After years of giving a platform to climate change denialism, transphobic fearmongering, pearl clutching over too much woke at liberal colleges, both-sideing the efficacy of vaccines and indulging in Covid conspiracy nonsense, the NYT has finally achieved its goal.

I remember when Microsoft first attempted to prevent the standardisation of Open Document Format (used by LibreOffice and others) and then bullied its way into getting approval for own OOXML standard. Already back then, supporters of FOSS warned that Microsoft would use the overly complicated OOXML to maintain its stranglehold on users of Office-like software.:

Whenever applicable and possible, standards should build upon previous standardisation efforts and not depend on proprietary, vendor-specific technologies. Albeit, MS-OOXML neglects various standards and uses its own vendor-specific formats instead. This puts a substantial burden on all vendors to fully implement MS-OOXML. It seems questionable how any third party could ever implement them equally well, especially when a standard comes with 6000 pages of specifications without serving its minimalistic purpose.

It all makes sense if you assume that everything Musk does is intended to impress a 4chan nazi circa 2012.

Dictionaries are - by definition - descriptive. It is not their duty to judge what goes into them. They merely collected terms used by people and explain what they mean.

Demanding to remove information from a dictionary, because you do not like what it expresses or the people who use those terms, is the very definition of censorship.

Consider this headline from Bloomberg in this context:

About 90% of Migrants Deported to El Salvador Had No US Criminal Record

The problem is that it's not a question of intelligence.

Trumpists and their ilk are living in echo chambers of "alternative facts", perpetuated by Fox News, Murdoch newspapers and an nearly endless amount of rightwing influencers (starting with Rogan at the top). They are not looking at what's happening, because they are surrounded in a very comforting bubble of disinfo and propaganda that confirms everything they wanted to hear: The illegals get deported, the queers get finally put in their place, the liberals are frothing with anger, finally men are back in charge who tell women where they belong and America is going to be "great" again any moment now.

It's fascism and fascism has always been a "cult": The early pioneers of fascism (particularly D'Annunzio and later Mussolini) explicitly said their aim was to create a "secular religion" around the nation, the people and the leader. And you can only be a member of that religion if you accept its "truth" and reject everything that contradicts it.

Very smart people can adhere to a religion for a variety of reasons and the most obvious one is (and always has been) because it promises them power over others.

This is a prime example of why patriarchy is hurting men too, because what this guy is saying boils down to:

• We can make them work at any hour of the day because who cares if these guys have any life outside work?
• We don't have to do any work management, we just call those guys
• We can send them wherever, whenever
• We can create a toxic work environment and it's okay to treat guys like shit
• And those guys don't even complain because they need this job so bad
  Isn't it great?

The statement about "workplace laws" is so telling: Yeah, who cares about treating men with respect and dignity!?
It's not just about discriminating against women, it's also about mistreating men. That's what patriarchy is at its core: Pit men and women against each other and then reap the benefits. It's a "divide and conquer strategy".

Chanel No.5 suffers from the problem that it was originally made over 100 years ago. While the scent of No.5 did not change much, lots and lots and lots of products that came later imitated the scent of the (at the time) prestigious No.5. So it's not necessarily a case of "No.5 smells like soap", rather than "soaps smell like No.5". And No.5 can't escape the position it founds itself in without becoming something else entirely.

Art is by Skaroy

A little long maybe, I assume it won't be long until it's just "likensub".

Because there are lots of people in this thread who paint whales as "rich schmucks" who can afford to spend $48k without thinking twic. This is a myth that lots of the gaming industry itself loves to perpetuate, because it absolves them of taking responsibility for ruining lives.

Research has shown repeatedly that whales are much more likely to be people with mental health problems and/or gambling addicts. That Star Citizen isn't a freemium game with loot boxes makes it marginally better than - let's say - Genshin Impact, but offers like the bundle in the article is still predatory.

Ars Technica has done an interview with Unity's Marc Whitten and Whitten's responses are very, very telling:

"It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way," he said. [...]
"A large part of the problem, Whitten said, was that Unity "didn't communicate effectively... There were areas where there was some confusion, and we could have done a better job." [...]
"That's on us," he continued. "We didn't do a good enough job... of delivering the information that would help people."

It shows how dishonest he still is: Of course, they wanted to nickel-and-dime everything. People were not "confused", they were outraged. No matter how much of a mess Unity's initial explanations of the details were, the core message was pretty clear: Unity was aiming to get as much money out of developers as it can and it did neither bother to iron out the details of the changes, nor assess the potential damage their plans could do.

Rumours from inside Unity said that their own employees warned management, but managment saw a chance to make money and plowed ahead.

And going by Whitten's statements, they still want to hide behind meaningless corpo-speak and the same people who got their business into this mess now claim that they have changed their ways.