It lets those with bitcoins cash out and leaves the taxpayer holding their bags. That’s it.

You can have more yachts, jets and homes than you know what to do with with well less than a billion, to the point where acquiring new ones becomes a cognitive burden (“which yacht did I leave that on?”), so you hire people to manage your status symbols, and they become more of a token than a source of joy.

Beyond a certain point (perhaps in the tens of millions, perhaps in the low hundreds), it becomes impossible to spend your wealth on your own desires and joys, and the only uses of it are to jockey for status by wasting it on impractical things (“the other guy just bought a 1km-long yacht, I’d better buy a 1.5km one. Can’t let him outdo me”) or, by buying up labour and political decision-making, diverting society’s efforts from objectives thrashed out by its members (however imperfectly) to your own fantasy projects.

I heard they were caught flipping a grunt.

in Minecraft

and Guevara was a Stalinist. Though nobody’s perfect.

Free as in puppy

For decades, Britain has had campaigners against metric (or the “Napoleonic system” as some of them call it), who were generally on the populist right. There was a grocer who refused to display prices in metric measurements and, when he was fined, refused to pay and was sent to gaol; the tabloids called him the “Metric Martyr”, and lionised him as a hero alongside those who vandalise speed cameras. One of the promises of the Brexit campaign was to abolish the metric system and go back to imperial measures, though after they won, they realised that the imperial measurements have been legally defined in reference to SI units for decades, and establishing a new basis for measurement would be far too expensive and disruptive to do just to placate a bunch of pub bores and opinionated van drivers, so they dropped it.

So Britain has a mixed system (beer and milk are measured in pints, and road distances/speeds in miles, but most other things are metric), only the fluid ounce, which is 1/20 of a pint, is legally defined as 28.4ml or so. Even worse, road distances given in yards (each being around 0.9 of a metre) are actually in metres, going on the assumption that the average person can’t tell the difference. Of course, they can’t call them metres, as there’d be irate letters to The Times and questions in Parliament.

To the publishers, scarcity is a resource to be preserved. And destroying old games is as much their right as torching the Warner catalogue is David Zaslav’s.

As the IRA said to Margaret Thatcher, they only have to succeed once.

Fawkes was a religious fanatic who sought to blow up the English Parliament to replace it with a theocracy, so as an actual historical figure, he’s not much of a progressive role model.

Sony’s industrial design is second to none. The PSP still feels amazing to hold, despite being an antique.

They’re about to drop the indie-folk album of the year

Is Poland pissed in the American or British sense of the word?

If web comics were a part of neurotypical culture…

He/Him, but also asshole

That would be by the renowned Elizabethan psalm composer Peter Waterman, I’m guessing

Is it affection, or a dominance display?

There’s a Werner Herzog documentary about an auction-calling competition titled “How Much Wood Would A Woodchuck Chuck” which is well worth seeing.

Writing the same app in Javascript for a DOM browser is quicker and easier than writing it in a native GUI toolkit, as you don’t need to think about life cycles or memory management as much. Of course, nothing comes for free, so the cost is borne by the userbase needing more RAM and faster CPUs to get the same work done. Which is philosophically in the same tradition of offloading negative externalities as dumping toxic waste in rivers.

The thing is that Electron apps don’t even look good compared to native apps. They’re slow and janky and, once you’ve seen a few of them, your impression is “the company didn’t care enough to build a native app”. In that sense, an Electron webpage in an app has the same connotations as AI artwork on a Substack essay: it looks slick if you’ve never seen one before, but cheap and shoddy if you know what it is.