Any times of USPS crisis are basically just manufactured by people in government who want to privatize or eliminate it for personal gain. The PAEA and Trump’s bullshit come to mind.

I get and respect that people have different places where they draw lines. But to me, it doesn’t seem like they are abandoning the concept of DRM free in any real way. The majority of these have small bits of extra content, often cosmetic, like twitch drops that need the software to be online to redeem/verify.

For the few games on that list that are actually unplayable or crippled in some way, I am disappointed. For additional free or giveaway content from the developer that is part of the original package distributed through GOG, I’m much more understanding of GOG if the developer failed to accommodate offline verification/unlocking of that content.

Can you please elaborate on and define what DRM is “allowed” on GOG? From my most recent understanding, you can still play offline and don’t need to use the GOG launcher or some other launcher that requires an Internet connection.

We are not far from general AI

You mean AGI? Yeah, no. I don’t believe you.

With their proposed ideas, I’d mostly agree.

However, with the increasingly shittier Republicans they have compromised further and further into utter shit. They’ve tacked toward shitty, pretty hard in some cases, to try to lure some shitty votes their way… alienating those who want less shit. They’ve opted to take money from extremely shitty people because they have a lot of money but those people desire there to be more shit. The Democrats abandoned their less shitty ground repeatedly even when they managed to find some real leverage, unleashing torrents of shit for no apparent reason (unless they actually want more shit).

So yes, their campaign websites have a lot less shit on them than the Republicans, but in practice the party as a whole has either pushed for things to be much shittier or compromised their alleged ideals unnecessarily resulting in things being much shittier.

There are certainly diamonds in the shit. I don’t think it’s all of them, but current leadership is definitely way more shitty than they look. What concerns me is that every time we get rid of some small contingency of Democrats that are obviously bathing in shit and willing to open the floodgates for the Republicans, we always seem to find just enough of the remaining Democrats wiling to dive in and replace them. It gives the impression that, for a significant subset of them, their campaign slogans and alleged ideals are performative.

after having the US and Israel bomb civil infrastructure, as well as committing other war crimes

That was the point of my first paragraph. Israel not participating in the CCM was just a bonus. I was aware there were international agreements not use to cluster munitions and I looked into it because I was curious.

Who would have thought that ignoring international law, treaties, and conventions would encourage your enemies to do the same? It’s almost as if limiting yourself to limit those who would do the same to you makes sense. Pesky laws.

It’s also noteworthy that neither country, to my knowledge, agreed not to use cluster munitions.

I think they’re beyond hypocrisy.

They are at war with truth, reality, and civility. These things are only important if they are currently working in their favor. Acting in bad faith seems to be their default. All that matters is that they get their way. The ends always justify the means unless it looks like something might hinder their ability to get their way in the future… and they are usually confident that they’ll find a workaround later and do that thing anyway.

Is there even a word for such brazen, naked duplicity?

Maybe they’ll manhandle a few rich fucks that happen to be brown and Congress will suddenly care.

My microwave has an option to turn off all the beeps, and it’s a landlord special so I imagine others can do the same. Check your model and see if it has that option.

For mine, I literally need to hold down I think the number 3 for 5 seconds. It’s in no way obvious.

Allegedly an incorrect rumor.

Windows Central

Fucking LOL. https://www.idmerit.com/blog/idmerits-data-breach-fail-safe-architecture-game-changer/

Depending on the lore, running water can also stop vampires… though I suspect a squirt gun would not count. Though it could be blessed/holy water in the squirt gun…

They’ve changed their tactics in that they are becoming even more hostile to observers, protestors, and organizers. They are pressuring social media companies to hand over information about anti-ICE organizing and posters. They’re confiscating phones and cameras when they encounter them. Clearly, they are making a show of arresting journalists like Don Lemon. It is continuing to ramp up, but it is more distributed so that it harder to find and record.

The Republicans are rewriting history. I’m tired of Trump being treated like a special case. He’s been aided and directed by the entire GOP and their Christo-Fascist circle (Heritage and the rest of their like). When the bastard finally succumbs to whatever degeneration he’s suffering from, the country can’t just pretend like the fight is over. He’s just the face of this monstrosity that is trying to destroy America and rebuild it as their perfect playground.

Communism, socialism, and the theoretically fairer alternatives I speak of have a number of possible implementations and, for the reasons I mentioned above, virtually no untainted historical examples for us to cleanly learn from. Every time someone takes a crack at it, the circumstances are unique and the powers looking to sabotage the system or seize it for themselves are different. It usually gets dismantled or becomes so corrupted as to be nothing more than another attempt.

I know nothing about what happened in Egypt and I’m commenting solely on my general knowledge and the words you have provided me.

The president back then decided to take a big chunk of land from the ultra rich and divide it among the farmers. Factories were nationalized, big chains and businesses were taken away.

When a land lord owned vast amount of land, he had enough money to buy most advanced equipments and most talented and experienced engineers in agriculture but when the land got divided among many poor farmers, they couldn’t afford any of that and productivity went down fast and the effect is lasting until now.

So the farmers had no assistance and no plan to implement this massive change? Land was just taken from a large owner and haphazardly distributed to poor farmers?

While I don’t doubt that the loss of productivity has had a detrimental effect and caused harm, how were conditions for the laborers and those in poverty before this happened, when “productivity” was great? I’m not sure what the greater “good” conditions would be since I’m not familiar with the situation, the region, or its struggles. It is just notable that your description focuses on productivity.

Nationalized factories and businesses were given to people who - at best - didn’t worry too much if they’d succeed or not and at worse wanted to make as much cash as possible. Add to that people feared of succeeding too much least their possessions get confiscated.

Nationalized tends to mean state ownership rather than distributed or worker ownership. Who were the factories “given to” and what does that mean? Again, was there a plan or were they just seized and handed off without serious consideration for how they should be managed and maintained?

Perhaps there is a reason I’ve never heard of the Egyptian communism you speak of. It sounds like it was not implemented with any kind of long term plan and, unsurprisingly, didn’t achieve very much. Or it might just be that it received little attention because it wasn’t a country of “white” people.

What shakes me to my core is that any attempt to establish a fair system is immediately bombarded by countless external and internal malicious actors looking to either exploit any loophole they can find for their own benefit or sabotage the system to prevent it from gaining any traction because it threatens their power.

I don’t think capitalism or any of the similarly exploitative systems that came before it are superior solutions to proposed fairer alternatives, but the wealth disparity they have created and the perverse incentive structure they push on society leave us ill equipped to transition away from them. Right now, our economies are all so interconnected and interdependent that it’s impossible to exist outside of the influence of capitalism or it’s awful predecessors.

That’s the spirit!

Or they use AI to just alter the photo…

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, really, truly.

When I look, credit unions advertise great savings rates for balances of up to $1,000. After that, it’s depressingly small: 0.05% or 0.10% vs. competitive rates of 3%+ which I currently get at my evil-corp-mega-bank. 3% doesn’t even come close to inflation and fractions of a percent feels like pissing my money away while saving for the pipe dream of owning my own home. Maybe I’m misreading something? “Finance” is not something I’m particularly confident about.

Do you know of any tools that would help people shop for ethical, local credit unions? I don’t trust any results from a web search at face value these days and I don’t have the patience to research every result to see how legit it is and do a background check to find that their board or whatever is run by fascists or something.