Yep. We can look at the source to see what their metrics are. They have economic freedoms and personal freedoms.

The metrics for economic freedoms they used are fiscal and regulatory freedom. Focusing on fiscal, that branches down into: state taxes, local taxes, government spending, government employment, government debt, and “cash & security assets.” It’s obviously a libertarian based definition of “economic freedom”, wherein they feel someone with $5 to their name and no obligations is more economically free than someone with $100 to their name and $10 of taxes. Completely illogical bullshit.

But you can look at it and see that a lot of them are incoherent or intentionally overlapping even if you buy into their base ideology.

Why are government spending and government taxation separate entries? Is someone with low taxes less “economically free” because their government budget is able to afford to be larger anyway? Why does government employment factor in at all? Surely — especially after you’ve accounted for any budgetary, taxation, and debt based impacts — there’s nothing inherent to government employees existing that can be argued to impact someone’s “economic freedom.” Even within their base libertarian fantasies, the overlap and design of the categories will specifically make a richer, but otherwise completely identical, state less free than a poorer copy-cat.

The rest of their categories are even more bullshit. They have an entire section under personal freedom categorized as “Travel Freedom.” A sane person might define that as both the right and the capacity to travel places. They define it as “This category includes seat belt laws, helmet laws, mandatory insurance coverage, and cell phone usage laws.” So a state is less “free” according to Cato if it makes it illegal to text while driving.

tl;dr it’s all libertarian bullshit.

The spirit of your point is right, but: game patches existed back then. The first patch for Half Life was 1.0.0.8 released in 1999 (release version was 1.0.0.5). I cannot find the patch notes or exact release date as my search results are flooded with “25th anniversary patch” results.

What was true is that players patching their games was not a matter of course for many years. It was a pain in the ass. The game didn’t update itself. You didn’t have a launcher to update your game for you. No. Instead, you had to go to the game’s website and download the patch executable yourself. But it wasn’t just a simple “Game 1.1 update.exe” patch. That’d be too easy. It was a patch from 1.0.9 to 1.1, and if you were on 1.0.5.3 you had to get the patch for 1.0.5.3 to 1.0.6.2, then a patch from that to 1.0.8 then a patch from that to 1.0.9. Then you had to run all of those in sequence. This is a huge, huge part of why people eventually started to fall in love with Steam back in the day. Patches were easy and “just worked” — it was amazing compared to what came before.

The end result being that patches existed but the game that people remember (and played) was by and large defined by what it was on release. Also console games weren’t patched, although newer printings of a game would see updates. Ocarina of Time’s 1.0 release was exclusive to Japan; the North American release was 1.1 for the first batch of sales. After the initial batch was sold out the release was replaced by 1.2. That was common back then. As far as I know there was no way for consumers to get theirs updated, or to even find out about the updates. But they did exist.

Do you have data on that? A modern nuclear power plant is going to be in the 500-1000+ MW range. I have a hard time imagining that even operating at half capacity that they do not offset the carbon used for concrete within a relatively short order. But if that is in fact the case I’d love to see data saying so, so that I can correct my thinking.

Paying over a third of all revenue generated from searches on Apple’s platform. That’s incredible. Not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will work out legally, but I have a hard time parsing such an enormous pay-share as anything other than an aggressive attempt to stymie competition. Flat dollar payments are easier to read as less damning, but willingly giving up that much revenue from the source suggests the revenue of the source is no longer the primary target. It’s the competitive advantage of keeping (potential) competitors from accessing that source.

It’s not true, I saw a different meme on it the other day and looked it up. This came about because some company made an advertisement at Salzburg Airport that looked kind of like a help desk tag for someone that mistakingly flew to Austria instead.

The giveaway here is that it’s Salzburg, not Vienna. International flyers into Austria are almost universally going to end up in Vienna by default. Vienna’s airport sees ~20x the annual passenger count.

It could be that.

My first thought is that it might be the post-lockdown tech demand crash hitting Apple later than it hit the rest of the industry. If I remember right Apple was holding on fairly well when the market first started to crash as society shifted into a “post-Covid” mentality, relative to their competition.

Could be that for whatever reason the drop in demand for Apple was just delayed by about a year.

To do that the current party in favor of removing rights needs to be kept out of power long enough that they conclude that removing rights is an electoral loser and changes their ideology accordingly.

I’m not going to hold my breath.

That really depends on what their goal is.

From a business perspective it’s not worth fighting to eliminate 100% of ad block uses. The investment is too high. But if they can eliminate 50% or 70% or 90% of ad block uses with youtube? That could be worth the effort for them. If they can “win” for Chrome and make it a bit annoying for Firefox that would likely be enough for Google to declare it a huge success.

People willing to really dig all the way in to get a solution they desire are not the norm. Google can be OK with the 1% of us out there as long as we aren’t also making it possible for another huge chunk of people to piggyback off it effortlessly.

The very start of that article:

October 6 Update: A newly published report has clarified that the discovered code bits are not related to Windows “12.” Also, the next-gen Windows version will not require a subscription.

The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn’t truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been “fixed.” Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.

Vista’s issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista’s reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.

I don’t think Kotick is at all certain to be kicked out. As easily as I can see MS letting him go with an enormous golden parachute, I can just as easily imagine them keeping him onboard because all they care about is Activision’s ability to make money.

In all likelihood Blizzard isn’t going to be managed any differently. Microsoft’s modus operandi with gaming acquisitions is to leave the leadership in place and let the dev/publisher run itself. Why is everyone expecting different here? The most likely outcome is MS does nothing to Blizzard and Blizzard continues on more or less the same trajectory as before.

Unit Ready
Unit Ready
Unit Ready

Construction complete

They’re fixing the last line of that. Republicans parred it back some it’s still seeing substantial budget increases. You can see the 10 year timelines.

The tax enforcement budget would see a 69.2% increase relative to the pre-IRA projection. I forget what the size of the debt limit deal cutback was, but my recollection is that it was not enough to change the core fact that the IRS is going to see substantial improvements to its budget and especially to its enforcement arm.

EDIT: Worth highlighting that stories like this one are exactly why republicans hate the idea of the IRS being properly funded.

It’s also because their current shows suck, and because any shows that are actually good get shitcanned after season 2, because Netflix sees less consumer growth after two seasons.

I’m always surprised at how often other people (not you) will defend this practice from Netflix. It’s classic case of following the data in a stupid way. If their data shows that interest drops off after two seasons, I don’t doubt it.

But… that comes with a cost. They have built a reputation as a company that doesn’t properly finish shows that they start, that will leave viewers hanging. That makes it harder to get people invested in a new series, even one that’s well reviewed. Why get interested in something you know will end on a cliffhanger?

That kind of secondary order impact from their decision isn’t going to show up in data. Doesn’t change that it happens all the same.

It should be done, but Biden has never had the opportunity.

The size of SCOTUS is set by statute, and would need a law passed by the house and senate to do so. Democrats don’t hold the house today, but did in the prior congress. That vote likely could have succeeded. It would have failed in the senate. At the time the senate was 50-50 and I cannot possibly imagine any scenario where Manchin and Sinema would have voted for that law. King and Feinstein wouldn’t have been certain votes either, but likely winnable if it came down to the wire. Even if all of them did vote aye, regular legislation can be filibustered and there is definitely 0% chance that Manchin+Sinema would have voted to kill the filibuster.

Dems need a house majority and at least a 52-48 senate majority for this to happen. I suspect that rage has already faded enough that it won’t happen even then, barring SCOTUS doing more Dobbs sized awful decisions.

The pressure campaign for RBG to retire was when democrats still held a senate majority with 53 seats. Republicans blocked Obama’s SCOTUS appointment when they held the senate majority. In 2016, republicans simply just didn’t allow a vote to happen because the senate leader sets the vote schedule. The nuclear option had already been invoked by that very same dem caucus on all other presidential nominations too.

The scenarios look similar on a surface level but in the details that matter they are leagues apart. If RBG had retired in 2013 or (most of) 2014, her replacement would been confirmed, barring a Kavanaugh-sized scandal. Either republicans would have provided the seven votes needed to secure cloture, or Reid would have invoked the nuclear option to lower the cloture requirement on SCOTUS nominees to a bare majority, like all other positions. Either way the nominee would have been confirmed.

I’m more willing to forgive members of the house running despite their old age than I am senators.

Representatives only serve two years, so they’re making a shorter commitment. It’s substantially easier for someone to think they can keep doing something for another two years than it is for them to think they can do it for another six years. Especially on health matters. But also, individual representatives are simply just less important. In our current political environment, an individual senator leaving office is going to be a huge disruption for any balance of power that’s less than 54-46, with another critical point reached at the 60-40 balance. In the house it won’t matter for any caucus that’s ahead by ~5+ seats. Even in today’s razor close house, it was elected as 222-213 seats — a nine seat gap.

There’s a decent number of older representatives out there. I wouldn’t have minded Lee sticking around there for a bit longer. The only real issue with older representatives is that by staying in office they block the pipeline for new blood and building a bench for future offices. Running for senate in her late 70s is ridiculous though, especially for a first term.

For Pelosi specifically, I’d put it at 50-50 odds that she retires shortly after the 2024 election. If it wasn’t for her personal feud with Hoyer I’d put it at near-certain. When she decides to retire, I expect she’ll stick around for one last campaign solely because it will improve her ability to fundraise for the DCCC. She’s a team player through and through.

So you’re saying I need to stalk them down and introduce myself? Seems like a lot of work to avoid being incorrect, but since this is the internet I am obliged to do what I must to be correct.

Mine was never stolen, to break your streak. I had one of the little 4GB ones.

But did you ever stop to think about how Italy’s system impacts the most important among us: the wealthy shareholders? A truly humane system would prioritize them at all costs.

/s (should be obvious, but I’ll put it there to be safe.)