Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?

This is what he's done throughout his career - the only thing that's notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.

It's entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn't bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn't even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.

There's undoubtedly at least a bit of projection there, but I think more what it is is just that tankies are driven almost entirely by righteous indignation, and they'll take pretty much any chance they get to indulge in it. They don't really stop and think about things - they just see something that could serve as a basis for a nice, satisfying righteously indignant screed and off they go.

And that leaves them susceptible to, among other things, hypocrisy.

Sort of, but not quite. I get where you're going with that though, and it's the right idea.

The explicit goal of Project 2025 is simply to make it easier for greedy and power-hungry privileged right-wing assholes to bring harm to people and to the nation as a whole for their own imnediate benefit. So yes - it actually serves as a sort of backhanded guide to what is of value in government.

It's just that doing the opposite of what Project 2025 calls for would mean expanding agencies and regulations rather than reducing or eliminating them, and that's likely not the best option, since it could just lead to governments run rampant instead of corporations run rampant.

As with most things, the optimum lies between the two extremes.

But yeah - at the very least, it can be taken as a rule of thumb that there's a direct correspondence between the value a thing provides to the people and the nation as a whole and the degree to which Project 2025 opposes it and intends to destroy it.

It's funny how much you sound like a MAGA.

Tankie apologetics.

Any ideology that bans books is self-evidently intellectually and philosophically bankrupt.

Had to read down quite a ways to find the inevitable bullshit in this article.

After applying some complex statistical models to the underlying data, Volckmann finds that, unsurprisingly, relative revenues in the weeks following a crack's release are lower than the baseline expectation for uncracked games in the same time period. These negative effects of a crack on revenues—which are highly statistically significant (p<0.01)—"impl[ies] that the appearance of a crack reduces revenue relative to the no-crack counterfactual," Volckmann writes.

I have no doubt of that.

However, the headline clearly implies that that loss is overall or on average 20%. And that's bullshit.

Just how much money a publisher can expect to lose from a Denuvo crack, though, depends heavily on how quickly the game is cracked, Volckmann finds. A Denuvo-protected game cracked in the first week after release can expect to make about 20 percent less revenue than if the DRM had remained in place, according to the study, while a crack six weeks after a game's release only costs an estimated 5 percent of theoretical total revenue. After 12 weeks, new sales are so negligible that "developers could eventually remove unpopular DRM schemes with minimal losses

So 20% is actually the maximum, and is only the case if a game is cracked within the first week after release.

Six weeks after release, there's only approximately 5% difference, and 12 weeks after release, there is no significant difference.

So the headline, unfortunately predictably, is misleading at best.

I don't think I've seen anything that so neatly sums up the blithering insanity of the MAGA right than them politicizing a hurricane and issuing death threats to meteorologists.

Imagine the strategy meetings behind this.

"Look guys - our standard racist and misogynistic hate isn't resonating with suburban women. We need a different hate to appeal to them."

Of course he did - Putin's his man-crush.

Exactly as intended.

Yes - that is a huge part of it, and dating all the way back at least to the CIA-backed overthrow of Mosaddegh.

Middle Eastern oil wealth administered by stable and rational governments would be a direct threat to western hegemony so the US has long had a vested interest in destabiliziing the Middle East, and has long pursued that exact goal.

And yes - Israel is key to that.

None of which makes any of it any less insane.

Nearly every day, I'm astonished yet again by how blatantly insane this timeline is.

Think about it - US taxpayers have paid over $20 billion so that a rogue state can massacre tens of thousands of people and displace millions, so that a corrupt psychopath can stay in office and out of prison, so that some other psychopaths can sate their bloodlust, and so that a relative handful of defense contractors and politicians can finance their lives of wholly unearned and undeserved privilege.

There isn't even the faintest vestige of sense to any of that. It's wholly and completely insane. And yet it's reality.

How is that even possible?

That word "overt" isn't there by accident.

There's a significant difference between an oligarchic kleptocracy that has to pretend to be a representative democracy and an oligarchic kleptocracy that doesn't have to bother pretending to be anything else.

I assume it's going to go until World War III, and until the US is an overt kleptocratic police state.

Really.

rogue state

noun

1. state or nation acting outside of the accepted international norms and policies.

Israel is a rogue state.

I choose to hold myself to high standards. Writing is one of the great joys of my life, and there are few things I enjoy more than the satisfaction I feel when I do it well.

Additionally:

If someone disagrees or has a problem with what you say then they can just say so and you can clarify.

Would that that were so, but the reality of the internet in this benighted age is that many (most?) who misrepresent another's position do so not because they sincerely try but fail to understand it, but because it serves their purposes to do so, and no amount of clarification is going to overcome that. It's a waste of effort at best, and is actually often detrimental, since saying more just provides them with more fodder for even more fallacies and diversions.

Which is another reason that I write for my own satisfaction.

Thanks for the response though.

Gee whiz - who'd've thought that the woman who married a rich guy who looks (and notoriously smells) like a gigantic ambulatory drain clog would be so mercenary.

It's just so tedious and transparent. He doesn't have the will or the courage to take a meaningful stand, but he has to create some illusion of demanding at least some restraint from Israel, so he draws a line in the sand that's distant enough that they likely weren't going to cross it anyway, and makes his stand there. And it's doubly meaningless, since if they do happen to go so far as to cross it anyway, he'll just let them, with no consequences.

It's all a sham.