I’m of two minds on this. I agree that fewer safe spaces for bigots is fantastic and pushes back against the normalization of some really vile things as “just an opinion”, “just joking”, “voicing all sides”, “making up funny stories about famous people”, “just boys being boys”, or other means of “criticizing” those in power.

However, we are ACTIVELY sliding down the slippery slope that people have been calling a fallacy for over a decade, and watching the same arguments used to create spaces free from the most hateful people on the internet get twisted and co-opted by those same people to ban and punish genuine criticism of atrocities and voices against abuses of power.

There are sacrifices with either choice more akin to a check in chess than an opportunity to choose a truly better outcome. Seeing all the good other Minecraft communities have done in making libraries and humanitarian resources available in creative ways gives me hope, but watching a government bedbuddy of a company like Microsoft start with the easy win of banning Nazis and bigots makes me really hope that thats truly their focus and not an opening to take out some of the amazing and creative workarounds people have done to combat censorship and human rights abuses in their own Minecraft way.

I’m disappointed I didn’t see a piracy parody of this before seeing this. Come on internet.

Genuinely curious:

Is the author saying that ACO and VBC were decent ideas that got UHG’s fingers grafted into the legal structure, or are they just saying that ACO and VBC are bad in general?

And I knew that we had some awful structures within our healthcare system, but I LOATHE UHG and didn’t realize that they OWN our medical system. Disgusting.

For those looking for more. Fez is a delight and a classic in the genre. The very last puzzle is more interesting from a community lore standpoint than actually being a decent puzzle, though. So be kind to yourself on that one.

I use “Observational Maintenance” all the time:

When you ask someone to look at a problem and it’s fixed by the time they do.

A friend showed me an issue they’d been having for over a YEAR. I did almost NOTHING and it was working by the time I looked at it.

More often than not it’s me that looks dumb, though.p

For me, my “misery is the point” game was This War of Mine. I got it just before Ukraine, but still couldn’t stomach it. My first character had a kid that was constantly crying and whimpering and I just couldn’t do it. I was bad at it—if you can be good. I couldn’t help others in the ways that I wanted to. I couldn’t stop the whimpering. Then I went out as someone else and came back and the dad and kid left. And I had to stop there for a bit.

I set it down to come back later, then Ukraine happened. Where it was hard to stomach while I knew this was hypothetical and the Euro-setting was pretty abstracted from the current reality there—though still very present elsewhere—knowing that people on the ground were looking and sounding similar to what was happening in game and seeing that in news daily just cut off any desire I had to play. It’s powerful and DEEPLY empathetic, but that spiral of misery and failure was the point and it made it in spades.

That’s definitely my hope.

It’s less the repaired retail market (which they control on Amazon at least) and more the “I could repair this for cheaper than half of a new phone” lost sales. They’ve been quietly letting that group slip by for years of progressively more expensive to “repair” (read, “swap modules”) while people who could get a basic repair done for cheap are pushed to buy new phones instead.

What are the holes that can be poked into this as written? I firmly believe Apple is still against repair that would eat into their new sales. So where does this, as written, give them the room to keep that going?

Is it just that they can continue to make their “screen issue = replace whole top shell of laptop” and similar the default and draw the line there, standardizing high-cost repairs even if it’s just a wire or small component replacement? If they don’t allow ANY standard repairs more granular than swap module for module, they don’t have to provide more granular resources than that. I’m not fully up on what repairs Apple authorizes.

This is definitely a win to some degree, though. But when your opponent goes to your side and draws a line, that always gives me the chills.

There’s a reality here where someone saw this as a no-lose situation. Either:

A. We get some improvement, but it doesn’t reach their claims so we don’t go forward.

Or

B. We get the promised improvement and it’s actually worth it.

They missed a few obvious issues in that the cars may become safe or get worse longevity from the experiment. That and the contract process took time and money if they had a reasonable expectation of failure.

Still, it’s not entirely stupid and so long as Mullen got NOTHING besides a scam record, this could be a win.

I use storygraph, though don’t care to do anything more than track reads, set goals, and share with my wife who uses that and gr.

It’s nice though! and let’s me split content by the exact edition/format pretty easily.

I’m here because Reddit told me they view me as a wallet, not a participant, contributor, or anything else.

The fediverse isn’t and may never be strictly “better”, but neither will Reddit. Reddit has a singular vision of worse quality and worse management going forward. They may claw BACK some of what they’ve chucked out the window, but they’ve shown they’re not going to make the product better. Ever. Just different versions of bad.

Had they taken a boiled frog approach, I’d be there a lot longer. I wasn’t excited to pay, but it would become a decision of “pay for a better experience or get something worse for freeTM”. That’s a different choice than “use my worsening app or screw off.” They made the choice relatively easy where they could have made it a lot more nuanced.