The immigration angle is bait and switch politicking. Has been for decades.

People feel economically stagnant and culturally disconnected.

Couldn’t be the capitalist machine grinding you to dust while gnawing away any sort of social institutions or greater visions than “line goes up”. It’s clearly Juan or Abdul who are scrabbling to send a few dollars or Euros to their family. Excluding them is gonna roll back the clock to when a single worker could get a no-degree factory job straight out of high school and raise a sitcom-style family of four, you know!

Better content.

I think this might be the new Turing Test right here: If you can’t shitpost to the level of six-sided ursines, you’re not human.

Realistically, it’s a counterprogramming game. Content farms either want to sell you something, or drive you in endless circles to make ad revenue. That inherently steers towards certain kinds of messaging, which have a distinct smell.

When that’s the competition, the audience burns out. We all have our mental or technical block lists-- this site never actually delivers ehat it promises-- and they’ll grow over time.

The content-farm only works for low stakes scenarios, where people don’t mind scrolling into an endless void. But that’s basically the web equivalent of turning on the TV and listening to the random sitcom noise while doing something else. For anything more important, the bloxklists go up and people still end up looking for real resources.

This seems like something that would be effectively enforced by applying state pressure to payment networks. I know some banks just deny any transaction coded as gambling, although that could be personal moralization or chargeback risk fears, as well as actual legal rules.

If there’s some fraud factor involved (I recall at one point seeing some scheme in the US where people would buy wildly overpriced items from a “seller” where the $500 golf balls were really a $500 deposit to a betting platform) you might not even need new rules to intervene.

Hell, you could weaponize the players: if there’s a bounty on firms and people that middleman the money, you incentivize anyone who lost money to help the state slash the operators’ tentacles.

Can’t imagine the business staying afloat if they had to resort to players mailing wads of physical hundred-yuan notes to a purser every time they needed to replenish their account.

Next one that comes to the door, I’m telling him he can have $20 if he humanely escorts the Latrodectus Hesperus living in our cupboard out. Let’s see if he has any tricks up his sleeve other than poison.

Chromebooks maybe?

I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.

Imposed multipkayer content can be toxic.

I played Revelation Online for a while and one feature of it was that you needed to play some 5/10 man raids for desirable upgrades. These were timegated to once a week, so if you weren’t there at 00:00 server time on Sunday, everyone else had already done the run and the place was dead.Hard to stsy committed when you couldn’t progress effectively.

What about Mouser?

Source?

I’m more willing to forgive not getting Baizhu for the promise of unlimited cheap energy…

Whatever else you can say, Hillary was not channeling a lot of enthusiasm outside of a very narrow group.

It felt like there were weeks in peak campaign season where she wasn’t touring or making speeches. What even was her signature issue? (Considering how she was associated with the abortive attempts towards universal health care during Bill’s term, that would have been a sensible focus, but I don’t recall it mentioned once)

The whole campaign reeked of “play to not lose” rather than “play to win”. She assumed she was the annointed favourite, guaranteed the win, and that’s not really going to excite uncommitted voters. Bernie, at least, generated buzz.

I’m not there. You might try a forum like Audiokarma.

Don’t toss the Technics reciever either.

Using Windows 1.x to show off your machine… even in 1985, an interesting choice.

Back in the Windows 8 era, I bought a little 8" tablet PC from Dell. It was flaky from basically day 1, and after ~2 weeks it bricked entirely.

I go to RMA and they ask “If we refund you $50, would you be willing to keep the unit? How about $75?”

Admittedly, they did give me a refund, but that was so the wrong branch to follow on the chat script, honey. If I’m going to be out over three hundred dollars for a paperweight it better at least be made of something cool like meteorite.

I guess I was startled when I went for my go-to desktop (fvwm) and it wasn’t in the main repo, but the AUR.

It feels like it means they’re not actually maintaining a lot of their package pool, just tossing it off on third parties.

I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.

Perhaps a lottery scheme would work, like hunting permits. That seems to manage a constrained resource.

I think 2049 is the 100th anniversary of the current PRC, so a reasonable target for ceremonial goals.

No different than saying an American leader said he wanted a Mars landing for the tricentennial in 2076. It’s good symbolism, not necessarily a technical merric.

I’m surprised nobody makes an affordable PCI or maybe even USB GPIO box.

To me, the RasPi served two purposes:

• if you wanted GPIOs and the associated ecosystem of hats/shields/capes/straightjackets but a less barebones experience than a bare metal MCU
• RiscOS, because an Archimedes is far rarer than even an Amiga or ST in the Rogue Colonies

I figure we get two things out of it:

• Regaining the moral high ground; we are no longer complicit. This is, to a big degree, playing for a domestic audience, and I think it’s what a lot of protesters are after. Yes, Congress may ultimately cut the cheques, but I’m pretty sure the administration can find ways to tie up delivery of support in red tape.
• Israeli impunity has always been backstopped by the assumption the US would never turn on them. If other countries turn up their nose, it doesn’t have the same meaning. Losing American support would be a huge shock to their political system.

Alternatively, we could go to the point and publically declare what everyone knows-- Netanyahu is fanning the war because once it’s over, his administration is defunct, and his legal problems resume. We could singularly demonize HIM as a warmonger-- personal sanctions, supporting his prosecution for war crimes, or classic Cold War style encouragement of regime change.

Yes, whatever we do, we piss off Israel, but if we don’t take off the kid gloves now, then when? If they finally admit to nuclear weapons by dropping one?

I sort of understood the premise for chain-of-custody style use cases, but the other side of the coin is that these usually, or always, have a final arbiter of validity. Typically it’s a court system or an end purchaser who decides if the data is valid.

For example, an obvious use case is “record a will or deed on the blockchain, cryptographically signed and timestamped, to eliminate any disputes about ownership.” Except the same problem is trivially solved by a scheme where I could register my will/deed with the legal system itself, which is already pretty good at storing documents, and no need to cart around a big, heavy blockchain. Most of the problems in that space come from spotty, inconsistent record keeping (why aren’t these documents centrally registered in the US?) and more centralization solves them.

That’s why the fixation on decentralization is often a waste. I suspect the real appeal is fear of human institutions. A banking or legal system subject to laws and social norms might refuse to honour the documents you file, but soulless decentralized code will dance as it’s told to. For example, I could imagine wiring a smart contract triggered to irrevocably pay on the event of someone’s death, while writing “hitman fees” in the memo of a paper cheque probably raises a few eyebrows at the bank.