We just subtly redefined the economy. It no longer involves provision of essential goods and services to actual people. It's all a scoreboard of stock prices and interest rates.

Cults never change: we're all going to transcend and become ~~beings of pure energy~~ Nevada Limited Liability Corporations that no longer need food or housing because we can subsist on ~~Lord Kalutika's Golden Light~~ eternal 9% annualized paper growth.

I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.

"Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan." is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.

I'm sick of "unlimited" services that really mean "there's a limit but we aren't going to say what it is." By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!

Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare's product matrix. Everyone loves the "contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan" model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn't it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there's value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.

Why would you want to turn back?

So the Nippon Ham company is starting with sausages with bones, and working their way up to the perfectly round cylinder of roasted meat with a large straight bone through the centre that anime and video games have teased us with for decades.

Gotta start somewhere.

I sort of liked GTK back in the day when it was still the Gimp Tool Kit first and foremost. When it was 1999 and your other choices were a broken Lesstif, an early C++ centric Qt, clumsy Tk, and pre-Cambrian Xaw, it was nice to have something full-featured and tasteful.

Now I hesitate to pull in a GTK app because it won't theme right (I want to use the same bitmap fonts I liked in 1999, but apparently Pango stopped supporting them) and runs the risk of convincing the package manager to dump several gigs of GNOME crud on my drive.

I gather even the GIMP itself no longer tracks current GTK-- it's become solely in service to GNOME and their absurd UI whims (* * * * client side decorations)

There's no circle to square.

American liberals are incapable of going for the jugular. Biden can't do squat, and is surrounded with a party that doesn't know how to do squat. Trump and the GOP has an easier time because outside of maybe a wall, they don't have any deliverables to build; he goes in knowing his mission is to bust the place up.

Now, I can see why they've learned helplessness: there's very little on a lot of real economic or envitonmental issues they can touch that won't get capital riled against them.

But they seem to have gone the same way on the low-risk social issues too. They had 40 years to say "Roe is a compromise we've all agreed to shirk behind, maybe we should codify it to take it out of the discussion." Ditto trans rights, gay marraige, etc. These could have been safely vaulted 10 years ago, before they became the bugabears they are now.

I think they revel in the "more-civil-than-thou" righteousness of inaction. Thry didn't have to go too aggressive to protect that stuff because it would cause needless conflict. Actually closing the door to the henhouse isn't respectful to the fox.

Can I at least get one of the cool new 10RMB coins with a dragon? How many shitposts does that require?

Evwryone loses Viet Nam. And Afghanistan. They've got plot armour. In 200,000 years, when humanity is gone, the planet is solely populated by uplifted mantises and a life form that evolved from Shamrock Shake residue, the mantis capitals will be HCMC and Kabul.

There's a case to be made for dueling what is essentially a post-scarcity socialist Federation against the embodiment of capitalism-as-cult.

Conversely, the Borg are in a way aspirational-- growing and assimilating knowledge and improvements seems a bit higher of a goal, but their presentation comes off ham-fisted.

I feel like there's a missing explanation of why "assimilating the diversity" of a civilization needs to be a total stripmine rather than taking a few (potentially willing) representatives and regularly coming back in case anything new evolved, like binge-watching a civilization every few years. The stripmining aspect seems necessary to make them recognizabily villianous-- the enemy of sacred individuality rather than just data hoarders whose homelabs turned into giant cubes.

It does feel like Latinum is very much a MacGuffin for undermining a huge amount of "we have virtually infinite free energy and can replicate anything we need" worldbuilding; they needed a way to make 24th century capitalism seem remotely plausible.

It feels like one of the few positive outcomes of the Cold War was the Sputnik shock.

The public and politicians suddenly got very worried about actual scientific competitiveness and winning a competitive race on something other than bombs.

I wish we'd have a similar moment when it came to China and infrastructure.

This is a country that was built by railroads. Even today, you can see the strings of towns spaced to the size of a steam locomotive's water capacity. But what do we see from that legacy now? The Acela, an effort that would barely be competitive in the 1970s, on a minimal set of routes. Meanwhile, the Chinese are laughing from the windows of their 300kph trains.

(Yes, I'm aware that American freight rail is efficient and impressive, but somehow almost every other industrialized country has figured this one out)

My problem is there are not enough tankies and too many exploded heads. It's troubling they can operate a keyboard; makes me think of headless chickens running running just on wired instincts.

Lies!

I see wi-fi antennae. What gamer settles for that?

I want to go to an estate agent and say "I want a house so wired that if I down 82 redbulls and punch through the drywall after losing a round of Call of Skyrim, anywhere in the house, I should be able to reach in the hole and pull out a bale of Cat 6."