I dunno about soda, but washing down Oreos with Guinness is fucking amazing.

Science is a subdiscipline of philosophy.

I may let him.

Newton had massive social adjustment issues and deep religious convictions. I’m not so sure he would react well to the modern world.

What payment terminals? They could go years just being an online credit card. Hell, initially it wouldn’t be very different from any company that bills their customers. Start it as a Steam only thing, then add select partners one at a time. It doesn’t have to be in your grocery store on day one, or ever really. Fraud detection is easy when you can just yank the game back. Sears couldn’t do that when you bought a washing machine. I worked in banking infosec and I have no idea what “digital compliance” means in this context. The hardest compliance standards in this space are PCI, and those are defined and enforced on clients by the payment card industry itself.

Valves internal structure wouldn’t scale to that size either

Which is why I specifically said it would be run as a subsidiary.

and they have no experience running a company of the size that would be required in a different structure.

Gosh, where on Earth could they find people with experience running a company that would look like 99% of the companies in existence?

You’re just throwing shit on the wall and hoping something sticks. You could neigh say anything, and nothing in the world would ever be accomplished.

they had hundreds of thousands of employees, and they didn’t need to deal with all the digital shit we gotta deal with now.

They needed hundreds of thousands of employees because they didn’t have “digital shit”. Today, the entirety of Discover Financial Services is around 21k, and probably falling.

If Valve did it, it wouldn’t be under the Valve organization anyways. It would be a subsidiary, and Valve has plenty of cash-flow to build it out.

I think the point is that Valve has the reach to start their own credit card network. It might be far fetched, but I’m old enough to remember when Sears launched the Discover card. It’s totally doable for a company that already has the technical capabilities of Valve.

The most successful method the wealthy have used to subvert social movements is infiltration. When a drone swarm can do that, then drone swarms will be what I worry about.

Get over yourself. All I did was state a fact that was contradictory to the previous comment. I didn’t even say anything about whether it was good or bad. Trump is trying to cut VoA.

The word “propaganda” is tricky. It has connotations of being lies, but that isn’t always or even usually the case. Objectively true information can literally be propaganda. The mission of the VoA is to spread American propaganda. That’s why it’s funded. That can be truths that foreign governments want to suppress, it can be spin, or it can be lies. VoA is generally pretty truthful, especially compared to the privately run domestic versions like cable news outlets.

Government officials don’t need to dictate content. As you pointed out, content can be controlled by who is appointed to manage the content. They know the mission.

He literally has control over it though.

True

Be that as it may, Trump is trying to dismantle it.

Except that Trump is currently trying to dismantle Voice of America" and other propaganda machines around the globe.

What’s Jesus have to do with Christianity? Christianity has always been Paul’s religion, not Jesus’.

Your concept of Hedonism is uncritical and severely narrow. It is a broad term that encompasses lots of philosophies. For instance social hedonism is about minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure at a societal level. Chasing immediate pleasure for oneself is a popculture definition.

I think that happens in any black hole formation. At least that’s my understanding of how neutron stars are formed. The electrons get forced into the nucleus and turn the protons into neutrons. From there it’s quark gluon plasma then a black hole.

In any case, I have no idea how either a grain of rice or a mountain could be made to do such a thing.

Theoretically you could make a black hole with a single grain of rice. You just have to figure out how to crush it down enough.

You are right, but the problem is less about corruption in politics and more about the weakness of voters. As bad as shit is, it’s pretty much exactly what we voted for.

I used to want them to give some ground. Now I want us to take it. It’s become absolutely clear that they don’t just beat us down for advantage, they hate us and want us dead or suffering.

We have the power, but they have us using it to fight each-others. It’s time for the people to unify and use our power to tell the wealthy what the new rules are going to be.