Hong Kong? Taiwan?

I’d recommend one that’s not plastic. (Though I have that same one and use it occasionally.)

https://www.hario-usa.com/products/switch-immersion-dripper

I’ve heard great things about Malazan. I should probably pick that up.

Sanderson is a great airport read.

I wouldn’t recommend it outside of that context. It’s nothing special.

I understand the intent, but this is not phrased well.

prevents your messages being spied on by Signal, but ironically they’re probably one of the most trustworthy actors in this whole chain, so the fact that it’s protected from them, while commendable, is not particularly valuable security

It’s extremely valuable security, because most companies, even if they don’t want to spy on you might be compelled to by court order. And those companies often think their security is sufficient because they have good intentions, and they expect the government to have good intentions when they’re going as far as getting a court order. (I also suspect more court orders are justified than not, but a few bad subpoenas spoil the bunch.) The fact that they physically are unable is quite important.

All your points about how things around that can fail are valid.

I will say that double posting is a completely reasonable solution. More orgs should be the gateway where they can be seen, and have the visibility of the big platforms, but they also offer Mastodon as an alternative. If enough orgs do that, it enables people to just… move.

It’s hard for users to move when 75% of their content is exclusive to X. And it’s hard for orgs to move when 75% of the users are on X. Double posting allows this to move to 10% X exclusive content, 60% content that’s available everywhere, and 10% exclusive to open platforms. After the orgs move the content, it’s so much easier for users to move, and after the users move, it’s easier for the orgs to move.

This should be a cooperative thing. And afaik it doesn’t take that much effort to post the content to two places.

Would you enjoy being a garbage man or a plumber? Or is that work you’re saving for others to enjoy?

Doctors make good money and we don’t have enough of them because it takes so much time and dedication. You think getting rid of money would help there?

Do kids need to go to school? Five days a week?

Automated by who?

We do need incentives to work. As technology and efficiency advances we should be able to work less, but we still need people to do work they/we don’t want to do.

Personally I think people are pretty happy working 24 hours a week even if their job isn’t something they love doing. I’m more interested in working towards that, slowly, over time, than just going to “nobody needs to work”.

Or the Russian regime. Or at this point the combination.

Would your country like to join the Internet borg?

There are absolutely reasons. Firefox is done by a reasonable job of anti-fingerprinting, and it’s a fine line to walk to disable as many of those indicators as possible without breaking sites.

Browsers do give away too much, but at least Firefox is working on it. And it’s not extremely straightforward.

Except for the whole shitload of jet fuel part.

The amount of man hours, time, etc etc to make a game? Fuck that

And 30% of the purchase price doesn’t go to those people. It goes to Gabe’s yacht.

Using those services or run their own?

If they could have still images and text on the Steam store and a link to their external site for everything else, it’d by far be running their own.

It’s the exposure that Steam has an effective monopoly on.

Not everything has to be black and white. I appreciate Steam, but 30% is absurd. They’re absolutely raising the price of games and taking money away from developers.

I’m not gonna say Steam sucks. It’s a nice organizational tool that enforces some standards.

I’d rather have a drm free game that’s 20% cheaper though. The devs can pocket the other 10%.

Honestly not that much. The biggest thing Valve brings to the table is advertising and access to customers.

Hosting doesn’t cost that much. If you were that desperate for bandwidth (no one is), torrents exist as an option. Blizzard used to have torrents built into their downloader.

The infrastructure is a nice afterthought.

Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?

Yeah, not 30% of all PC games. It’s how they turn out absurd profit.

Any of those places charging 30% on a product they’re only publishing electronically is using walled gardens and monopolistic practices to do so.

I’d rather they go after Steam last, but Steam belongs in that group with Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It’s extraordinarily difficult to sell your PC game without Steam. A few large studios can do it, but not many others.

Still notas egregious as Apple, and now Android with their restrictions on side loading.

I call them “Left Behind Christians” based on a popular book series that is basically glorification of this premise.

The people bringing it about believe they’ll be rewarded with the second coming of Christ and heaven.

They’re no different from the jihadists and their “virgins” that they mock and claim to hate.

Religious extremism is the biggest threat to humanity.

Should be fine. They don’t have to use a browser to retrieve that feed.