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Ursula LeGuin puts the publishers in their place
  • You're not wrong, but when you compare the general perspective of baby boomers vs the general perspective of Millennials/Zoomers, you can at least see that there now exists a will for change.

    I like to think that maybe Ursula LeGuin was able to play a role in that change through her words.

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    Steam Families is here
  • I'm not sure that would be the best solution. A cheater could still get caught cheating 6 times before requiring a repurchase, and it's still a pretty harsh penalty for someone who didn't cheat. You keep your game, but you can no longer share your library if your family situation changes.

    'Sorry, son, you can't play my games on your computer because daddy made a bad decision when he was 21.'

    The ultimate solution is probably an online identity when playing any game. Imagine if cheating got you banned from all online games for 5 years.

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    Steam Families is here
  • Yeah, it's most likely to prevent someone from using the family feature to get away with cheating.

    As it stands now, if you get caught cheating you must create a new account and repurchase the game. So the main deterrent is the full cost of a game.

    With the steam family function you could potentially create 5 new accounts per year, and simply remove them when they get caught cheating. The only deterrent would be the wait period.

    So I agree with their decision. The downside is that you must trust someone before adding them to your family. If your cheating son gets you kicked off counterstrike, then just remove him from your family. They're never too old to drop off at the fire station.

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    *Nobody believed in me*
  • Some of y'all didn't grow up in the southeastern US and it shows.

    Not all of the teachers in my school were unreasonable narcissistic sadists, but about half of them were.

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    He deserves it, dadgummit
  • His role in The Frankenstein Chronicles always made me chuckle.

    Spoilers

    He gets murdered in a period fantasy setting, but they do him the honor of bringing him back to life.

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    I'm getting old
  • My entry point into Star Wars was KotOR so I've always been pretty critical of the average Star Wars media. I really enjoyed Rogue One, Andor, Mandalorian S1&2, and Clone Wars S7. Star Wars can deliver sometimes.

    With a budget of $180M I was hopeful that Acolyte could be great, and it hasn't delivered yet.

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    Protestation
  • Why does Communism require "true equality amongst its citizens?" What does that even mean, in practical terms?

    Do you imagine a communist system that has social classes?

    How would a group of people take advantage of this to form a "practical dictatorship?"

    Castro, Zedong, Putin

    Capitalism does not deploy the most efficient means of product delivery, but the most profitable...

    You're arguing Communism on a philosophical level against capitalism on a practical level.

    What of Marx have you read? Or any leftist theorist?

    As I said, I'm not well read and unprepared for the higher level argument you are seeking here.

    I can make some suggestions for reading material if you wish.

    I appreciate your desire to educate, but I'm too busy being exploited by the current system to dive further into social philosophy. When you guys are ready to rise up I'll be there, but I won't be a part of the debate on which system we should implement going forward.

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    Protestation
  • The recurring issue with Communism in practice is that it requires true equality amongst its citizens and there's always some asshole or group of assholes who want power and dominion over others, so it seems to repeatedly fall into a practical dictatorship.

    Capitalism at its best requires businesses to find and deploy the most effective and efficient means of product delivery in order to compete with each other, which means that the consumer will always have the best product at the best price allowed by the market. The problem is that greedy assholes either conglomerate competing companies into monopolies, or otherwise collude with one another to maximize their profit margins.

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    Protestation
  • I'm not well read in Marxism so I'm probably not qualified to answer this, but the recurring issue with Communism seems to be the same as capitalism, in that it requires people to not be assholes in order to properly function.

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    America’s housing crisis continues to worsen, renters are struggling more than homeowners, report says
  • At the very least, they should raise real estate taxes on empty units. This will penalize people for owning several vacation homes, as well as incentivize landlords to lower rates in order to fill the unit.

    Difficult to enforce, but send a few people to jail for real estate tax fraud and the rest will fall in line.

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    The Acolyte discussion and review megathread
  • But this is 200 years before the fall. We're supposed to see how the Jedi lost their way. This is just a bunch of incompetent assholes with authority. The witches call them kidnappers and they barely deny it while nearly embodying it. Where's the honor? Where's the mysticism? Why must we continually suffer this bag of dicks while being told 'this is what they were always supposed to be.'

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    Chinese coast guard ram and puncture Philippine military boats in disputed shoal
  • Well, according to China, those waters are their territory, which means that the presence of foreign military vessels is an invasion.

    Practically speaking, I think you could call that area a contested region, so minor skirmishes like this are expected and could escalate to war (like Crimea eventually did).

    I think that the Philippines approach has been something like, 'You can claim those waters if you want, but you can't possibly keep us from entering them, so we're just going to ignore you until you start killing our people, and then we're gonna call in big brother America.'

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    The Acolyte discussion and review megathread
  • They did the Jedi so dirty. The council members are petty, the masters can't defend themselves against a sith apprentice, and the knights are constantly taking Ls on screen. The only one who seems mostly competent so far is the padawan Jecki.

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