I like the idea of supporting creators to whatever extent I can. As an anime nerd I know that Blu-ray sales are the main metric whether a show gets another season or not. That and merchandise sales but I don't really have space to set up merch and I don't like buying it just to put it in a corner of a closet. Plus buying blu-rays gets me high quality video on a pressed disc that will more than likely outlive me.

I have no illusions though about how the people who make anime get treated. I know only a tiny fraction of the money I spend ever makes it into their pockets and more often than not they are run out of business repeatedly by rapacious corporations. So at the same time I don't really begrudge anyone who doesn't want to buy into that literally.

I think the correct solution is to buy the official release to support the creators but also change how you vote so that workers stop getting exploited. Worker exploitation is a political problem after all not an economic one.

Of course I have to live in the world the way it is now not the way I wanted to be so again if you're not buying blu-rays I don't be grudge you in the slightest. Although it's an anime fan like I said without the blue ray sales and the merch sales you're not going to get more of that show you like... And it really is the Blu-ray sales the drive the next season even more so than the merch a lot of times.

Dell can't match Apple because Win 11 wants 16 GB RAM to boot to desktop and 32 to be useable.

MicroSlop designed the os before the AI boom. They can't fix that without giving up their spyware and they're not gonna do that.

Mind you Apple really need 16 GB but that's still half Windows

I'm impressed that you figured out something is wrong but you don't know what to do about it do you?

Honestly I can practically smell the fear on you.

Anyway if you look at the elections and supposed red States there are still one by microscopic margins well within the margin of error. Meanwhile we all damn well know what voter suppression is because we all got taught about the civil Rights movement. Not so sure about kids these days but us old farts could not escape it and it's one of the reasons the racists are so upset. They know that at any moment the center and the left could just do something about voter suppression and they become irrelevant again.

And we're not talking about businesses owned by rich people we're talking about businesses owned by billionaires. I don't think you quite understand what it means to be a billionaire. They aren't Rich anymore they are powerful beyond belief. They are God Kings. That's what happens when you let people hoard that much wealth. It stops being wealth and becomes power. And if you were paying attention last election, and I can tell you right now that you weren't, you would have noticed that they fully exercise that power for the first time in a long time.

Remember it's a big club and you ain't in it.

It's extremely difficult to manipulate and voter suppress when the voters can just throw something on the ballot and pass a law. They will try to manipulate that process by either making it very very difficult to get something on the ballot or by changing the wording on the ballot measures to confuse people. I remember a bunch of states did those cigarette bands and they were all sorts of weird wordings and rulings and tricks and shenanigans to try and prevent them.

One of my favorite TV commercials of all time is a bunch of old people sitting around talking about something scary. They never once say what the scary thing is just that they're very very scared. At the very end it ends with a impassioned plea to vote no on propositions such and such, which was really just net metering AKA paying people for the solar energy they produce in excess. If I remember correctly the proposition passed.

To be fair though that only worked because the concept of net metering is a little esoteric. But something is blunt and obvious as how crappy data centers are now everyone knows we don't want them and it's just a question of whether or not we are still enough of a functioning democracy to stop them.

Billionaire corruption and voter suppression is how it became GOP controlled. There are no red states. There are some States where people are allowed to vote in some States where people aren't.

In the last election they were over 3 million illegal challenges to signatures and registrations. Every single one of them requires someone to drive down to the courthouse on a weekday during business hours and prove that they are who they say they are even though there is virtually no fraud except from Republicans occasionally casting their dead wife's ballot.

Meanwhile blue leaning swing states have multi-hour wait times to vote some as much as 7 hours.

Finally 90% of the media is owned by billionaires. Google the phrase sane washing.

Donald Trump said it himself, this is the last time you need to vote. Very soon they won't care what you think or say or do. And when you try to turn the violence they will just use drones to kill you

So a common way to make your resume stand out as a programmer is to contribute to open source projects. It's one of the ways open source projects get contributors in the first place. The problem here is you've got people doing AI slop trying to get their names on lists so they can apply for jobs.

So for years and years there was a shortage of technology workers and we didn't need a union to bargain for higher wages. We got Big heads because of that. What's more because people are so incredibly stupid around computers we tend to get really really big heads. That makes us want to avoid collective bargaining because we want to see ourselves as amazing rugged individuals who don't need no help.

So you have a combination of a period of time that has long past when we genuinely didn't need unions and the arrogance that comes from having a skill that for some reason the public at large has a tough time with.

To be fair video game programmers and artists are much higher up on the totem pole than code monkeys and project managers but they also suffer from the problem of being artists and artists really just want to do their art. They're pretty unhealthily obsessed with it.

Decades and decades of outsourcing

They are running at the absolute bare Bones possible to be a functional industry at this point. They're just isn't anyone else they can fire without not being companies anymore. This means that if you're looking to unionize they can't really credibly threaten to fire people because they are isn't anyone left to fire.

If you build the kind of facial recognition network that can detect people like this woman then you are giving up your civil rights whether you like it or not. There are just some things that are mutually exclusive whether you like it or not.

I could care less about a dying old woman. I have elementary critical thinking skills. Would you evidently lack. Every time you see a story like this this is the authorities telling you that it's okay to give up your civil rights because look at this scary scary terrorist. The fact that this is the best they could come up with to encourage you to give up your privacy and civil rights shows how utterly fucking worthless it is for anything except screwing you over.

Maybe it's the American in me talking but those who would give up essential Liberty for temporary security deserve neither. Which I could give a fucking rat's ass about you or anyone else who isn't in my immediate family or friend group at this point you all can go fuck yourselves except you're dragging me down with you.

I really wish you would stop but you're not capable of it. This is why I think the human race is finished. I don't think we're going to make it another 50 years.

A terrifying terrorist?! Quickly eliminate all civil rights! Because that kind of crackdown and surveillance certainly isn't exactly the kind of thing terrorism is designed to cause because terrorists are hoping to create social pressure leading to further crackdowns that they are hoping will turn into some sort of magic revolution instead of a even worse fascist State because nobody understands anything...

Again you're trading a 67 year old woman who hasn't committed any crimes in decades for literally all of your civil rights. You already know that's not a good deal but you're taking it anyway. Are you really that desperate to hurt people?

I sincerely hope you are a bot because if you're not I am genuinely embarrassed that you wrote that.

Unless it's just high satire in which case bravo sir, bravo.

The Poe's law is strong with this one.

So you want to trade all of your privacy and all of your freedom for a 67 year old woman living in hiding. I mean you do you but that seems like a bum deal to me.

Also funny that the alpha males always go straight to the police and government when they feel harmed or at risk. And they fall over themselves to give government and police limitless power at the slightest provocation. Curious!

Where else am I supposed to play Knuckles Chaotix and Spider-Man web of fire!

There is no such thing as a safe nuclear reactor. Only reactors that are less dangerous.

If you walk away from a solar farm because the money is not there anymore no harm no foul. There are some ecological impacts for building them out but that's it and honestly the land will reclaim given time.

That is not the case for nuclear power. There's a bunch of stuff you can do to make it so that it's basically impossible to have Fukushima happen but if we could guarantee those things got done Fukushima wouldn't have happened.

Every time I point this out inevitably a bunch of people come out and say that other sources of power kill more people which would be true if wind and solar didn't exist. Never mind the fact that as an American I would rather be dead than without property. Fukushima had to be evacuated for 10 years and everyone involved lost their property. America does not treat people without property well.

Anyone that doesn't have $600 for a new game console might care.