Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.

Statism creates billionaires.

And that's the core of the issue.

If it were profitable the companies wouldn't be shutting it down.

If it meaningfully impacted customer sentiment or business goals, they'd open up or release servers, or make that last-minute change to the game as a final update.

As games are, so much time has passed. The original dev team has moved on two titles, three titles, maybe even more since the initial development, especially for long-running games. The maintenance teams have also come and gone. The last teams who are there when the games are 'turning out the lights' are skeleton crews or some IT guys who reboot the machines when needed. The institutional knowledge has moved on, the teams have moved on, build farms have been repurposed, etc.

A few promised to keep source code and servers in escrow to be sure they were distributed when the product eventually ended, and that made approximately zero difference to the industry.

I'd argue for most people, it's not the servers they way, it's the nostalgia. It's the remembering the good times with guild members, the anticipation of new worlds opening up and the novelty of seeing them when they're new. It's remembering the overfilled lobbies, active auction houses with all the powerful items, the peak excitement of crowded, vibrant communities. There is no joy that comes with opening a server and seeing the player count: 0/1500 - open for join, or a quest that needs 5 participants while knowing the servers are empty.

They prefer the shorter "Fake News!"
This crew's creed is "Perception is reality."
By controlling the information you receive they seek to control your perception of reality.
This is the goal of propaganda.
This is how they manufacture consent.
Reject it. Demand a fact-based reality.

These days people use bullets, the 4th box of liberty.

Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy, all shot and killed while in office. Seven more presidents had shots that landed but didn't kill them. Most presidents in the 1900's and all of them in the 2000's have had assassination attempts that were intercepted and stopped before they could get their shots fired at the president.

The story is that even during the constitutional convention, when discussing why a president would leave power after a successful impeachment and conviction, or after an election, one of the delegates reminded them "if they don't go peacefully, they can always be removed the traditional way", which ended the discussion.

A positive thing I note is that after all modern authoritarian regimes collapse, many of their followers become unemployable. The SS after Nazi Germany, the Stasi after the cold war, many KGB agents after the fall of the Soviet Union ended up turning to organized crime instead if they weren't picked up by the new government's security/intelligence services. People just don't want to hire them. I suspect in a couple years, anybody who decided to remain at ICE will struggle to find jobs as long as that's on their resume, and government prosecutors moved from being a prestigious mark for a lawyer into quickly becoming a limiting factor instead. From the first administration, quite a few struggled to get work after it ended, I'm assuming it's going to be worse for them after round two, however this current presidency ends.

Agreed. For as far back as I've known it, companies are reluctant to hire less experienced workers, and mentorship is seen as a high cost rather than valuable.

In smaller environments, hiring an inexperienced worker or recent grad was seen as a cost to repay your own mentorship; everyone was expected to take at least one new person under their wing, sometimes multiple. Mentoring is generally considered essential, and it's part of the transition from senior worker into leadership. Seniors train juniors, and those approaching retirement finish out their careers training everybody, mostly just supervising and commenting, and that's a good thing for knowledge transfer, both for institutional knowledge and collective wisdom across the industry.

In corporate environments people want to hire already-trained, drop-in experts. Phrases like "hit the ground running", rather than "six month training period", unless the worker themselves are expected to pay for that training period. Companies see training, mentorship, and learning as something people do on their own time, not something the company does. And there's no retirement phase where the declining workers spend their days passing along their institutional knowledge, they're fired the moment after passing their peak, and the institutional knowledge vanishes.

It's what passes for journalism these days. Give it a few rewrites, it will be on the various news aggregation sites that you're an insider with first-hand knowledge, or that you're a spokesperson for the company.

Same, I had that for a while.

The wifi names were "Surveillance Van 5" and "Surveillance Van 24" for 5Ghz and 2.4GHz channel. I set the family's cell phones network device names "Surveillance Operator 1", "Surveillance Operator 2", "Surveillance Operator 3", and "Surveillance Operator 4". For house guests sometimes it got a chuckle, "connect to surveillance van 24". I know when I went to friends who took their networks seriously, I had someone ask about it.

> UBI will create permanent poverty level while maximizing billionaire income.

Without a UBI the permanent poverty level is no income...

A UBI raises that floor...that's all.

You can think of it as we already have a $0 UBI... seems that a number greater than that would be a better outcome regardless.