A second loss should be a death knell of the current Republican party. He won’t transition any of his power to Vance or any other Republicans. He could die and we still would see 10% of the Americans to vote for him in 2028 because his death was just media propaganda as far as they are concerned.

We all have happiness, it’s just hard to see it past all the other stuff we got going on in our heads.

The big issue is that physical media degrades. A cassette tape wont sound the same as it did after just existing for 20 years. CD’s and Vinyl records if kept really well can last for 100 years or so but are delicate in other ways and a bad record player can cause permanent damage.

Preserving the experiences of others, art, media is important, but at the end of the day nothing we do is permanent. I know that thanks to online archives I can go and find old music if I need to. I am glad some folks preserve hard copies but a preserved collection isn’t really a functional one and a functional one isn’t really going to last 50 or 60 years at the same quality as what you can get from streaming.

If you do it that way you are importing a good.

The end of this would not be that Steam relenting enables folks to start using foreign currency to get cheap games on a publicly traded space.

What will happen if that goes through is a swift increase in taxation of export of digital goods. You’d have countries fighting tariff wars over video games.

The idea that you can use foreign safe spots to buy and sell goods at a cheaper cost is something that only rich people get to do. As soon as it becomes broadly available to the general populace the governments crack down on it quickly.

Discrimination only applies if the two parties are similar. In this case the location makes these parties dissimilar due to the inability to just go from one place to the other legally. Brazil gross national income is 1/3rd the US. It makes sense to price things at 1/3rd the US price.

Steam taking 30% is a better deal than any other form of media gets by a mile. It’s crazy folks complain when it is so easy to self distribute a video game, people have been doing it for years and years. Steam doesn’t even require you to sign up for exclusivity like basically every other distribution/marketing service does for all media including other video game services.

This is why I used Spotify listeners and not plays or ticket sales or album sales. It’s a metric that doesn’t really require a band to be currently active. New hits will clearly improve the metric but we’re talking here specifically about a person’s outreach today and influence on a voting population.

The idea that more individual people listened to her music than had a single Beatles song in their playlist or a single Michael Jackson song in their playlist is pretty insane. I know I listen to at least one Beatles song a month, it doesn’t matter if it is new.

45 million monthly listeners on Spotify. That is 10 million more than The Beatles right now. 60th overall on the top list of plays just above Michael Jackson. Half the amount of TSwift

So they are a well known artist.

Every PC will be using AI as we move forward and thinking they won’t seems as head in the sand to me as thinking the Internet would be a fad. Remember how awful the Internet was in the 80s and 90s? AI is in a similar spot today.

Why would I read a manual when I can ask an AI to summarize it and give me pages so I can confirm? If I’m trying to do a task I know a million people have solved like Python code to translate XLSX and CSV to JSON and back, why wouldn’t I use AI for that?

Trusting AI outright and not reviewing the answers is silly, but doing research with AI is soooo much faster. Also the majority of articles and manuals you find online written in the past year used AI and you can have CoPilot spit it out to you WITH the original sources that the website/blog hides.

The idea that AI isn’t trustworthy is silly, because no one is trustworthy. You should always have been double checking things for yourself, but sitting and struggling through something for 2 days is foolish when AI could do 80% of the work for you in seconds.

2060 job posting, Quantum Stability Engineer.

Unwrap them and open it and then put them all back so they look used. Write on the box in sharpie “Backups 1/127”. Delete the critical production system at your work. When someone asks where the backups are, hand them these.

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For the US the pretty well known policy bangers are The New Deal and The Interstate Highway System both which are not just socialism but Federal level socialism.

All state run armed forces are by definition socialist in nature. Mercenary armed forces have been used many times to great effect but the backbone of most armed conflicts are the most socialist structure you could create.

Every large modern religion (abrahamic, hindu, buddhist) is socialist in nature and got to the level they are now due to socialist policy.