I dunno, I feel like we could pretty cost effectively fill his stomach if we used pennies.

Yeah, we get it, Bezos. You want us to shove more and more money down your throat.

I’m prepared to contribute a whole lot of pennies to the cause.

I’m not really familiar with those tactics, so I’m open to being convinced if you can provide some examples. I suppose you could argue that forcing its use for their games isn’t great, but I don’t see that as exceedingly terrible even if it’s not great.

Sure, and I didn’t mean that FO4 is terrible or has no staying power. I haven’t played it, so I can’t judge. I just meant that player count isn’t necessarily a good metric for whether it will develop a thriving modding community.

I don’t think Steam got where it is by trying to monopolize, though. They just have a long history of genuinely trying to not suck, and nobody else is willing to try at all, so they just… Win by default. It’s basically a meme now that Valve just has to do nothing and win these days.

I don’t think that’s really the best metric. Call of Duty from 2022 has 30k current players and 39k peak 24 hours. https://steamcharts.com/app/1938090

I think a whole lot of people would agree that CoD games are not great and are generally mass produced, mass appeal crap. But they sure do rack up the sales and players. Just having a large player base does not necessarily mean a game is genuinely good with the cultural staying power needed to attract a large modding scene.

Is there anything explicitly forbidding it? I can’t say I recall anything specific about it, but I admit I could be just forgetting a constitutional clause or something.

Maybe don’t be a fucking dumbass who breaks explicit protocol and willfully endangers themselves, and you won’t feel endangered. Maybe don’t try to make a traffic stop you have ZERO authority to perform. Maybe clean the fucking boot polish off your tongue.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yes and no. The receiver does need to somehow communicate the destination to the sender, I believe typically through an invoice of some sort. Been a long time since I kept up, so the details are getting hazy. Anyway, there are only two times that lightning network usage requires a publicly visible blockchain transaction: when you want to put coins on the lightning network and when you want to take them back off to the blockchain. You open a channel with a node basically saying “I’ll put X amount in this channel in if you’ll put in Y amount (one of them can be zero, i.e. send or receive only), and here’s a signed transaction you can publish on the blockchain to get your money back at any time.” Any time you make a transaction over the lightning network, you rewrite that cashout transaction so the balance shifts by however much you’re sending plus any fees you agree to pay, but you do it in such a way that you only really give them the signed transaction if they prove they’re gonna pass on what you want to send to the next node, and this process repeats with every node in the chain until everyone agrees to move the money.

All that to say there’s really no record of any transaction ever happening outside of however your balance changes between putting it on the network and taking it back off. There’s no record of who sent what, how many transactions it took, what path any transaction took to get there, nothing at all except initial and final balance. Now, this does mean that if the money is withdrawn, there’s evidence you’ve been paid, but not for what, by who, by how many people, over how many transactions, or a anything else but the final total amount from all transactions. If they just spent everything they received back over the lightning network, there’s effectively no real evidence that any real transactions ever occurred.

Of course, this hypothetical nonprofit is almost certainly going to be paying a company that wants US dollars. They’ll probably have to cash out in a highly traceable way, and actually buying the ICE data will require a highly traceable bank transfer or other conventional payment method. In that sense, you’re right, the nonprofit gets left exposed. But they could completely mask who sent money.

The receiver ends up hanging a bit in the wind.

Actually, the way the payments are structured, no money moves AT ALL if ANYONE in the chain tries to back out. It maintains the trustless nature of crypto. I don’t recall the specifics of how it’s done, though.

That’s a good point, they’d definitely just subpoena your bank records. If crypto is used properly, it can be nigh impossible to trace, though. Bitcoin isn’t very private at all on the blockchain, but if you send over lightning network, my understanding is that it becomes effectively impossible to track, unless your adversary controls enough lightning network nodes to track the payment as it bounces between nodes. They wouldn’t need to control the whole path, but they would need to control nodes VERY close to origin and destination, ideally the adjacent nodes, and enough of those in the middle to be reasonably sure they can accurately follow the money. The lightning network doesn’t leave a detailed ledger behind, so only way to trace a payment is to be involved in its processing, which means controlling the nodes the money passes through on its way to the recipient.

Of course, that’s way too obscure and unknown for the vast majority of people, so I don’t see a nonprofit succeeding that way these days. Maybe if crypto actually does get mainstream, but that’s still a pretty big if.

Are nonprofits required to track who they receive donations from? I could be wrong, but I don’t think they are. They have to have financial records, but I don’t think that means maintaining a donor list.

If they want to target more technologically capable users, they’ll just hard code the IP addresses so it doesn’t need DNS and make any IP changes in routine updates.

I bet a nonprofit would have a reasonable chance of raising the funds to buy the data and publicly publish it.

That’s not entirely fair to say. Trump is certainly a critical component in all this, but absolutely none of it would be possible without the Republican party being so eagerly complicit. They let him make the big, loud, unfavorable moves and support those moves as quietly as they can.

Every vote is a push in one direction or the other in the US. You can vote to push right, you can vote to push left, or you can avoid voting and let the rest of us decide for you. But the last time a bunch of leftists weren’t thrilled with the options, the electorate voted to push right. From your valid gripes against Newsom, I’m gonna guess that was not what you wanted.

Come election day, one of the two candidates is guaranteed to become president. You cannot stop that. I won’t try to say Newsom is ideal or even a good candidate. I’d love to see someone else run instead. But if you want an even more leftist candidate next time, the country has to show they’ll tolerate movement in that direction, and that means not electing another fucking Republican.

Nah, that’s too obvious, could have just been a coincidence. This, though…

Can you not? I haven’t really used OpenMW, but I’ve been thinking about using it to go through Morrowind. I assume it’s not perfect, but I got the impression it was getting to be pretty good.

That’s only after your mouth and esophagus. Those aren’t really geared to tolerate exposure to strong acids or bases. Even foods that aren’t acidic enough to immediately damage these regions can still contribute to tooth enamel being worn away, for example. It’s either strong enough to at least consider the impact on those, or it’s weak enough that adding lemon is a questionable move.

True, but your body will not enjoy water that’s very alkaline, so there’s a chance it’s sufficient since lemon is pretty acidic.

Plus, if the whole point of it is to be alkaline, why directly counter that with what you add?