Please, elaborate. don’t make us go hunt their content down. is this like an Illluminaughti thing or what?

It’s free and runs stuff good.

Well, in a certain sideways sense, every legal interaction kinda is a matter of contract. The problem is that you don’t get the right to choose whether you’re a signatory or not, and the other party has the right to amend or update the contract at any time they choose. The problem is, unless you’re a signatory to at least one of those contracts (by birth or by immigration), you have no rights at all. Once you’re in, you really can’t get out safely.

Basically your birth certificate is the checkbox on the EULA of lawdul society. Good Lord, I hate that I just thought of it that way, but it works so well as an analogy.

I think they might be stupid enough to believe that the value of the house is less silver than was given to sell out a certain heretical carpenter. And that’s the kindest reading I can give it.

Sadly no, but my first encounter with one who’s this far down the rabbit hole. Usually it’s just creative tax dodges and exploitation of every loophole that I run into - stuff like creating a 501 nonprofit corporation to buy a thing, voting yourself off the board, and declaring bankruptcy (I forget which chapter at the moment), so that basically the creditors get told (legally) to go jump in a lake.

It’s madness, but it’s plausible. And it has worked at least once. That’s the level I usually see them at.

You bring me a big enough truck full of coins, we might have a conversation going.

Of course, kemosabe.

I think that varies on the amount of silver.

I don’t hate the idea of buying a house in hard metals with witnesses, instead of wasting money on a lawyer. But surely this person isn’t so dumb as to think the price wouldn’t be set by the seller, rather than legal nonsense.

No, it was in a later episode where they said they’d never traveled at or about Warp 10.

Then decrease the demand by reducing what you buy and the lifespan you demand of the hardware and software.

That’s not canon.

Offer them some kind of swag, or free drinks, if they hold the meetings. Reward the positive behavior.

I honestly can see the beginning of the logic: You’re at a con to meet new people who are doing things like you. Therefore, as organizers, we should try to put as many people who are doing similar things in the same rooms as we can, or at least suggest that they talk.

They went wrong when they used AI, instead of saying, “We have these opportunities for you to meet with these companies. Can we go ahead and book the meetings in the rooms we have available?”

That’s interesting - I wonder which of Trump’s animals had a gym membership they couldn’t get out of.

COBOL is about as far from a “toy” as I can imagine. Almost everything corpo runs on it at some level.

I mean, there’s that too.

Getting into that case also gets into pedagogical theory, because giving kids primarily analog entertainment compared to digital seems to be beneficial. I was talking about those of us adults who are already doomed. We have computers. We already have machines. We don’t need the new one.

Quality is exactly what we need in games machines.

Not meaningless iteration and oppressive corporate greed. The 2600 was a quality machine - you can still find working VCS consoles in the wild - and when they fail, it’s usually something that can be fixed by the owner of the console. It doesn’t die because software tells it to die, or because of a known manufacturing fault where a simple fix was ignored because it wouldn’t have been profitable. The same can (mostly) be said of NES, SMS, MD/Genesis, SNES, and even TG16/PC Engine.

Beyond that, I expect that 32-bit machines and forward should still work, even if disk rot is affecting the ones that weren’t cartridge based.

My PC is not a “gaming” PC. I play games on it. I have access to a nearly 50-year library of games. Just because I don’t have the newest and shiniest doesn’t mean I don’t have tons of fun games available. And I said ‘if you need a console at all’. If you are determined to play video games and you don’t want them on a PC, phone, or tablet, then fine. There are thrift stores, there’s eBay (though that’s loaded with scalpers and scum even more than the thrift grifters), there are many ways to buy a used console. But I also stand by the thought that if what you have is working and being fun, keep using it. If the corporations have made it not fun, either go to older hardware they can’t do that to, or get homebrew set up.

Don’t just keep it on a shelf “in case”. Don’t store it. And for the love of anything good, don’t just discard it.

Reduce. If you think you’ve reduced “enough”, find something else to reduce.