SpaceX is not actually supposed to even have direct control over Starshield. It uses Starlink infrastructure, but is a military application that is supposed to be under the control of the federal government.

SpaceX shouldn’t have the option to pitch different plans.

The democratic House resolution is basically an opinion letter. It’s no different than when they pass a resolution declaring that Christmas is a special time of year.

They’ll make good data centers. As in - data storage and networking infrastructure, not the pollution and hallucination machines.

That’s not how it work in a 2-party system. The 2 parties themselves are changed.

This happens constantly. The Republicans were the party who ended slavery and gave the vote to non-white people, while Sothern Democrats fought the hardest against women’s suffrage and civil rights. Hell - 30 years ago we had a Democratic President who banned openly gay people from serving in the military.

Ans as much as we like to blame everything on Reagan, Trump has massively transformed the GOP through his ability to primary his enemies in the party.

The Dems are going through a round of change, and the old guard is scared they’ll be primaries next. And it’s our duty to make sure that happens to move the party to the left.

A lot of that pollution is Western pollution outsourced to China.

It’s like how California has a water crisis because its agriculture is supporting half the country, making their per capita water usage insane.

Maybe even a scrum

The City isn’t their real customer, and public safety isn’t their real product.

The like the public safety angle, because then they get cities to pay the costs of deployment, but it’s profitable without them.

I workforna city that just fired Flock, and what’s making them move the cameras is that we’re revoking their right-of-way permits and paving the shoulders where the cameras are located. Our ROW encroachment agreement boilerplate language allows us to destroy anything that is in the way of a public works project if it isn’t removed within 10 business days of notice of revocation.

They don’t like the largest expense on their books being Steam’s cut of the sales. After overhead, marketing, locensing, etc the actual dev teams making the games probably make less than Gabe personally does on the same game.

“I want a South Sudan, and by friend here would like a Brazillian blend.”

Super Mario Brothers was released closer to World War II than to today.

If reading that hurts, you need to schedule your colonoscopy.

I give them a little something extra. I understand that groping my genitals requires a pretty exhaustive search.

If you’re installing a game through Steam, you’re dealing with DRM, a third-party launcher, and online verification, and Steam is taking a 30% cut to insert those features into the process. It doesn’t matter how “indie” your game is.

No disagreement that they’ve failed in their mission and have become a tool of fascism, but conceptually there’s a place for an investigative law enforcement agency specializing in immigration and customs. Having undercover assets investigating human trafficking and smuggling would be appropriate as a part of that agency’s activities.

It should still be abolished, of course. ICE is irredeemable at this point.

Their assholery isn’t customer-facing, but it ABSOLUTELY impacts customers.

His innovation was to create the modern online verification bullshit that plagues the industry. Before Steam, you bought a game, put in the disc, and played it. If it HAD and online component, you may have had to type in a CD key.

No extra launcher to access your library. No having to reconnect to the internet to renew your license. I had a dedicated gaming PC that didn’t even have a modem. And no mandatory updates. It’s unacceptable that any time I want to play a single-player game I have to hope there hasn’t been some 140 gig patch that I have to install because the multi-player suite I’ll never open added a new $30 outfit to a character and they just make everyone reinstall everything.

If Half Life 2 had come out a year earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to play it because I didn’t have internet connected to my gaming PC until college.

Public trading results in short-sighted planning because investors can always buy/sell stocks and move on to whatever is profitable moment to moment. Private companies plan longer term because the investors benefit from the company’s long-term success. Their profits come from the company’s profits, not the value of the stock.

Make no mistake, Valve is in it for the money. They’re as greedy as anyone. But they operate under a corporate structure that values the long-term viability of its platform.

And they’re still assholes. They are all about lootboxes, DLC, etc. And they take a massive cut of sales. Do Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo do the same? Yeah - but they also provide the hardware platforms. Does Best Buy and Gamestop charge similar fees? Yeah - but they have the overhead of the retail locations. Steam makes stupid money off a download platform and game launcher.

Gabe is a billionaire yacht collector, not your friend. His greed just takes a longer view than that of someone looking to sell their shares from minute to minute.

Most people don’t have that granular kind of control. They have workplace 401k or pension plans with matching contributions from their employer. I get double-matched by my employer (I put in 7% and the employer puts in 14%), but I can’t call someone and have them move my money. I can attend annual meetings and vote, but I have no direct control over my money unless I divest from the program entirely to go with another program and lose that 14 percent.

ICE isn’t just supposed to be Nazi gestapo rounding up people the President is tarelgeting as a political distraction.

There is a place for undercover investigations of smuggling and human trafficking rings.

I loved Mass Effect 3’s multi-player despite expecting it to be horrible, but it was also the first game I really enjoyed that had such horrid lootbox mechanics.

ME3’s single-player was a masterpiece until the last hour. I didn’t even necessarily hate the endings. I just hated that in the end no matter what had happened, it came down to “pick the ending”. I would have been much more satisfied if your actions throughout the trilogy had determined the ending you got - especially since they had done so much tying together loose ends from the previous games.

I loved that you could actually save both the Geth and the Quarians, but only if you’d made the correct decisions in Mass Effect 2 AND 3. That same kind of logic could have been used to pick the ending.

Real answer: It’s not that knowledge is itself evil. It’s that by obtaining the knowledge of good and evil, mankind was responsible for its actions.

The idea is that animals aren’t capable of being good or evil because they have no knowledge of the concept. Whereas humanity’s knowledge and understanding means we’re aware of the morality of our actions.

To put it in a more contemporary, non-religous context - you can’t blame or judge invasive Kudzu or Bark Beeltes for the environmental damage they cause because they aren’t aware of their impact. Humans are aware, and should be held to account for their actions.