I read that from top to bottom and not a single thing was wrong or even an exaggeration.

It really is that bad.

Alternativelly, they’ve just been competent in the execution of their less savory intelligence operations and thus not been caught doing something too outrageous.

It makes a lot more sense for China to arrange an “overdose” than shoot somebody in the middle of a busy street in broad daylight from a car with diplomatic plates and a Chinese flag.

Same for all other countries, by the way, though in Autocracies politicians have less to worry if the country ever gets caught murdering people in foreign soil than politicians in Democracies do (though, judging by a century of American murders, even those in supposed Democracies almost never have to worry about it)

What we’re talking about is “The Great Game”, not Tit-Tac-Toe.

Do you have a source for that or is it just a conclusion you reached?

The reason I ask is that I vaguelly remember of seeing somewhere that the way the front of modern ICE cars is designed makes the engine literally fall when a high-speed frontal collision happens exactly so that the front can act as a crumple zone rather than the engine being pushed inside the passenger compartment. That being so, things aren’t quite as simple as you say and I think we need actual real world test results showing that difference in safety rather than mere expectations extrapolated from superficial knowleged about cars.

Well, we do see news about celebrations of their birth.

With age this improves: I can now come back to were I left the story after I went down on a tangent, even after going down tangents of the tangent.

(Well, usually).

Passenger: Watch out for the old ladie.

Passenger: Watch out for the old ladie!

Passenger: WATCH OUT FOR THE OLD LADIE!!!

*Bang!*

Passenger: Shit man, if I hadn’t opened the door you would’ve missed the old ladie.

Now is a very good time to exercise one’s Delayed Gratification ability.

por qué no los dos?

Steam’s policy is to, if a gamedev company gets a better offer in another store that doesn’t add the 30% markup that Steam adds to the price of games and shares that with their customers by selling their games cheaper in the other store, Steam will take their games down from the Steam store.

Now, if Steam was just one amongst many small games stores, the gamedev could just ignore that, but Steam has such much of the Market of digital game sales that gamedevs cannot ignore having their games taken down from the Steam store.

Oh, by the way, this applies to Indies as much as it does to the rest, so we’re not just talking about widelly hated AAA publishers here.

Steam absolutelly is using their dominant market position to shaft both gamers and game devs, including Indies.

Which is why simping for Steam is so, so sad.

Absolutelly: the system in the US is designed to remove choice from the “riff-raff”.

Then again to a large extent in the past it was also so in those EU countries talked about here (and, as an EU resident, let me tell that there’s a lot of effort going on around here slowly reverting things back to those days)

Further, people too have make it so in the US, for example by not joining Unions or by parroting propaganda about how Free a country America is (which is pretty close the opposite of true: real Freedom in America is something only the rich have).

Whilst I dislike the near-religious take on the “Founding Fathers” of America (who at best were “progressive” for slave owners) the “American Constitution” (a prototype for Democracy which is riddled with problems, hence the current situation), many things from that time including some said by American Founding Fathers are eternal truths, such as the one about “eternal vigilance”, and the one about the tree of freedom needing to be periodically refreshed with the blood of patriots.

What the US doesn’t do enough compared to Europe are General Strikes, rather than protesting.

Protests don’t really hit the Owner classe were it hurts them the most and can easilly be portrayed as a violent rabble or simply not talked about (both things which in countries were the entirety of the Press is captured, are the norm in terms of news coverage).

For all the feeling of release of righteous rage they give to protestors, Protests by themselves are just people walking and shouting (with at most small shops rather than big companies suffering) and thus are easy for the powerful to ignore.

General Strikes, on the other hand, have a way bigger impact on the money making of the people who have a disproportionate amount of power and there are even more impactfull options when the HQs of certain companies or the homes of very rich people are targetted.

Unless they’re properly inconveniences the powerful only pay attention to Protests when they’re a signal that there is insatisfaction amongst the general population which, if not addressed, will lead to things much worse than Protests, and in countries were things don’t actually go further than protesting like the US, the powerful can easilly not care about protests.

Cogito, ergo sum

As a random person on the Internet I don’t actually have anything to add but felt it would be nice to jump in.

If there had been a “Buy 10, Get 1 free” they could’ve used 11 humans instead of 10 for the same $250.

They sure are loudly “supportive” of “Charity”.

You know, like people who do it to benefit socially by projecting an image of being “a good person” towards others, rather than people who genuinelly empathis with and care about others (who are not in fact loud about their “charity”, because being seen as charitable is not why they do it).

I lived for a decade in Britain and that society is all about “keeping up apperances” at any cost (maybe why their Performing Arts are some of, if not THE, best in the World) and not at all about empathy.

I lived in Britain for a decade.

Amazingly, in my experience not a single one of those things is true in practice.

• Britain has First Fast The Post and an unelected second house of Parliament and Head Of State. The current government has a parliamentary ABSOLUTE majority (in a country with no written Constitution, so they pretty much can enact whatever laws they want with it) when they only got 33.7% of votes cast, so a lot more like Putin’s Russia than, say, a country like The Netherlands.
• To see Britain’s “Rule of Law” just look at how one group of demonstrators against the Genocide in Gaza were deemed Terrorists because of nothing more than throwing paint at a parked airplane used for surveillance in Gaza, and than was then used to arrest anybody supporting that group as being “Terrorist supporters”.
• Harder to explain: culturally Brits - especially middle class and above - see people as having a moral obligation to fit in, which is how you end up with things like demonstrators being arrested for “Disturbing the Public Order”. Also, just notice the transphobia in Britain. Britain’s love of individual liberty was little more than a short period of relaxing of moral mores in the sexual sphere that lasted a few decades - just enough to legalize Homosexual Marriage - and then stopped and now you get things like upper-middle class “Feminists” writting newspaper opinion pieces in the supposedly liberal The Guardian raging again some sexual practice or other.
• Just read how Muslims are described in British newspapers. Also talk to any friend of yours in Britain who has an ethnicity other than white-Briton, including white non-Britons such as Poles.

In reality British values are almost all related to “keeping up appearences” (hence the whole “stiff upper lip” thing), a belief in the inherent superiority of Britain, Britons and British ways and about how others “should know their place” (to the point that “kicking down” on those below on the social ladder is vastly more common that trying to climb that ladder)

De facto Kindness is not a British value, though there is a lot of loud and performative “contributing to Charity” which is really about projecting a good impression of oneself on others to help one’s own image (plus a lot of “Charity” in Britain is just the visible side of a very common Tax Evasion system for the rich involving setting up “Charitable Fundations” in the Channel Islands and then “donating” all of one’s income to them to end up paying ZERO tax).

Britain is a society which is very big on performative “looking like you’re doing”/“saying” good things and punishing those who do not (and the punishments themselves also differ depending on a person’s image - for example in Courts “posh gentlemen” get totally different sentences than Arabic-looking people), not one that expects people to follow principles like refraining oneself from advancing one’s personal upsides if that would hurt or harm others.

That, said, like everywhere else, there are genuinelly kind people in Britain, tough there they often are preyed upon by those running “Charity” grifts.

What this shows is that the human definitions of the words “standing”, “sitting” and “lying” are vague rather than strict.

Lack of taking the “the meaning of spoken language words is in fact pretty blurry around the boundaries (even for words ‘everybody agrees on’)” effect into account is the reason why technical implementations “not doing what the users want” is so incredibly common that it has become a running joke in fields like software development.

There’s a reason present day “AI-in-everything” Microsoft bought a code hosting company.

Games in GOG for 2€ or less right now. Quite a number of them still look great and others have fun gameplay which transcends time.

Then there are quite a lot of free games like OpenTTD or Luanti.

Last but not least, for PC games piracy has a pretty low technical barrier to entry.