To put it quite simply, Americans don’t know how to protest anymore.

Our communities have been gutted and any support structures destroyed, and we’ve been fed lie after lie for decades about the “proper” way to protest. The only people who can afford to protest are those who have already lost everything and college kids, and they face constant harassment from the progressives for not protesting out of sight where they can be easily ignored and violence from the conservatives and cops with no repercussions.

Everybody else has just enough left to be afraid to do anything that would risk losing it, and they have to spend all their energy trying to keep their head above the water anyway, so they don’t have the time or energy to put towards swimming for dry land. Plus a good portion of the population is busy trying to push everyone else’s heads underwater and drown them. It’s the same reason why the Nazis managed to embroil the entire world in a war and commit one of the worst genocides to date while only making up maybe 25% of the German populace at their largest. I think they maxed out around 15%.

Nothing will happen until a certain threshold of the population has nothing left to lose.

You underestimate the ability of the American populace (Republicans) to handwave away and justify any action so long as it’s their team who’s guilty. It won’t be long until they’re arguing about the distinction between pedos and “minor attracted people” and ephebophilia.

Valve does not have a monopoly by any definition of the word, especially the legal definition. They don’t have a majority of the business because they buy out the competition or use their position to drop prices to a level that others can’t compete with. They have a majority of the market because they provide a better service than the competition and have been doing it long enough to have developed a cultural gravity in the same way that Xbox, PlayStation, and Facebook and Twitter have.

“Something something piracy is a service issue.”

-Gandhi, probably

It’s a cheap and easy replacement for actual seasoning. My family has a recipe for a dip that’s literally just onion soup mix and sour cream. It’s delicious, but it’s really just deconstructed sour cream and onions flavored potato chips with extra seasoning and real sour cream.

Yes, but it’s not a big deal because it only will run once the humidity gets above a certain level - especially if you’re using it to cover multiple rooms where any heat from it running will disperse across a wide area. You set it to something like 60% and it will pop on occasionally for a few minutes to maintain that level.

In a closed room with a swamp cooler it’s a bit of a different story, but that’s why I recommend that only for a short period of time, a couple of hours at most. Just long enough to cool down yourself and the room.

So you leave the dehumidifier on all the time on an automatic setting in a central location in the house to keep the air in the house fairly dry, run a swamp cooler late in the afternoon to cool down your room, and if it isn’t too hot and humid outside, open a couple of windows in the house to get some cross ventilation going and air out the house once the sun goes down.

Also add “-AI” without the quotes to the end of your search. Booleans still work with DDG at least, I don’t know if they do on Google anymore.

Dry is key, wet and cold winters are awful.

I think this is a key distinction between the people who generally like one over the other. If you live somewhere where winter is wet and summer is dry, you probably prefer summer. And vice versa.

The other big thing that I never see anyone talk about is the wind. I think the wind is probably one of the most impactful things for a season. Hot summer with a cool breeze bringing cold air from over the ocean? Fantastic and refreshing. Snow on the ground and gusting 8-16 kmh? I don’t care how sunny it is, that wind is cutting through every single layer you put on. I woke up the other day to a wind chill that brought the temp from -10°C to -17°C. That’s 14°F to 1°F.

A dehumidifier plus a “swamp cooler” (a bucket of ice in front of a fan) works pretty well so long as you keep it to one room and only expect it to work for a few hours or so. Otherwise you’ll be buying a lot of ice and doing a lot of work dumping the water from the dehumidifier.

No. What makes you feel colder is the air moving faster and therefore absorbing sweat off your skin more quickly. If the air is already moist then its capacity for extra heat goes down. You should look up what Wet Bulb Temperature is. In short, it’s when the humidity nears 100%, which prevents the air from absorbing any heat from your body because it’s no longer pulling sweat off of you. At this level of humidity, even special forces units have found themselves incapacitated within hours due to heat stroke during army tests of soldier capabilities in those conditions. There was a heatwave of about 70-80F in the UK a couple of years ago where multiple people died of heat stroke related organ failure because the humidity was so high that their organs couldn’t cool down and overheated until they just stopped working.

If you want to cool down, ideally the first step is to get a dehumidifier to pull water out of the air. This is how air conditioners work as well, they pull moisture out of the air which carries heat, and then transfer that heat and moisture somewhere else.

In the short term, you can use a “swamp cooler” as an ad hoc air conditioner to help cool down. A swamp cooler is just a big bucket of ice in front of a fan. The ice will cool down the air in front of the fan as it blows over it, allowing it to absorb heat from the rest of the room. This only works short-term though, because it won’t do anything about the humidity in the room and will actually increase the humidity as the ice melts.

So you’re saying that the ChatGPT’s and Stable Diffusions of the world, which operate on maximizing profit by scraping vast oceans of data that would be impossibly expensive to manually label even if they were willing to pay to do the barest minimum of checks, are the most vulnerable to this kind of attack while the actually useful specialized LLMs like those used by doctors to check MRI scans for tumors are the least?

Please stop, I can only get so erect!

And the Cheeto got less votes than he did the first time around. People are fed up with the system on both sides it seems.

It’s the usual bisexual dilemma: “Look how smoll he is! And look how tall she is!”

When it comes to Epic, a quote from the great Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of many beloved Nintendo icons, comes to mind: “A delayed game is eventually good. A rushed game is bad forever.” First impressions are incredibly important and trust is a hell of a lot harder to gain than to lose, and Epic not only made a bad first impression but they also kept doing things that people generally disliked.

IIRC, the sale on unreleased games was only some big AAA titles, but not only was it scummy, it also was clearly a part of a larger strategy that Epic was using to try to force people to use their store rather than actively compete with Steam. They had nowhere near the number of features Steam has, the store was difficult and frustrating to use, and the launcher was performance hungry as well as acting similar to malware - it checks through your internet browser’s history for one thing (or used to, I haven’t touched it since it launched).

People disliked exclusives even when they were relegated only to consoles, and the lack of exclusivity was a selling point of PC gaming for a long time (until every publisher under the sun tried to wall off their titles behind their own launchers and stores, and people hated that as well). But the big sin Epic made was when they bought out devs who had plans to release on Steam and demanded that they pull their games off of Steam - sometimes for a period of a year, sometimes permanently. These were games that people had paid for, either through preorders or as backers for Kickstarter funding or something.

And then you get into some of the more…beliefs and values side of the system. Where Valve has made a stand against NFT and AI games to general applause, Epic has embraced them and the store has filled with all the things that gamers expected to see as a result of those: asset flips and scams. They’re already an issue on Steam, but keeping NFTs and AI off the platform has mitigated some of it by eliminating some of the tools that make it even easier to make them than it ever was before. I believe they also got in some hot water with devs around the same time that Unity did for some policy change that negatively affected people using Unreal as their game engine (that they later backed down on).

I mean, there were mass protests, they just didn’t do shit.

Another issue is the car-centric culture of the US and the fact that rail and any other form of public transportation directly impedes upon the car companies’ profits (including building sidewalks). This means that any project has to fight an uphill battle against corporate lobbyists or avoid simply being bought out and disbanded like what happened to the various highspeed rail companies in the 2000s.

France is another interesting one to take a look at. I watched a video awhile ago on the history of highspeed rail in France, and if I remember correctly, while they’re culturally closer to the US and the UK, highspeed rail has a history as a point of competitive national pride for the French and so they’re culturally favorable to it because they’ve held the title for the fastest trains in the world a couple of times.

Yeah, but it’s not a 1 to 1 comparison like people like to make it out to be. Valve takes a higher percentage but offers more for that higher price.

Agreed, my first thought was about the stats for Twitch streamers where having more than something like 10 concurrent viewers consistently for a 30 day period puts you in the top 15% of streamers on the platform or whatever. I forget the exact numbers, but it’s something crazy like that.

Steam also provides a lot more than just a store front for devs at that price, including customer support, multiplayer servers, anticheat, and forums and other social features.

Epic also launched their store without a shopping cart (you had to buy everything as individual transactions) and put new, unreleased games up for sale at up to 50% off without permission from the devs during their first sales event, amongst other things. Like buying multiplatform games to ensure that they only launched on the Epic store. Nobody liked it when Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard, or Rockstar tried that exclusivity crap with their own launchers/storefronts, and they don’t like that Epic does it either.

Dude is a twat and his opinions unfortunately drive Epic’s policies. People hated Steam when it first launched as well, but Valve as a company has consistently worked to put customer value and rights as a selling point of their products, and people appreciate them for that. Beyond Steam as a sales platform, they’ve been a driving force in other parts of the industry such as VR and Linux gaming.