Nintendo doesn’t want you to play their games if you’re not willing to follow their rules. Ok, that’s their prerogative, but that means I will not be playing their games…at least not their new ones.

I prefer playing on my Steam Deck these days, and I really don’t want to buy another handheld just to play Nintendo first party titles. I’m going to play some of my favorite classic Nintendo titles on my Deck using emulators and just not play the new stuff. I’m sure they’re great games, but so what? There are lots of great games. I’ve got a huge backlog of great games already in my Steam library, and 20 more on my wishlist. If Nintendo some day decides to make their titles available for Steam Deck or PC, I’d consider buying them, but since that’s extremely unlikely to happen, I think I’m just done with Nintendo.

these platforms sell unsafe products

Which is something that can, and often does happen in unregulated free markets. The invisible hand is not necessarily very good at things like consumer protection, among other things.

Of course parents not taking appropriate precautions doesn’t absolve the companies of responsibility. Unethical behavior is unethical behavior, even if there are things consumers can do to protect themselves from it. After all, the precautions wouldn’t be necessary if the companies didn’t engage in this behavior in the first place, so these precautions aren’t really solutions only mitigations.

RIP Lt. Zogg

The irony is, something like this probably would have been a lot less expensive to make, while also appealing more to fans. It’s funny how so many people in the movie business are not very good at, you know, the movie business.

When people are told that depression is an aberration, we are telling them that they are not part of the tribe. They are not right, they don’t belong. That’s when their shame deepens and they avoid social connection.

And that’s not the only reason people are made to feel they’re not part of the tribe, that they don’t belong. There are many things in this modern (post modern?) world that cause us to become alienated from other people, even and especially those in our own community. The nature of community itself has changed. Many relationships and social institutions feel more tenuous or impermanent.

It’s a vicious cycle: people feel alienated from others, it causes them stress, the stress causes anxiety, that leads to the immobilization response and depression, the effects of the anxiety and depression cause people to become further alienated from others, and the process accelerates and perpetuates.

I’m ok with a decent amount of tech in a car. Like I’m fine being able to connect my phone to the car and have android auto take over the infotainment system.

This reminds me of my 2016 Honda Civic. It had just the right amount of tech.

I don’t think the housing crisis is being caused by people who live in rural areas and don’t want there to be endless urban and suburban sprawl. Most people want to live in urban areas, because those areas are where the jobs, shops, and infrastructure are. Sprawl is expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment. It should be prevented as much as possible. But, the only way to prevent it is to make housing in urban areas, the area where people want to live because it’s where everything is, more affordable, and that means building more, dense housing in those areas. The real NIMBYs are people who own low density, single family homes in urban areas and don’t want higher density housing to be built in that area because it would bring down their property values.

Nevertheless, a nationwide housing drive risks stoking homeowners’ ire in a country where the middle class derives most of its wealth from real estate and two-thirds of dwellings are occupied by their owners.

That’s the thing that nobody wants to talk about. I’m constantly hearing people saying that “NIMBYs” are the cause of the housing crisis, which isn’t untrue, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Why do NIMBYs exist? I think the prevailing assumption is that they’re just greedy, miserly boomers who love money and hate young people, but I think the problem is systemic, not simply caused by some individuals who happen to have character flaws.

It’s easy to call these property owners greedy, because it’s not your wealth. If it were your wealth, I bet many of you would be NIMBYs too. Because, again, it’s not just a matter of you having better moral character than them, it’s about the incentives, and how people with opposing financial interests have different incentives. People with wealth have an incentive to protect their wealth, and people without wealth have an incentive to try and acquire wealth.

This is why I’m a critic of capitalism, and why I want to move toward something that could be called socialism (although, not necessarily a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist conception of socialism). I think capitalism creates too many oppositional relationships. It causes people to have opposing interests. Owners and workers, companies and consumers, home buyers and home owners. I think it would be better to try and build a system around our shared interests, around the things we have in common, as opposed to one where we are constantly in opposition to one another.

We all need housing. It is a universal human need. So why have a system that incentivizes some to restrict other’s access to it? Why have a system that creates an adversarial relationship between those who have a home (and the wealth associated with it) and those who don’t?

All of these oppositional, adversarial relationships cause conflict and division.

The level of paranoia is kind of crazy.

It feels like there’s still some, mostly unspoken animosity between liberals and demsocs like AOC. I think the Democrats would like people to believe that liberals and demsocs have reached a consensus, and that moderates and progressives are unified, but I think there are still philosophical and ideological differences between them, maybe even some that are irreconcilable. The liberals have definitely made a lot of concessions to the demsocs, but I think they have also tried to make it abundantly clear that the Democratic party is still a liberal party. And that’s understandable, liberalism is the predominant ideology in America. Sure, there are a lot more demsocs today than twenty years ago, but we are still heavily outnumbered.

One of the many games just sitting in my steam library, waiting to be played.

The true measure of success is the percentage of our total energy consumption that comes from renewables/fossil fuels.

In 2013, renewables accounted for 5.8% of total energy consumption, fossil fuels accounted for 84.4% of total energy consumption.

In 2023, renewables accounted for 9.8% of total energy consumption, fossil fuels accounted for 80.6% of total energy consumption.

Source

It’s certainly moving in the right direction, but much more needs to be done.

We just got a leaked image from inside Team Cherry:

Is mpox going to trigger another pandemic?.. That seems highly unlikely.

Well, I guess that answers that question.

The Democratic vice presidential candidate has no asset ownership, bolstering his regular-guy image. But is this what America wants from its leaders?

It’s what this American wants from his leaders, yes.

If the world was warming even faster than scientists thought it would, seemingly jumping years ahead of predictions, would that mean even more crucial decades of action had been lost?

Yes. Yes it would.

The state should be [held responsible] if they’re enacting rules that criminalize health care

They should. They should sue the state, but, like you said, it wouldn’t accomplish anything so long as this SCOTUS remains as it currently is.

The Biden administration says hospitals must offer abortions when needed to save a woman’s life, despite state bans enacted after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion more than two years ago. Texas is challenging that guidance and, earlier this summer, the Supreme Court declined to resolve the issue.

This is why I don’t think the hospital is really to blame. They’re stuck in this legal limbo wherein one action might violate Texas state law, and another might violate a Federal law.

We moved much of our production to other countries, especially China. It’s going to take time to bring it back. It’s going to be difficult, too. Companies have gotten used to higher profits, due to the dramatically lower labor costs in other countries. Those companies aren’t going to be happy about coming back to the US where they’ll have to pay workers more, especially now that there’s a push to bring unions back.