Time to invest in ivermectin suppliers.

The typical conservative response to that is “but then they’ll take their businesses elsewhere and now you get nothing.”

The typical conservative response also fails to even consider just how difficult, expensive, and risky it is to move a large business to an entirely new region. Real estate has to be purchased and sold, employees have to be relocated or replaced, logistics have to be established in the new region, valuable business connections and contracts will have to be severed, and for brick and mortar businesses, the competitive landscape will be different.

Legal, probably. Whichever corporations push that hypothetical bill are going to write it very specifically to ensure that it excludes their use cases.

Here’s an example of how they could do it:

S.A.V.E.K.I.D.S:
Support Age Verification Environments Keeping Internet Detectable Signals

Blah blah pretext and background information…

Blah blah surface-level purported reason for the bill is to prevent kids from bypassing age verification checks by using a VPN to pretend they’re a resident of another country…

No entity operating in or doing business within <jurisdiction> may provide services or make available technology that irreversibly redirects, masks, or otherwise obscures internet-destined traffic to appear as originating from any source other than the internet-connected network in which it was generated.

Site–to-site VPN? Fine, it’s destined for the intranet.
NAT? Also fine, it is the originating internet-connected network.
HTTP reverse proxies? Still fine, they pass the origin IP along.

VPN that routes all traffic through it? You’re getting locked up and they’re throwing away the key.

“New legislation mandates that we no longer offer the VPN connections necessary for our remote workers to access the company intranet off premises. Starting immediately, all employees are to return to office 7 days a week. If this does not work for you, please reach out to HR and they will accept that as your resignation in lieu of a written document.”

— Meta (the corp pushing the age verification laws), probably.

I was being sarcastic by the way.

Anyone with a shred of humility and critical thinking skills should realize that cutting corners to chase short term profit is being “penny wise, pound foolish”.

For the well-connected, that doesn’t seem to be necessary to fail upwards into leadership positions, unfortunately. Even ignoring the glaring orange example, there are people like John Riccitiello who managed to skull-fuck the reputations of both EA and Unity and still walk away with a new job lined up.

Right, but you’re not thinking like a MBA.

It hasn’t happened yet, historical trends suggest it won’t happen, and more importantly, that’s perfectly good profit going out the window. The shareholders will be pleased to know that we reduced operating costs by 10% this quarter, and I’ll reach the target for my bonus.

There’s a few of them. Notably, the guy who didn’t care that AI art is built on the back of copyright violations getting pissy about his AI-generated art not being eligible for copyright.

But more importantly here, I don’t think most artists in the gaming industry are in much of a position where they can stand by their artistic integrity. If every publisher pushes studios into using AI to be more “productive”, the choice becomes between slopping or starving—and most people don’t like starving.

We as consumers are the only ones that can afford to push back against this shit. Our survival doesn’t rely on buying DLSS 5 games so we have the ability to boycott them to send a message.

Power and grid infrastructure is a limitation that can exceed hardware availability in some regions. Musk has a datacenter with 20-something methane gas generators running throughout the day to power his mini-me sycophantic AI, Grok.

At the cost of a cultural deficit, solar could provide an environmental benefit there during the day.

If you thought Flock cameras were a bad situation, imagine not being able to query, read, write, or probably even speak about topics that they decide are “unpatriotic” or “satanic”.

The only difference between right now and then is that right now they aren’t doing anything about it. They already have the data about people’s opinions and leanings as a side effect of the massive network of tracking built for targeted advertising.

It will obviously be worse when we’re stuck renting computers, but what you’re describing is a today problem just as much as it’s a future problem. The only reason it hasn’t turned full 1984 is because they haven’t gone full mask off yet.

No, it won’t. It will cause more of the supply to be reallocated away from consumers into enterprise, and that is exactly what the big tech companies want to see happen.

Having access to a computer and phone is as much of a necessity to survive in modern society as internet is. When personal computing is unaffordable to the point where subscription computing is a good enough “deal” for consumers to jump on, the ball will start rolling towards the inevitable price squeeze that we have no choice but to accept.

Great, now we’re going to have them shooting more people because they felt threatened by large suitcases that “might have a bomb” in it.

Sure, you’re not all vile people. And yes, liberals have a problem with generalizing their political rivals.

Whataboutism notwithstanding, surely you can recognize that to also be a problem in your own party too, though, right? I’ve seen the shit people on r/conservative say whenever there’s a major political news event, and it ain’t great.

What exactly do you think the greater evil is, then?

It must be pretty bad if the lesser evil is the former BFF and associate of a convinced child sex trafficker, had directed a riot of followers into impeding the fair and free election process laid out in the constitution, and has bombed 3 countries in the past 12 months.

Which is uncannily large for the wrist it’s attached to.

The researchers said it was “maddening” that such easy action to fight the climate crisis was not being taken, and said people should be angry. Stopping the leaks can even be free, given that captured gas can be sold – methane is the “natural gas” that fires power stations.

It’s maddening but expected.

When corporate decisions are based solely on pleasing investors, fixing a leak isn’t a priority. It might be a long-term investment that eventually pays for itself, but it comes with a front-loaded cost that diminishes the profits of the current quarter.

The only way to get them to care about the problem is if it’s actively unprofitable or comes with personal liability for the leadership, and the only way that will happen is with regulations.

In other words: “why about the survivability of the species when we can instead care about making our investor’s loins tingle?”

Eventually we’ll get his second term declared invalid, and roll back all of his EOs, legislation, etc., including pardons.

Let me fix that for you:

Eventually he’ll get his second term declared invalid, and use that as his reason for running for his third term.

They’re not awesome when your workflow revolves around the command line and you’re stuck choosing between wasting days trying to layer your configuration on top of the project devcontainer or giving up and using the unconfigured bash shell included.

The Darwin kernel is based on BSD… sort of. It’s a monstrosity hybridization of an ancient version of BSD and the Mach kernel.

You should do dev work in devcontainers anyway.

Devcontainers work for Visual Studio Code when developers are more than happy to click their way through running builds and debugging problems. But, as someone whose workflow is optimized for the command-line, they can fuck off.

He used OpenClaw to write and commit code. That shows a complete lack of care for even the most bottom of the barrel security standards.

If there’s any valid reason for someone to be ridiculed over using AI, it’s that.