So what, like, 30 cents per violation?

Ok, so we are now at the performative ‘I have a family’ stage of our conservative politicians realizing they don’t actually have any meaningful, truthfully held values.

Republicans sure talk about hating post modernism, but they’ve done so, so much to prove that empty signifiers are the entirety of their politics.

Well, that and hurting people they don’t like.

…

Maybe when they say ‘think of the children’ they really do just mean it as an entirely solipsistic thought exercise.

It exists partially because many great games, for a long while, before widespread internet access, could not be played if they were no longer directly sold without either paying out the nose for a working, used cart or disc, and console… or via emulation, which is apparently basically illegal, in practice, technically, its complicated, etc.

Then the video game landscape changed with widespread internet access, much more oriented toward what used to be seen as buying a fancy pants board game into well now you’re just buying a ticket to a fancy pants board game that can be revoked at any time, and now you just have an expired ticket to a box that is magically superglued shut and will light on fire if you pry it open.

Some of us olds still view software as a product, a good, not a service.

The Stop Killing Games concept is not stopping or protecting anyone from buying video games.

… Neither is slapping a warning label onto games that says ‘hey you don’t own this the way you own a blender.’

That’s very strange framing to use.

What SKG does is mandate that your purchased product be technically possible to be usable in perpetuity, or refund the cost of it.

Everyone knows servers cost money to run, so its not reasonable to mandate every game that is totally online only just have servers up forever, maintained by the publisher.

But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day (Games for Windows Live, anyone?) or having a massively online game that could still be enjoyed by dedicated fans, willing to front the cost for one or two servers… but cannot, because reverse engineering network code is orders of magnitude more difficult and costly than the publisher just releasing it to the public when they no longer want to officially maintain it.

SKG would completely allow you to purchase an online game whose official server support would end someday.

It… just augments consumer rights by mandating either a refund at that point, or a pretty effortless and costless release of the server files and configs.

I am really struggling to see how you are interpreting this concept as somehow preventing the purchase of games.

Please reread the second sentence.

It doesn’t make any sense if the whole market is shitty rip offs.

In this case I’m not saying all games are bad, shitty games, but they are all shitty rip offs in the sense that they all legally can, and many do just suddenly deactivate, and you’re not even compensated for this.

The whole fundamental legal trick the software industry has pulled is making everything into a license for an ongoing service, as opposed to a consumer good.

And the problem is that this is now infecting everything, expanding as much as possible into anything with a chip in it.

Even if the consumer is perfectly informed, it doesn’t matter if the entire market is full of fundamentally unjust bullshit, as there aren’t any alternatives.

All you get is consumers who are now informed that their digital goods can poof out of existence with no recourse.

A while back I was discussing Ross Scott’s ‘Stop Killing Games’ proposal in the EU, in some other lemmy thread.

If passed, that law would make it so you cannot make and sell a game that becomes unplayable after a person buys the game, or you have to refund the purchase of the game itself as well as all ingame purchases.

If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.

If it uses some kind of DRM that no longer works, it has to be stripped of this, or properly refunded.

Someone popped in and said ‘well I think they should just make it more obvious that you’re not buying a game, you’re buying a temporary license.’

To which I said something like ‘But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.’

So, here we are with the American version of consumer protection: We’re not actually doing any kind of regulation that would actually prevent the problem, we’re just requiring some wordplay and allowing the problem to exist and proliferate.

All this does is make it so you can’t say ‘Buy’ or ‘Purchase’ and probably have a red box somewhere that says something like ‘You are acquiring a TEMPORARY license that may be revoked at any time for any reason.’

US gets a new content warning. EU is working toward actually stopping the bullshit.

QAnon and Trump taught Republicans that its totally ok to live in an alternate reality where they are always correct and never have to admit to being wrong, or if they do want to admit to being wrong, its because of a vast elaborate conspiracy.

They live in a delusional fantasy land. Its basically mass hallucination/psychosis in service of a cult leader, but because there’s a lot of them, its not seriously considered a mental illness.

So… short answer is no, if you mean a self sufficient, self sustaining colony that could reasonably continue in perpetuity.

We just do not have the technology to pull that off at a basic level. Even with the best currently existing proposals, it would be massively, absurdly expensive, as well as dangerous, and far, far too many things could go wrong.

Now if you mean a non self sustaining colony, one that gets frequently resupplied, offers the option to go back home… then we have the Moon.

Despite what Elon thinks, Mars is not a realistic option for anything other than conducting a sadistic experiment.

If you mean … exoplanets? And just assume we have a warp drive to get colonists there?

Unless I am mistaken, there are a few that could possibly harbor some kind of life, but almost certainly not us.

I don’t think we even have a rudimentary atmospheric composition estimate for any of the exo’s that are in the Goldilocks zone, if any of them at all.

1. God is punishing us all for allowing the gays and the trans and abortion to exist, and not mandating bible study in k-12.

2. General misdirect toward incompetent government bureaucracy being the culprit, therefore we should get rid of more of it and privatize more stuff.

3. Its all because of private and public DEI hires of illegal immigrants who also don’t work and get too many benefits thus bankrupting us

4. Secret deepstate illuminati cabal runs everything, we need more sweeping authoritarian powers to stop them

1 - 3 basically are the talking points they’ve used since the 80s, 4 has always been there but is now openly used for about a decade.

So, the goal here is to prevent ghosting by making ghosting minutely costly to the ghoster.

They pick from an array of multiple reasons why, and the app formulates an exceptionally kindly worded explanation to send to the ghosted person.

I don’t see this as dangerous to people who are ghosting potentially dangerous people.

Instead of getting nothing, and formulating whatever cockamamie explanation in their own minds (or maybe just going ‘sigh, oh well’), they at least get a facsimile of closure from a canned response.

Obviously this does not magically solve the many problems of dating apps, but I fail to see how this is more dangerous than just ghosting on its own.

The problem is that its minutely time consuming to provide a ghosting explanation.

This ghost explanation requirement requires people to actually explain themselves, and that’s gonna be very cumbersome to people who are not really looking for a serious, long term relationship.

It makes it very annoying to use the app in a scattershot approach for rapid fire hookups, with tons of potentials on deck, as you’ll be forced to consistently ‘tend’ to all of your simultaneous matches, or drop them…

…and for people who think they’re looking for a serious, monogamous relationship, but consistently ghost people, it will basically cause uncomfortable cognitive dissonance when they realize they don’t like having to do a modicum if effort to explain why no one seems to meet their standards or is due their attention, even though they previously thought they were interested.

Basically, the problem I see with this app is that it forces users toward being honest with themselves.

It could be a cool or lukewarm beverage with caffeine, and I have seen people drink and eat stuff their dentists tell them not to after an oral surgery, and tonsilectomies can leave open wounds if the dentist doesn’t fully cauterize them or bandage them properly… and I have also seen people remove bandages/gauze faster than they are instructed to for all kinds of wounds…

But southsamurai seems confident that the difference between absorption into exposed oral capillaries and just normally through your gums/mouth is negligible.

Made me spit out my covfefe!

Could having open wounds in your mouth allow caffeine in a beverage to directly enter your blood stream much more quickly than when it is processed by your digestive system?

Wow, within 24 hours of the determination that everyone near East Palestine is owed compensation from them burning off chemicals in situ for no actual reason, this happens.

Way to go, Ohio.

Fluoridation, you say?

E.G.G.M.A.N.

Just… taking a step back from the politics… all that…

Imagine attempting to explain the bare basics of this to an 8 year old.

The CEO… of the Anti Defamation League … publicly defamed a Congresswoman.

Arguably, a mechanic who is literally performing maintenance on exceptionally mechanically dense and complex parts of a rocket, say the rocket engine plumbing or wiring harnesses… is figuratively performing rocket surgery.

Though this is not for idiomatic phrases, there’s also misnomer, for when something is named in a misleading or inappropriate manner.

Though, different dictionaries seem to give different scope to what can and cannot be considered a misnomer, and others place different emphasis on precisely how the name is wrong qualifies it as a misnomer.

Cambridge lists ‘dry cleaning’ as an example, a process that involves liquid and is thus antithetical.

The focus is on something being named such that the obvious, plain reading of it implies the precise opposite.

Merriam Webster lists that its a misnomer to call a farmer a peasant, which is not antithetical but more along the lines of being rude, out of date.

Their conception of it is fairly broad: any name that is inaccurate for basically any reason, or even just a word that has offensive connotations due to inaccuracy.

Dictionary.com uses the examples of Chinese Checkers, a funny bone, and hay fever.

They focus the definition on the factual/historical inaccuracy of the term:

Chinese Checkers did not originate in China, a funny bone is actually a nerve, not a bone, and hay fever is not caused by hay, nor is it a fever.