Oh, please. The crying will not be isolated to January.

Deichkind?
Halcali? Jovanotti?

I don’t have much for this one.

Food for thought:

Regarding prices, PC gaming has a MUCH higher up-front cost but MASSIVELY lower ongoing costs. A gaming PC, especially these days, is going to cost as much as or more than two or three consoles. However, console games are damned expensive and never get any cheaper. PC games often come in bundles that can make them cheaper. Humble Monthly is ~$1 per game most months. Indie games are often released at <$20 and get cheaper if you want to wait. PC games generally get cheaper if you wait. Epic has a free game every week, and steam parapetetically has games go free or into steep discount too. There are also many great FOSS games, all priced as free, most with the option to kick back a bit of cash if you like them. Modding is also generally free, and can turn one game into effectively 50. (e.g. Minecraft is one game. Modpacks turn it into almost a completely new game. TFC based modpacks affectively do it all over again. And a few others do it again. One copy of MC effectively becomes multiple games, possibly dozens.) All that means to get 100 games, you could be looking at a difference between paying ~$6,000 for console games and paying less, but possibly even literally nothing for the PC, depending on what games. It will basically never be more expensive for the PC version, though.

Consoles only win out in two places. 1. You will never get a PC as capable as a console for the price of a console. (At least not unless Valve does something truly amazing with the Steam Machine) so the upfront cost is far lower. And 2. Consoles let you hit the power button and spin up more or less straight into the game. If you are a child, or have one, having access to the system outside of games can break your ability to play games, so a console is locked down to prevent that. That’s not to say they will run perfectly, just that you/your kid won’t be the reason things are breaking.

Mostly just toys.

If you can’t rely on them more (not ‘just as much,’ more) than the people who would do whatever the task is, you can’t use them for any important task, and you aren’t going to find a lot of tasks which are simultaneously necessary and yet unimportant enough that we can tolerate rolling nat 1s on the probability machine all the time.

Learning resources are common. Good ones that go beyond ‘sudo yourmom’ are rare.

More approachable man pages sounds like a cool idea. Superman pages. It could not only have a list of flags but nested explanations of what those things mean. Maybe some wikipedia style markdown to connect it all. Simple English wikipedia writing style. Someone get on it. I don’t have time for any more projects.

If you want to control what your child sees you have to control what your child sees. There is no shortcut. You either shut off the methods for the companies to feed slop to your child or you curate the things that come in via those methods. You cannot automate it.

Personally, I’d shut off basically any social media or algorithmic feeds for the kid. They don’t need that corporate reality-distortion during the years in which you are trying to develop them into a functional human.

Sort of.

Billboards are not owned by stores. They are owned by marketers and rented to advertisers. An additional element may be needed to require ‘own space’ advertising to only advertise products and/or services available at that location. (i.e. within ~100meters)

Sign spinners are being paid to display their sign. They’re gone.

Flyers are not delivered with explicit consent and request. They’re gone.

Door-to-door is tougher to classify because it has variance in form, but probably would be allowed on the condition that the first thing the potential customer sees is a person requesting consent and not some piece of media.

Also, I think I’d have to simplify the start to ‘issuing or accepting payment’ rather than targeting a single party. Advertisers and marketers should both face punishment.

This image bothers me, and I think it’s because it’s formatted like a comic but contains neither a joke nor an anti-joke. It’s the setup without a punchline. Could they not come up with a punchline?

The best definition I have come up with so far is to ban ‘Party A compensating party B via money, goods, or services for displaying and/or broadcasting media to party C, in particular and/or in general, without party C’s specific consent and request.’ The only exception might be to allow it for companies that both A. have an annualized revenue less than 10x the median wage, and B. are not making a profit. That would be just to allow small businesses to get the word out at the start but would cut off anything getting to the point where it should be self-sustaining.

If only…

Made the switch to Bazzite at the end of 10 so I love Heroic.

The ‘content’ actually may not be illegal in many places. Laws in a number of places do not include non-photographic representations because the harm is in the creation of the imagery by abusing real human children or the incentivisation of abuse by purchasing the material. At any rate, the point is that it’s not the platform but the content people object to. Closing twitter down would not stop people who want it from using GenAI to make images. The tech exists now and we will have to figure out how to handle that.

Regulatory: Ban advertising.

All of the worst elements of the internet are ad supported. There would be no downside.

“But won’t the heliu-”

“FOREVER!”

‘I just need to make the numbers look good until I can quit this company and level up. Apre moi, le deluge.’ - capitalists without capital

‘I just need to keep things flowing toward me until I can quit this world and level up. Apre moi, le deluge.’ - capitalists with capital

Anyone with a scintilla of awareness knows it has limits, but you can’t ‘level up’ in capitalist games by accepting them.

I really want to see what percentage of ‘users’ licenses are actually paid, and/or what average percentage of ‘users’ titles are just free. I have precisely one game I have paid for on Epic (Satisfactory, because I was excited for first person factorio) but I have over 100 titles in my library. I have to wonder how many of those free games I would have to download before the server costs completely eat the profit from that one copy of Satisfactory.

I’m no fan of banning this or that particular platform (it’s like trying to get rid of cheeseburgers by banning McDonalds; the burgers are still available from all the other burger chains and all the people who use the one will just switch to others) but this is a hilariously wrong way to get to the right answer.

A doctor can arrange a sputum test. Basically, you spit into a container and they check it for active tuberculosis. Oh, wait… consumMAtion.

It’s important to understand, there is no ‘feeling the waters’ with ideas. The response to half of an idea is always separate from the response to the whole idea. e.g. ‘I will’ is understood differently from ‘I will kill, tonight’ and both differently from ‘I will kill, tonight, on stage at the comedy club.’ If you want to know how people will react to the whole idea, you have to express the whole idea.

If you are smart enough to be suspicious, you are not their target audience. They feed on the fact many modern societies expect the mentally ill/handicapped to take care of themselves.