Ehh if you are on a reputable tracker that has scene releases it’s generally downloading a torrent, copying a crack into the game directory or running some crack software, and play. It’s not in the least bit difficult.

Realistically most people don’t care about things like automatic updates enough to justify spending money on it.

Many games are trivially easy to pirate and this has been the case for decades. It’s literally as easy as downloading it from Place B.

People still buy the games.

The claims of genocide are colored by propaganda and misinformation. Academic researchers are split on the issue, at best. The fact of the matter is that Israel could swiftly end all life in Gaza through overwhelming military force if that was their goal, and this has not happened.

I’d agree that Israel’s actions in Gaza are unethical but there is a stark difference between acting without regard for civilian casualties and outright ethnic cleansing. The evidence doesn’t seem to support the latter.

A good president would divest and sanction Israel

A good president would prioritize what’s best for America, which means preserving the favorable relationship America has with Israel. Meanwhile, a good president would provide humanitarian aid for Palestine and help negotiate for peace.

That’s exactly what Biden is doing and refusing to vote for him harms almost every party involved, including Palestine. Really, the only groups who would benefit are the far right and Russia… makes you wonder where comments like this come from, doesn’t it?

Biden isn’t “committing genocide” and saying he is amounts to simple propaganda.

The conservatives want to take aid away from Ukraine to deliver it to Israel. If Trump wins, far more weapons will be going to Israel than they are now. Repeating propaganda like this is not helpful for the Palestinian people.

Lastly, Israel is an important ally from a strategic perspective. Not only are they our closest ally in the Middle East, but they have a number of important resources like intel semiconductor facilities. Cutting ties with Israel would be bad for America, and the role of the US government is to put America first. It’s more complex than simply supporting one side or the other and Biden is attempting to balance aid for Palestine with preserving our relationship with Israel. That’s exactly what a good president should be doing.

Only if we value safety and convenience over freedom.

Personally, I’ll take the freedom.

If you think that’s a satisfactory replacement for the average person you don’t know much about motorsports. The costs alone are outside the reach of most people.

The fact of the matter is that people will happily pay for content if it is made available in a convenient and affordable way. Hell, many people will voluntarily pay artists for content that is available completely for free. That’s how patreon works, and there are self published authors approaching $1M/year in income due to readers choosing to support the author for their hard work.

People have no issue paying content creators.

Piracy rose to prominence in the 2000s because a few executives were funneling massive amounts of money into their pockets by the sale of CDs and cable services that were simultaneously expensive and inconvenient. The studios attacked pirates directly to little effect because you simply can’t stop the free dissemination of information among the public.

Piracy almost completely died when streaming made the alternatives affordable, user friendly and convenient. In a world where the proliferation of streaming services is making content just as expensive and inconvenient as in the old days of cable, it’s only natural that piracy will once again rise to prominence.

If they want to get paid, they simply need to stop fucking with the customer and offer a service people want to pay for.

Their heritage line are descended from classic men’s work boots, intended for iron workers, miners, that sort of thing. You know what you like, but they’re stereotypically masculine workwear style boots.

Unfortunately, quality boots that last a long time tend to be handmade and therefore quite expensive. The bummer is that some brands have gotten really good at making boots that look high end but aren’t.

The YouTube channel Rose Anvil cuts boots apart to look at build quality and construction. They do some solovair boots. If that’s something you are interested in I highly recommend you check it out.

I’d argue that “the last word” is the rOtring 600

Pentel makes great stuff though

Now we are comparing used cars to new ones? It has always been the case that you get more for your money with a used car than a new one, it’s nothing new.

In any case, these are all just niggly complaints if I’m being honest. It’s far nicer and more spacious than the average family would choose in most of the world outside America. It’s a perfectly adequate car for most families.

We often see this straw man argument that standardizing on electric cars in the future will make it impossible for people to afford to drive. The Bolt shows there is a future for the economy segment with EVs.

None of those issues have anything whatsoever to do with it being a EV. It’s a GM product deep into the economy price bracket, and you’re complaining about a lack of power seats or cheap sounding door closure? It’s a cheap car, it’s no surprise that cheap cars lack in luxuries.

Being a cheap car is kind of the point though. There are family friendly 4 door EVs in most new car buyers’ price brackets, from cheap hatchbacks to the fastest super cars and almost everything in between.

As a parent, I’d think you would be particularly concerned about the long term impact of carbon emissions. If food is expensive now, what is going to happen to your kids’ quality of life when changing weather makes it impossible to raise food in traditional farming areas? Pretty much every model shows rapidly increasing food prices at best, widespread starvation at worst.

I’m sorry you’re struggling to feed your kids and I’m kinda baffled why you are assuming I have no sympathy for those in a bad spot. Perhaps a better solution would be to push for better government assistance for those who can’t afford food. Loosening carbon regulations to reduce food prices is just kicking the can down the road so the issue will be far worse when your children are adults.

Blue Origin has been around longer than SpaceX and still has yet to get anything to orbit, while smaller companies than either have popped up and managed to in the meantime.

You hear this a lot and it’s pretty misleading. Blue didn’t begin working on an orbital rocket in earnest until ~2019 and in the 2015-2020 era the headcount was on the order of hundreds instead of thousands. That headcount was spread across multiple big ticket space infrastructure projects.

In addition, New Glenn has been held back by the unexpectedly difficult qualification process to deliver engines to ULA, who is contractually entitled to the first flight articles. I’m of the opinion that bidding to be the Vulcan engine provider was a mistake, but the point remains that it’s not at all a fair comparison between SpaceX, the various smallsat launch companies, and Blue. The landscape is very different.

I don’t think I’d try to contract them for launching a satellite either if I had one, one would be stuck waiting for development on an unproven launcher when ones with a reliable track record are already available.

To be clear, something like half of the planned Kuiper launches are already contracted to go on New Glenn. The only real competitor on price/kg and turnaround time is SpaceX, whose products are a direct competitor to Kuiper. It’s not a mystery as to why they’d prefer alternate launch providers in that context.

Bezos owning both companies has little to no impact on where the contracts go due to shareholder obligations. The two companies are run as discrete entities. For example, Dave Limp, the new CEO replacing Bob Smith, comes from Amazon and is firewalled from any non-public information about Blue until he is fully transitioned to his new role.

The Chevy Bolt is big enough for the average family and starts at $27k before incentives.

Yes but climate change will have dramatically negative effects in agriculture in the long term. The cost of food can’t always be a silver bullet objection to climate regulation. We can undoubtedly find ways to grow food with less carbon cost if there is economic incentive for it, and long term impacts need to be considered even more than short term when we consider how bad the projections are.

In the case of bikes, it’s luckily mostly true that you get what you pay for and that bikes in bike stores tend to be reasonable quality. They aren’t all great but at the minimum they’ll generally accept readily available replacement parts and not fall apart right away. The nicer bikes will last many decades.

The thing about bikes is that running a bike store is a very low margin business that barely pays the bills. Most bike shops are purely in the business for the passion of it. They love bikes, they love sharing the hobby, and they hate seeing people turned off of cycling because their department store bike stripped out the crankset two weeks after purchase. They also don’t make much money on bike sales; they mostly rely on servicing and parts/accessories to keep the lights on. This means customer relationships tend to be important to them.

If you have a good bike shop like this near you, you can have a frank conversation with the people at the shop about your needs and they will steer you towards something decent.

The problem with modern bikes is that it’s a minefield.

I don’t disagree with you. Low quality bike manufacturers have gotten very good at making their bikes appear high quality to uninitiated while being cheaply constructed.

Unfortunately I think this holds true for a lot of things these days. Back to the analogy of boots, high quality footwear is undergoing a renaissance right now where resoleable long lasting shoes are more available and more affordable than they have been in decades. However, that comes with the undercurrent that some brands have sold out on construction quality to make a quick buck because they know how to keep the “indicators of quality” on the outside while using cheap materials on the interior construction of the boot.

Luckily there is a great, passionate, community for bikes that will happily help people find quality products. I just don’t want to discount the work of the engineers, the bike shop owners and the manufacturers of quality bikes. There are an insane number of really incredible modern bikes that blow anything from the 60s or 70s out of the water in nearly every way.

If you look at my post, I qualified this with “if you buy a good one”.

Mongoose bikes are literal cheap throwaway trash bikes. This is exactly why people with knowledge about bikes try to steer people towards good quality stuff from bike shops. Cheap department store grade bikes are built to a price for people who rarely ride them. They fall apart under normal use and are not intended to be repairable.

Good quality bikes are very much long lasting, durable, and repairable goods. This is kind of like buying cheap fake leather boots off of alibaba and bemoaning that they aren’t as reliable as the handmade leather boots of your childhood. Of course they’re not! You chose not to buy good boots.

Steel frames have become less common, in favor of aluminum and other metals that are more energy intensive, and carbon fiber which significantly degrades over time.

I’d like to address this directly. Perhaps aluminum is more energy intensive but this seems like an odd thing to focus on considering the long lifespan of bikes, relatively small amount of metal used, and how much better cycling is for the environment than cars in general.

On the properties of the materials, steel is still readily available for those who want it. However, carbon and aluminum are better in most regards than heritage style lugged/brazed steel frames. They’re:

• Lighter. CF is the lightest, obviously, but even AL will be about 25% lighter for a given quality level than steel.
• Better in terms of lateral vs vertical compliance, combining great pedaling efficiency with good compliance over bumps. Steel frames are known for their unique ride, but high end hydroformed aluminum frames use complex shapes and butting schemes to get more control over the structural properties. The result is that you make less compromises in terms of pedaling stiffness and ride quality. CF takes this a step further because the fiber orientations can be manipulated to tune material properties.
• In many cases more durable. Nice steel frame bikes have very thin walled tubing. Thin walled steel tubing is damaged much more easily than similar quality AL or CF. The idea that CF “degrades over time” is a carryover from before manufacturers knew how to make long lasting CF frames. CF as a material can theoretically withstand unlimited stress cycles, and modern CF bike frames have effectively unlimited lifespans short of crash damage.

Bicycles in general are not flimsy products with short lifespans if you buy a good one. A modern, run of the mill, road bike with mechanical groupset will likely last many decades and tens of thousands of miles if well maintained and looked after.

It’s honestly weird to me that we are talking about 1960s bikes in a good way here. Bikes now are just so tremendously better than anything you could have gotten in the 60s.

Do you not understand how ads work? It’s about making sure that IBM is the first company that comes to mind when you think about potential suppliers for an upcoming project.

It’s no different than ads for Coca Cola. You know what Coke tastes like. An ad isn’t going to materially influence whether you like it or not. However, it attempts to keep the name present in your mind so the first thing that pops into your head on a hot day is a nice cold Coke.