I switched to Tidal. It’s missing a few features, but the music library is basically the same (the only songs that didn’t transfer over from my Spotify library were very obscure anime soundtrack stuff) and the audio quality is superb.

Why isn’t Trump going after these people? Because the first door the feds would have to kick in is his own, obviously.

Yeah, which is a problem for their share price, but not for their bottom line.

Like, the worst case scenario for Nvidia is they go back to merely being the world’s biggest supplier of GPUs. Oh boo hoo hoo. They will see a massive correction to their share price, and the execs would all rather tht didn’t happen because it will destroy a lot of their newfound personal fortunes, but the company itself will be fine (unless they’ve massively over leveraged themselves with their shares as collateral).

People sometimes ask me why I, as a Canadian, care so much about what happens in US politics.

This is why. Because you mouth-breathing, knuckle dragging neolithic reprobates have been handed the keys to an economy and military so powerful that you can bully the rest of the world into doing whatever the fuck you like and rather than treat that as the awe inspiring responsibility that it is, you low-life ignorant pieces of shit get drunk and go joy-riding.

Sure, but they’ve already got plenty of made up reasons to arrest people, all of which were harder to disprove than “Cartel hitman”, a claim that would need serious fucking evidence.

Don’t let them fool you. This isn’t an escalation, it’s a retreat. A small one, sure, but it signals that things aren’t going their way.

So, obviously this is a lie, but I think it’s interesting that they’re having to resort to this particular lie. Until now the argument has basically been “Ooooh, spooky scary antifa protesters!” as justification for their extreme tactics, unwarranted use of force, concealed identities, and all of the other bullshit. The fact that they’re now having to raise the spectre of evil scary cartels going after them tells you that the public isn’t buying the “scary protesters” line at all. Portland, in particular, have demolished that idea with their dancing frogs, street parties and naked bike rides.

“I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

I really need to read Use of Weapons again. I’m such a huge fan of Banks’ work, the man was an absolute genius. Reading The Hydrogen Sonata was heart-wrenching, knowing that I’d never got another of these.

Yeah, parrying needs serious work. I don’t think I’ve been able to make it happen even once.

Everwind is fantastic. Fixes just about every complaint I have about Minecraft, and I say that as someone who bought Minecraft back in alpha. There are things that could be improved, but even where I think there’s room for improvement the baseline always seems to be “It’s already better than Minecraft”. For example I really feel like the combat could do with a dodge mechanic and harsher stamina management, but that’s based on comparing it to stuff like Dark Souls. Even in its current state it absolutely clowns on Minecraft’s combat.

The artstyle is lovely, the building and crafting feels really good, the range of furniture and decorations you can build is massive, and you get to build and fly an airship. And that’s not an afterthought, it’s a core part of the game and feels really, really good.

I just want to add to this that YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BOYCOTT SOMETHING COMPLETELY TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

It’s absolutely OK if you cannot 100% cut Amazon out of your life. It’s OK if you have to buy from them sometimes because it’s the only place you can find that particular thing you need.

You just need to stop making them your default. Check somewhere else first. Make that little bit of extra effort to see if maybe a local store has what you’re looking for.

If you reduce your spending on Amazon by 80%, that’s still a huge reduction. If enough people do that, they’ll be in serious trouble. And it’s a lot more manageable than an all or nothing boycott.

And if we could convince a hundred million people to reduce their spending Amazon by just 10%, that would have far more impact than a hundred thousand people cutting them out entirely. It’s better to set a lower standard that more people can engage with, especially because the more people develop that habit of not always going to Amazon first, the more it’s place in their lives will continue to shrink.

I call this “soft boycotting”. Reduce rather than remove. It’s far more sustainable as an option in your every day life, and it encourages people to actually engage with boycotting instead of writing it off because it feels like an impossible commitment.

All of which amounts to a company that, in a serious world, would have maybe a fifth of their current valuation. I’m not saying that Tesla are worthless, just that their stock price is entirely disconnected from reality.

Generally speaking, in object oriented programming there are ways to derive one class from another. So if you have a Car class, but you decide that it would actually make sense to have a Truck class as well, you can use Car as a starting point, inherit all of its properties, and then just change the specific parts that are different for the Truck class. This saves repeating work, and allows you to build in layers; instead of Car and Truck you might start with a Vehicle class, then derive a GroundVehicle class from that, then a Bike, Car and Truck class from GroundVehicle, and so on.

At this point I think it’s clear that Tesla’s share price is entirely irrational. Their sales are down globally, they’re facing a government in the US that’s openly hostile to EVs, a market in the EU that openly detests their products because their CEO is a Nazi, and in China they’re being destroyed by cheaper competitors.

Even if they were a successful car company with clear skies and open road ahead of them, that would not justify their share price. Tesla’s market cap is 1.44tn. Toyota’s is 262bn. There is no sane world where Tesla’s car business is worth 5½ times Toyota’s.

Investors are, at best, pricing Tesla on the notion that their self driving tech is where the real money is at, but even that is entirely irrational because Waymo are destroying them on a self driving. Tesla have over promised and under delivered on self driving for years, and have little more than lawsuits to show for it, while their competition have been solving all the problems they still struggle with.

Which leaves us with the conclusion that investors are really just pricing Tesla on vibes, and perhaps on the broader bet that one of the richest men in the world will always succeed in keeping the main source of his wealth from collapsing. Basically the only argument for betting on this company that I can see is that it’s too big to fail in a world this corrupt.

This is an obscure one, and not high on most people’s lists, but my personal favourite PS2 game is Steel Lancer International, a game where you build mechs and take them into arena battles in a post-apocalyptic future.

+1 for Burnout 3. That’s a series that desparately needs a new entry.

Zone of the Enders was phenomenal.

Ah yes, single player open world Helldivers.

Absolutely amazing game. Just Cause kind of captured some of the same energy, but never quite there. There’s nothing quite like being able to deploy cluster bomb strikes at will.

Alright, you just sold me on borg backup. Well done.

Is it even worth reading? It’s RT. They’re going to describe whatever Putin pitches as the greatest, kindest, most generous offer in all of history.

Edit:

The Russian president has shown he values peaceful coexistence

Holy shit. That might be one of the most brazen lies I’ve ever seen.