I'm not American. We've decided to move away from Starlink. I don't wish ill on Americans, though. I hope one day they get their country back.

Having seen what Musk pulled in Ukraine, does any sane person doubt he will pull some kind of fuckery on some subset of Americans if the price is right?

Paypal used to be a useful tool that did useful things. Now it's just a way for rich people and con artists to extract money from others who apparently don't know better. It's infuriating how many nonprofits are losing truck loads of cash to paypal as the fees continue to climb. The ones I'm involved with switch to Zelle a while back for the majority of all transfers and that has been a huge step in the right direction though of course not without its own set of tax weirdness.

Flying fish. Flying squirrel. Flying fsck...

That sounds a bit circular there. The argument is to get the newest hardware to run the newest software, but the newest software is specifically written only to run on the newest hardware - actual benefits of the hardware be damned. Certainly Sony and Microsoft wouldn't be selling these newest consoles if there wasn't money to be made doing so (regardless of where the profit actually lies for them).

It's just a hugely diminishing return at this point from my perspective. 2nd generation consoles -> 3rd generation consoles was a tremendous leap. 3rd generation -> 4th generation was a tremendous leap as well. 4th generation -> 5th generation was a bit less of a leap than before. 5th generation -> 6th generation was still significant but still smaller than before. We're now in the 8th and 9th generation of consoles, and not only do many people find the 8th and 9th generation titles indistinguishable from each other, many people have a hard time seeing benefits of even the 9th generation over the 7th generation.

Obviously the whole bit still makes a ton of money. Obviously folks don't care what I think of it. I'm going to say it anyways. Maybe I'll go yell at a cloud after lunch.

I'll start by saying I've never owned a console from Microsoft or Sony. I've seen them, I've seen game demos in stores, etc, but I've never owned one.

To me as one random consumer I fail to see the drive to upgrade from PS4 to PS5, or from the previous XBox to the newest. The games don't look that different. For that matter, it doesn't seem that the two consoles are really offering much difference from each other either. Both consoles are primarily hawking the newest Quake look-alike, or the latest professional (or college) sports titles. I see very few games for either that don't fit into one of those categories.

In other words my argument here is that they have sold to their core market already, and the demand has dissolved for the rest of the public. Even if we ignore the cost, the benefit is no longer clear to many people. Why upgrade to the newest console, other than to say you have it?

I can't recall the last time I ate a burger at McDonald's that tasted better than the wrapper it was served in. A while ago I tried the McRib as well and was left wishing it had stayed in the 90s.

A Quebec diver was attacked by a great white shark recently. C'est tres etrange.

I can't disagree with you. Up here in Canada we have the CBC, which to some extent tries to keep things honest. Even they have been compromised to some extent, though, by politically driven appointments and funding decisions, and the outrageously powerful Israeli propaganda machine.

This is a bit of a twist on what's gone on in journalism for the last hundred years, but it isn't entirely a new invention.

When I was a teenager and working for a small town weekly newspaper, the editor spelled it out for me: "If something arrives all nicely written in CP style, easy to cut from the bottom up, ready to drop into any unexpected hole you might have on a page, you should remember somebody paid good money to get it onto your desk".

It's possible that this article is less than honest on the matter, but it certainly appears that Trump had a license in NY issued at least as recently as 2012 .

He would only ask it for things that result in an improved situation for him, personally. There is nothing at all for him to gain by seeing lower gas prices. He hasn't bought gas himself in many years - and will never have a reason to buy gas again for the rest of his life - so the price is completely irrelevant to him. If the price fell and the MAGA party lost part of congress he would still blame it on other people. If the price stays the same and the MAGA party loses part of congress he'll blame that on other people as well.

It's easy to reach that conclusion if you have never been active in a party. The democratic party does have a good local ground game that is run by volunteers who actually have beliefs and principles. The problem is that at the end of the day the candidate who wins in the one who can pull in the most money, and that's true no matter what. Where do you see a situation where an independent candidate can pull in enough money to win an election? The message is important, but getting the message out is what brings in votes. Just as the democrats need a more coherent message than just "we're not Trump", an independent needs a better message than just "I'm not a democrat or a republican" - and they need backing in order to get that message out.

There have been some democratic candidates who have been able to get some local traction without taking special interest money, but that's only possible if they had a large war chest of money ready before they announced their candidacy. An independent would face the same challenge.

Some people seem surprised by the glasses and how they can be used in perverse ways. These people seem to have forgotten what the original aim of facebook was. The website itself started as a way for "bros" - who would have been called incels had the term existed then - to trade pics of women from their campus. How many of those pictures do we think were taken with consent? Even if they were taken in public they still could have been creepy. This is just the same mindset, applied to technology that didn't exist at this scale in the early 2000s.