I like to call it a ward against boredom.

If I don’t have one, then I’m going to be bored. If I do have one, I’ll be busy enough that I won’t need it.

all of this is just bullshit meant to distract you

I personally doubt this; Trump is an egotistical moron who is behind the times and doesn’t like listening to any counterarguments. Battleships are cool, thus battleships are effective, and the USA was stupid to stop making them, and they should make them again, and by the way, they should slap his name on it because he’s so smart and also a good military leader and better than Sleepy Joe. It doesn’t need to be a distraction to exist.

Okay, slow your roll there. Protecting pedophiles is not nearly in the same category as directly facilitating pedophilia and engaging in human trafficking.

Downvote all you like, but a murderer is still guilty of a greater crime than their friend who is helping them bury the bodies.

TF2 had a long and prosperous life. It’s 18 years old at this point. There are a few live service games (usually with subscriptions) that have survived longer, but TF2 had its run, and it was a good one. I bought it as part of the Orange Box and I absolutely got my money’s worth and then some from it.

As for physical media - I don’t know if you were around for it, but there was a period before Steam took over the industry when most major PC game releases had CD keys you had to input and validate before you could play the game. Do something the publisher doesn’t like? The key gets revoked and you can’t play the game any more unless you buy another license. There were entire underground communities devoted to cracking the CD key validations in games. Now you just use Luna or Steamless and call it a day.

All it would take for Valve to lose their effective monopoly on PC game distribution would be for someone else to make a better product.

Every other major PC game distribution platform (besides GOG, and they’re far more niche than Valve) has essentially started their attempt to unseat Valve with enshittification baked in, and it was obvious.

Even in a democracy, you will still have a small group of people imposing their will over others, and only giving them what they feel they deserve. The only difference you are seeing is that of scale. Instead of a collection of elected representatives who are granted disparate powers by the plurality of people they are ruling over in their various capacities as governors, a benevolent dictatorship has one person who is granted all governmental powers by the people they are ruling over. Even a democracy can, briefly, be a tyranny. It just requires multiple bad actors to work together.

The primary difference is how long it takes for the wheels to fall off. In a dictatorship, it can - and usually does - happen virtually instantly. That’s the primary reason democracies (and republics) are the way they are - to slow down the encroachment of tyranny, hopefully enough to allow people to react to it and overturn it. (And as we’re seeing in the USA right now, that’s no guarantee.)

Yes, that is why I continued to give examples of when it would go south.

This is absolutely a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Benevolent dictatorships work as well as state-run communism does - which is to say, in theory they’re great, but they show cracks nearly the instant they’re actually enacted.

What the fuck?

WHAT THE FUCK??

I’ve seen demos of software that uses AI to split a song into multiple tracks, one for each instrument. THAT is pretty cool. It’s not lossless, you’re going to lose some of the human performance because the AI has to reconstruct the sound for each instrument and it’s not going to be 100% perfect, but it’s a really neat (and useful) tool.

Notably, it’s not the kind of thing you generally see when tech bros are touting AI.

The original point about a benevolent dictatorship being the ideal form of government is, in my opinion, true. Having a single point of decision means that issues are dealt with quickly and efficiently, the ‘benevolent’ part means that the needs of the populace are heard and addressed, oppression is eliminated wherever it can be found. A truly benevolent dictatorship looks a lot like a well-run democracy.

The problem comes when the benevolent dictator dies peacefully in their sleep. Or when other parts of the government begin to realize that they can feed the dictator lies in order to get what they want. Or when the dear leader starts to get paranoid. A benevolent dictatorship only works briefly, after which the ‘dictatorship’ part starts to become a real problem.

Or if ‘benevolence’ includes religious extremism (although I would argue that a leader like that wouldn’t count as truly benevolent).

If you have something that you can’t afford to part with, you don’t let it leave your person. It goes in your pockets, or in your carry-on.

If you have something that needs to get somewhere safely, and you can’t afford to lose it, and you can’t carry it with you onto an airplane, you don’t put it in your checked luggage - you ship it. With insurance.

Everyone either knows someone, or has had the experience themselves, of losing luggage due to an airline’s neglect. It’s a known risk.

Although I agree that they couldn’t just end it at the bottom of the ocean, if it were written better it could have had an ending that actually tied into the rest of the story, rather than what it wound up with. The whole thing just felt like a lot of missed opportunities.

Instead of a tragic - but sensible - ending, magical aliens showed up after Earth was kaput, and gave him what he wanted. There is nothing to tie this ending to the rest of the plot besides the main character, no agency involved in its happening, no nothing. It’s unsatisfying. It’s a deus ex machina, and not the good kind.

Amazon is a service. That service is becoming materially worse (I have a harder time finding what I’m looking for because of the flood of substandard products and Amazon’s preferential search treatment practices, and even when I do find what I’m looking for, there’s a sizable risk that it’s a fake). This is very much enshittification; they captured the market share, and now they’re squeezing it. Anything that makes them more money but is worse for the consumer, they do. Anything that is better for the consumer but costs them money, they don’t do.

There are two factors necessary for a truly free market that prevent any capitalist system from actually being a free market. They are:

1. Consumers need to have perfect information about the products and the companies that make and/or sell them - in other words, companies must not be able to hide their sins.

2. There needs to be zero friction for new entrants into the marketplace, whether that is from costs to start up a business, or anti-competitive behavior from other companies with money to throw around.

It is impossible to achieve either of these in the real world.

Instapots will seal completely once they’re making enough steam, and are built incredibly robust. This one blowing up was entirely because the lid was not on correctly (steam escaping out the sides shouldn’t be possible).

Somehow I don’t think the people who were performing mayoral duties on behalf of the dog were hidden behind the scenes. Especially since it’s a tiny little town; everyone knows everyone else.

Ugh. Well, sounds like I made a good choice dropping it…

Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

Mostly I just wondered why the movie was made in the first place. Sure, examining the tragedy of creating an intelligent being that cannot mature and cannot let go of emotional attachments by design is interesting… but the meandering, pointless story had like three places it could have ended and just … didn’t, finally topping it off with a ‘bittersweet’ ending that seemingly had no purpose besides to give some catharsis to the audience despite being so out of left field that it had no relation to the rest of the story. It could have been an art book showing off the scenery instead of bothering to throw an aimlessly wandering robot child into it.

Kpop Demon Hunters initially looks like a girlie movie that was shoehorned into being an action flick.

It’s a drama, interspersed with enough comedy and action to make you forget that it’s a drama. The story isn’t anything special, but it has well-done emotional beats backed by a soundtrack that elevates it. It is absolutely worth watching. (And the animation is fantastic.)

Don’t go into it expecting a cinematic masterpiece; it’s made for kids. It is also, however, a kid’s movie that is intended to entertain the adults who take their kids to see it.