Personally there’s a lot of things I’d change about our government, and a lot of things that I think need to be changed but I’m not entirely sure what would make a good replacement.

I think getting rid of the Senate makes some amount of sense, but only if paired with a number of other changes. I’d first make it clear that constitutional rights apply equally to everyone and can not be revoked, and just as importantly that corporations are not people and have no constitutional rights. Corporations can have rights but only by passing laws to explicitly grant those rights. I would make it so that congress requires a 3/4ths majority to pass a new law, but only a simple majority to repeal one. This ensures that it’s hard to restrict rights for people, but easy to remove restrictions, and conversely that it’s hard to grant rights to corporations and easy to repeal them.

I would outlaw first past the post voting for any partisan office. There are a number of other good options that could be used instead (star voting for instance seems to produce really good results), but just about anything besides FPTP is preferable.

I would remove the electoral college. It’s often justified as a bullwark against a populist leader, but that very clearly has not worked, and a better solution is to just better educate the public.

I would consider making voting mandatory, and make election days federal holidays.

I would extend the basic human rights to include access to food, water, shelter, and basic utilities such as electricity and Internet (this would not preclude having to pay necessarily, but fees should be commensurate with capability to pay them), as well as make most (all?) criminal fees and penalties be proportional to a persons wealth (thereby eliminating the current system where any crime that the penalty is a fee is only a crime for the poor).

I would severely tighten anti-monopoly laws, E.G. having an outright ban on acquisitions and mergers for any company that doesn’t have at least a dozen healthy competitors.

I would require laws to be periodically re-passed in order to stay on the books. There are far too many obscure laws that aren’t even enforced but still stick around for prosecutors to go fishing for when they decide they want to intimidate someone. The big laws, the things that violate a persons well being or rights like murder or assault could be baked into the constitution, but the small stuff like littering and jaywalking, or more controversial things should be forced to be periodically re-evaluated to decide if they still make sense today, or if they need to be rewritten or tweaked in some fashion.

There’s probably a load of other things that should and would need to be changed, but that’s just a few things off the top of my head.

I think I understand what he’s trying to get at. The US government is essentially a fun house mirror of the British one. The British had a house of lords and a house of commons, one represented the nobility and the other the commoners. The US mirrored that but instead of nobility our “house of lords” represents the state, that’s the Senate. The House of Representatives meanwhile represents the people (aka commoners, hence why representation there is proportional to population), while the Senate represents the wealthy that run each state.

If the goal is to become an actual democracy instead of just saying we are, then eliminating the Senate would seem to make sense. The downside is that that eliminates one of the checks since you’d only need to get a bill past one chamber of Congress instead of two. On the other hand with the way the two party system currently runs it’s essentially the exact same state when one party controls both chambers so it’s not really a huge leap.

I’ve seen it proposed that cops should have to start carrying essentially malpractice insurance that they pay for out of their own pocket and that would cover payouts in the event that they get sued. This would have the added advantage that all those “bad apples” that somehow always seem to end up transferred to new precincts instead of fired and banned for life wouldn’t be able to get anyone to insure them effectively banning them.

Spam was never done with “burner phones” in the first place, it’s mostly done via VoIP through shady telecoms companies that can’t be bothered to validate their customers. Due to the age of the phone system it’s incredibly easy to spoof phone numbers because it’s essentially a trust system. Phone exchange A talks to exchange B and says phone number 123 is calling number 456. How does exchange B know that it’s actually 123 calling? They don’t at all, they just trust that exchange A is telling the truth. It’s really hard to get into the system, but once you’re there you essentially have unlimited power with virtually no safeguards in place.

Basically from a security perspective the phone system looks a lot like the 1980s internet, there is technically some security in place, but significantly less than there actually should be.

It is entirely possible and often is the case that all parties involved can be in the wrong, legally if not also morally. Ben really fucked up in a few places and ended up helping BAM out because of that. Had he been a little more cautious where things are currently would be a lot more straightforward with all the legal fallout aimed squarely at BAM. Instead there’s a not unlikely chance Ben could end up in serious financial and possibly even legal trouble. It’s not inconceivable that he could wind up facing some jail time and an even higher chance he could wind up with the kind of judgement against him that he’s not going to be able to crowd fund his way out of.

The only somewhat bright side is that it’s looking highly likely that Mansell will wind up getting his $100K and/or Legos back, even if literally everyone else winds up financially ruined.

Unfortunately the ones I see getting away with their crimes in this situation are as usual the dirty cops.

Pretty sure the average person dies at two hegseths over the limit.

Sure they do, it’s called money. Like all US politicians (and many in other countries as well) they vote as they’re paid to vote.

Priority one in any attempt to fix the US needs to be overturning citizens united. There’s an admittedly long list of other things that need to be done as well, but getting corporate money out of the equation is a significant force multiplier.

That’s how you know it’s probably a good idea.

Personally I’d go a step further and regulate algorithmic feeds in general. It’s pretty clear at this point that feeding people a steady drip of content picked to maximize “engagement” above all else has done incalculable damage.

Dude is officially the least popular president in American history.

Unfortunately that only means something if Republicans refuse to vote for him, and most Republicans I know would vote for literally anybody running as a Republican just to minimize any chance of a Democrat getting elected. About the only way I could see Republicans refusing to vote for the Republican candidate is if we were in some bizzaro world where the Republican candidate was a black queer woman and the Democrat was a white straight man (although I would happily pay thousands of dollars to witness the absolute knots all the racist Republican bigots would tie themselves into trying to square that circle).

It’s kind of weird that they’re trying to bucket a bunch of religions under a single moniker anyway. They’re all related sure, but if you’re going that route you might as well go all in and just make the category Abrahamic religions.

Fundamentally that has always been the problem with Christianity, none of them can agree on whether the others are “real Christians” or not, and half of them hate the other half. LDS is just the latest and kookiest of the lot (although I admit it’s exceptionally weird, only Scientology has it beat and that “religion” was literally thought up as a way to scam idiots).

I game almost every single day, and haven’t booted Windows in years. In the last 3 years I haven’t actually had any game I wanted to play not be able to run in Linux. I’ve had one that crashed non-stop, but judging by the thousands of complaints from Windows users about the same thing that wasn’t a Linux problem.

So yeah, gaming is no excuse, you can game just fine under Linux as long as the devs don’t intentionally block Linux like what happened with Destiny 2 (which Bungie just summarily executed so they can dump more cash into the trash fire that is Marathon, RIP Bungie I await the bankruptcy announcement).

Doesn’t even need that, the physics of it just doesn’t work. There’s basically no way to cool it and no way to power it. Anyone who thinks a space data center is a good idea has failed high school level physics.

Will it though? I could easily see Trump just writing off the deaths of any service members as a favor to his best buddy Putin or even ordering them to help Russia with the invasion. Best case scenario he just has the entire base stand down and sit on their asses while Russia does what it wants. He’s already indicated he doesn’t give a single flying fuck about NATO, and it’s not like he’s ever let little things like laws or treaties stop him before.

Need to bring back the concept of leper colonies and dump all these anti-vax and anti-pasteurization people in them. Quarantine them away until enough of them die off that the rest decide maybe this was all a really dumb idea.

That said his instincts (or rather prejudices) align most closely to the Republicans, mostly due to the Republicans spending every year since Nixon more closely aligning themselves with racists and Christian nationalists (aka Nazis).

Except for the slight problem that those 5 AI agents cost the same as 3 people so you could have skipped the agents, just hired 3 people and gotten 400% output instead of 120%. Yeah it takes longer to scale up and down, but exactly how volatile is your industry that demand is fluctuating that much month to month?

The crux of the case is whether Valve is applying that rule to non-Steam keys or not. Lawsuit says they are, Valve says they aren’t. If Valve is telling the truth, they’ve done nothing wrong. If Valve is lying however that is an anticompetitive practice that should be punished. We won’t really know until the trial concludes though.

Personally I think the most likely answer is that some junior support people at Valve misunderstood the policy and told some people the wrong thing. There’s a decent chance that when those accusations first surfaced a decade or so ago (yes this has been a thing for that long) Valve probably sent some internal memos to clarify what the rule actually covers and what it doesn’t and hopefully that was that.

It almost entirely comes down to porn preferences. Women tend to prefer pornographic stories while men tend to prefer pornographic images and videos. There’s a reason “romance” novels are one of the absolute largest genres for books and that their demographic skews heavily towards women. I would not at all be surprised to find a certain number of women using LLMs to generate erotic stories possibly featuring acquaintances or celebrities in them. Same impulse, different medium.

Primarily their review system which is hands down the best in the industry, as well as the laundry list of shady practices they’ve banned companies from employing. They’re not perfect by any means but they’re still head and shoulders above the competition. They’re also at least somewhat responsive to the community with them either implementing new policies to protect consumers when major scandals happen and even occasionally being proactive and banning bad practices when companies start talking about implementing them.

As for GOG they’re a bit of a mixed bag recently. They started carrying games with DRM at some point so they’re no longer the DRM free zone they once were, although the majority of their catalog is still DRM free. I believe they do warn you when a game has DRM though. On the plus side though they recently committed to improving their support for Linux which many people will be happy to see.

Multiple companies have tried to become the de facto games store and every last one of them has failed not because Steam uses its dominant position to crush them, but because not a single one of them has been willing to invest in the features, capabilities, and pro consumer policies that Steam has. Every single one of them thought that doing the bare minimum and then throwing cash at ads and publishers would be the path to victory. It wasn’t. Yeah, Steam may be effectively a monopoly, but it’s because nobody else really wants to compete with them at their level. The closest anyone has ever come is GOG.