office, it was essentially just a vote against the idea of a half-dead guy with senility getting re-elected. It's not like they gave me anyone else on my ballot I could choose from.

Second? Damn right I'm "one of the old people". I'm already past 50 and I've seen a lot of crazy stuff come and go during my life, so far. Anyone could wind up homeless for a number of reasons -- but I doubt I'll be one of them. That's because I happen to prioritize having a roof over my head and I'm fine with living in "less desirable" parts of the country so I can own one without paying the "I live someplace COOL!" tax slapped on the land and property. In fact,where I live right now -- it'd not difficult to find a house to purchase that's as cheap as maybe $50,000 or so, if you're willing to do the work to fix it back up to code and make it safe to live in again. I see people signing up to pay nearly twice that for a new truck or car that's going to depreciate by $20K the minute they drive it off the lot!

Medicaid funding? Look .... the whole system is irrevocably broken at this point, regardless of how they dole out the funding. I'm very close friends with people who haven't been able to make use of ANY government assistance for medical care for YEARS, because of their life situations playing out like they did. (EG. Mental illnesses they're able to manage pretty well, but which qualified them for disability only IF they stayed in the same state long enough to go through all the hoops needed to get it. Meanwhile, they have reasons to move to a new state, which starts that qualification process all over again from scratch AND now they can't afford to pay for the doctor visits needed to put a disability case back together again.) Whether Medicaid programs get cut to the bone or massively expanded -- this is still the reality. Some people are milking the system to get all kinds of free care that they really should be paying their far share for. Others aren't able to take advantage of any of it and have to resort to going to Emergency Rooms of hospitals, agreeing to self-pay, and then refusing to pay the bill. Medical care simply costs FAR too much in America at this point. People wanting it free because they manage to qualify for government to pay the bills for them is just a big band-aid. The REAL problem is only apparent if you want to pay your own bills for it. I can fly to another country and pay out of pocket for just about any medical procedure and save many thousands over what American doctors/dentists/hospitals charge! The inflated cost for care is the core issue -- and that really has zero to do with anything Trump enacted.

It might require class-action lawsuits, or a sub-industry dedicated to suing them, somewhat comparable to patent trolls (but for a good cause).

Amen! It would be a great consolation prize.

Don't buy the thing!

I'm pretty much done spending any money on consoles due to the corporate greed that comes with them. My g/f was a huge console nerd and owns pretty much every game system made after a certain year. (She didn't bother to collect the early systems like the Atari 2600.) In her defense, she also had 5 kids so the money spent on all of the games and systems and accessories was justified by all of them enjoying using them too.

But I lost all interest in it after buying a PS4 and seeing how expensive it got for the PSPlus annual subscriptions, required to keep the unit from being little more than a crippled console that can't play anything online. My g/f has a PS5 that we hooked up and it's arguably even worse about it. An X-Box 360 is just as bad.

Nintendo keeps locking their stuff down too. USB-C is intended to be a standard connector/port. Any hardware implementing it in a non-standard way is broken/defective as far as I'm concerned.

Can we make some kind of wager on it?

The Donniban have taken over.

They can't afford the ambulance.

Donkey cart? The ironic ending of a poor Republican.

Poor Republicans seem to be sadomasochists.

I guess they want to be martyrs against LGBTQ+, which Fox et. al. hyped to be the Worst Thing On Earth, despite the fact Jesus himself never mentions LGBTQ+ in the Bible (although he did belt the shit out of greedy people).

They'll find a way to pretend Democrats are the only ones responsible for the rapidly-growing budget deficit.

GOP has been responsible since Reagan. Democrats usually inherent GOP's econ crashes when they get both chambers, which are not a good time to raise taxes.

But the rich do bribe Dems also to have lower taxes. We are part plutocracy, I'm just the messenger.

(Dems perhaps could have put in delayed restoration of taxes into bills, such as kicking in when unemployment drops below 5%. Biden did increase IRS auditing of rich, which helped, but GOP eventually removed it.)

As we have seen, the 2a nuts mostly don't do shit. The only time he's allegedly been attacked is one of the most obvious false flag operations of all time. I wish I were shocked to see so many on this site fall for it, but I already knew there were loads of idiots here.

This EXACTLY. They are getting NOTHING. In fact they are losing everything, and owning themselves HARDER than "the libs." And they're asking for it to happen more.

Apparently the bill just passed, so it looks like they are getting it.