Don’t forget habitually refusing to pay contractors who do work for him.

They’re a niche product that has a very solid use case (court transcripts). They require far less training than a stenotype, but because they’re so niche, the people who do make them can more-or-less charge what they want. If we’re being less skeptical, the low demand means the manufacturers can’t take advantage of the efficiencies of scale, so the price remains high.

What happened is that we lost several big fights against fascism, and governmental entities are barely bothering to even pretend that they care about the citizens any more. If they want it, they’ll ram it through no matter what we say.

We’re saving our energy for the next election, and if that fails, then we’re cooked.

It’s a part of gaming history and a conversation piece, as well as a neat piece of kit. It has sentimental value above and beyond its utility. People who are buying from scalpers are doing it for that reason.

I hate to break it to you, but most Americans never have the opportunity to personally interview their representatives.

Of course Americans vote for who they’re told to vote for. Every candidate is being built up by someone else. You’d say the same thing if all the candidates that the establishment DNC propped up had won. The trick is finding someone who both shares your values, and has the knowledge to give you an informed opinion. Mamdani is a pretty solid voice to listen to.

From my perspective, it seems like Mamdani has a personal policy of finding things that will make a positive impact, no matter how small, and giving them the push they need to get done rather than letting them get bogged down by committees or fishing for funding.

A lot of politicians in similar positions spend their days wrangling and maneuvering, rather than finding a thing and just doing it.

Hanlon’s razor only applies if it CAN be attributed to incompetence.

When a pattern emerges of it only happening when it benefits the company, that stops being attributable to incompetence. It takes effort to make that happen.

If they did that, it would trash the cell reception. Metal blocks signal.

Although you are correct, you miss my point.

In the Roman days, the phrase meant superficial appeasement of the masses by the politicians. It was a tactic to prevent the uprising of the lower class. My point is that these days, the ruling class isn’t bothering to give the populace any appeasement. No give, only take. The small artists and performers are fantastic, but they are organized at the small, local level by the very class of people that are being repressed, and so do not fit in the ‘bread and circuses’ quote.

soooooo the lower class is getting priced out of both the bread AND the circuses?

I have the heart of a child!

In a jar.

It’s a skull-and-bones. In modern day it is far more associated with pirates than it is Nazis, and he was in the Marines.

Also making sure there is enough bloodflow to the skin to keep it from just dying off.

Also it’s cheap if you use their stupid app, depending on what you get. When I’m trying to pinch pennies but don’t have time for anything else, it comes in handy.

Their app really is stupid though

Ticketmaster was teaching people at conferences how to set up buyer bots to suck up all the tickets for scalping, because Ticketmaster gets a cut every time a resale happens as well as the initial sale. That’s why it got so bad.

It’s not even that. It’s about Steam apparently trying to enforce a clause that doesn’t exist. The most-favored nation clause applies to Steam keys only, but Steam allegedly sent Ubisoft a nastygram about them selling a non-Steam version for less.

And twice as many.

Unless you’re running it locally, DeepSeek is kinda risky considering where you’d be sending all your requests. Corporate espionage is big business in China.

edit: Okay, it’s an open-source model, it wouldn’t be hard to find a more corporate-friendly inferencing service.

I told you a joke via UDP, but I don’t know if you got it or not.

Don’t actually fire it up until you drain and replace the gas. It’ll have turned into varnish by now and you don’t want to have to completely disassemble the thing so you can clean out the injector.