Funny because I’ve worked on and off in Tech Startups since the 90s and what I’ve seen is the very opposite of your statement: post year 2000 Crash Tech has become more the Even Wilder Wild West Of Finance (i.e. no-rules hyperspeculative) and that has been reflected on how most of the Founders and Investors are people with backgrounds in areas heavy towards Sales practices (i.e. Finance, Marketing, actual Sales people and, more in general Grifters) and very few have backgrounds in actually making things.

The Techie with an Engineering background coming up with a new Technology or twist on Technology and making a successful company out of it that was common in Tech boom of the 90s has been replaced by money-men and those whose main skillset is to find and keep investors (so, those good in spinning a good tale, not making something that actually works).

If engineers have become more equity seeking, that’s because of the truly insane amount of situations over the last decade or two of people working their asses of to make a company big expecting to win big via options they got and when the company does get big the founders and investors do some kind of financial swindling to make those options worthless and the more those founders and investors are grifters and similar, the more it happens.

People demand equity because the rules around it are a lot more tight than the rules around options which are a total joke and hence those who get options as motivation often end up with nothing when the company does make it big.

Well, they’re not domesticated enough to let me pet them unless I catch a chick which fell off a nest.

Sparrows.

The abuse of autoritative sources (not to be confused with “authoritarian”) positions for personal upside maximization (which often meant spreading propaganda) and subsequent fall in trust in authoritative sources long predates Trump.

I mean, in the US, Newspapers - which are supposed to inform people, not to convince them of anything - openly gloat about their “opinion making” and are criticized if they do not openly support a candidate in Presidential Elections (the very opposite of Journalism)

Then there’s the decades-long massive abuse of “expert sources” on Finance and Economics by Neoliberalism to push very specific narratives, for very specific political ends which overwhelmingly benefited a very specific subset of people.

What you’re seeing now is the product of the deceit practiced by many of those who are supposed to be independent experts who inform the rest on important subject, and the blanked distrust on the the Media and “experts” and subsequent blooming of shameless loudmouth liars who speak with maximum confidence in politics is really just the harvesting that which has been sowed since at least the 80s.

IMHO the tipping point was decades ago and what you see now is the acceleration downhill having been going for long enough that the speed of travel downwards has become scary.

Forced diversity characters are generally just cringe.

Characters who are normal people who just happen to be female, of a minority ethnicity, non-heterosexual and so on are generally as good as all other characters because that’s just about people living live in an imaginary situation, so just like in the real world not everybody there is a white heterosexual male and people who aren’t white heterosexual males are, just like the white heterosexual males ones, not some stereotyped cartoon cutout of a person.

(That said, in Action movies, especially XX century, often all characters are stereotyped cartoon cutouts of a person)

This also dovetails with how Modern Acting techniques work: good actors will naturally play more believable characters in more believable situations because the actor also has their own version of “suspension of disbelief” going on.

If you want a neutral metaphor, it’s like the difference between seeing a scene in a Film or TV Series which is pretty obviously product placement for a cola brand were one or more of the characters are using said product in a way that makes sure its brand is seen and mentioned vs a perfectly normal scene were somebody just happens to be drinking something that looks like a cola - the entire vibe is totally different between having something which is not a natural story element shoved there to fulfill objectives other than telling a good story and just telling a good story that naturally reflects the real world in its many facets hence all that’s there just feels natural.

When human and social situations are interpreted in simplistic one-size-fits-all ways by people who have linked such interpretation to being a member of a “political side”, their takes are not really about what’s best for the people involved, even when they claim otherwise.

There really isn’t any “one size fits all” approach for most human subjects, specially something as socially significant as gender is in most societies.

I don’t think criticizing large cars in a post or two qualifies as “dwelling” on large cars.

Also the margin is irrelevant for a vehicle’s danger to pedestrians or its consumption, only its mass and velocity (because the energy of a moving object is proportional to the mass and to the square of the velocity), which is why even a bicycle can be deadly to a pedestrian if going at a high enough speed.

My point is that large cars are generally worse than small cars (significantly so when the mass is 3x or 4x), not that small cars are not bad or that use of small cars can be excused by there being people using large cars.

I can get it if your detesting of cars is an absolute thing with no specific reason, but I suspect that for most of us our detesting of cars is anchored on various very concrete reasons, and personally danger to pedestrians and other road users such as cyclists and polution are two of the biggest ones for me, in which case it makes sense to detest even more a trend in car use that makes them more dangerous and more poluting (and even electric cars are poluting because of tire microparticle emission - which by the way is proportional to weight - and energy generation still not being 100% renewable so indirectly cars fueled by electricity still polute)

There has always been lots of Corruption in the US (IMHO), but now there is also a feeling of impunity and no shame, so both more Corruption and it being done in more visible ways.

I think a point could be made that larger cars are environmentally more damaging as well as more dangerous to pedestrians and other road users, in both cases due to there being a lot more weight of metal being moved around in larger cars (so, more fuel consumption - which in the case of electric cars is still indirectly causing some polution - and more momentum that needs to be removed to stop a collision or involved in the actual collision).

Not really the way the other poster was making his point but still provides a “Fuck cars” reason to complain about “government buys lots of large cars”.

I’ve also made an argument elsewhere about how the higher values involved in corruption in the Procurement of Car Fleets compared to non-Car options might be incentivising state officials to go for cars and car-friendly policies, but that’s not relevant for this specific thread.

The superior yield for corruption in the procurement of fleets of cars for a State seems like a Fuck Cars issue to me.

I mean, I can see how there could be corruption in the procurement of State Bicycles or State Employee Walking Shoes, but the values involved would be way lower.

And this is without going into the whole point made by somebody else that Governments having and using fleets of cars (especially State officials) incentivises them to have pro-car policies.

LOL!

Reduced to name calling.

Good try, shame you don’t have the chops (as the way you express yourself gave away very early on)

I very explicitly said the whole thing is slower than the speed of light (much slower even) and even pointed out why: at the most basic of levels, the way charged particles push each other without contact is the electromagnetic force, meaning photons, but the actual particles still have to move and unlike photons they do have mass so the result is way slower than the speed of light.

To disprove the idea that a push on a solid object can travel faster than the speed of light (which is what the OP put forward), pointing out that at its most basic level the whole thing relies on actually photons which travel at the speed of light, will do it.

There was never any lower limit specified in my response because there is no need to go into that to disprove a theory about the upper limit being beyond a certain point. (Which makes that ironic statement of yours about the speed of sound-waves quite peculiar as it is mathematically and logically unrelated to what I wrote)

Going down into the complexity of the actual process, whilst interesting, isn’t going to answer the OPs question in an accessible and reasonably short manner using language that most people can understand.

And how do you think the information that an electrically charged particle is moving reaches other electrically charged particles…

You’re pushing the atoms on your end, which in turn push the next atoms, which push the next ones and so on up to the atoms at the end of the rod which push the hand of your friend on the moon.

As it so happens the way the atoms push each other is electromagnetism, in other words sending photons (same thing light is made of) to each other but these photons are not at visible wavelengths so you don’t see them as light.

So pushing the rod is just sending a wave down the rod of atoms pushing each other with the gaps between atoms being bridged using photons, so it will never be faster than the speed at which photons can travel in vacuum (it’s actually slower because part of the movement of that wave is not the lightspeed-travelling photons bridging the gaps between atoms but the actual atoms moving and atoms have mass so they cannot travel as fast as the speed of light).

In normal day to day life the rods are far too short for us to notice the delay between the pushing the rod on one end and the rod pushing something on the other end.

I run my pirated games in Linux sandboxed using firejail (Wine itself doesn’t sandbox anything as it’s only an adaptor layer) configured to block a lot of things including network access.

Then again I also run my non-pirated games in Linux in the same way.

Well, technically speaking, if it’s the same shit from the same ass but you can chose your favorite buttcheek, you do have a choice.

I can log into my GOG account with Lutris and it will NOT auto-update my games but rather works as a pull-only manager, which I prefer since over 2 decades in Software Engineering have taught me that shit getting updated at the convenience of a 3rd party is a great way to randomly and for no good reason have stuff that works stop working. Even in Windows I refused to use GOG Galaxy for exactly that reason and kept downloading offline installers (and that’s also part of the reason I favored GOG over Steam). You could say it’s a professional quirk 😀

I’m definitely one of those people who swears by Lutris and even went to the trouble of figuring out how to run games from it automatically sandboxed and have mine configured to run them with Firejail set for, amongst other things, no network access (it looked into it because I wanted to make sure any pirated game wouldn’t hack my system, but it also works well to stop official versions of games from doing any funny business - mainly privacy invasive stuff - so I have it set up as default for all games).

I too was holding back from having Linux as my main by the lack of availability of games that would run on Linux - and I’ve been playing around with Linux and even using it professionally since the early 90s - so I’m very happy with how this transition from Windows to Linux turned out for me and, like you, almost all of the games that I know won’t work are games I don’t have interest in playing anyway (mainly because the Online Multiplayer experience for AAA games nowadays is horrible even when compared to the 2000s and early 2010s, worse compared to LAN gaming in the 90s).

Well, my Steam collection isn’t all that big (I mostly buy from GoG) plus I’ve only changed to Linux about 6 months ago, so out of the 6 Steam games I have tried so far in Linux, only for 1 (The Sims3, an EA game from 2009) has it failed to run from Steam whilst a pirated version ran perfectly fine with Lutris and Wine.

If I remember it correctly since the very beginning this game was problematic even in Windows because of its excessive DRM and if you look at ProtonDB, most recent experiences reported with the Sims 3 are either negative or problematic.

I’ve tweaked a lot of problematic games to get them to run in Linux (mainly GoG games with Wine and Lutris, though in addition to the Sims 3, one of the other 6 Steam games I’ve tried require tweaking in Steam, which for that one worked and I got it to run) plus I know enough about tweaking Wine to get pirated games to run in Lutris (Lutris doesn’t have install scripts for downloaded “releases” like that, so they often requires tracking in the logs the missing DLLs and figuring out what to install with Winetricks or even if the problem requires forcing use of the native DLL in WINEDLLOVERRIDES) so it’s not as if by now I’m devoid of experience at tweaking that stuff.

In summary, my total rate for problems running Steam games under Linux is 33.3%, half of which I could solve with tweaking and half I could not, though it’s a pretty small sample so the error margin is large.

For comparison sake, with Wine and Lutris out of maybe 20 games, looking at my notes - because I write the tweaks down for future reference - 5 required tweaking (so around 25%) and only for 1 of those (10% off the total) I failed to get it to run properly.

Compared to the last time I tried gaming on Linux (maybe a decade ago), it’s incredibly good.

In some cases my 0 minutes played are because I bought it in Steam but had to go get a pirate version to play it in Linux (via Lutris and Wine rather than Steam and Proton) since the Steam version didn’t work in Linux but the pirate one did (probably something to do with the game’s own DRM, which in the pirate version has been cracked)

Which, IMHO, is more sad than just buying a game because it’s cheap and never actually getting around to playing it.

Acting techniques improved massively during the XXth century, so stuff that relies on that (basically anything but slapstick Comedy and mindless Action) will feel less believable, which impacts mostly things from the 60s and earlier.

Then there are the Production values: the scenarios in early XXth century films were basically Theatre stages whilst more recent stuff can be incredibly realistic (pay attention to the details in things like clothing and the objects and furniture in indoor scenes in period movies) and Sci-Fi benefited massive from the early XXIst century techniques for physically correct 3D rendering and Mocap techniques so there is a disjunction in perceived realism between even the early Star Wars Movies and something like The Mandalorian.