Orcocracy [comrade/them]

I don’t even think there’s a room!

It’s not people though, it’s a social structure: a set of systems and rules with no one person in charge that, once broken, is very hard to put back together again.

True, and I just checked Burnout 3, the other game OP mentioned, it’s from 2004. These are both Playstation 2 era games. These games aren’t just older than any teenager, they’re also older than the Xbox 360 the teenagers supposedly found. Who knows whatever it was they actually found, or are actually playing.

A 19 year old today would have been 8 when the 360 was replaced by the XBone, and may have kept playing on one for a few years beyond that. It wasn’t quite that long ago when that generation was still current. Perhaps these particular kids / child labourers are so young they think the “retro” cutoff line is the start of the pandemic.

Yes, EU policy is clear. Foreign companies deliberately undercutting European business to monopolize whole sectors is only ok if they’re American, not Chinese. Amazon good, BYD bad.

Gaming PCs really ought to have some sort of extra processing chip on the motherboard just to run all of the fucking launchers each with own their special account and DRM and whatnot.

All kneel before the newly crowned king of the nepo babies

Surely the French would say butter and not olive oil, right? Maybe olive oil is the Italian version. Although to suggest that Anglos would use any garlic at all seems too kind.

I’m reminded of this cliché: European writers discuss class but forget about race, North American writers discuss race but forget about class.

What book is this image from? It definitely speaks to the massive problem with fragile masculinity in American media - it would be interesting to see what else is said about it.

Bill Clinton statue in Kosovo

Train derailed by wayward car on tracks

Fahrenheit is what Americans feel, Celsius is what everyone else feels, and Kelvin is just Celsius +273.

Th DRM is the real issue, especially when viewing habits are taken into account. The most watched shows on Netflix for years have been repeat viewings of old sitcoms. The re-watching of shows like Friends, The Office, Seinfeld, etc is especially energy intensive because of DRM. Viewers download the same episode again and again and again, only for the DRM to automatically delete the downloaded file every time. If Netflix was just a folder on a server of DRM-free .mp4 files it would be very efficient.

But it isn’t. Instead, capitalism demands an inefficient over-engineered mess of a system, with a confusing algorithmically reshuffled interface of self-destructing video files so that people can be charged money every month forever and ever.

Right now the policies most of the NATO-aligned powers have towards boats full of people fleeing war zones to claim asylum is to ram the boats and shove the survivors in prison camps.

I think the Maoists and the Anarchists both have some very good ideas. The Maoists seem pretty serious about doing important reforms, but I think the anarchists would be more fun to have a beer with.

The US anthem can’t be sung well by the average person (especially towards the end), hence why in stadiums the crowd doesn’t even try to sing along and just cheers and whoops. The UK is about the monarch at the level of the text. But the US anthem is about the same thing in how it functions as a piece of music to create a social situation where the crowd remains passive in its adoration of a single person. There is no collective experience of doing and participatory togetherness. There is only the admiration of the celebrity pop singer as an emblem of the American aristocracy.

But yes the UK anthem is an awful dirge.

Or to put it the other way around: what much of the world considers a warship, the hyper-militarized US uses as a speedboat for lake cops.

AI, algorithms, and the statistics that power them are not that smart. They have no way of knowing for sure what is in your head when you hit the delete button.

Yes, the drone pilots double-tapping weddings sure are heroes.