nfh

To me, multiplayer video games should be about having fun with friends. Couch co-op, LAN parties, online multiplayer work for different genres and depending where your friends are. I don’t care if they’re older games, newer games, as long as it’s fun and interesting.

To me the question is whether the result of what you’re doing makes the world around you better or worse. Would the people living in your place be better off if you were out of the equation? Then you’re a bad landlord.

If you’re making money from providing labor for the people who live in a place you own, and they’re paying your costs to do so, I think there’s a case for that being a reasonable occupation to hold. If there’s an issue with it, it’s not my highest priority, and there’s definitely some value in flexible housing stock for people.

If your goal is passive income, or you’re making money from owning housing and denying that ownership to people who need a place to live, then you’re behaving as a parasite, and I think it’s reasonable for people to give you an amount of respect proportional to that.

The EU had a documented process for a member state to leave. It was untested and messy, but it existed.

There’s no legal basis for a state to leave the US. Now it’s possible we let it happen despite this, with or without armed conflict, but it’s hard to imagine a hypothetical Texit not being messier than Brexit ever was

When a contract ending almost caused Sony to remove all Discovery content from users last year, including digital copies of things people had paid full price for, the cracks between buying a digital license and actually owning something that can’t be taken away became more visible to a chunk of people. It’s something, but it’s not ownership, and it can be taken away based on agreements you may have no way of gaining insight into.

Or through parenting, perhaps?

If you personally have two, but have two kids with zero, you’re responsible for lowering the average to one, or lower depending on how we account for your partner’s contribution

It’s worth noting that the barrier to entry as a maintainer depends on which distro you’re using at the time. It’s not uncommon for a distro to have a community repository system, like PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR for Arch, MPR for Debian, etc. I’m not very familiar with Mint, and couldn’t easily tell if it has its own or just uses PPAs from upstream.

It isn’t especially taxing on programming skills, and if you don’t pick too complex of a package, the Linux skills required shouldn’t be wildly above your level, but may push you to learn some new things by digging a bit deeper. I haven’t formally maintained public packages, but I’ve needed to build a few over my years using Linux, and it was easier than I’d expected to just build one. It may be easier than you think, too.

I don’t agree that’s true in general, and it’s also not relevant to free speech

You’ve conflated punishment and consequences. You have the freedom to hold some morally repugnant view like white nationalism, and your freedom of speech protects your right to express those views. But your family can hear those expressions, and cut you out of their lives, publicly condemn those views, or you for holding them, without affecting your freedom of speech. A company can refuse to allow you to use their platform to spread those views without affecting your freedom of speech.

What can’t happen is a politician or government official use their powers to suppress your speech, arrest you, unless your speech act harms people, like shouting fire in a crowded theater. People disagree about exactly what those exceptions should be, but except for a few small but loud conservative groups trying to censor things like LGBTQ content, this basic premise is pretty uncontroversial, at least in the US.

And it was… me. It’s always me.

Even a database with no licensing fees costs money in terms of wages/salaried employee time to use, so while that cost advantage is real, there are costs on both sides. If MS has products you want to use that are much easier (read: cheaper) to use with their paid database than some free alternative, that’s certainly a good reason to consider it.

The longer you use it, the less likely it is to pay off, but execs focused on short term profits don’t weigh that very highly.

Pre-sanitized, with garlic.

My preschool class took a field trip to our local children’s museum, which was a very tactile experience, so they really emphasized that you could touch anything there. My three year old brain wanted to know what happened when I touched the fire alarm. I understand shortly after they changed that emphasis: you could touch almost anything there.

Muscle is like 15% denser than fat, and you might also be building muscle in different parts of your body than where you’re losing fat. Depending on the job, I assume this is either in your arms or lower legs. You can take a few extra measurements to check this if you’re interested.

King Pyrrhus of Epirus. He was known for winning battles against superior armies, at the cost of taking heavy losses. He was once quoted as saying “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

He was so famous for this, that the term for a victory that devastates the victor bears his name, a Pyrrhic victory.