Little kid: “Why is there a bright ball of light in the sky?”

Me (thinking): “Oh, shit…”

Yeah, because of this situation the dark unreformed underbelly which is the thinking about people as “ethnics” that was one of the core foundations of Nazism, has been brought to light - very much alive and well - in the power structures of Germany and its power elites.

Yeah, the word “buy” in this is just one element of a broader pattern, and whilst per-se it isn’t sufficient to distinguish between acquiring a thing or getting access to a thing, in these cases of mounts, armor and so on being sold in games, the entire framing wording and even store structure around it tends to lead people towards concluding that the meaning of it is for “acquiring a thing” not for “getting access to a thing”, especially because in the absence of domain specific clarification (an absence I believe is entirely purposeful) people who aren’t intellectual property lawyers and fully informed of the subject matter will tend to for virtual goods use the same logic to deduce the full meaning as they would for equivalent goods in other domains, specifically physical goods.

This is why also in the physical world legislation forces some kinds of business transactions with consumers to explicitly use the words “rental” or “lease” in order to make clear the nature of the transaction but might not have any such requirements for business to business transactions because businesses are assumed to have the capability to assess the full contract.

Non-Jews defining what being a Jew is, denying what actual Jews said about it, is exactly the kind of thing Nazis do (both the literal, historical Nazi Party members and supporters and present day ethno-Fascists)

The real anti-semites are the ones who accuse of anti-semitiesm people who are against Genocide, since that is logically equivalent to saying that commiting Genocide is a Jewish trait.

Portugal has exactly the same system (I’ve lived in both countries) which has actually even more features (such as letting you pay yours bills at any ATM) than the Dutch one.

I think that at least in Europe the countries were ATMs rely on VISA or Mastercard for inter-bank withdrawals like in the UK and US are the exception rather than the rule.

I live in a 10 million people European country which is the leading cork producer in the World

Also the first European country to explicitly decriminalise drug consumption.

Those two things are unrelated.

Ultimatelly it boils down to whether people have spent the money to have something or to use/enjoy something.

Which is probably why most people who disagree with selling of items, mounts, armor and so on, don’t find it problematic when what is being sold is access to game areas: the former are things (even if virtual) and people tend to treat them as something which they have, whilst the latter is just access to new experiences, like buying a ticket in a carnival to go on a Ferris Wheel, and is thus not something people tend to feel like they own it.

So yeah, the problem is the preying on people’s instincts around ownership versus mere rental - in their stores these things are invariably framed as being a purchase (buy! buy! buy!), not something you are purchasing temporary access to - on things whose mere existence depends on the whims of a company and which can be taken away at any time.

Mind you, in the Age Of Enshittification this kind of scam has extended to even hardware which is powered by software that requires access to 3rd party servers.

Several years ago I looked into importing LED Lamps from China into the EU as a business and exchanged some emails with manufacturers in China and analyzed some samples of their products.

Basically they compete on price and hence advertise for bulk purchasers (so basically the no-name and white label brands) the version of their product with the cheapest power converter they have, which is quite crap and more of a hack than a proper converter. However if you pay them a bit more (back then it was maybe 10c for a good LED light bulb that costed less than $1 from the factory) they’ll use proper power converters.

As a consumer and if you’re buying no-name brand lamps you can try and get the ones with the better power converters by buying “dimmable” LED lamps (even if not using a dimmer) because to get the LED lamps to react properly to the effects of a dimmer in the power that’s fed to them, the lamps need to have the better power converters (that do proper AC-DC with voltage step down conversion, rather than the sort of shortcuts used for the cheap converters). Unsurprisingly, dimmable LED Lamps cost more than the regular ones, though nowadays LED Lamps aren’t really expensive.

Stuff designed for Europe which has a CE mark has since 2017 to have been tested for (if I remember it correctly) at least 20,000h of use and 10,000 on-off cycles with no more than 5% failures, plus there is also a maximum loss of brightness of the LEDs (as the light emitting diodes themselves tend to lose a bit of brightness with use after manufacturing) and rules about color quality.

The stuff I get here in Portugal, even no brand stuff from Chinese stores, has quite a low failure rate and I have been using LED lamps for ages (to the point that all the lamps more than paid for themselves in energy savings versus the other options back when I started)

So you might try choosing lamps with CE marks.

Bloody Grammar Nazis coming over here and correcting my writtings about Nazi bars … ;)

In your specially crafted scenario it is indeed applicable.

However that’s not at all how it’s being used here. Here it’s just another variant of the propaganda used in the last year or so by the members of the Democrat tribe which boils down to “if you don’t vote Democrat you’re voting Trump”, which is a blantant false dichotomy and falacy.

Couple such sleazy salesman style of political propaganda with their active support of a Genocide were tens of thousands of children have already been murderer and, when seen in the broader context of World Politics, the Democrats are almost as low and disgusting as the Republicans.

To add insult to injury, I suspect that it’s the continued expectation amongst the Democrat Party leadership that the use of these propaganda techniques will retain enough of the Leftwing vote for them to win no matter what they do, that has allowed Biden during the last year to overtly support a Genocide to the point of doing things like sending Israel the very 2000lb bombs (which the US Military refuses to use because of their massive collateral damage) that they used in bombing Lebanese neighbourhoods: by having been parroting for months shit like this false-choice meme, these people have enabled Israel to be sent the very weapons with massive collateral damage that they used in bombing civilians and have hence been indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands.

(Had they instead been putting pressure on the Democrat Party, as the Israeli Neue Nazi side did for themselves via AIPAC, things would likely be very different now).

I too am not an American, I just have been involved in politics in two countries and seen it right up close in another two and after having been massivelly exposed to American Political Propaganda here in Lemmy in the last year or so, find it appallingly manipulative and deceitful, from both sides, though far more hypocrite from the Democrat side (Republicans are more users of straightforward lies rather than using more sophisticated methods of deceit such as presenting false choices like this one or cherry picking).

Funnilly enough, my enormous disgust with this kind of sleazy propaganda grew up during the decade I lived in the UK, especially the Leave Referendum period: compared with The Netherlands and Portugal were I lived before that, English politics, which is dominated by Public School types, is insanelly heavy on this kind of sleazy slimmy posh-salesman discourse crafted to mislead without outright lying and especially after my decade living amongst the plain speaking Dutch, I’ve come to really detest that kind of hypocrisy, especially when, like here, it’s deployed to cover those commiting morally unacceptable acts such as activelly supporting the mass murder of human beings.

It was bad enough when such style of politics was used in the UK to screw the lives of millions and its even worse when it’s used in America to enable the outright murder of hundreds of thousands of people, over 40% of whom are children.

I can barelly begin to convey my utter disgust with such practices and those who use them to enable what can only be described as evil-doing.

If the information never leaves the device then it doesn’t need a policy - privacy is not about what an app does in the device which never leaves the device hence never gets shared, it’s about what it shares with a 3rd party.

A clock doesn’t need to send system time settings information to a server since that serves no purpose for it - managing that is all done at the OS level and the app just uses what’s there - and that’s even more so for location data since things like determining the timezone are done by the user at the OS level, which will handle stuff like prompting the user to update the timezone if, for example, it detects the device is now in a different timezone (for example, after a long trip).

Here in Portugal a country of 10 million people, the “in group” with the dictator was 9 families.

Scaling it up to the US and it’s 300 million people, it would be 270 families.

Absolutelly, it’s a wild estimate, but it should give a decent feeling for the rough size of the in-circle under Fascism.

It makes no sense because most of Twitter’s business is outside the US - even if Trump wins, which would be indicative of of a majority of American voters chosing him (maybe not even that given how the US voting system works), that would still only strengthen Nazi-bar Twitter amongst about 100 million people and do very little about the rest, plus those 100 million not being in average the very educated or afluent probably means that it wouldn’t attract most of the biggest and higher spending advertisers.

In other words, strengthening it’s Nazi-bar nature isn’t exactly a strategically sound thing for a business that tries to cater for a large proportion of the people online all over the World and then make money by selling access to them to advertisers.

Also, as we seen with Truth Social, targetting the MAGA crowd can’t really sustain a big online business even with the endorsment of the MAGA-in-chief.

That’s because it’s not a clock, it’s a private information stealing app disguised as a clock.

Oh yeah, it’s still not at the same level of ease of use as Windows.

It’s massivelly better if compared to the old days in Linux and, curiously, it’s easier for those who in Windows were never “sophisticated” user that did not relly on store frontends to manage the installation for them, but if you’re the kind of user of Windows that does actually know what folders and executable files are, it’s more complex to get going than in Linux.

Curiously in my experience even Linux native games are way more complex to get working in Linux that the Windows equivalent are in Windows (or even Linux: I have at least one game were the Windows version installs almost flawlessly in Linux whilst the Linux version is a “missing library” nightmare), unless they’re recent enough that they come in something like Snap or Flatpack)

In my experience with standalone EXE installers and Lutris, the problem is often that Lutris just guesses wrong the name of the game executable after installation is done or can’t even guess it.

Personally, every single time I had a problem of installing a game with Lutris from an EXE installer and when starting it afterwards the game goes to “Running” (see the left top list) and then quickly ends with no error, it’s Lutris having guessed the game launch EXE incorrectly.

Having started with using Lutris’ GoG integration first (were an install script generally takes care of all that) and only later moved to standalone EXE installers, I can see how one would lose hope on the whole thing if they started with the installers since so far for me almost all of such installations failed to give me something that just runs without tweaks afterwards, and for almost all of them the problem was Lutris picking up the wrong launch EXE or even having no launch EXE at all (which gives you a small and easy to miss warning in the Lutris install log at the end of installation).

If you still can, go and check in the game configuration in Lutris for one of those games (it will be in a tab with only a handful of option, not in the last tab with a ton of obscure options) if the launch EXE is present and correct.

I was lucky that when I moved to Linux some months ago I got used to install my games from Lutris and Steam, which seems to solve most problems and only maybe 1 game of the 15 or so I tried so far wouldn’twork no matter what.

That said, I and to figure out how to do diagnostics and use Winetricks and my little doc of Tips & Trick cover 5 games (out of about 15) so those are the ones that would work only after tweaking.

I still have weird situations like The Sims 3 from Steam not working but the pirate version I tried working flawlessly on first try (so now I know how to install pirated games with Lutris) which is maybe not the kind of thing the publishers would want people to know, but more often than not things just work.

All this to say that it’s way better now than before if you use the kind of tools that wrap Wine (or in the case of Steam, Proton which is a derivative of Wine) with install scripts that will do the necessary game-speciric tweaks for you, but even then you’ll need to learn how to diagnose problems and do the tweaks yourself if you want a higher that 60% or so rate of success or if you want to hoist the Skull & Bones and sail the high seas from your Linux Galleon.

Bullshit!

I’ve been using Windows 7 for years well after end of support and my computer never got hacked!

Oh yes it did