It’s a pretty apt metaphor. One minor quibble, gamers don’t think games are real. Sure, it’s no less important to them maybe just because it isn’t real, but they do not, in fact, think it’s real. Also if you don’t want to play their game, they won’t sack you or throw you in prison or kill you.

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Why do Putin and the billionaires he shepherds think that all this far-right democracy killing shit is so super duper? I marvel that they never seem to stop and think “this could eventually go badly for me.”

I thought it was going to say “IG-88 was a dildo.”

“We were talking about the Middle East, and he took a piece of paper and he drew on it [a] map of the Middle East with all the nations on it, which most Americans couldn’t do,” he told the right-wing broadcaster.

haha yeah and Kim Jong-il bowled a perfect 300 game at his very first try at bowling, scored 11 holes-in-one on his very first try at playing golf, wrote over 1,500 books while at university, composed 6 operas, could walk at 3 weeks of age and speak at 8 weeks of age.

o well

If you have ever had a dream where you can’t get something right. Like, in your dream you know you need to do something - you even know exactly what it is that you need to do. You have no excuse for not doing it - maybe you actually try to do it - and yet you keep finding it is as yet undone.

You eventually wake up, because you are alive and you are dreaming. But if you are dead, you are not alive, you cannot wake up. You have all of the agency that you had when you were dreaming, which is none. Until you woke up - you were helpless in your dream, try as you might. The dead are helpless in their dream as well, but they do not have the luxury of waking up.

So have some pity for the dead.

This is worthless because it’s not the children whose use of social media is destroying the world.

This isn’t funny.

Wow, so Something Awful was being very prescient 20 years ago when they came up with the name for their cooking forum.

Windows 10 users, I’ve been using kill-update.exe for years now to only update Windows when I damn well want to.

Disclaimer: before the inevitable dogpile, yes, this is bad practice. Yes there are many reasons why you might not want to do this. Yes, allowing your software to update itself whenever it wants is safer. No, I don’t care. If you don’t care either, this software might be for you.

Which doesn’t really change the point does it. These people are de-facto kings ruling us; their wealth subverts the entire idea of democracy. You can’t tax them out of existence without taxing their wealth because none of them have any actual income. Banks fall all over themselves to fund anything they care to do.

In any case, 2% isn’t going to do fuck-all even if it gets passed which is hardly a certainty.

Le Coq suggested that when simply considering the 10 biggest fortunes in France, the tax would bring in no less than €13bn for the state.

A 2% tax on billionaires. Give me a break.

The point isn’t to bring in money, the point is to eliminate these blights on society by any means necessary. How bad will the world have to get before something that looks like this happens? When the world was more civilized - the world conservatives constantly pine for - the ultra-wealthy were taxed over 90%, because we knew that too much power in the hands of a single person was immensely dangerous. We knew this intrinsically from generations of being ruled by kings, but we got firsthand experience with it from them constantly fucking up the economy.

There was shame in being wealthy. Hell, there was shame in being rich when I was growing up - it was understood that you couldn’t get mega-rich without stepping on the necks of the working class and being horrible people. It’s nearly Christmas - go rewatch It’s a Wonderful Life for crying out loud. 1946!

It was big in Dragon Age.

Now if only they could do the same with the stock market. But the conspiracy theorist in me believes that all this manipulation is being done hand in hand with certain arms of the government in order to maintain the government’s appearance of solvency and to control inflation in the face of what appears to be nearly unlimited spending. Just keep moving around fake money using a million different utterly opaque methods.

For those unfamiliar with the source.

Nice straw man. Nobody said the community was going to “Linux-sized” nor that it was going to be built in a “few days,” nor that it was going to have paid devs. It’s like you’re being intentionally obtuse.

There are already multiple supported forks of Firefox and while it doesn’t take much to maintain such forks when they are being fed a large part of the codebase by Mozilla, if you think such a project would not pick right the fuck up where Mozilla left off if Mozilla tried to pull a Google and get behind Manifest V3, you are, I believe, mistaken.

Mozilla itself owes its existence to Netscape’s failure in the face of unfair competition by Microsoft’s Explorer. Netscape released its source code, Mozilla was founded and the power of open-source created Firefox. Chrome’s halfhearted support of Mozilla is itself owed to the fact that they don’t want to get spanked over Chrome like Microsoft was over IE.

Ah thanks, I was about to call Peter.

As if installing and using something else means you can’t have Chrome lying around for that one stupid website.

Yes, and we will drop Mozilla when it drops uBlock as well. We will all get behind whatever open-source browser stops ads, and it will very quickly become the most widely used browser. Why? Because everybody despises fucking ads and you can’t curb-stomp them into liking ads, that’s why.

Google can spend all the money it likes trying to piss on users and tell them it’s raining but at the end of the day, a new king will be crowned and if it isn’t Chrome and it isn’t Firefox, then it will be something else.

And no, FOSS doesn’t need money behind it. FOSS needs a dedicated community behind it. Assertions to the contrary are FUD constantly being seeded by Google, Microsoft and their ilk to destroy competition. This is an existential necessity for Google, you can bet they are doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo.