TIL most people don’t know that “apologists” means apologetics which does NOT mean “apologize.” It means to defend something.

Has to be Krampus, and Anna and the Apocalypse.

Krampus really scratches that nostalgic itch every year and I don’t know why. The broken family dynamics, the environment, the sound and set designs are amazing. And it has a lesson like every good Christmas movie should.

And Anna and the Apocalypse is similar. It is funny, musical, and ultimately an allegory about growing up and leaving everyone behind to forge your own path. A good reminder that you never know when it will be your last Christmas with someone. Or maybe I’m looking into it too much and I just like zombie musicals.

Well, Hamas specifically has rejected a 2 state solution twice in recent history. Their official stance is to not negotiate for it and instead kill all jews and end the state of Israel. There’s no chance at peace til Hamas is gone, rightwing Israeli government is gone, and Iran’s nutjob religious class no longer control the state and export its cancer around the world.

So you agree with the IDF in that targeting civilians is self defense?

Or are we playing pedantic games again where we try to rationalize bad things by wearing victimized status one moment while murdering children the next? Maybe the IDF and Hamas are both responsible. Hamas aren’t freedom fighters like my fellow lefties are making them out to be. They want a theonomic system. And they have one.

The problem in this scenario is that the biggest player will still have an opportunity to dominate. Proof of work blockchain? Well, Amazon just has to outspend all the others—which they can handily do, or run computation on AWS. Similar with staking, except worse because more money = more direct influence.

Our local stores, as discussed in other comments, can’t even offer shipping or workable websites. And we expect them to self administer part of that blockchain? They are just going to pay Amazon to do it.

And big data companies like Amazon would love to peer into the blockchain and see the throughput for each of these competitors and discover patterns. Edit: and they already do that for vendors selling on Amazon, which is where all these Amazon-branded products come from.

That’s probably the biggest turn off to the MBA-types; it would require sharing information, even if obfuscated.

Citations Needed had a mini series where they discussed why this happened. The US government will give material support to movie and game studios in exchange for some creative control over the content. That’s why so many movies with military equipment in it are rabidly pro-war; the studios don’t get access to the real equipment without the government’s support, and they don’t sign off on extremely critical scripts.

COD and similar games don’t just pop out of a void and still strive for some semblance of realism. That is a huge selling point after all. So the government gets involved, even if in little ways. Same way China gets to censor movies, either by omission or fundamentally changing things, around the world.

Not OP, but generally the arguments I’ve been told are:

Microsoft is an abomination (true).

“Don’t make me explicitly state types; it is too confusing!” Installs 20 libraries including fucking pad left to eek out basic functionality.

Strongly typed haters are right up there with curly brace haters.

For now. Google is locking down certificates in Android 14 which absolutely cannot be changed even by devs (barring exploits, which will be patched because this is Alphabet’s bread and butter on the line).

Google has put into place infrastructure to lock apps down as well with its App Bundles to replace APKs. And, wouldn’t you know it, they just so happen to rely on Google to be functional and even built! Custom made for your device and configuration and account. What a coincidence that you can’t rip that off your device and widely share it without massive workarounds. And even then, with Google clamping down on CAs….

People best become acquainted with ROMs again. Providing, of course, that Android doesn’t start employing anti-root tactics like Apple does which essentially eliminates the possibility of almost everybody actually owning their devices.

Basically the atheist dad yelling and screaming at his daughter for not being gay and not wanting to have abortions. Typical fundie Christians projecting their inner most thoughts and darkest desires onto their opponents thinking.

From Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine:

"The project begins in the programmer’s mind with the beauty of a crystal. I remember the feel of a system at the early stages of programming, when the knowledge I am to represent in code seems lovely in its structuredness. For a time, the world is a calm, mathematical place. Human and machine seem attuned to a cut-diamond-like state of grace.

…

Then something happens. As the months of coding go on, the irregularities of human thinking start to emerge. You write some code, and suddenly there are dark, unspecified areas. All the pages of careful documents, and still, between the sentences, something is missing.

Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background. It cannot simultaneously do something and withhold for later something that remains unknown[1]. In the painstaking working out of the specification, line by code line, the programmer confronts all the hidden workings of human thinking.

Now begins a process of frustration.

[1] clarifies how multitasking typically works, which was usually just really fast switching at the time of the book.

And let’s not forget the societal implications of celebrating and institutionalizing abject greed-is-good mentality. Capitalism inherently trends toward zero sum thinking and acting. Little wonder it always leads to something resembling fascism in the end. Some countries just haven’t advanced that far yet, but that’s why it is a very real threat even in what my fellow Americans idealize in democratic “socialism,” a “socialism” in which parasitic capitalists still get to retain ownership of enterprise while they grow fat and rich off the work of others. This is why there has been a resurgence of ultra rightwing extremists around the world in capitalist systems.

The only reason a developing country would want capitalism to generate wealth is because the established capitalist order will blockade or otherwise decimate any country which tries to step out of line. We’ve seen it time and again throughout modern history. Planned economies work for developing countries. They work so well that capitalist countries will band together in order to isolate those economies from the world out of fear of contagion. This was, for example, a key reason capitalist countries tried to contain and isolate the USSR and China, before both started embracing liberalization policies.