Making fun of people for pushing back on something you’re never going to do is cringe

Because there are some unstated criteria for inclusion.

Used to run LAN parties. We had a big bag of ethernet cables we inherited from the people who ran it before us, and like 50% of them had no tab. Eventually we chucked them out.

I remember trying to terminate some Cat5e in uni. I don’t think a single one of the cables I made up were able to do gigabit… actually I don’t think a single one was able to do 100 megabit. I’m colourblind so ordering the wires correctly was essentially impossible, but all of us involved were fucking up in various ways…

😭

Ow.

Loss leaders don’t have to literally force people to buy your other stuff. Supermarkets sell a bunch of things at a loss that they know people are price sensitive to, because most people don’t do their weekly shop spread across multiple supermarkets. That, after all, is how supermarkets took over from the butcher, the greengrocer, the baker, etc. So it may still be that selling Steam Machines gets people in the door and more likely to buy Steam games.

But in this case this is a fairly picky point. People who aren’t already in the Steam ecosystem are fairly unlikely to buy a Steam machine, I would say, so a lot of your potential customers are already buying those games on Steam and you gain nothing. Maybe due to the form factor it replaces an XBox and so those people buy more games on Steam rather than on XBox? Hard to say.

Certainly the safer bet is to aim to at least break even.

How d’you do, fellow trees?

I remember when my dad was skeptical that I copied a game from my friend’s computer onto ours via floppy disk. “A game is too big nowadays to fit on a floppy,” he said. “Just you wait,” I said.

I had copied the shortcut from the desktop.

Oh, rictal

Option 2 is unquestionably evil, but it’s not for its own sake. It is instrumental evil to achieve - supposedly - something else.

I think it’s risky to pursue that strategy. As you say, other countries and their citizens really don’t like it. But look at what is happening so far: strong words… from only a few countries. Sanctions… but very limited sanctions, from only a few countries. Netanyahu’s gamble is simply that they can murder and force out the Palestinians slowly enough that nobody makes a big enough fuss while it’s going on, but fast enough that it’s complete before the US realises how monstrous of a thing they are doing.

US protection isn’t eternal. But how much do you bet that it will run out before there are less than 1,000 Palestinians left in Israel? It’s far from a certainty, right? So no matter what you think makes more sense, there will be people - and clearly there are people - who think something else. And it just so happens that they’re in power in Israel.

I don’t think either thing there is what’s going on, and I think ultimately it is possible to make sense of things. Israel’s main motivation is neither “evil for evil’s sake” nor Lebensraum; it’s fear and hatred. Actually I think Germany also wasn’t really evil for its own sake; they were also more motivated by hatred.

Maybe the difference sounds academic but it’s not - people who want to be evil for its own sake can’t be denazified/whatever the name that will be given to removing the hate from the Israeli regime. Some hateful people, however, can still be brought back to humanity by promoting empathy.

Israeli Jews generally (obviously not all) hate the Palestinians for October the 7th and previous attacks going back decades. It doesn’t matter to them what Israel has done to Palestinians before or since - they have been attacked, they suffered, they want a) to prevent it happening again and b) revenge. So questions of “how will we use the land if we bomb it to smithereens” are not even secondary, not even tertiary, they come way down the list of priorities.

There are two smart Israeli takes on this:

1. You don’t win security by enacting ever greater atrocities against your enemy - that just ensures their children hate you forever
2. Actually, you do win security by enacting the greatest atrocity imaginable, because if there are no Palestinians, there can be no threat from Palestinian attacks.

Clearly some evil people in the Israeli government subscribe to option 2. Very few people subscribe to option 1. Sadly, option 2 does actually make sense if they can pull it off before the world gets off its ass.

So the evil is not for its own sake - it stems from the fear and from the hatred. Fear of attack creates an incentive to commit the ultimate evil of genocide. Hatred of those who attacked them creates an incentive for cruelty - what you see from Ben Gvir going around and performatively abusing prisoners and so on. These are evil acts, but they do make sense.

Lack of empathy is the root of so many of the problems in society and the wider world :/

[shocked Pikanyahu]

Today you have wrought art

It is now!

If you either pronounce e and a the same, or s and sh the same, it’s a fine pun. But with both being different in English, it’s bad IMO

We pronouncing “redis” like “radish” now?

What billions? Article says drivers are being paid double what they were stiffed out of.

HELL YEAH!