I’d vote for ToS era Pike over Trump. I’d vote for a candidate who only communicates via ouija board over Trump. I’d vote to not have a president for 4 years before I’d vote for Trump.

It’s crazy that Trump can get convicted of fraud, be found liable for sexual assault, promise to abuse presidential power to get revenge against those who cross him, actively undermine both national and global security, promise to round up millions and put them into camps, attempt to overthrow the election and refuse to not try it again, and so on, and his side is still so loyal they’ll wear solidarity diapers for him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_theseus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus

Well, for starters, it’s over 50 grand for the base vehicle, and that’s before adding the bed. And it’s bigger than what I’m looking for.

What I want is something more like an electric version of the Ford Maverick, but one that adds to the bed length by switching to a regular or extended cab, and by moving the cab forward a bit since we no longer need to accommodate an engine. I want different proportions, but the same basic size and price (obviously making it electric likely comes with a price increase, but that shouldn’t be enough to double it).

I just want a reasonably sized two door electric truck with a decent sized bed and only minimal space taken up by the frunk. I haul enough stuff that I could really use the cargo space, but I don’t want to drive an aircraft carrier on wheels that doesn’t fit into parking spaces. And I don’t want it collecting as much data as possible on me, but that’s not just a truck thing.

So, my options are basically leave the country, drive a 30+ year old ICE truck, or start my own car company. Because despite the fact that there is clearly demand for a smaller truck that’s actually a truck, no one is interested in making them for the US market. Not when you can make a big useless luxury truck that has a much larger profit margin.

I like wireless, I just fucking loathe earbuds. Unfortunately, they have completely replaced the wrap around on-ear headphones that were the best for wearing while running errands or exercising.

I don’t want something big and bulky while I’m walking around, but I also don’t like having shit jammed into my ears. And critically, those on ear headphones are just the right size to have a convenient button layout so I can easily pause or go back a few seconds in my audiobook whenever I need to.

But Apple decreed that wireless earbuds were the future and the market for everything else fucking died.

Why do people defending Star Wars keep shitting on sci-fi and fantasy? “It’s just a movie about space wizards with laser swords” they say, as though having fantastical elements negates all criticism.

The original trilogy isn’t schlock. It’s fun, relatively lighthearted adventure in a fantastical setting. It has its flaws, but there is genuine artistry there, and it resonates with people because of that.

And even if I am looking at classic Star Wars through nostalgia goggles, that doesn’t invalidate criticism of new Star Wars stuff. Rise of Skywalker is a train wreck of a movie all by itself, no comparison needed.

He’s firing from both ends.

I was responding to someone else’s post which was discussing intergenerational blame. I’m sorry if this made you feel like you weren’t the center of attention for 2 seconds. But I’m sure if you keep being an asshole to random strangers on the internet you’ll eventually fill that void.

Everyone who is alive today is descended from slave owners, thieves, rapists, murderers, conquerors and oppressors. They are also all descended from people who were the victims of slavery, theft, rape, murder, conquest and oppression. If people are responsible for the actions of their ancestors, then we are all guilty of damn near everything, and it’s basically just original sin without all the Catholicism.

Why the fuck does the song assume we know Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen, but it has to ask if we recall Rudolph, despite him being “the most famous” reindeer of all?

Because they could sell them as new games.

Fallout is hot right now thanks to the show, and from a business perspective its kind of crazy that they didn’t plan to have something available to capitalize on that interest. A Fallout 1 & 2 remake or remaster would have been an easier option than a whole new game. And it’s the kind of thing you can outsource to another studio, so it doesn’t have to disrupt their current plans.

If I were some soulless executive at Microsoft, I’d have been getting this put together the second I saw that the show was a huge hit. I’d be trying greenlight remasters of basically all the games, plus a new non-numbered game in the series that could have limited scope but keep the same basic flavor, and maybe a new game in a different genre altogether. Things that could be handled by other developers and pushed out over a reasonable time frame so we could at least have something to announce before season 2, while letting Bethesda keep Fallout 5 for whenever they finally get around to it.

Steam isn’t a monopoly, I can get my games elsewhere (epic, gog, humble store, origin etc). But Steam is dominating the market because it does it better. It offers value and features that others don’t, and it generally hasn’t abused its dominant market position to squeeze the consumer or crush their competitors. The closest thing to enshittification we’ve seen from Steam was them allowing third party DRM and launchers, which isn’t something they wanted, it’s them backing down from a stand-off.

I want competition, but there’s good competition and bad competition. Good competition is what we see from Steam and gog, where they stand out by being good at what they do and giving customers what they want.

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

I think it’s easy to look at all the bullshit EA and Ubisoft and the like pull now, and imagine that same pattern from streaming playing out in gaming.

What’s really clobbered Firefox has been the rise of smartphones, where Firefox has very limited uptake.

That’s fucking crazy, because Firefox has been far better than the default options for as long as I’ve had a smartphone. I only recently dumped chrome on desktop for Firefox, but I took one look at Chrome when I got an android and immediately dumped that shit.

Unless Ubisoft has stopped requiring that I log into an ubisoft account for every game, I will have to pass.

Not for the Dominoes trip specifically, but they were paying for me to be there. I would assume that the local Dominoes got some kind of money out of it.

I’m not saying that the Chik-fil-a thing is something that would have interested me as a kid or that I would pay to send a kid to it. For one thing, the focus on customer service stuff does make it a bit weirder to me. Just pointing out that I had a similar experience and that it was something I enjoyed.

Some kids would probably love getting to see what happens in the kitchen, making something, and eating it. As long as it’s safe and age appropriate, and assuming they aren’t actually being used as labor, I don’t see how this is harmful.

Don’t forget the psychic ones. Any world with abundant telepathy and mind control is pretty much guaranteed to be a dystopia.

When I was a kid a summer daycare program I was in took us to a Dominoes and I got to make my own pizza. It was awesome.

I believe there was originally a line of dialogue about there being resistance when they pushed through objects, which was supposed to explain why they don’t just fall. That line was cut, but IIRC it is still referenced indirectly when Geordi’s hand gets zapped and he says that there was more resistance to pushing through stuff afterwards.

That wouldn’t explain why there is enough resistance in the floor to stand and walk, but not enough resistance in walls to prevent them from easily passing through. Presumably their mass and the pull of gravity are unchanged, so the resistance would have to be enough to counteract their weight. And even if they did weigh less, they still propel themselves forward through walls by pushing off the floor, so either the floor needs to be more solid, or they should be nearly weightless and move by paddling their feet through the floor until they build up momentum enough to smash through a wall. Also, if they are applying pressure to objects they pass through, shouldn’t people they touch feel it?

Personally, I’d probably explain the floors specifically being impassable by blaming it on the way the artificial gravity is generated.

I don’t have a good explanation for how they can breathe, how they see without interacting with light, how they can hear clearly when matter isn’t really touching them and therefore can’t conduct sound, etc.

She believed it only because she had experienced many similar revelations during the last few years, ever since she heeded Trump’s warnings about the “corrupt, lying mainstream media” and decided to disconnect her television. Her friends introduced her to far-right media platforms online like Mike Lindell’s Frank Speech and The Elijah List, where each day she listened to a rotation of self-proclaimed patriots, biblical prophets and also sometimes political figures like Lara Trump. They offered Zakas not only conspiratorial ideas but also the promise of a community that extended far beyond the loneliness of her house, with a grandfather clock ticking away in the living room and views out the window of an emptiness that stretched clear into California. Each day, something urgent was happening in the far corners of the internet — something big and dark and secret, and that knowledge fueled her days with both purpose and agency.

A major part of the problem is that a large portion of the population will always choose the lies that resonate with them over the truths that bother them. And while I would love to see legal consequences for fraud and defamation when possible, that can only reduce the damage being done, and force the bigger names in misinformation to stay in a gray area of half truth and innuendo while still misleading people for economic and political gain. They can still lead people to the wrong conclusion, they just need to phrase it as a question rather than a statement (Note: This is a massive oversimplification).

I don’t see a good solution to the problem. Any tool strong enough to stop media that isn’t just overtly committing fraud and slander is a tool that will also likely be used to silence dissent and legitimate free speech.

She came to believe, along with millions of others, that Covid was a creation of the federal government used to manipulate the public and steal elections; that two doses of the vaccine would make men infertile; that Trump had been anointed to lead a “government cleansing”; that fighting had already begun in underground military tunnels; that Trump’s election in 2024 was preordained by God; that he would return to power with loads of gold collected from other countries that had capitulated to his power; that, during his next term, Americans would have free electricity, zero income tax and “medbeds” powered by a secret technology that could harness natural energy to heal diseases and extend human life; and that the only thing standing in the way of this future was a deep state so malicious and vast that its roots extended all the way into tiny Esmeralda County.

But maybe psychiatric help would be a good place to start.

This is one of the big things that killed Amazon for me. They used to have a great search and filter function that was designed to make it as easy as possible to find what you were looking for. Now it’s designed to find things that are related to your search and ignore your filters when sellers pay them to promote their product. Combined with the fake reviews and the ocean of low quality trash that fills 95% of their inventory, it’s now actually easier to drive to a store and search shelves manually than it is to sit and click.

And don’t get me started on AI generated “reviews” that are just reworded marketing material with affiliate links. It used to be that google could get you some relatively reliable sources, but most of those have long since replaced real reviews with this bullshit. At this point, I just assume every review is a lie unless I see a video of a human testing the product while taking about it.

I honestly think that anyone who is making money by misleading consumers with product reviews that aren’t actually based on some interaction with the product should be in prison for fraud.