Trump is actually very bad with money, historically. His father was the clever businessman, and Trump apparently squandered his inheritance. His partially public tax returns reveal as much. He’s lost absolute fortunes. He couldn’t even get a casino in Atlantic City to stay afloat. I’m pretty sure that everything about his public image is a lie.

Crucial and Samsung have good reputations.

Dawid Does Tech Stuff is as least as entertaining as LLT but without the inaccuracies or the drama: https://youtube.com/@DawidDoesTechStuff

Dave2D is great for laptop and mobile phone coverage: https://youtube.com/@Dave2D

Paul’s Hardware is good for tech news and build guides: https://youtube.com/@paulshardware

Kit Guru has consistently good hardware reviews: https://youtube.com/@KitGuruTech

Sara Dietschy has probably my favorite general tech channel on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@saradietschy

Every time I mentioned Trump on Reddit’s world news sub, I got shouted down for talking about “irrelevant” US politics. I tried to explain his potential impact on the politics of other countries, but they didn’t want to hear it.

Costco, yes, last I heard. Trader Joe’s has lost my vote, though, after their intimidation tactics against labor organizers.

Running files you downloaded from a Russian website, what could possibly go wrong

It also would have been perfectly fine to name the company in the headline. There is plenty of room for it. But that’s Business Insider for you.

Well, he became the guy who would sign their shitty legislation, appoint right-wing judges and other officials to long-term positions, undermine regulators, spread fascist propaganda amplified by the power of the presidency, etc. The person with the R next to their name opens the doors for the flood of partisan garbage and shuts down those pesky people who want things like “democracy” and “tap water that doesn’t poison my family.”

However, I have a strong suspicion that video game subscription services will end up following a similar trajectory to TV/movie streaming services at some point… Gamepass doesn’t really have any major competitors, and has been priced very aggressively in order to build market share, and it reminds me a lot of Netflix in its early digital stages.

Netflix pricing has always had a lot of pressure on it because the company has no product diversity. All Netflix offers is Netflix, so all of its revenue comes from there. Meanwhile, MS has Office as the world’s default productivity suite, and it rakes in billions from corporate Windows licensing and cloud services. As of about a year ago, gaming was actually less than 10% of their annual revenue. So they can support narrow margins on Game Pass pretty much indefinitely. And they are motivated to do so as the heavy underdog to Sony, whose consoles consistently outsell theirs by a ratio of about 2:1.

The issue with the donation has multiple stages. Stage 1 was the donation itself. Stage 2 was the intellectually insulting way that Brendan Eich defended his actions. Stage 3 is the negative impact that Proposition 8 had on California for many years, during which time millions of dollars in taxpayer money was wasted on legal proceedings to walk back the amendment banning marriage for people who dared to be of the same gender.

And we did actually hear a lot about the people who donated millions to Proposition 8. There was a lot of coverage of the millions that Mormons donated to get this type of marriage banned. It was a political decision that haunted the LDS church for years. Example 1, five years later. Here’s some more coverage from just last year. We’ve been hearing about those people for years. Because California remembers the damage that they wrought.

No one is saying that it should be free. The issue is that $50 for a straight port of a 13 year-old game is ridiculous when Sony’s competitor offers free backwards compatibility—and 4K upscaling. Microsoft absorbed their expenses for that as the cost of doing business, and it would be a blip on Rockstar’s balance sheet as well, since they make a perpetual avalanche of money from GTA Online. There’s really no credible justification for a price this high.

Some context, courtesy of WaPo:

Christie lobbied harder than anyone to become Trump’s vice-presidential pick, but he was passed over in a way that seemed to surprise him. Then Christie took over Trump’s 2016 transition team, before being quickly pushed aside. Trump declined on multiple occasions to make him attorney general, the cabinet job Christie was most suited for, leading Christie to explain in early 2019, “He hasn’t offered me anything that I really wanted to do.” 
It was at this point that the cracks in their alliance began to form, and they became chasms after Jan. 6, 2021. Christie has even blamed Trump for giving him a coronavirus infection that landed him in intensive care in late 2020. He said Trump never called to check on him.

Yes, they’re not conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theorists start with a set of verified facts to arrive at a speculative conclusion. These people are twisting and ignoring facts to form an agenda. That makes them textbook propagandists, not theorists of any kind.

They gave themselves the wrong label, knowingly, and the mainstream media has blithely and consistently granted them this wholly unearned legitimacy.

Clearly a coincidence.

Happened quite often in the past…over the course of thousands of years. Man-made global warming is a very different animal.

There’s always been a sociopolitical rift between artists and the corporations that hire them. The corpos would like nothing more than to send the hippies packing, and the corpos are the side with the money and the lawyers.

It begins with things like book covers and movie posters. And at some point, AI is trained on animation as well as artwork. Individual actors become created by AI, voices included. Feature film CGI sequences get produced by digital brains. It will be rough at first, but less and less intervention will be needed as the training models are refined, until it gets good enough to satisfy the suits and their bean counters.

Popular music as we know it will probably also come under threat. Various types of writing will also be tested. Anything that an AI can be made to sufficiently emulate is going to be tested by someone who wants to make more money – or pocket more of the dividends instead of sharing it with stakeholders with a pulse. “Made by people” becomes a rallying cry for the creators who push back.

If I recall, it was a ghost town because Google was very stingy with its invitations. I don’t know if they were having problems scaling, or if they were trying to generate hype. But progress was so slow that Google Plus was unable to reach critical mass.

Please don’t “both sides” this. Fox News was created explicitly as a propaganda arm of the Republican party. The others are basically centrist news organizations.