My personal favorite platform is GOG simply because it offers actual ownership instead of a crippling dependency on their ecosystem. My second favorite is Steam because it has games GOG doesn’t. I’m not sure why I would want EGS beyond the free games, which are frequently not of interest to me anyway.

As a mostly liberal American, I just don’t know where to begin.

As an Irishman, I would say Ranked Choice Voting. It’s not a silver bullet, but it does solve the main problem that prevents the other problems from being solved.

I think most of us have experience of the concept of something being said ironically, as a joke, at first but then being increasingly serious. It’s like magic really does exist and if you say words often enough they start affecting reality, like a spell. Freedom of speech is a right but it’s also a profound responsibility.

Well that comes under point #3 but yeah

This is most likely a combination of:

• Trump’s tariffs driving international users to seek alternatives to American OSes

• Windows 10 support coming to an end soon despite most people not wanting to upgrade or not having a desktop capable of upgrading to 11

• Steam supporting Linux increasingly well

The money saved will pay for one dev, or two if you cheap out

I don’t have kids so I dunno if it’s still happening, but my dad had a brief and very awkward conversation with me to tell me that if I had sex to make sure to use a condom but if I ever did get a girl pregnant I could always tell him and it’d be OK, we’d figure it out, etc. Nothing fancy or anything; just the essentials to make sure I wasn’t a dumbass about sex.

Honestly, nowadays a part of the “birds and bees” talk should include an explanation of privacy settings and common Internet scams.

Absolutely not; I wish all kids argued their case using well-thought-out presentations

In principle I agree. The problem is that there are countries which don’t care about respecting law and if you kill AI in the West, all that will happen is the West will get left behind.

My limited knowledge of history suggests that it’s always something really random that finally sets off a revolution. Real “straw that broke the camel’s back” stuff. For example, Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire and suddenly the entire Middle East is experiencing the Arab Spring. There was a lot of discontent leading up to it, but in the grand scheme of things, nobody could have predicted that that would be the final straw.

To borrow some terminology from Criminal Minds, there’s a difference between a stressor and a trigger.

Well it is, in the sense that rather than you becoming slightly better at things, everybody else becomes much worse, thereby you are still above average even though you have gotten worse.

Well, yes. It’s no use just paying and not actually downloading it, for obvious reasons but also for the reasons I assume you mean, whereby once you have the files you’re no longer reliant on GOG to keep them available.

Just buy your games on GOG. No DRM

I would develop some city neighborhoods and set up some community land trusts to run them.

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That’s a rug pull, though. Both the American and EU states only agreed to join their respective unions in the first place on the promise that these systems of balances would give them this level of input on union policy. Without such assurances, what small nation would ever agree to become inevitably subordinate to the whims of a larger state? It would never happen, and the western world would remain fractured into small nation-states constantly warring with each other, failing to cooperate and probably getting picked off, one by one, by nations like China or Russia which have no such qualms about forcing a union through conquest.

No, these unions were negotiated in good faith and if we’re unhappy with them now, then the answer should be secession. Brexit proved that nobody is forced to remain in the EU if they don’t like the deal.

The EU has a similar system:

• Each EU member state gets ONE seat at the EU Council, regardless of population. This is comparable to the US Senate.
• Differences in population size are accounted for by EU Parliament, where the number of MEPs (Members of European Parliament) a member state gets is determined by population. This is comparable to the US House of Representatives.
• Finally there is the EU Commission which is the executive branch, comparable to the US president and cabinet.

The point of the EU Council/US Senate is to protect isolated regions from getting steamrolled by urban regions. Farmers are comparatively few relative to city industry workers, but any nation, union or federation is built on the back of farming. However, due to the distance and lack of interaction between city dwellers and rural dwellers, it’s easy for city dwellers to grow disconnected from the reality of just how important the rural dimension is, and vote for laws that only suit the city. It is utterly necessary to create a system which balances the two. Otherwise you’d have, like, three states (New York, California, Texas) making all the decisions, with the other 47 states having to like it or lump it.

Yeah, I was testing how robust the formula was by using the first adjective, curse word, and noun that I could see in my immediate environment. I’m not convinced it holds up.

Nothing much you designated pussy field.