“An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”
Reynolds has done something impressive. She has said one of the most stupid things I’ve ever heard from a republican. That’s a very high bar to clear, saying something so inconceivably stupid that it has special distinction from all of the other inconceivably stupid things republicans say. Yet somehow she managed to pull it off.
Yep. We can look at the source to see what their metrics are. They have economic freedoms and personal freedoms.
The metrics for economic freedoms they used are fiscal and regulatory freedom. Focusing on fiscal, that branches down into: state taxes, local taxes, government spending, government employment, government debt, and “cash & security assets.” It’s obviously a libertarian based definition of “economic freedom”, wherein they feel someone with $5 to their name and no obligations is more economically free than someone with $100 to their name and $10 of taxes. Completely illogical bullshit.
But you can look at it and see that a lot of them are incoherent or intentionally overlapping even if you buy into their base ideology.
Why are government spending and government taxation separate entries? Is someone with low taxes less “economically free” because their government budget is able to afford to be larger anyway? Why does government employment factor in at all? Surely — especially after you’ve accounted for any budgetary, taxation, and debt based impacts — there’s nothing inherent to government employees existing that can be argued to impact someone’s “economic freedom.” Even within their base libertarian fantasies, the overlap and design of the categories will specifically make a richer, but otherwise completely identical, state less free than a poorer copy-cat.
The rest of their categories are even more bullshit. They have an entire section under personal freedom categorized as “Travel Freedom.” A sane person might define that as both the right and the capacity to travel places. They define it as “This category includes seat belt laws, helmet laws, mandatory insurance coverage, and cell phone usage laws.” So a state is less “free” according to Cato if it makes it illegal to text while driving.
tl;dr it’s all libertarian bullshit.
The spirit of your point is right, but: game patches existed back then. The first patch for Half Life was 1.0.0.8 released in 1999 (release version was 1.0.0.5). I cannot find the patch notes or exact release date as my search results are flooded with “25th anniversary patch” results.
What was true is that players patching their games was not a matter of course for many years. It was a pain in the ass. The game didn’t update itself. You didn’t have a launcher to update your game for you. No. Instead, you had to go to the game’s website and download the patch executable yourself. But it wasn’t just a simple “Game 1.1 update.exe” patch. That’d be too easy. It was a patch from 1.0.9 to 1.1, and if you were on 1.0.5.3 you had to get the patch for 1.0.5.3 to 1.0.6.2, then a patch from that to 1.0.8 then a patch from that to 1.0.9. Then you had to run all of those in sequence. This is a huge, huge part of why people eventually started to fall in love with Steam back in the day. Patches were easy and “just worked” — it was amazing compared to what came before.
The end result being that patches existed but the game that people remember (and played) was by and large defined by what it was on release. Also console games weren’t patched, although newer printings of a game would see updates. Ocarina of Time’s 1.0 release was exclusive to Japan; the North American release was 1.1 for the first batch of sales. After the initial batch was sold out the release was replaced by 1.2. That was common back then. As far as I know there was no way for consumers to get theirs updated, or to even find out about the updates. But they did exist.
Do you have data on that? A modern nuclear power plant is going to be in the 500-1000+ MW range. I have a hard time imagining that even operating at half capacity that they do not offset the carbon used for concrete within a relatively short order. But if that is in fact the case I’d love to see data saying so, so that I can correct my thinking.
Paying over a third of all revenue generated from searches on Apple’s platform. That’s incredible. Not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will work out legally, but I have a hard time parsing such an enormous pay-share as anything other than an aggressive attempt to stymie competition. Flat dollar payments are easier to read as less damning, but willingly giving up that much revenue from the source suggests the revenue of the source is no longer the primary target. It’s the competitive advantage of keeping (potential) competitors from accessing that source.
Election law varies from state to state. But generally from what I gather, a write-in candidate is only valid if the candidate registers with the state in advance.
If there’s a winning plurality for Mickey Mouse in your state for a statewide office, it won’t matter. The state won’t be forced to see if there’s anyone there that has the name Mickey Mouse and then pick which (if more than one) was the individual meant by the voters. Someone has to register with the state saying that they’re going to run a write-in campaign for office with name XYZ.
Note that these details are a bit of a side track. The above person was talking about Trump being excluded due to the 14th amendment. However that doesn’t say “not on the ballot” — it invalidates people from office entirely. If applied to Trump, the not being on the ballot would be a consequence of being determined ineligible for office, not a method to make him unable to win. Also it’s all moot: while I think on the face of it the correct action would be to apply the 14th amendment to Trump, the fact of the matter is that this will not happen. States are not going to be willing to risk the political backlash from going down that path, so they will not.
Typical corporate greed in that sense. It’s stupid but I’m not at all surprised by that attitude.
The part that even if they were morally right in that sense… it’s already too late. This is trying to close the barn door not just after the horse left, but after the horse already ran off and made it two states over. There’s definitely value to LLM in having more data and more up to date data, but reddit is far from the only source and I cannot imagine that they possess enough value there to have any serious leverage.
Reddit would/will survive being taken out of internet search results. Not without costs though: it will arrest their growth rate (or accelerate shrink rate, as appropriate) and make people less interested in using the site.
The giveaway here is that it’s Salzburg, not Vienna. International flyers into Austria are almost universally going to end up in Vienna by default. Vienna’s airport sees ~20x the annual passenger count.
It could be that.
My first thought is that it might be the post-lockdown tech demand crash hitting Apple later than it hit the rest of the industry. If I remember right Apple was holding on fairly well when the market first started to crash as society shifted into a “post-Covid” mentality, relative to their competition.
Could be that for whatever reason the drop in demand for Apple was just delayed by about a year.
To do that the current party in favor of removing rights needs to be kept out of power long enough that they conclude that removing rights is an electoral loser and changes their ideology accordingly.
I’m not going to hold my breath.
That really depends on what their goal is.
From a business perspective it’s not worth fighting to eliminate 100% of ad block uses. The investment is too high. But if they can eliminate 50% or 70% or 90% of ad block uses with youtube? That could be worth the effort for them. If they can “win” for Chrome and make it a bit annoying for Firefox that would likely be enough for Google to declare it a huge success.
People willing to really dig all the way in to get a solution they desire are not the norm. Google can be OK with the 1% of us out there as long as we aren’t also making it possible for another huge chunk of people to piggyback off it effortlessly.
Yep.
On paper she’s about as incompatible with the south as you could get apart from that. A liberal WASP that never practices religion (a WAS?). I used her as an example because I think she represents the relative indifference of much of US society on these matters. Politics starts and ends on election day; thinking about the South as a political entity and how their culture and political identities are tightly linked is anathema to her. It’s just getting too involved. Whereas she always hears how nice the people there are, and her books reinforce that idea, so it must be a wonderful place.
That’s about the level of thought most people will put into it. “I heard they’re nice; the media I consume broadly comports that. Therefor I don’t hate the place.” Younger, online generations that are in discussions like this are atypical.
I support making OP’s opinion a popular one, I wholeheartedly agree with it. I just suspect that it actually is unpopular overall (not on Lemmy.)
The story of the end of reconstruction is more depressing than that, IMO.
It was successfully implemented for a decade. Then the North started to grow complacent and socially and politically wanted to move on. It’s easy to pretend a problem is solved if you personally face no direct risks to it not being fixed. Southerners became increasingly violent towards those in favor of Reconstruction and towards blacks in general. With many people being killed. The economic and social costs were staying high and people were inching towards just pretending the problem was solved and being rid of the issue.
Then the 1876 presidential election happened, and that killed off any hopes of maintaining Reconstruction. After the election, the southern candidate, Tilden, had 184 electoral votes; the northern candidate, Hayes, had 165 electoral votes. There were 20 contested electoral votes from four states. The majority threshold was 185. Hayes needed to win all four states to become president. In the end a compromise was reached: the power brokers of the south would not contest having all four states awarded to Hayes if Reconstruction was ended.
Reconstruction ended shortly after. Congress did change hands to the south at the time too, but that was in no small part a byproduct of their years-long campaigns of violence to sow discontent with the northern populace.
The only silver lining is that the US actually did learn from this failure. The post-WW2 denazification of Germany relied heavily on the lessons learned from Reconstruction and its ultimate failure.
I think in US society at large it likely is an unpopular opinion. The south has successfully sold itself as: affordable, nice climate, with extremely hospitable people. My mom has a highly romanticized view of the south because it’s the setting of so many of the romance novels she reads. Not going to pretend she’s typical, but there’s going to be a decent chunk of people falling for that or the myth of southern hospitality.
My experiences are limited, but “southern hospitality” has always come across as performative and insincere to me. It’s a superficial level of ineffectual niceties done for social expectations while actually requiring no true kindness to be displayed. A lot of people fall for the myth of it all the same.
I’d bet that while a majority of people are not pro-south, the pro-south group (excluding southerners) is larger than the anti-south group — with a large majority of people not giving a fuck.
The very start of that article:
October 6 Update: A newly published report has clarified that the discovered code bits are not related to Windows “12.” Also, the next-gen Windows version will not require a subscription.
The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn’t truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been “fixed.” Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.
Vista’s issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista’s reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.
Cities Skylines sees a fairly decent improvement going to the 3D cache chips from AMD (17% speedup here for the 5800x3D). Whats your ability to increase the budget to go for a 7800X3D look like? If this is a genre of game you like and you want to hold off as long as possible between upgrades, it might be worth springing the extra. The difference the 3D cache provides in some games is rather extraordinary. City builders, automation, and similar games tend to benefit the most. AAA games tend to benefit the least (some with effectively no gain).
A 7600X should be more than capable of handling the game though. So it’s not a question of need but if it’s worth it to you.
You do not want 4800 CL40 RAM though, that’s too slow. I’d strongly recommend going for 32GB of RAM as well; 16GB can be gobbled up quickly, especially if you want to use mods in Cities Skylines.
Going up even to DDR5-6000 is not much of a price increase. I’d suggest 6000 and something in the range of CL36-CL40. There’s a lot of 32GB kits in those specs in the ~$90 range. I would not build a gaming system today with 16GB of RAM.
I don’t think Kotick is at all certain to be kicked out. As easily as I can see MS letting him go with an enormous golden parachute, I can just as easily imagine them keeping him onboard because all they care about is Activision’s ability to make money.
In all likelihood Blizzard isn’t going to be managed any differently. Microsoft’s modus operandi with gaming acquisitions is to leave the leadership in place and let the dev/publisher run itself. Why is everyone expecting different here? The most likely outcome is MS does nothing to Blizzard and Blizzard continues on more or less the same trajectory as before.
Unit Ready
Unit Ready
Unit Ready
Construction complete
I’d agree, though I wonder how much of this is how appealing consumers find the competition? None of them seem to be making major inroads at the moment. The biggest competition is also raising prices, nullifying the competitive penalty Netflix would face from that move.