A+ game development right there. I don’t like how Nintendo runs their online services (and actively opposes game tournaments), but you wouldn’t expect such a change in Smash.

The game is a mess. I watch my kid play it and it’s so less graceful than smash. Framerates randomly drop, lag spikes happen a few times a minute, hit boxes seem nebulous compared to attack animations.

You can use maybe a quarter of the roster for free. You may be able to unlock everybody from in game currency, but I’m not too sure. They also just… removed a character that wasn’t free. If I paid any money for premium content I’d be pissed

“Well grandma was a little racist at times”

I honestly don’t know if this would be like letting toddlers run a daycare or if it would be paradise.

I’m glad it’s suitable for yachts. Can’t have my yacht looking like a second-rate palace without my LuxTouch tiles.

Beautiful music. Looks like a more interactive take on Stardew Valley

The real Microsoft was the studios we shut down along the way

Look at this human still using SSH. I bet they still process on old PCs instead of PC2’s

This shit can destroy companies and tank its value

Leaving hundreds of contacts in limbo with no resolution has the potential to cost more than $17 million in legal fees and termination clauses.

Where the fuck is the board of directors and why are none of the shareholders revolting?

We have plenty of things to be old grumpy grouches about.

“Those banks ruined the American dream and we bailed them out!”

“Fossil fuel companies successfully lobbied the government to allow them to poison our planet in the name of profit!”

“Those Disney crooks consolidated all media and destroyed independent creative ventures!”

“Back in my day we could afford a house if we saved 10 years of earnings for a down payment and then took out a loan eventually totaling twice the value of the purchase price. You kids have it easy with your rental sleeping pods and low-monthly rate outdoors park subscriptions. You don’t even contribute to furniture or clothing industries because you don’t own a place to put any!”

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The bottom 20% of earners aren’t likely to make the same amount in CA vs TX.

California’s minimum wage is $16. Working 40 hours (hard on a minimum wage job for reasons) brings $640 a week. 10.5% of that is $67

Texas’s is $7.25. 40 hours of that job is $290. 13% of that is $38.

In this bad example, a minimum wage earner in California pays almost double the tax than a minimum wage worker in Texas. It’s a bad example for many reasons, including us not taking into account the extra spending power the California worker has after taxes.

I’ve lived in both. The average people don’t seem to care.

Older Texans might namedrop California at times when they’re airing political grievances, but older people everywhere seem to have some casual “product of the times” prejudices against something.

I hope games will be able to hit 60fps stable or offer some type of 40hz minimums for the higher refresh rate TVs.

Resolution is important, but if the games still perform like they do now, I’d be disappointed.

Imagine WW3 kicking off from TikTok. Not even a cool battle or anything, just massive misinformation campaigns to incite violence and false flag attacks

I’m not an economist but that makes sense to me.

What about a modified scenario:

A small island has three cupcake makers operating out of their homes: Meta, Alphabet, and Bytedance. Each has captured a section of the island’s market with cupcakes and at this point, there’s no real opportunity for growth. Meta can’t convince Bytedance’s customers to switch because they prefer other flavors. Meta would need to purchase one of the other cupcake companies in order to expand.

None of the cupcake makers are interested in selling their companies. They consider themselves elite and their successes feed into the CEO and shareholder perceptions of value and success.

Now, we consider that one of the cupcake companies is funded by a rich uncle from a different country. The island’s elders decide that the uncle’s influence is too great and orders Bytedance to sell its cupcake company or leave the island.

We’ve established earlier that people who like Bytedance cupcakes don’t necessarily want to eat Meta or Alphabet cupcakes, so if they leave the market, those customers may be gone for good. They may have a change of heart and decide that cupcakes of any flavor are fine, but they may also be angry that the government forced their favorite place out of business. In any case, Meta and Alphabet cannot rely capturing this segment of the market to grow.

Faced with the dilemma of possibly gaining customers organically or definitely gaining customers by purchasing their preferred product brand, I’d argue that the remaining companies may jump on the opportunity to purchase Bytedance before they are forced out. None of the cupcake companies were up for sale in a traditional sense before, so this was never a realistic path to achieve growth.

“Vote to participate in democracy! Here’s some local voting resources”

vs

“Vote to protect our interests! Tell your representative that they are killing free speech if they don’t listen to me”

The US government has been caught doing the same thing… poorly. You probably aren’t going to find a lot of sources showing that the US is fighting these fights on Facebook and twitter, but you can read between the lines with interviews. In general, these kinds of things aren’t performed out in the open.

Agree with you though. National security has trumped privacy. 9/11 changed a lot of things in a bad way.

I’m not arguing against them explaining their rationale. I originally argued that they shouldn’t be taken as experts.

Zuckerberg and Musk “get” to do these things because they are in the US, with majority US-based workers, running off US-based infrastructure. If any of these platforms are being used to facilitate attacks against the US, the government can choose any number of methods to step in and enforce compliance to mitigate the threat. That’s it. This is about free speech in that not all speech is protected. If somebody uses TikTok to perform the digital equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater, the government sees a need to control it.

If Facebook was run and operated out of Tunisia, I’d expect these same conversations to be happening with them as well.

They largely don’t write the legislation. Lobby groups draft the materials and if we’re lucky, the congressional aides make a pass and clean things up.

You can search for why TikTok is dangerous. There are plenty of examples of how the application and platform are not being forthright with how they collect your identifiers and weaponize them for information operations campaigns.

As I mentioned earlier, the powers that be aren’t as worried about Facebook and the like because they’re US-based and have working relationships with law enforcement. Facebook has been used for the very campaigns that TikTok is being used for now, but a large difference is that another nation has near complete control over the platform.