When the top 10% of wealth holders account for 50% of consumer spending, that’s actually logical of them. Most of us aren’t their target customers.

We need to go back to the way income taxes were for most of the 20th century. Using US numbers out of laziness:

By 1918, the top rate of the income tax was increased to 77% (on income over $1,000,000, equivalent of $16,717,815 in 2018 dollars[24]). The average rate for the (unspecified) “very rich” however, was 15%. The rate was increased in 1917 during World War I.[25] The top marginal tax rate was reduced to 58% in 1922, to 25% in 1925 and finally to 24% in 1929. In 1932 the top marginal tax rate was increased to 63% during the Great Depression and steadily increased, reaching 94% in 1944[26] (on income over $200,000, equivalent of $2,868,625 in 2018 dollars[27]). During World War II, Congress introduced payroll withholding and quarterly tax payments.[28]

Following World War II tax increases, top marginal individual tax rates stayed near or above 90%, and the effective tax rate at 70% for the highest incomes (few paid the top rate), until 1964 when the top marginal tax rate was lowered to 70%.

History of taxation in the United States

I loved hunted. I’d almost exclusively play 24/7 hunted servers. I loved that game mode so much.

I can’t wait to play it again with this mod.

“reading” one of those pages but don’t remember what the page was about.

That’s one of the biggest tells of AI-written text. It uses a lot of words to say very little, but does so in a very authoritative-sounding (or needlessly flowery) way.

SEO-based business models used blogspam before. It’s the same SEO garbage that gets it into search results, but the content is now AI slop instead of contracted labour at pennies/word.

And search is garbage, now, because of enshittification; Google gets more money when you give up and couch the sponsored links, and re-query or load more pages of results to load more ads. So there’s no incentive for them to filter the spam.

Echoing that I’m really tempted to get this as a work phone. It would be great to turn my work phone off at the end of the day and not see it.

My work is great about boundaries, too; I want this for my challenges cycling out of “work mode” to be present for my family (and myself, for that matter).

Not being American is one of the deepest, most consistently held parts of Canadian identity. It’s why we are so insistent on spelling colour correctly.

What a dumbass.

Ummm… Yeah? That was the point?

Did you read or listen to the speech to know who the “them” in this context is about, though?

It’s us. Canada. Medium powers.

Listen to the speech; it’s one for the history books. Carney hit the nail on the head.

This article isn’t about AI companies at all. Not one is mentioned, iirc.

This article is about “regular” businesses’ use of AI.

Again, that’s backwards. The billionaire bought the media companies so they can push their message and shift public discourse.

It’s not about profitability; they target engagement/profitability by making everything rage bait.

I’ve been using CachyOS for a few months now and it’s mostly been great, and so so much better than Windows.

I should probably just try to run .exe installers more. That might solve some of the challenges I’ve had with the transition, particularly since getting devices working correctly in my Windows virtual machine while still keeping full functionality in Linux has been challenging (webcam, sound, microphone, mouse4/5 and dpi buttons).

Docker has solved my biggest other challenges, for apps that have a Docker image anyway. They just work.

Right, but that all comes from upstream, with Conservative media (and politicians) focusing all their attention on “wedge issues” to distract their base from their ruinous fiscal policies, gutting the government services their base would benefit from to steal more wealth for the ultra wealthy.

Black & White did really cool things, but they didn’t really work. You could try hundreds of times to show your creature how to do something, but the learning didn’t work.

Cool concept, but it was puddle deep. And no fun, for me at least, once I realized the game didn’t come close to the hype.

Maybe this time will be different, but I won’t hold my breath.

What are you in about, mate? Of course they “don’t have a problem” with being in Steam—they have almost all the marketshare!

Humble is a Steam key reseller.

GOG is a completely different, DRM-free storefront.

Sure, Humble has limited marketshare (just like GOG), but with Humble, they just send a batch of keys and wait for money to come back. With GOG, they’d need to support an entirely different storefront for, potentially, the same limited revenue potential they’d get from Humble.

Not at all comparable. And totally reasonable that some publishers/indie devs aren’t willing to put their games on GOG. Disappointing, of course, but not hardly surprising.

That interview makes me very, very hopeful for GOG’s future.

We’ve seen, with Valve, how a private owner with vision for creating value for their customers can make waves. GOG is now in a similar situation and the owner clearly understands that directly competing with Valve (Epic style) is a fool’s errand. He had his own vision, distinct from what Valve is doing.

I feel a bit badly that I don’t think I’ve bought much on GOG. I mostly stopped buying individual games (and shifted to mostly buying game bundles) before GOG became a store with a good indie catalogue. I’ve been holding off on buying BG3 until I actually have time and motivation to play it “properly”, but I’ll definitely get it on GOG.

Fantastic article. Thanks for linking!

The CBC does a remarkably good job considering how their budgets have been repeatedly cut, relative to inflation, at the same time that their ad revenue has been in stay decline (same as everyone else).

And yet the CPC wants them axed, because the Republicans have shown them that conservative-owned media is one of the main ways to shift the Overton window further right, and public broadcasting/reporting is a major obstacle to them. Unbiased, accurate reporting doesn’t align with their goals.

What the flying fuck. I’m only 6’, and in 30" seats, my knees were already touching the chair in front in an already uncomfortable seating position. I could squeeze in tighter a bit, but only with a painfully small hip angle. With losing 2", I’d only fit with my knees in front of the seat next to me. Three men of high-average height couldn’t reasonably fit into these seats next to each other, I reckon.

I’d probably need to stand in the aisle the whole flight, then sue in small claims court if I didn’t get at least full refund.

The only way losing 2" could work would be with hard-backed chairs, since they’d be thin enough that you could fit, but I don’t think it’s safe for many to sit, with limited possible movement, on hard chairs for any length of time.

What a disaster. And all to get, like, 2% more seats on a plane? Not to mention how much retrofitting 22 planes cost. Such a colossal fuck up.

I’m liking Krita and Photopea (web app), but I’m not heavy into photography. I haven’t looked for a Lightroom replacement.

It will also likely work really well, apparently. I think you just need to be careful to pick a distro that comes with NVidea drivers, like CachyOS, and it will likely just work. Test with a live USB boot.

Shitty timing for the Gabe Cube launch to have all these market forces fucking with hardware prices. There’s going to be some massive sticker shock when the price is announced.

If you have an AMD GPU and don’t care about playing games that require kernel-level access for anticheat (ew), then Linux might just work better for you than Windows, for most games.

Like, getting Minecraft installed and working with mods in CachyOS just required installing Prism Launcher from the CachyOS repos (1 easy step) then launching it. I didn’t even need to open a web browser to download an installer.

Heroic Launcher is amaze balls, too. It pulls all the free games I get on GOG, Epic, and Amazon (iirc?) into one library that looks and works like Steam’s (amazing) library. So slick. (I think it’s preinstalled in CachyOS, too.)