Crucial and Samsung have good reputations.

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

If they exposed the specific reasons for each rating, that would expose how arbitrary it all is.

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."

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.

Unless I’m missing something here, this website does not provide a link to the original source and adds little to the discussion. They don’t even refer to them by their full name.

This is the original source: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/sources-nintendo-switch-2-targets-2024-with-next-gen-console/

This is considered to be very scummy behavior not just in games journalism, but in journalism in general. If you can’t do your own coverage, at least have basic respect for the people who can.

It’s okay, I think his spine took most of the impact

Blocking ad blockers has to be the real reason behind this convoluted bullshit. Google gets the lion’s share of its revenue from ads. The whole thing is a Trojan horse destined to make things better for them at our expense. The mere proposal is already accelerating my shift away from their products.

Something like 80% of Google's revenue is from ads, even with that 30% cut they get from everything on their app store. So their core existence deeply conflicts with a free and open web. And it's particularly unsettling because their web browser dominates the market, so they have the leverage to force us into their vision of the future. And this domination would be very difficult to counter. It's the default browser on Android phones, and it is constantly flogged on Google.com, which is one of the most popular web portals in the world.

”Don’t be daft. We’re in a warming phase.”

Yeah, here's what you tell them. Temperatures were at baseline when the industrial revolution began. That's just a handful of generations. We've now seen an increase of, what 2 degrees C since then? I don't know the exact number. The point is, this sort of increase is not present anywhere else in the geological record. It takes thousands of years for average global temperatures to naturally increase to a point like this one. There are literally no hard spikes--until the industrial revolution began. The only credible takeaway is that humans are the problem.

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.