Do you blame capitalism and America for bad weather too - or when you stab your toe in the morning?

Capitalism is a product of human nature; nobody designed it that way. When people attempt to design better systems from the ground up, far worse human behavior is being directly rewarded. Seriously, do you have any idea how much more disgustingly selfish and self-centered people are under economic and political systems that are supposedly better?

If you look at the most democratic nations on Earth, the ones with the best functioning institutions, the best education, the most innovation, least inequality, you’ll find nations that are fiercely capitalist, with strong mercantile tradition dating back centuries. These people were capitalists before the term was first coined and they selfishly wanted the state to protect their investments, so they created strong institutions for that purpose. They had no idea that these institutions would end up doing so much more, spreading and maintaining wealth far beyond the small elite that they were supposed to serve while at the same time slowly moving power away from them. The many smaller educated merchants, who only educated themselves, because they selfishly wanted more prosperity for themselves, ended up being an amazing nucleus of a well-formed civil society, which is the backbone of every single successful free country.

Forget about America for a second or pie in the sky ideas that failed spectacularly any time they came in contact with the basic reality of human nature. This is what works: Stumble into a system that accidentally rewards selfish human behavior in such a way that everyone ends up benefiting from it. The problem from the perspective of ideologues is that this isn’t glamorous, there are no dashing revolutionaries applying catchy slogans with the butts of their rifles. It’s slow, incredibly difficult to replicate, requires rewarding the “wrong” kind of people for the longest time and. There’s no trickling down or other such nonsense, but rather the slow collective realization that the same system that protects investments and the free exchange of goods and services can do a rather excellent job at protecting and increasing civil rights. It was neither linear nor planned and the resulting societies are by no means perfect, but they are the best we managed to achieve as a species so far, so consider learning from them how they were able to make capitalism work.

Sorry for the uncalled for wall of text, but I’m increasingly tired of people here blaming capitalism for everything. It comes across as performative, even downright intellectually lazy. I get that this is a left-leaning place to say the least and there’s a reason why I’m here too, because I’m identifying with many typical left political positions - but certainly not all of them and most definitely not those that have failed historically and don’t hold up to the most basic of scrutiny.

Here’s your +100 social credit score, loyal citizen.

Do you really think that had AI been available to apparatchiks in Communist countries, they wouldn’t have used it to advance their careers?

The problem isn’t capitalism, it’s human nature, regardless of the system. Incentivize behavior that is beneficial to the individual (even if just in the short term), but not society as a whole and people will engage in it. It doesn’t matter if there’s a democratically elected leader, monarch or first party secretary at the helm of the nation.

But what about America…

Thanks, I’ll give it a go!

Simon Tatham’s Puzzles is my go-to. No art to speak of, but it just does what it’s supposed to and you’ll quickly find a few favorites. No fluff, no ads, nothing to annoy or distract from the gameplay.

People on Steam are complaining about their antivirus freaking out about this game. While that’s the PC version, this isn’t exactly a good look, especially not on a F2P game.

How mature is the game? Can it be recommended to players looking for a complete experience or are there still many bugs and obviously unfinished features?

changing region lock app stores to china

This wouldn’t work, given that TikTok isn’t allowed in China. This cyberweapon is only meant to be used against foreigners. Either way, don’t help them and instead actively dissuade them from trying to keep their addiction alive.

No, that’s not what they are talking about. Even if you set the video to 1080p and make sure that YouTube isn’t lowering it to a lower resolution, it still won’t look very good.

Whether you notice or not depends on how perceptive you are, the quality of your eyesight and also the size and quality of your display. It’s hard to notice on a low-grade laptop screen (or smaller), as well as a cheap TN panel monitor, but go beyond around 20" and use a decent enough IPS panel and those blocky compression artifacts are hard to miss.

AVI is a container, not a codec. An AVI container can contain video encoded with any kind of codec (unlike some other container formats, which are more restrictive). If you want to, you could put e.g. a VP9 or AV1 video stream (so the ones that YouTube is using) into an AVI container. In theory at least, if you uploaded an AVI file containing VP9 video, YouTube could just extract it from the container and stream it as is, but they’ll still re-encode it. Before you think that all of this talk of modern codecs in AVI containers is theoretical, AVI is used a a standard for archiving with some institutions, so it’s more relevant than you might think.

However, you are partially right in that AVI can not be used for streaming, not just by YouTube, but in general, since this requirement obviously wasn’t taken into account when it was introduced in 1992 and thus not incorporated into this standard.

There’s something else that hasn’t been mentioned yet: Video games in particular have been so detailed since the eight generation (XB1/PS4) that 1080p with its significant compression artifacts on YouTube swallows too many of those fine moving details, like foliage, sharp textures, lots of moving elements (like particles) and full-screen effects that modify nearly every pixel of every frame.

And no, you will not get a less sharp image by downsampling 1440p or even 4K to 1080p, on the contrary. I would recommend you take a few comparison screenshots and see for yourself. I have a 1440p monitor and prefer 4K content - it definitely looks sharper, even down to fine-grain detail and I did the same when I had a 1200p screen, preferring 1440p content then (at least as soon as it was available - the early years were rough).

If you are noticing high CPU usage at higher video resolutions, it’s possible that your GPU is outdated and can’t handle the latest codecs anymore - or that your operating system (since you’re on Linux based on your comment history) doesn’t have the right drivers to take advantage of the GPU’s decoding ability and/or is struggling with certain codecs. Under normal circumstances, there should be absolutely no increased CPU usage at higher video resolutions.

These adjustments are mandatory in the EU. Keep in mind however that the intended use for this angle adjustment is for when the rear axle of your car is under full load and the headlight pointing upwards. You should not adjust the headlights otherwise. Especially at higher speeds, you need to be able to see far enough ahead in the dark.

As a vegetarian, this kind of reminds me of what I’m going through sometimes. Eating out in particular can be annoying, with most meal options in most restaurants containing meat.

Are you not using a software out of principle if it’s proprietary?

Both lasted for around seven years. Not great, not terrible.

I’ve still got a Samsung Odyssey+, which is a WMR headset, a standard from Microsoft that they have unfortunately sunseted (update 24H2 drops support), which is why I can’t recommend it. I’m sticking with 23H2, which should give me until November of next year to find an alternative. It’s a shame, really, because these headsets are cheap, easy to use, work with most games and all have rather excellent screens. Controllers aren’t the best, but still good enough even for demanding games.

The best light gun shooter I’ve ever played is a small VR game: Space Pirate Trainer. You’re just standing on a landing pad shooting down waves of robots, but it’s incredibly well balanced, has an ingenious dual-wielding system allowing you to prioritize protection or various kinds of firepower. You’ll leap around, duck and throw yourself to the ground trying to evade the merciless onslaught. It’s a ton of fun and a surprisingly good workout at the same time.

I’m mentioning this game, because I think that VR shooters are the modern-day successors to light gun shooters. Many players are so fully immersed in the latter already that they are instinctively ducking and evading enemy fire with their bodies, even though it has no actual effect on these games. In VR however, it does and the way you are aiming and firing is identical, albeit not limited by a static screen.

I should have mentioned that these tokens are one time only.

That’s just the reality of doing business on the Internet. This is by far the best way of doing it right now, not that this information appears to have made it down under so far.

While Australia’s new legislation is ham-fisted and poorly thought out, the intent isn’t wrong and there’s broad consensus for it (77% approval in Australia). We need to do something about the uncontrolled exploitation, manipulation and endangerment of minors by social media services. Corporations are clearly not interested in protecting them and parents are obviously incapable of it as well (although I could have told you the same thing 20 years ago). That’s precisely the kind of issue where the government is supposed to step in with regulation of some sort.