The real question is if there was enough backlash to the spyware crap with Civ 6 that they learned their lesson or not.

All the talk the last few months about SteamOS and Bazzite (plus Windows 10’s imminent death) got me to finally let up a Linux dual boot. Choosing a distro is a fairly contrary process with half the review lists being useless “tech media”, half AI buzzword word salad, and half distro stans trying to sell you on their version by pointing out flaws in the others.

I jumped in and am now on Manjaro as I use my computer primarily for gaming and media consumption. I originally planned this because of Manjaro Gaming edition, but Manjaro Gaming edition hasn’t been updated in years so looks like abandonware. Regular Manjaro it is, and add what I need as I go. I hope.

I decided to try Manjaro over PopOS due to enough anecdotal reviews about PopOS stability issues to make me second guess it. I have used Mint on old hardware in the past, and it was ok but I was concerned about gaming support and Nvidia drivers (accidentally jumped from Nvidia to Amd anyway, but that’s another story). Ubuntu has the same issue as PopOS on top of being the corporate distro. I also still have a bad taste from trying Ubuntu years ago and gaming attempts on it sucked.

I do not want to distro hop to find the promised land or just to see what the other grass is like, it’s just not something I am interested in and never have been. As bad as Windows can be, I have usually been able to ride an installation for multiple years barring external incident. I want to primarily sit down and use my computer. Reinstalls should be reserved for hardware refreshes and new builds.

If SteamOS can eventually simplify the decision paralysis involved in making the jump to Linux, it is going to be an absolute win. As a hard core techie with decades of experience building PCs, if I had this much trouble making the switch then I expect an even worse experience for the regular Joe.

The Warhammer tide games, either Vermintide 2 or Darktide. Best melee combat in a video game, relatively short rounds, and super satisfying to just genocide some heretic/xeno hordes for the Emperor/Sigmar.

You just alerted me to the existence of Orcs Must Die 3, and I am going to check it out after absolutely loving the first 2.

All excellent recommendations, and I’ll triple down on the Vermintide 2 recommendation. One of the best bang for buck indi games out there. Darktide has similarly hit a state where I can recommend it as well finally, even if it took an embarrassingly long time to get to a Vermintide 2 level of playability. If you like the -tide games, give it a go.

Behind the scenes Bungie decided they didn’t want to be a single franchise studio and sunk all the money from Destiny 2 into a bunch of failed projects. Something like 8 new IPs they tried to get off the ground and none have seen the light of day. Marathon or whatever it might be called now might get a release, but no guarantees. Basically squandered all the money and good will for the Destiny franchise trying to become the next Activision or EA and committed corporate suicide.

Add the new massively expensive campuses while having a mostly remote workforce, and the CEO buying millions of dollars in classic cars to display, and you have this worst timeline we live in. Expect Sony to replace the board and completely take over the studio soon.

Sunsetting killed the game for me too, I wasn’t able to replace ever piece of gear to keep my stat split correct and there were still entire element and weapon types missing entirely a year after it went into effect. I took a break, then a longer break, then never went back because I felt like I missed too much.

I heard they fully un-sunset everything they had sunset, but at this point I have zero desire to play the game anymore. This is after having played thousands of hours and having D2 as the only game I played for much of that time. As a 50/50 PVE and PVP player, the slow death of PVP and the removal of half the raids kills the game for me.

Close, but it’s a threat: You’ll Never Walk Again. They are kneecapping people up in here.

And there you go from the moral/intellectual high ground, mocking them as toddlers and saying it’s right and normal to laugh and make fun of them.

I can’t stand vaccine hesitancy and anti-science bullshit. I’ve had to deal with this becoming a Fox News thing in my own family, and lost too many people from alternative “Eastern” medicine over “Western” medical science. But the mockery and ridicule only feeds into the Christian persecution complex most of that rural white population already embraces, and causes the wagons to circle.

I don’t think those are inherently opposed, the whole point of libertarianism being about liberty. Power gained through free market principles is no different than any other power, and thus can and should be opposed through competing ideas/services. If I don’t like your service being provided, I or anyone should be free to provide a competing service that matches my needs/values.

Being a libertarian doesn’t require keeping Fountainhead as your Bible and worshipping at the feet of oligarchs instead of politicians/the State, and I would argue selling your soul to the company store is as antithetical to liberty as selling your soul to a centralized State. But as you’ve indirectly mentioned, there is a rather huge spectrum under the libertarian umbrella.

I won’t speak for other libertarians, as I know there are those that think do worship the oligarchy, and many of my views do probably put me on the left side of libertarianism. If I didn’t believe that government has a role is keeping free markets free and providing stability and peace for liberty to exist (most fiscally conservatively paid for by collapsing all social safety nets into an actual UBI requiring miniscule overhead, Universal Healthcare, and more Georgist tax codes), I’d probably be closer to the anarcho-capitalists maybe? Maybe some offshoot or flavor of Minarchist?

This may only be within the range of human hearing, and you can and do still suffer damage from excessive amplitude by frequencies above and below what is human detectable. ANC is not a protective technology for this reason, it is a quality of life technology.

I’ve been wanting that since 1994. Jawsome!

Each Wyoming is worth one California in the Senate due to the fact that California and Wyoming are both single states. The messed up part is the missing like 140 representatives that should exist to balance population to representative for each state.

The Virtual Boy was released in 1995. It wasn’t wildly successful, but was roughly the start of home VR gaming. There were many VR arcade games and attractions after that in the intervening years until the Oculus DK1 and “modern” VR in 2010. That’s ignoring the really early VR stuff in the 70s and 80s. Just because we have had major breakthroughs in the last 14 years with consumer cost doesn’t mean time starts there.

Palmer Luckey didn’t invent VR at 16 in his garage out of whole cloth without the decades of tangible growth and development done in the prior 2-3 decades. His breakthroughs in latency paved the way for the the current renaissance in consumer home VR, not minimizing his contributions, but VR didn’t start with him, nor Valve, nor HTC.

I haven’t argued anything before that post, but this conversation about the semantics of the word organization means is interesting to me. To answer your question, I’d say Yes? Deadheads were a group of people associating with each other under common interest and intent. They didn’t particularly have leaders or any hierarchical structure, but they gathered in locations of common interest (concert venues and the surrounding local) based solely on individual discussion and desire, participated in the event alongside and with the group, and almost everyone participating identified as a deadhead. I really don’t understand the problem with them falling under the edge of the umbrella of the term organization.

They were an organization when viewed as an association or society: in this case a voluntary association of individuals for common ends. Deadheads were a distinct subculture in and of themselves, and I don’t understand in what universe that wouldn’t qualify. Keeping with the musician fandom, I’d say the same for the Juggalo’s. Being on the outer edge of the Venn diagram is still part of the whole picture.

Organizations do not necessarily require structure, association is a synonym for a reason. Decentralized organizations and associations are a thing. Decentralized workers solidarity movements and co-op/community strengthening initiatives can be/are “organizing” even if no one is in charge. You don’t need to be a member of a union or an official neighborhood association to be part of an organization, there just needs to be general or vague common intention among a group and something of a shared identity. You might not get as much done a fast when not structurally organized, but you also don’t not exist if your not a card carrying member. I don’t understand the desire to divorce Antifa from being an organization or even existing. It’s like saying that the Deadheads aren’t a real thing because no one was directing the vast majority of fans who packed up and followed the band across the country.

Your absolutely right. Trump gets a pretty failing grade on 2A rights and from a general libertarian measure, and shouldn’t even be run on republican tickets. As someone who wants more Democrat aligned things like universal healthcare, UBI, police reform, and tax reform, I want those things from a libertarian framestate where those things are the most effective way for the federal government to provide for the common good with the least amount of bureaucracy and government intrusion into citizen’s lives. This means I hold all of my constitutional rights in high regard, the 2nd among them.

I hate having my options being a “choose which rights you least want to lose” adventure game. Since taking the guns is a Democrat plank compared to at least lip service in support at the Republican party level, you get shills like Trump getting the pro gun vote cause he was quiet about it for long enough. Living in the flyovers, I have been voting for my not-anto-gun Democrat at the state level, but I wish i had those options at the House/Senate and Presidental levels too because without RCV my third party votes are basically protest votes. Further off topic, I am getting feed up with more and more libertarian candidates not being libertarian but Christian nationalist lite. The cancer is spreading.

Everyone should vote for whomever represents them best despite whatever letter follows their name, and everyone should know all of their local and state options to be able to do so. Please do the same for your primaries if you at least want a slim possibility of having a decent option. Ranked choice voting would help a lot, but engagement at least helps a little. Hell, third parties got elected this year even.

People blindly straight party ticket voting after skipping the primaries simply because they just hate the other team is how all the shitty entrenched old guard like Pelosi, Manchin, and McConnel (extra especially McConnel, who even republicans hate) stay in power on both sides. And forgetting about the primaries is how we end up with such weak ass candidates as Trump and Biden. It’s so good damn infuriating.

I want limited government focused only on common defense, common good, and keeping the markets free. I feel this is best accomplished through a simple and loophole free tax codes that ensures the wealthy pay their fair share and that all wealth levels are engaged with skin in the game. I believe that this should include a land tax, and that a consumption/sales tax works better than income or wealth tax. These taxes should fund a UBI for all and centralized healthcare, replacing the bureaucratic tangle of our various social safety nets and welfare programs. All monopolies, duopolies, and oligarchies need to be crushed to keep markets free, because the invisible hand needs a paired visible hand to prevent regulatory capture by capital. Drugs should be decriminalized, 2nd amendment rights should be respected, reproductive control should be respected, the government has no business in who married who, religion should be kept to one’s self, and environmental regulation should just ensure clean water, clean air, and long term watershed protection. The market should drive pretty much everything else, with the understanding that unlimited growth is as bullshit as assuming a frictionless sphere in physics. All of these “socialist” programs actually result in functional limited government and maximum individual freedom. It’s not a communist utopia, but I consider it functional Utilitarian Georgist Libertarianism.

First, your username finally clicked and I feel slow for missing it for so long. I actually love it.

Nextly, to also be fair, the existence of a difference between private and personal property isn’t widely known, and China’s implementations of these concepts are even less well known unless someone has been more than toes deep into communist/socialist discussion. Even a lot of “communist” posters don’t have a good grasp on it and can’t really articulate the original intent behind “abolish private property”.

I would like to point out that there are currently enough homes in the US for everyone, and far more vacant homes than our entire homeless population right now. We have major density problems and collusery artificial scarcity that has long crossed over into being illegal and immoral, so we need to be building homes on the scale we did in the post war period. Houses should be much further down the commodity end of the commodity/investment scale, but until we reach a true post scarcity environment (Star Trek levels of post scarcity), I don’t foresee full decommoditization of housing working sustainably.

Lastly, while the communist state really isn’t coming for your toothbrush, obstensively communist countries have overshot going after the landlords and replaced most residential personal property with government landlords. Soviet khrushchevka blocks are a trope for a reason, even if overused.

And thank you for the actual engagement and conversation on this, I appreciate your insights.

Not to be pedantic, but you did write just the broader enforcement of property rights and not private property rights, and I approached it from that broader perspective. Under your clarification, your house does not cease to be your personal property when you leave it for work, but only if the government uses their monopoly of violence to enforce it. And yes, it was a stretch of rhetoric, but not made dishonestly.

The concern is that under this ideal scenario, what happens if you leave you house for a longer term? How does this take temporary moving into account? Examples: I get temporarily transferred for a year to a new city by my job and I fully intend to return to my home after this assignment. Rental homes/apartments aren’t a thing, so I must either buy a dwelling there for a year, or stay in a hotel for a year. If I buy a dwelling, I now own two properties as long as I can afford to pay both mortgages. More likely, I am forced to sell my long term home because I cannot rent it out for that year I am gone. If I do keep it, can I own two separate pieces of personal property or does one become private property because it is not in habitation? I have deprived someone of buying one of them by owning both, and ownership of empty dwellings is usually complained about just as much as renting them. Will my personal property rights be enforced on my vacant home for that year? Should the government allow someone to move in and use my house for that year without my permission or compensation, and only resume enforcing my rights when I move back in? Am I forced to sell and hope that I can rebuy my home when I return? A similar dwelling in an adjacent area may not factor against the sentimental value of a family or generational home. Are any of these parts different if I become temporarily disabled and move in to another person’s home for care. What about a year in the hospital or rehabilitation facility? I don’t think any of these concerns are all that absurd, even if they would affect a small percentage of the population.

You were also seemingly arguing that allowing non-residential private property rights would/should still be enforced so that the capitalist class gets to keep commercial property, unless you are classifying personal, private, and capital property as three distinct categories. Since generally the argument is that private residential property is being used as a rung of capital, I was viewing these as similar enough to be lumped together. It does seem that maybe you were hinting at this being a first step, keep the capital class from revolting while we take out the rentier class, and then move on the remaining private property in swallowable chunks as power is consolidated, which is another reason to view it at a somewhat extreme angle.