If you write enough laws in a manner that makes it easy to violate them accidentally, then anyone can be prosecuted at any time and civil liberties can be removed via technicalities.

Most police departments also don’t generally have helicopters and paint bombs.

The real world isn’t GTA where you get a 5-star rating and suddenly all the cops can instantly appear with missile launchers and shit.

I work for a small city in the same building as the police department. And yeah, they have AR-15s and body armor now, but grenades and helicopters are a different story. They’d have to get the closest major city, or more likely the National Guard to deliver that kind of firepower.

And it’s not that the police didn’t try whatbthey could in this case. They jumped on top of the machine, and even dropped a flashbang (which SWAT teams do have) into the stovepipe to try and disable it.

The governor reportedly considered sending in the national guard with an attack chopper, but a hellfire missile does a lot of damage and theocal decision to try and block his escape from the hardware store with a different dozer worked. He wasn’t able to back out after ramming the shop, and was forced to try and drive through, getting stuck in the process.

The 196 community has an (unenforced) rule that you must post every time you visit, so they’re posts that are following the rule.

Grenades aren’t exactly standard issue police equipment.

Sony doesn’t want to come out and say “Best Buy can get fucked” because Best Buy still sells headphones, TVs, and other products Sony makes, including the Playstation itself. They need the retailers to sell their products.

But with digital goods, they can cut out the retailers retailers. The $10 bucks or whatever the retialer would get now goes to Sony.

Not even his daughter. He’s the PM and he does it to get a princess released.

And it turns out she’s released before he even does it.

You have to specifically asknfor it in the US, and they act like it’s a crazy request. And they usually won’t give you your PD.

That’s the point. It’s not about the disc. It’s about cutting out retailers.

Games sell at the same price or cheaper at the retailer as they do digitally, and the retailer takes a cut. Games sold through PSN or the Xbox store make Sony and Microsoft way more money.

And that’s before we get to used sales.

The old Mechwarrior games were more like simulators than modern mech games, so were pretty complicated to get into.

And they were very demanding performance-wise.

There’s scraping data, which should be considered stealing, and then there’s asking people to steal company data as part of an interview process.

This is actual industrial espionage. If true, it could be a big deal.

Yeah, but they also own the $50 frames.

It’s harder for people who go to the optometrist and get their glasses.

The Luxoticca-owned insurance company makes them use the Luxoticca-owned optometrist that sells Luxoticca-owned frames with Luxoticca-owned lenses.

Moat people don’t even know you can ask the optometrist for your prescription so you can go buy frames and lenses from Zenni or Coastal.

They had a bunch of great titles.

Age of Empires, Freelancer, Mechwarrior, and more.

Some of the studios were bought through acquisitions, but they received the backing and support they needed to make great titles in a way that was good for the games, the devs, Microsoft, and the gamers.

Lemming

The shitty thing is it’s hard not to give the fuckers money.

Luxoticca owns most eyewear brands, optometrist offices, eyewear retailers, and even a ton of optical insurance providers. They control the frames, lenses, and more.

Oakley used to be independent, but they actually stopped lenscrafters from providing lenses for them and bullied their suppliers until Oakley’s stock dropped enough to buy them out. They’re the reason frames that should cost $15 cost $900.

They’re one of the clearest examples of a monopoly in the world, but we just fucking let it continue.

Microsoft’s gaming division was pretty respected in the industry for a long time. Lots of people give them (deserved) flack over Kinect for the Cbox One, but what really drove them over the cliff was buying all these studios to make Gamepass more attractive. It was actually a good deal for everyone when it was mostly games that were older, but when they started doing day-1 releases of first party games and buying studios to add to the number of games getting that day-1 release it turned sour.

A bunch of games that early adopters would previously have paid 60 bucks for were suddenly included in theit $7/month subscription, so tons of people who would have been buying 10 games a year were suddenly spending less than a hundred bucks on new Xbox games because enough new stuff was coming to Gamepass they could stay busy, so all these AAA releases that cost $100 to make were losing money.

So they raised the process of gamepass to try and keep up, but didn’t. Then they bought Activision and lost their lunch when Call of Duty sales plummeted because millions of people with Gamepass who had been buying it annually didn’t.

So they increased the price of gamepass so high everyone canceled, removing the only reason many of them were still using Xbox over Playstation, and at the same time the consoles skyrocketed in price.

Now they aren’t including Call of Duty from Gamepass for the first year and taking the price partway down, which was a good start to righting the ship but too late.

Chasing the Netflix model doesn’t work if you do it dumb. Netflix didn’t buy all the other studios to make their original programs. They did make some internal studios, but they mainly partnered with existing studios to make specific programs. Instead of buying Bethesda, they could have partnered with them on specific games, which would have been better for the games, the studio, Microsoft, and Xbox customers. But buying Bethesda was a simpler brute-force solution they employed dozens of times.They became an even dumber Embracer Group. Embracer at least they had a (dumb) plan to sell off the assets. Microsoft bought a bunch of studios with no plan for how to make it profitable.

That’s how they’ve been operating for years. They’ll go public soon enough though, so your 401k will take the hit instead of the parasites on top.

That’s what the SpaceX IPO was about. They were listed on the NASDAQ way earlier than companies are normally allowed to be so the assholes up top could raid your retirement fund despite there being no path to profitability.

They also stopped doing the 30-minute thing because they kept getting sued over the wrecks caused by trying to meet the 30-minute deadline.

I want to go to the kinds of bars where counting in binary wins bets. Most of the time it’s things like “open a beer bottle with your eye socket”.

The US has a weird mix of big emplty spaces, really fucking expensive existing underground utilities and roadways, and private property (easements ain’t free) that makes new underground utilities stupidly expensive to run.

You have to buy big easements, negotiate utility contracts with local and state governments (to use the public right-of-way), dodge existing infrastructure while repairing what you break, and lay a fuckton of cable.

I work on the municipal side, and despite Google Fiber having a utility agreement with us for years they still have yet to lay a single foot of underground fiber because we won’t allow them to cut across roads that we just replaced in the last year, require their microtrenches to follow engineering standards, and they need to show existing underground water, gas, wastewater, and electrical services on their plans because they’re famous for just running a trench and making it the water district’s problem when they cut 7 public lines in an hour.