Just forgot about the monopoly part

However, if you follow that train of thought, you’ll often get to the point where you’d need to get rid of cars as we know them today.

If people weren’t depending on them, fewer would have one. And if only few people have one (they are expensive, after all), why build roads just for them? Why all this costly infrastructure that would only benefit 5% of the population? Why use everyone’s tax to fund them?

The fact that cars are built like today - basically comfort cages - is only because all this infrastructure exists. They’re not used outside of that environment. So of people don’t depend on it, they’d probably vanish in a couple of decades, at least outside of their respective niches.

If you go by the initial acronym, it means personal iirc

You could probably make four versions of this image with one of these people each in all corners and it would still make the same amount of sense

Anyone with a semi working brain was flabbergasted how the MAGA crowd pushed a topic

• that started under Bush (Epstein plea deal with the US government was in 2007, Obama was elected 2008)
• that had significant events happen during Trump’s term
• heavily involved Trump personally

Yeah, Dems and their donors are probably involved as well but… all the super shady stuff was under Republican rule, and it feels like there are more pictures of Epstein with Trump than without him… it makes no sense to me to push the topic from a right wing position, but I guess this was the only connection to fringe conspiracies they could find. And now, big surprise, they don’t want to follow up on their rhetorics… and MAGA is surprised? How much hate-flavored Kool-Aid do you need to drink to not make the most basic connections?

Regardless of this particular issue, he is a convicted felon, so of course he’s guilty

Personally, I’m not a fan of vigilante justice, regardless of the crime, and this is certainly what this would lead to. But the big scandal is actually that there seemed to be no investigation into people apart from Epstein and Maxwell; this is the question people should be asking in my opinion: why has nobody else been prosecuted?

Not saying this happened under Biden, but why would those files be released when they could be used to prosecute those in there? It was the Republicans and more specific MAGA pushing for a release and making it an election topic. At least for me (European), the list, if it exists in this form, is something you base investigations on. You gain nothing from releasing it to the public. But Republicans used it to feed their fringe conspiracy voter base, so the question is not exactly “why don’t they release it”, but rather “why don’t they release it after talking about it for years and then putting the radio hosts who talked about it into key administration positions just to after claiming the files are on their desk stating that they don’t actually exist while simultaneously damaging people on release”. And it’s not like any potential list came up during Biden’s admin. Epstein was arrested and died under Trump.

I’d also think that some people have some kind of Dead Man Switch for releasing the relevant documents (if they exist).

https://github.com/derrod/legendary is the open unofficial client, I think it’s what Heroic Launcher uses under the hood

You don’t need the client to connect the games, I just do it via browser. And you don’t need it to launch the games either.

Apart from all this, I think they do lose money on the store, and are subsidizing it with Fortnite money. But I could be wrong.

You’re not really dependent on EGS just because of the free games; neither in the sense of drugs nor as in you build an infrastructure on it, like with other software. Let’s say you’re a student and get Microsoft products for free. You wrote applications for Windows, you create office documents. Later, Microsoft charges for new versions (since you’re no longer a student). Now you have the choice: keep using unsupported software which is a security risk; pay up; or migrate everything you have created over the years, which will take a long time. You have become dependent on the vendor.

With games, who gives a damn? It’s not like Little Nightmares 2 replaced Little Nightmares. I just keep that version. They’re completely different things. No more free games with EGS? Okay, now what? I’ll just keep using what I have. There is no lock-in effect. This is all just a promotion for their shop like a free ride voucher for a theme park where they hope you spend money on other stuff as well. Or basically any loss-leader anywhere, just that it’s not sold under price, but actually given away for free.

There’s a good reason the free games are so far down on their website, they want you to scroll all the way down and look at their stuff so that you maybe buy something. Which is fine by me, I actually even bought something there once (shouldn’t have, game was way below expectations, but that’s on me).

So yeah they’re not giving stuff out because they’re good. But it’s also not nefarious. Just really lazy and I guess more expensive in the long run.

Context from the article: they’re not against the tax, they’re against the tax going to the EU as opposed to going to the member states.

Imagine having Fortnite money and all you can deliver is the EGS. Yeah free games are cool I guess but it’s like the laziest approach regarding actually engineering and developing a solution

Same is true for games on Steam if the developer decides not to use Steam integration (some features like achievements are ok I think). For example Noita doesn’t need Steam running, you can just copy the folder to another machine AFAIK

also there are Steam emulators

It’s just unfortunate that this BS is the way society is forced to realize that agriculture is built on exploitation, this isn’t meant to be a “both sides” moment but neither Reps nor Dems ever really cared about this. It was just always hypocritical to hate on the undocumented while relying on them

However, we all know that this administration will find the worst and inhumane way to deal with the situation.

Ich würde davon ausgehen, da die AfD als “gesichert rechtsextrem” eingestuft ist. Bei ihren Mitgliedern kann daher davon ausgegangen werden, dass sie die Werte des Staates nicht teilen, und dass ist ein valide Grund, sie nicht zu beschäftigen. Anders sieht es natürlich bei Sozialleistungen etc. aus. Sie werden vom Staat ja nicht von öffentlichen Leben ausgeschlossen.

Hab ich immer darin gemacht. Ist schließlich auch nur ein Umluftofen

Das wäre allerdings eine Zweckbindung; und die sind für Steuern verboten.

Agreed. But he’s also an abrasive know-it-all. A modicum of social skills and respect goes a long way towards making others accept your pet projects.

This isn’t what I get when reading bug reports he interacts in. Yeah, sometimes he asks if something can’t be done another way – but he seems also very open to new ideas. I rather think that this opinion of him is very selective, there are cases where he comes off as smug, but I never got the impression this is the majority of cases.

I wasn’t talking about the protocol, I was talking about the implementation: PulseAudio is a crashy, unstable POS. I can’t count the number of hours this turd made me waste, until PipeWire came along.

PipeWire for audio couldn’t exist nowadays without PulseAudio though, in fact it was originally created as “PulseAudio for Video”; Pulse exposed a lot of bugs in the lower levels of the Linux audio stack. And I do agree that PipeWire is better than PulseAudio. But it’s important to see it in the context of the time it was created in, and Linux audio back then was certainly different. OSS was actually something a significant amount of people used…

Kettles aren’t black, they’re metallic, and when the pot calls the kettle black, it only sees its own reflection. But both Musk and Trump are turds. No need for reflection