Oh, absolutely. These days, I spend so much time checking the output from computers, it would normally have been quicker to do searches by hand. This is... not useful.

I can fully understand that.

You're okay with him disregarding the constitution? You're okay with him being the laws and acting like a king, eliminating power of Congress? Finally are you okay with a Democrat coming to power and doing the things Trump is doing?

Ah yes, I definitely remember that time in 2018 when the FCC threatened ABC's broadcasting license in order to get rid of Barr; both sides, both sides!

Realistically, what will matter is what currently-clean-on-opset Pete will do to organizations(likely with Brendan Carr's slimy assistance). If they think that just doing journalist-level is going to work there's not much reason to just designate someone who can stay awake while holding a tape recorder to go collect the party line while everyone else skips the event. It's not like they are going to answer any but the most softball questions.

If anything, unless there's someone significantly smarter than Pete moderating the policy behind the scenes, this seems less likely to encourage compliance than the traditional measures; where you dole out little nibbles of exclusive and technically unauthorized 'access' to people you deem largely friendly precisely because the stuff at press conferences and releases is pure commodity(especially now that chatbots can, badly, munge it into other formats so there probably isn't even much future in rewriting or reading from the teleprompter those commodity releases).

I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

I have mine connected to a Raspberry Pi and a Google Chromecast. I can update the Pi myself and if the Chromecast fails, gets EOLed or just enshittified, I'm out $30 and still have a functional TV with the Pi. Then I just throw some other inexpensive device on it.

By contrast, the 'Smart' TV leaves me stuck. If it gets enshittified or EOLed, I don't have much in the way of options unless I can figure out a way to lobotomize it and make it a dumb TV.

Meanwhile, the all-or-nothing Smart TV removes real disincentives for enshittification.

So no, for the consumer, it really does NOT make sense. For corporate executives rubbing their hands waiting for enshitification day, it makes a lot of sense, unfortunately.

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

I'm not surprised that Valve is dropping 32-bit support; the 'gaming on 32-bit windows' market cannot be all that large or all that lucrative; what does surprise me a little bit is that the announced end of support doesn't line up with anything I immediately recognize. End of 2025/beginning of 2026 actually puts them considerably later than most stuff using chromium for UI rendering(not sure if they've been doing a bunch of backporting or if they consider the fact that they are mostly rendering their own content a security control); but doesn't line up with the deprecation of any other 32-bit dependency I recognize offhand.

Anyone have a plausible speculation on whether there is something else getting deprecated that likely drove the decision; or if it's just a matter of having to pick a nice round number to pull the plug on something that could be continued but isn't really worth the hassle?

Chromium is frozen on my desktop at the last version to fully support uBlock Origin. After they removed Manifestv2, chrome and its derivatives are no longer viable for me.

The thin is, the artists WANT to keep the prices down because they (or at least their managers) understand that fans able to get tickets and see concerts is a driving force for their fandom. You don't get big or even stay big by only being seen by a few wealthy patrons (or their kids).

Actually, they own a few and have a contractual lock on many many more.

The big problem with these "smart" things is that it's getting hard to avoid them. Several years ago I was looking for TV. A few dozen "smart" TVs to choose from but exactly 2 non-smart TVs. I don't mean 2 models, I mean 2 TVs in the whole store. Luckily one of them was suitable.