But GOG is alresdy the Steam with Principles…

I didn’t. It just looks like the fair number of Cisco (and the occasional Dell) 10/100/sometimes Gigabit switches I’ve seen in junk shops.

I bought a nifty blue Netgear 24-port one mostly because I’m more willing to buy junk from the Humane Society shop, but then decided it was too loud (40mm fans) and went to 2.5G (with smaller fanless switches) instead.

Wpuld someone explain who the hell Silac Insurance is?

I tend to watch crappy sitcom rerun channels when exercising and they run so many adverts trying to push “guides” to annuities. I’ve never heard of anyone actually using them as an insurance company, and AFAICT there are about nine people who are in the exact corner combination of situations that annuities are a good investment, so it makes me wonder where they can afford all that UHF airtime.

Old Cisco gear shows up in the thrift shops here. I think you can’t even give 10/100 kit away.

American security guarantees are the only thing propping up that stupid narrative.

They’ve always made the claim “TSMC will blow up their own fabs in the event of an invasion”. So, they’re dependent on a lose/lose spite play. If an independent Taiwanese state survives, they’ve demolished one of its major economic engines. If, as far more likely, it falls, everyone involved gets locked up or worse for gross sabotage, and you bought, what, 5 years of global economic distress (oh, no, it might pop the AI bubble…) before everyone else gets back to par with your top-line process? Or maybe you successfully blackmailed bigger and more equipped militaries to fight WWIII for you, and even in the unlikely event Taiwan survives the carnage intact, irradiated corpses buy very few semiconductors.

If America washed their hands of the situation, they’d pretty quickly switch to angling for a deal, perhaps expecting that they’d go for a HK-style “one country/two systems” play, which continues to let them make out like bandits. HSBC doesn’t seemed to have suffered too badly after reunification…

We can test. Send a lander with Palestinian tardigrades and see if they experience discrimination and attempts to expel them from the lunar surface.

GE no longer makes appliances. It’s a licensed out name now.

I figure their star finally fell when they stopped making locomotives. What kind of giant industrial conglomerate does that?! EveN Hitachi, a brand mostly known for marital aids, makes locomotives!

Not necessarily precise, just a more resonant presentation. She didn’t have a killer sound bite. If details actually mattered, we’d be in the closing months of the second Warren administration after all.

I literally saw scads of signs saying “Trump - Low Prices/Kamala - High Prices” and one that specifically claimed “Want $2.15 gas, vote Trump.” She didn’t counter well at the slogan/vibes level. There was no “Harris/Walz/$2-per-pound ground beef” signage.

It’s also an audience problem. The Democrats, as incumbents, were stuck with higher expectations. They couldn’t pad their numbers with low-hanging “I just want different” and “let’s burn it all down” crowds, so they have to chase voters who are harder to activate.

The message was weak though. The policy was fairly limited-- like limits on gouging in emergencies-- and not expressed in terms of a tangible achievable metric. And it’s not like we have direct economic control that would allow for specific deliverables-- how exactly are you goung to get Kroger to bend the knee? A fine that’s 12 seconds of their turnover?

‘I’ll get the 99-cent Taco Supreme back’ (or the $2 gallon of milk/dozen eggs) would have helped-- a graspable specific rallying cry. “We’ll tax gougers back into the stone age” maybe too. ISTR there’s some rightwing scumball in Canada who achieved most of his political rise by literally campaigning on $1-per-can beer. Again, a tangible goal, and one more achievable because there’s direct state controlled alcohol sales in much of the country…

We need to convince Trump that the way to win a legacy is to deliver something like universal health care. Present it as a display of personal power and his unique talents, and as a branding moment like no other (beyond Obamacare). 'The Democrats couldn’t do it in 50 years, but I rammed it through in 2. Got the chair of Cigna on the phone and fired him personally. Now we all have Trumpcare and even Hillary has to praise it through gritted teeth…"

The GOP tied themselves so tightly to his star that they’d have to own the pivot, or find some way to retract their allegiance. And the rest of us could at least enjoy the historic worst-person-you-know-makes-a-greatipoint moment.

I bought a (used) PS2 towards the end of its life mostly for DQ8 (and later Personas 3 and 4).

When DQ11 arrived on PC, I actually asked for it as a gift at near full price rather than waiting for the inevitable 75% off, but somehow I never got very far on it.

It manages to not age well even as a new title-- the tropes are a bit too tropey (Sylvando, dear, I went to the freaking Castro and saw less flamboyance) and the storyline doesn’t seem to give a rewarding feel of forward motion, just bouncing from aimless episode to episode like a shonen anime that went 500 episodes beyond its original vision.

It does have a unique nostalgia as a franchise in that it was basically EVERY American’s first JRPG, due to the first installment being given away by the millions as a “subscribe to our print game magazine” promotional item, so whenever you look at someone trying to produce a “8-bit/16-bit RPG” homage, it’s going to smell a lot like Dragon Quest.

While prestigious, I have to think the type of lawyer who wants Trump for a client is hardly goingbto want to do heavy government work for a civil servant’s salary. Surely there’s way more cash in skip-and-falls and “get six divorce punches on your loyalty club card and the 7th is free”.

What I hate about the current situation is that there’s no room for “Russia is a significant power that won’t suddenly vanish, so maybe if we can avoid being at complete loggerheads with them 24/7, it might avoid decades of tension and expensive military grandstanding.”

You must either fellate Putin or demand the entire 82 billion square kilometres of the Russian state turned to glass. No other options. It worries me that any more nuanced takes on Russia get pushed into the “Kremlin talking points” file.

Not that she isn’t a screwball all on her own, but we could use a less militaristic take here.

ISTR having some hallucinogenic colour issues when Vulkan wasn’t properly installed.

Thr death wave virus that crippled mankind requires a tech hegemony beyond belief.

I think it’s not even 100% a superiority thing, but the loss of position, purpose, place.

Stable jobs and healthcare would do so much to defuse the “I need to outcompete/hobble everyone else to WIN” grindset hustle mentality.

In my field (a “successful” one in the modern economy), the conventional wisdom is to intentionally change jobs every two years or so to get a bigger raise than loyalty yields. Other fields have either intentional high turnover or mismanagement that sabotages long-term employment. Nobody develops a pride of position and it creates more easily replacable workers. Of course this ripples to “nobody even stays in the same neighbourhood anymore” as we Grapes of Wrath ourselves across the map looking for opportunity.

If you aren’t forced to chase the ever-moving brass ring, maybe you can find satisfaction in being part of long-lived communities which encourage mutual support. If you know your needs are going to be taken care of, different faces and lifestyles are less of a risk to destabilize your world.

The Apple II’s big selling point, compared to the other two big brands introduced in 1977 (the Radio Shack TRS-80 and Commodore PET) was colour.

But it was a weird and colour scheme that took advantage of clever Wozniak hacks to make it viable on a cheap machine. Good video hardware, and enough memory for the colour display, were spendy. That’s why even into the 1980s you’d have machines like the ZX Spectrum with limitations like “every 8x8 block can only have 2 colours” which used less memory, and 40-column screens that were readable on TVs instead of dedicated high-res monitors…

The only appropriate family hauler is a 20-year-old Camry with 850,000 km on the odometer and the obligatory rear bumper dent.

If we can pick home computers that lean into cartridges, the Atari 800XL is a real winner. Nice two-tone finish, classy silver buttons with a plexi trim oiece covering the power light.

Can we bring back George III? Or at least poofy powdered wigs?