In rare (usually politically charged) cases? Sure

Mostly what happens is the owner pays back a fraction (if that) before telling the former employees to fuck off. Said former employees then need to decide if it is worth finding a lawyer to pursue this. And the margins for small businesses are often small enough that it is pretty easy to shuffle off any assets and then declare bankruptcy before doing it all over again later.

Everyone loves the news story where an asshole has been ordered to pay a massive fine. Very few people pay attention to what happens after the local DA takes a campaign photo.

If you JUST want to read pirated ebooks? Kobo is probably the best bang for your buck. But you can also pretty easily sideload ebooks to any kindle via the email interface (which I believe Calibre can utilize).

That said? I have a mix of ebooks I got from legal and less than legal sources. And some of those legal sources include amazon kindle because the prices are REALLY good.

So I like my Onyx Boox. Yeah… it is jank as hell and it allegedly comes with a free 5g modem so be wary of what personal info you put on there. But it works well as I can use the kindle app (which also syncs with my phone) for amazon stuff and the native ereader for any epub files. And because I use a webdav to sync my notes, grabbing new books is as simple as remembering to scp a folder to my nextcloud periodically.

Never thought this was possible? Maybe go do some research on what we did to Americans of Japanese (or Chinese or Laotian or…) descent back in WW2.

Also: Anyone who doubts that the military will “just follow orders” on this hasn’t been paying attention.

Depending on where you live, rent/mortgage is generally 20-30k a year for people who can even consider this. Add in utilities, property tax, etc and it is not that much higher. And if any meal plans are included in this, it is potentially cheaper than what a lot of the FIRE crowd would be expecting to pay.

That said: After cruise ships became literal plague ships in 2020, I do not know why ANYONE gets on a frigging cruise anymore.

Skimmed through a few of these earlier and REALLY excited for later today (pre-ordered on Steam for the bonuses, will refund if it is a total trainwreck)

The scores are all over the place because this is a B-A game so it has to actually technically perform well (unlike AA-AAA games like Jedi Survivor that get a pass…), But the actual text is fairly consistent:

The world is amazing. The early-mid game balance is brutal and unforgiving and you will spend a LOT of time using AKs so degraded that they WILL jam. The emergent behavior from the storms and enemy placements lead to frantic struggles to reach cover. And the performance and bugs are all over the place and we all REALLY hope the day-one patch fixes things but nobody is that optimitsic.

And… as a STALKER fan who loved SoC and CoP (and didn’t hate CS…):

Just to add on a bit for people thinking “I’ll wait ten years for the community patches”. Yeah, that will be a less painful experience. But it is well worth looking back at how modders have handled the STALKERs over the years. Even as early as year one there were people who insisted on changing the game balance heavily and EVERYONE wanted to re-enable the cut repair features at merchants. Which made the game a lot less frustrating but also kind of defeated the purpose of the game.

Because the experience of stocking up on ALL the good 9x39 ammo in The Zone to take your VSS up against the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant? That involved using AKs and ARs to go from point A to point B because you wanted to save up that durability for when it mattered. And when it did matter? The fighting was so intense that you burned through ALL that ammo AND your gun was busted and there was the experience of basically throwing away a perfectly good gun that you spent your entire net worth on to sprint out from the cover of a burned out bus (that looked suspiciously like the same asset pack Metro and Fallout 3 used…) to grab an AK off a dead zombie to return fire before the RPG soldiers got a good shot.

Also… this is a Ukrainian as fuck game made by Ukrainians during a war for their very survival. Decide how much slack you are gonna cut for that and how much long term support you expect with the upcoming “wrinkle” of 2025.

1. There is a lot of wiggle room about how POS based tipping is treated from a legal perspective
2. The food service industry, much like repair/contracting, is notorious for being largely unenforceable for fines like this
3. Let’s just say that I like the crew that does the actual work there and I am pretty sure none of them are in this country legally…

I’ve definitely noticed that my favorite takeout place’s POS makes giving no tip as hard as possible (Other->No Tip->Yes). “Fortunately” that is also a place where the owner is a prick and doesn’t share tips with the staff so they encourage you to leave no tip.

And the really funny thing? If it wasn’t about the same number of presses to leave a custom tip, I would generally round up at most POSes. Which isn’t a lot, but it does tend to cover credit card fees on the average and makes card statements easier to skim. Of course, I have also noticed a rise in “Regular” and “Cash” pricing where those fees are explicitly passed on to the customers to begin with so…

I’ll tip quite generously for a sit down meal or something like a haircut. For calling me up to the counter when my takeout is ready? Fuck off.

Its Texas. They just have to leave it open during the winter. Or the fall. Or the summer. Or probably the spring in a year or two.

Climate change and the inevitable week long power outages because of a self “managed” grid is more than enough to cause mass deaths.

but games consoles and its peripherals are indeed related enough to games to be allowed.

I still have no idea what you are on about and it sounds like you actually have a different set of rules you want to enforce.

So rather than confuse everyone when you are tired… maybe update the sidebar and the list of rules so that people know what you want this board to discuss?

…

Yes. If we completely changed how the internet is structured and written AND migrated back to a plugin based economy AND completely changed the role of a web browser then a project called “Chromium” would be feasible to be maintained by a decentralized group of randos in their spare time.

Please don’t use ableist hate speech.

Actually “data” is a better term for that.

Bandwidth is capacity in the moment. Data is what is metered by Comcast.

To put it in less technical terms: Bandwidth is your max speed at any given moment. Data is your max range. The more Bandwidth you use, the faster you consumer your Data

REALLY curious how “rigid” your interpretation is and how you feel this is not “related to games”

…

Wait. It didn’t support the PSN cloud from the start?

Like, I thought it was questionable that it couldn’t play ANY games locally (PS1 games run on a potato at this point) but sure. But I assumed it at least supported the cloud streaming Sony occasionally remembers they try to sell.

This thing was SOLELY for playing people’s own PS5s? What the fuck?

They worked great for 4x games and even slower paced real time strategy games or grand strategies. And they are an excellent shim for more action oriented games that are built around M+KB and don’t support a gamepad.

The problem is that this came out at the time when EVERY PC game was rapidly getting gamepad support. And with very few exceptions (Terraria and Stardew come to mind), it was a worse experience to set up your own mess rather than just use the bindings that let you play civ on an xbox controller anyway.

But yeah. If we can get both this time? That would be perfect AND encourage people to really dig deep on their setups for steam deck games. I know I would use the trackpads and even back buttons more if it wasn’t learning a completely different scheme for a game I also want to play at my desk or in front of my TV.

That said, I am also very wary of fitting all those controls on a single controller. Most of the mock-ups people make have HORRIBLE ergonomics. But… Valve knocked the Steam Deck out of the park so day one.

God… remember the new Wolfenstein duology? Machine Games had zero problems outright getting on stage and saying “fuck Nazis” and they were some of the most glorious and satisfying glory kills in all of gaming.

Then comes the sequel and it was clear Microsoft had given them a talking to and they had to do a MUCH more muted presentation. And chuds were freaking out and insisting that the KKK would NEVER have allied with the Nazis because they… love america too much?

And then the third game never materialized and we instead got a really mediocre action game that alludes to what would have happened in the third. And I suspect THAT only came out to help promote gamepass.

Here is a handy map of some of our nukes as of 2006 https://uploads.fas.org/sites/4/NotebookMap.pdf

But also? The expertise to maintain and build nukes are very much California and New Mexico as that is where the three major NNSA labs and their support facilities are.

The reason those problems are centralized is BECAUSE they are so complex. And because they are so high risk. Bad actors will GLADLY spend a year or two sneaking in various MRs to compromise a browser because it can potentially pay enough to never have to hack again.

Maybe that’s for the best. Some frugality with using standards. Web is a planetary library more than it is a platform for applications.

I love it. We take away their de facto standards. We increase their day job workload exponentially. And then we expect them to put in the after hours efforts to optimize page loading.

I mean… as long as California takes Colorado and New Mexico with it, I see no real issues with that. We get the economy, the nature, and the nukes.

“Short term” implies there is a real path forward.

Of the Chromium forks, the only ones with enough revenue to consider pumping back into major development costs (because the engineers you want working on the browser ~66% of the world uses aren’t cheap) are the ones you REALLY don’t want to have controlling said browser.

People have a tendency to very much not understand that even open source projects have development costs. That is WHY there are major foundations around Linux and the like. Because a hobby project is something people can work on in their spare time. A browser (or an OS) is something that requires full time engineers. Would have to check, but I wouldn’t be shocked in the majority of community MRs at this point are also funded by companies (getting a fix or feature support in).

And the idea that, “short term” all the Chromium forks and all the community would unite to manage it themselves when they have been dependent on Google/Alphabet doing the heavy lifting for 16 years.

At best? We are looking back at the dark times where anyone doing ANYTHING “web” related needed to have like twelve different browsers installed and fix specific bugs for internet explorer and netscape and so forth. More likely? We are seeing massive stagnation and you can bet that every single blackhat (and most of the greyhats) are gonna be out for blood.

By all means, fuck Google. But people need to understand what they are asking for and what will likely happen.