In America taking away social media from your kids would be pretty fucked up. At least assuming you can't either taxi cab them around town, buy them a car and get them a license or pay for a shitload of taxi rides

That's because the suburbs have basically spread us out to such a ridiculous degree that kids don't have a lot of opportunities to socialize. And no school doesn't really count you get maybe a half hour for lunch.

Hell people have been talking about how suburbs isolate people for ages. And it's only gotten worse. Back when my kid was in high school they were a good 40 minutes away from their closest Friend by bus. By car it was something like 10 minutes but like most places my city's bus system sucks balls. And when you have two or three hours of homework a night minimum sometimes as much as four or five that's just not going to cut it.

I suspect it was less of a problem for us old farts because not only were a lot of us in denser living conditions but even if we weren't we didn't have the crazy amounts of homework that modern kids get. Admittedly it's been years since my kids have been in high school but as far as I know that hasn't changed and kids still get multiple hours of homework a night despite all research showing that doing that's very counterproductive... More of the puritanical bullshit you just can't shake from our shitty culture.

So pretty much the only place your kids get to socialize unless you are very well off or they are very lucky is going to be on social media.

We could of course do away with the suburbs and make walkable cities but the car companies are worth tens of billions of dollars so there sure is shit not going to let us do that even if you could convince old people who are hung up on cars to do it

I suspect that old people are just going to keep grinding their kids into dust. Honestly I think most of us didn't want to have the little shits anyway. Men want sex and women want babies.

Although I would like to see the breakdown between actual game purchases and buying DLC it's still clear people are mostly buying games online and downloading them.

As for ownership gog.com is right there. I have not seen a single person mentioned gog. So honestly I think that all this talk of doing away with physical games isn't coming from a groundswell of opposition to the idea but it's just the usual content Mills looking for something they can shovel into our eyeballs. This is something it's easy to get outraged to buy and outrage sells.

It actually kind of pisses me off because I really like the fact that I own the games I buy on gog. And this was a good opportunity for them to get a bunch of press so that I could buy more games there because more games would get put there.

But that's not what the internet is for anymore. It's not there to be useful it's there to make you outraged because outrage drives engagement and engagement drives profit. So instead of a useful conversation about a digital service that allows you to own your games free and clear we get more worthless articles like this that were probably written by AI...

I hate this timeline

oh no! AI is coming for my click-bait articles!

It's just another pebble on the "AI is good" side of the scale if you ask me.

You don't just roll over and take it. This isn't necessarily just posturing even if they know they're going to lose. Sometimes you just have to fight a losing battle.

At this point the supreme Court itself is corrupt. These gambling dens are extremely unpopular with anyone who isn't a gambler and many people who are. So this is going to be laying the groundwork for public opinion and getting people aware and ready that the federal government is at this point completely corrupt. That's an important step in taking back the Federal government from the grifters and the criminals.

It's important to fight losing battles so that people can see that you're willing to fight. It does help to pick your battles but we are talking tens of billions of dollars being bilked from young men who very much cannot afford it.

If you don't think you want this then you're incorrect. You do not want this level of gambling going on in society legally.

I'm guessing most of the people who click on this thread already aren't fans of legalized internet gambling but I know there are some right wingers out here that will back anything the president is backing and the president's son is knee deep in all of these gambling companies so the president is backing it.

So put aside that for a moment. Let's talk about what widespread gambling is going to do.

You are going to have a shitload of young men brought up on the idea that luck is a skill that can be developed and that American exceptionalism means they must be skilled in everything or they are inferior human beings. This sets them up to gamble. A lot.

They will of course lose because that's how gambling works. The House always wins.

So congratulations you have a shitload of young men who are already broke as shit because there are no good entry-level jobs for them, and no working as a plumber at the entry level isn't a good job it pays about 15 to 20 an hour, and suddenly they are up to their eyeballs in debt from gambling.

This is going to create all sorts of problems for you personally. Many of those young men will work longer hours at their jobs and doing that reduces the value of Labor in the market reducing everybody's wages. Shit runs downhill and it's going to hit you just like it hits everybody else.

That's before we talk about the ones who get desperate and turn the crime of one kind or another. And yeah lock them up right? But you still have to pay your taxpayer dollars to keep them in that prison because you do not have the stones to execute somebody for sticking up a convenience store or doing some petty white collar crime like minor embezzlement.

What I'm saying is even if you think this is cool because freedoms and the president likes it it's going to bite you in the ass.

This is another classic chesterton's fence moment. Don't take down a fence unless you know why it was put up. In this case it's a little worse because we all know damn well why we limit gambling to one city in one state of the union.

Yeah Google is going to tell everybody that AI is the new hotness allowing them to make all their software the bestest. And I have no doubt that their tools will find some bugs that nobody cares about.

It would be funny if all these tools really did work though to the point where all the security vulnerabilities that that Israeli company uses to break into our phones for law enforcement got fixed up so that law enforcement couldn't just break into your phone anytime they want.

On the other hand the way the laws are changing right now and the way our civilization is rapidly going back to a feudal system of government we're not going to have enough civil liberties for any of that to matter but it's still an interesting thought experiment.

C3PO: "Bots reporting bots, how perverse!"

NASA lost the original Apollo 11 "first walk" video. Existing copies are screen-grabs, so lost resolution. Speculation is the tapes inadvertently got reused.

Biggest bonehead "lost originals" so far.

> Sooo, they get money from their enterprises via high tax that they then give back to subsidize them? How does that work?

It allows them to take money from established "cash cow" industries to prop up the expansion of selected industries. It's roughly comparable to Microsoft subsidizing an up-and-coming product or category using all their Windows and MS-Office profits, often bankrupting competitors in the process.

Wikipedia has some great examples of what happens when someone that's been promised "points" (a share of the net profit) on a movie has enough money to sue the studios that try to rip them off.

They scurry under the fridge like cockroaches and settle for big amounts to avoid having their accounting practices further scrutinized. I don't see why they're so afraid of it, everyone knows they do it.

My expectation is that the mechanism that puts an end to it will be the IRS or similar. Like Al Capone learned, the government lets powerful people steal from the powerless, but it doesn't tolerate it when you steal from the tax man.

Governments have the right to do anything your stupid neighbor lets them.

And about 45% of the country is composed of your stupid neighbor.

That's not quite enough to sell the other 55% down the river. But since most countries have winner-take-all first past the post voting all you need to do is apply a little voter suppression at the county level to stop about 6% from voting and your stupid neighbor gets to decide how you live your life.

Xi can't subsidize everything.

Interesting but how do you respond to Trump fucks kids? Because Trump certainly does fuck kids and he was made president of the United States by a bunch of people who like you do not care the Trump fucks kids. Or you do care but you wholeheartedly approve of it like in that onion video about how the GOP is having a fight between there pro pedophilia and very pro pedophilia wings of the party.

There are dozens of little laws we all break on the road every single day. The people overseas piloting these vehicles are following every single little law carefully because that's their job. I have no doubt that they're also getting reviewed and graded on it.

If for example every time you got in your car there was a 10 or 20% chance that if you violated a minor traffic law you would get a ticket and that was completely random so you couldn't just look around and check for a cop then you'd be a lot more likely to follow all those little laws we ignore.

So you would do the speed limit and you wouldn't do illegal u turns and you would drive slower and bad weather like you're supposed to. This would make you much safer and it would make you very annoying to drive around. Which perfectly describes the behavior we see

That's just because they are currently following every single law and speed limit carefully. So they follow rules that normal drivers tend to ignore that frankly we should be following. You will not for example see one of these cars doing an illegal turn even while under control of one of the guys in the Filipino call centers.