It’s a corrupt system.

This isn’t a “Is killing a person that insulted you right or wrong?” moral conundrum, it’s a “If you could kill Hitler after he had started exterminating people, would that be right or wrong?” moral conundrum.

Most people who would say “it’s the wrong thing to do” for the first one would say “it’s the right thing to do” for the second.

Mind you, the really right thing to do on the situation with this CEO would have been for the State to do its fucking job and protect the people from mass murderers like him, but it refuse to do so, hence here we are in a bad situation.

Well, in the total picture the best option of all would be Justice System which is Just and hence stop people causing massive numbers of deaths for profit, which is not what we have (especially in the US) and is even getting worse.

Ultimately all Just venues (I was going to say “non-violent”, but “lawful” violence is still “violence”, so even in a Just system, Force would still be used on the ones profiting from mass deaths) seem to have been closed in the last couple of decades.

The more options get closed, the more people will only see as options to either meekly accept the death of a loved one (or oneself) due to the actions of the people leading Health Insurance companies or vigilante vengeance, since the State has over the years removed itself from enacting Justice against the wealthiest in society, which would’ve been the best option of all (not least because it prevents the deaths of both the victims of guys like this CEO and of guys like the CEO)

Indeed, dichotomies presented in arguments are more often than not false, but sometimes they’re true.

In summary: Neoliberalism.

The price being almost €110 here in Europe (at least on GoG) does way more to stop sales of it than Russian disinfo ever will.

PS: I was curious so I checked and there are literally only 6 games in GoG including Stalker 2 with a price of €109 or above. No wonder I was so shocked by the price. :/

Trust in authoritative figures (for example, actual Journalists) was burned for political gains by mainstream parties and their billionaire owners (and by “owners” I mean of both the Media and the Parties) since at least the 80s - the essence of Neoliberalist propaganda was to use convoluted half-truths, purposeful misinterpretation and information flow control (mainly cherry-picking) to deceive people into supporting that which wasn’t actually good for most of them in the medium and long term (who can forget things like “trickle down”?) and the increasing disconnect between what people were told and what they saw happen and felt, ground away the trust people had in those autoritative sources of information (and in lots of other things: trust in experts as autoritative sources of information and interpretation in their own expert areas was also ground away quite likely due to how that Neoliberal propaganda also made heavy use of technocratic speaking “experts” - notice how even the trust on medical doctors for health-related things, such as mask wearing during COVID, was clearly lacking).

Almost everybody can be deceived about things they have no expertise on, but at some point in the past at least many if not most of those people were in some way anchored to objective-reality (-ish) by trustworthy sources of information and interpretation, and that’s not the case anymore because that trust was sistematically abused during at least 4 decades.

In the US both the Democrats and the Republicans were doing it with gusto, so the rise of populists like Trump is really just the reaping of a crop which both those parties sowed.

All this to say that blaming humans for being human rather than everybody that took and takes advantage of that, is at best naive and at worst being a bit of an useful idiot (for still falling for the swindle of excusing the very politicians who put us were we are now).

Surelly something capable of being trickle charged from a solar panel would be a superior option, at least for camping or any sort of situation were having no access to power would last for days.

Thinking about it, the “power outage” use case is probably more than sufficiently different from “camping” that which is the one you care most about has a big weight on the requirements for the portable power station.

Yeah, the case with antennas is a good point - when I decided to concentrate various things in a Mini-PC in my living room (TV-Box, Router and so on) I actually looked into these router Mini-PCs as an option and the biggest problem was the lack of a proper antenna, so I ended up going with a generic Mini-PC and leaving out the router functionality which remains done by my old router (which is quite decent, just a bit outdated).

Mind you, this one also wouldn’t work for me because I’m using 4 Ethernet ports (1 for the external connection and 3 internally) whilst this one only has 2 (a weird choice for a router).

IMHO, this isn’t really better than just getting an SBC with 2 Ethernet ports and WiFi and put it in a box with an antenna), a setup which suffers from exactly the same problem as this one: not enough Ethernet ports.

The very example I provided comes with an mPCI-e slot to install a WiFi card of your choosing.

Also they have SIM card slots so you can install a data SIM card and set-up a fallback configuration that switches to it if your landline internet connection goes down.

Whilst that’s a nice slogan, in Electronics “open source” doesn’t mean anywhere as much as it does in Software because it’s generally just knowing which components go into the circuit, which is but a fraction of the work (laying out the board is a massive chunk of work, in some cases most of it, and at high enough clock speeds circuit design is an art in itself).

Mind you, I like the Orange Pi and Banana Pi guys, and the idea of an SBC designed for being an open source router is pretty appealing, though nowadays maybe pfSense would be a better choice than OpenWrt.

Finally this thing having only 2 ethernet ports + WiFi makes it little more than a regular $70+ SBC board + a box - something easy enough to put together by any technically inclined person - which isn’t exactly exciting.

So, how is this any better than the Router Mini PCs you can find in Aliexpress (random example)?

One more reason to, when having the choice, prefer GoG over the rest.

Actually I just checked GoG without going through a VPN (from work) and I see the same “Lowest price in the last 30 days before discount” information, so maybe GoG just does it for all of Europe or maybe even always.

In other words, I don’t think is going via na IP in that specific country that’s doing it.

Guess I’ve just chosen the right country to point my VPN to then :)

Here in Europe they’re forced to show the lowest price of the last 30 days and I was looking at some games in GoG and for several interesting games their Black Friday “discounted” price is €15 whilst the lowest price in the last 30 days is €10.

So the Black Friday “discount” is in fact 50% more expensive than the previous time that game had a “discount” which happenned not even that long ago.

Yeah, runs on Linux fine (my experience was running it from Steam), looks good and is defintelly a shooter.

Turns out it’s not really my kind of game because it’s a succession of set-pieces (a sequence of fully fledged 3D areas were player progression is mostly linear) but for those more into the shooting and less into exploring or building angles it should be good fun as it’s definitely all about the shooting your way through enemy strongpoints (not really about defending from enemy waves).

Meat eating is actually a very cultural thing.

In India, for example, there is an area where most people are vegetarian and have been so for centuries.

My point about how people are psychologically pushed to consume also applies here.

Further, excessive meat eating (and the average meat consumption in most Western countries is at those levels) is actually bad for one’s health and life expectancy, so even from a pure individual selfishness point of view people aren’t doing what’s best for themselves, which would indicate there’s more to it than merelly individuals being selfish.

That said, I agree that people should eat less meat, it’s just the expectation that they’re informed enough (at various levels) to do it that I find unrealistic.

It’s another of those things which in order to change needs to be pushed as education to all of society, while what we really have is massive economic interests pushing in the very opposite direction.

Certainly that goes a long way to explain why so many think LLMs are actually intelligent.

Have you somehow missed just how car-centric just about everything is? I mean, most public space out there is taken by roads and public transport is generally insufficient.

Granted, there are much better countries in this than others.

Ditto on other things imposed on people such as planed obsolence: Can you still buy a fridge that will last you a lifetime? Does your 15 year old original iPhone still work well? How many of the electronics out there are not repairable?

Then there’s all the pressure to make people consume, using techniques from Psychology (you can go read all about how the nephew of Freud introduced into Marketing techniques from Psychology back in the 50s). Absolutelly, people should be stronger and wiser than that, but most are not and just claiming that “it’s people’s fault” when others take adavantage of natural human weaknesses is just victim blaming.

Absolutelly, Consumerism is a big part of the problem and it’s a lot down to individuals to do less of it, but lets not deceive ourselves that the environment we’re all in not only promotes it massivelly and relentlessly, but plenty of decisions which were taken for us by others mean individuals often don’t even have a choice not to buy new junk or ride a personal-polution-device, and in Capitalism those decisions were taken mainly by large Companies directly or by the politicians they bought.

Having moved fully to Linux some months ago, I look at this kind of thing both with with a feeling of smug satisfaction and with cold chills of somebody who only now starts to fully realise just how massive, heavy and fast the incoming train they just dodged is.