I still break out the old Sierra games (specifically the Quest for Glory series) from time to time. Those are still a lot of fun and ScummVM makes them run damn near perfectly.

Most non-indie stuff is complete and utter trash.

Ya, it’s telling that some of my favorite games these days all started as indie games. I do worry about them as they get in bed with larger producers, but I also understand the draw. E.g. I still love Valheim, but they were Embracer’d by private equity. And I’m waiting for that relationship to push them to shit all over their players. Though I understand that publisher backing lets them focus more on development and less on the marketing and distribution of the game.

So now I expect it will be just a patronising nostalgia IP reboot fest designed to extract as much cash as possible.

Ya, this is one of the big turn-offs for me. For example, I really liked Prince of Persia: Sands of Time back in the day. I’ve got exactly zero interest in the remake. Ubisoft’s logo now looking like a neat pile of dogshit, viewed from above, is pretty apt.

I think it’s pretty telling that so many of the people they talk to and a lot of the focus of the article isn’t really about older gamers, it’s about their money.

The opportunity is substantial. The 40+ segment in the US is on track to grow from $19 billion in 2022 to $43 billion by 2030, a 132% expansion at a moment when the rest of the industry is shrinking. These are players with the most disposable income, the longest gaming literacy, and the highest brand loyalty.

I’m in that “40+ segment” and I suspect part of the “problem” these companies face is that older gamers have seen the enshitification of so many of the brands we love. Our tolerance for bullshit is basically gone at this point. Micro transactions, season passes, fucking ads in games, all of that bullshit is a quick way to not get our money.

I also suspect “brand loyalty” is basically gone for the same reason. As a kid, I looked for the Electronic Arts logo. If I saw this logo on a game package, I knew I was looking at a good game. I haven’t bought an EA game in years. I don’t expect to buy an EA game any time soon and I basically ignore everything they do. Sure, if a trailer for Starflight 3 dropped, I’d sit up and take notice. I’d also expect it to be an enshitified mess wearing the skin of a beloved series to sucker me in, before pouncing on my wallet.

So ya, maybe just make good games and older gamers will inevitably buy them. I mean, Larian can pretty much say, “hi we’re making…” and I’ll have my wallet out and be pulling bills before they get any further. And maybe that’s your “brand loyalty”. Game companies who make good games and aren’t private equity firms wearing the dead skin suits of brands we used to love.

Soldiers give up a lot of rights when they sign their enlistment contract.

He might be right. He’s a complete ass for pointing it out. And the fact that he would think he might need to point it out should be cause for some serious self reflection. But ya, disparaging someone above you in the chain of command is going to run afoul of the UCMJ. I’m just not sure of the VP is considered in the chain of command.

I’d wonder how in the world such a young kid could have made that much money. And did so without me noticing.

More seriously, assuming this happens well into the future, I’d congratulate him and just ask that he be sure to take good care of his mother when I die.

My company has let us get Enterprise Copilot and has been pushing us all to “use AI”. So, I now use it as a a semi-functional search for SharePoint/Outlook/Files on an almost daily basis. I also ask it questions about Microsoft documentation on a regular basis. I wonder how long it’s going to be until they yank my license.

Seems like this would be a good place to treat those stocks (and options) as real property and tax them accordingly. With a properly progressive rate on them, we could set the lower end such that normal retirement funds won’t be impacted, with the high end discouraging hording assets.

Next up, we turn The Ellipse into the Circus Maximus. I mean, it’s already got the right shape for the chariot races.

The base is taking about Iran and not the Epstein files. I’d say Trump’s done a fine job fooling his base.

There is a reason I always say, “backslash, the one without the question mark”.

how would it put more dollars on the market than there was always going to be anyway?

Specifically printing money (as you proposed, or more realistically, the Fed giving more money to the US Treasury) means increasing the Dollar supply. Something kinda like that happens all the time and, in a much more controlled fashion, and is probably a net good. But, the Fed could just add $39 Trillion to the US Treasury’s bank account, it’s just a database update command anyway, and that would increase the Dollar supply by $39 Trillion. Sure, no actual bills would be created, that isn’t really important. At the scale those investments operate at, no one is handling cash, it’s just numbers in a database. But, it’s numbers in a database which are very carefully tracked and those numbers mean something to people. If I move $100 from the database at my bank to the database at your bank, you will have the ability to obtain more goods and services based on those database transactions. The whole thing is absolutely a house of cards, but it’s a house of cards that most people trust because if anyone fucks with that house of cards the US Government will show up and start shooting them. People also trust it because the US Government (US Fed, really. But that’s a whole different can of worms) is very careful about how it grows the money supply.

If the US Fed started just adding large amounts of money to the US Treasury’s account, people would notice and people would freak out.

The total Federal debt is $39 trillion, but there’s only something like $20 trillion actually in existence, if I’m not mistaken. Even if we collected every single existing dollar out there through taxes, we’d still have a shortfall of almost $20 trillion.

Wikipedia puts the number in actual bills and coins around $2T. But ya, the number of physical Dollars is dwarfed by the US debt. And no one cares. Most money exists as numbers in databases. But, those digital Dollars are every bit as real as the physical ones in the sense that they can be used to obtain goods and services.

Trump, is that you?
Jokes aside, this is a bad idea.

We could try printing our way out of it, but people will swear up and down that would cause runaway inflation

That’s exactly what would happen. With more dollars on the market chasing the same amount of goods (e.g. oil) the price of everything denominated in dollars would shoot through the roof. As a simplified example, imagine I have a barrel of oil and someone offers me $50 for it. That’s pretty good and I might be inclined to accept. But, with the money printer going BRRR, someone else has a lot of cash to splash around and offers me $100 for that barrel. Well great, that $50 bid can go get fucked. But they really want my barrel, and the money printer go BRRR so now they have $150 to offer me. And this cycle keeps going, so long as the money printer is BRRing along. Eventually though, I get smart and realize that, no matter how many dollars I get for my barrel of oil, the value of those dollars is going to collapse faster than I can spend them. So I finally get smart and tell both bidders to put their dollars somewhere else and demand that I get paid in a more stable store of wealth (e.g. gold or a more stable currency).

And, in theory, wouldn’t that cause bond yields to go down?

Maybe for a very short period, but it would reverse very, very quickly. If investors want to make money (wealth really). If they start to realize that US Treasury yields either not making as much money or losing money due to the devaluation of the US Dollar, they are going to demand higher yields. This is why countries which are suffering crises have to pay much higher borrowing costs. The US has been a special snowflake here, specifically because the US Dollar is seen as exceptionally stable and the US economy is seen as a safe place to put money. If we go stupid and start heading the hyperinflation route, that will all collapse. Read up on the Turkish Economic Crisis for something.

If treasuries were essentially guaranteed investments (and weren’t they kind of seen that way for a very long time, up until recently?), yields would drop and the cost of borrowing for the Federal government would go down.

That is why US borrowing costs are currently so low and one of the reasons the US can run these sorts of deficits and not have investors fleeing for other countries. Despite Trump’s flailing about, the US Dollar is still seen as a safe investment. It’s relatively stable, easily convertible and easily transferable. Plus, it’s used to buy oil. Inflating the fuck out of it would not help any of these perceptions and may make some nations with lots of oil consider requiring other forms of currency. You want to see a major economic catastrophe in the US? Convince the world to stop trading oil in US Dollars. Granted, as the largest single producer of oil and natural gas, the US has a lot of pull against that. So maybe, the US Dollar would survive the Middle East de-Dollarizing. But, it’s not a gamble I would want to make for anything other than really, really, really good reasons.

Answer #1: Someone gutted CISA’s budget. We’re not naming names here, but perhaps a branch of government with the “Power of the Purse” could figure out how to fund the organization properly.
Answer #2: Maybe don’t fire the people who actually make the organization work, just because they aren’t political hacks.
Answer #3: Cyber security is hard and it takes skilled people. Laying off large swaths of the staff isn’t conducive to good cyber security and leads to the remaining people taking short cuts which they shouldn’t. And a robust cybersecurity program has a batter chance to catch and correct these shortcuts before someone else finds them.

Of course, this would require the MAGAts in Congress to unwrap their collective mouths from Trump’s cock long enough to tell him to stop gutting critical government operations. Something we know isn’t going to happen. And given recent Primary results, is only going to get worse.

The just stopped working was the client stopped syncing?

The client doesn’t seem to detect new photos as they are created/taken. If I manually upload an image from my photos folder, it syncs just fine. Files in other folders seem to sync just fine. But, photos and videos just never even try to sync.

NextCloud decided to stop allow private made certificates with its client in 2025 and its what made me switch.

This hasn’t been an issue for me. I pay for a domain and have a certificate issued by Let’s Encrypt. The only certificate errors I get are when I refresh the certificate every 6 months, and that’s just the client asking me if I want to trust the new certificate.

Syncthing

I had looked into this a while back, but it seemed to be more of a point to point solution and not a client-server system. I was aiming to have an authoritative server with everything and clients (both phone and desktop) able to pull the needed/request files. I also like the ability to share via a web link when needed. Am I wrong in that understanding?

I currently use NextCloud, but I have been looking to move away from it. My main use case is for syncing photos and videos to the cloud from my phone (Android) and this used to work flawlessly. But, some time in early 2025, it just stopped working. I can still manually upload files and sync still works for other folders (e.g. Documents) just fine. But, photos and videos just won’t sync automatically. Not sure if there are other options which would work better, but NextCloud on Android just seems to be broke.

It depends on the user(s). Which position do you naturally reach for first? That’s where the oldest stock goes, with newer stock “behind” that in descending order of age. You always want to rotate stock, such that the oldest stock gets used up first.

You literally say it yourself. Precedents are being revoked. This shouldn’t be possible by the same court.

Why not? You are essentially arguing that the courts should always be bound by their first decision.

We have balance of powers for a reason

You don’t seem to understand what that means. The balance of powers doctrine is about ensuring that no one branch of government has too much power. A single branch changing its mind has nothing to do with that. In fact, all three branches do this all the time. Presidents can issue Executive Orders and those can (and regularly are) overridden by new Presidents. Congress passes laws regularly and it’s rather common for new Congresses to change those laws. It makes no sense to say that the Courts must always be bound by the first decision to be made and never update those decisions based on new information or a changing in society.

it was pretty well decided on that things don’t get re-litigated

Have you read a history book? Things are re-litigated constantly. Something I specifically pointed out in my last comment.

exactly to stop what is currently happening from happening.

Quite the opposite, really. Re-litigation of issues is one of the ways in which issues actually get changed. Let’s take something like Roe v. Wade. That was not the first time an abortion ban was in front of the Supreme Court. In fact, they had just decided US v. Vuitch. That case effectively rules that DC could enact a ban on abortion. Under your theory, Roe couldn’t have happened. We could also just jump all the way back to Cruickshank (which I mentioned before) and say that the restrictions on the Federal Government in the Bill of Rights (specifically the 1st and 2nd amendments) do not restrict State Governments.

Honestly, it sounds like your real complaint is that precedents you like or agree with are being overturned. And that sucks, but Supreme Court precedents have never crystalized US law in the past. On the upshot, they won’t in the future either. The actions of this Supreme Court will only last as long as the Justices continue to agree with the decisions being made. And that is likely to change eventually. It just takes time and hard political work.

They already can be. There’s a few ways to do it, but all of them are slow, difficult and rely on achieving a level of political alignment which is not going to happen any time soon. And almost certainly not for the things you’re likely to want.

First off, Congress can just pass a law to change the current law. For most things, this works out well enough and this still happens from time to time. But, it’s much less durable than other methods. If the Supreme Court sees that law as violating the Constitution, they will strike it down and that ends that path to change.

Second, Congress and the States could amend the Constitution. The has happened 27 times in US History, but it’s never been a simple process. The Constitution is hard to amend and it requires a lot of consensus. Given the fractious nature of current politics and going by voting patters, the near perfect split between left vs right, I doubt we could even get an amendment passed which just said, “don’t kick puppies”.

Lastly, the States could just call a Constitutional Convention and pass whatever they want. This is a bad idea. It’s a really, really bad idea. The last time the States did this, they scrapped everything the previous Constitutional Convention had written and started from scratch. Maybe this would result in something better, but given whom our current president is, I’d be kinda afraid of giving any political body that sort of power right now.

Technically, there’s also always the “ammo box” solution to forcing change. But, history provides lost of examples of that going very, very poorly and almost none of it going well. Also, that process is only legal if you win; so, maybe let’s not go there.

This proposed amendment would be based on the ratification provision in the Constitution, which requires only three-quarters of the states to approve an amendment. However, this amendment would only serve to overturn Supreme Court rulings if three-quarters of the state supreme courts reject the ruling or issue a contrary ruling.

Ignoring the fact that this would require an amendment to the US Constitution to put in place, it’s an interesting idea. Though, it’s worth noting that this would have likely delayed a lot of social change in the US. The 20th Century saw a lot of landmark changes to the interpretation to the Constitution, not all of them widely popular at the time.

What would be the political and judicial consequences if this amendment were to take effect?

This would devolve a lot of power away from the Federal Government. Arguably, this would be more similar to the pre-20th Century state of affairs. Control of State Governments would be even more important to political parties and this would likely shift power even further towards small, less densely populated States. In short, I’d bet on it causing a significant conservative shift in US law. Currently, the GOP hold 23 State Government trifectas (control of all legislative branches), and the DNC 16. The other 11 States are split. [source]. While such control does not guarantee control of State Supreme Courts (e.g. Virginia’s Supreme Court is still conservative), it is an indicator. But, I’d bet on a cumulative court decision being much closer to the current Supreme Court than many folks here would want.