Or decades of behavior before that. Fun fact, he was denied a permit to open a casino in Australia due to his clear ties to Russian organized crime* - in 1987.
* For those unfamiliar, Russian organized crime is deeply entrenched with the actual Russian government - hence the term “Mafia State”.
I remember stories from Trump’s first term about how his handlers had to babysit him and do things like hide his rough drafts of orders planning to go to war (he’d calm down and forget about them by the next day). It reminds me of the (hopefully apocryphal) story of how Nixon had to be lead to bed when he got roaring drunk and started threatening to nuke North Korea.
The staffers also preserved the documents he (illegally) shredded as a matter of habit, so scholars will hopefully be able to piece together what was going on in that hot mess someday.
None of those handlers are there this term. Trump spent the four years since his first term campaigning and gathering a crew of sycophantic parasites to do his bidding, and we have no view into what’s going on behind closed doors. The “checks and balances” every American was taught about as a child seem to be doing nothing, with him flagrantly ignoring them without reprisal.
I hope the US gets out of this as an intact democracy and without alienating every single ally in existence. People here don’t seem to realize how bad an antagonistic America would be - they have the military and logistics to take on half the world without nukes, and Trump has been very open (almost giddy) about his willingness to use those.
And a civil war would be worse since the government is wholly controlled by what most would should consider the bad guys and the military is trained to follow the chain of command, and Trump is openly purging top officials and replacing them with loyalists.
Ugh, sorry for the rant. The last decade has been exhausting.
Existing contracts, a lack of infrastructure, and the cost of shipping and insurance would be my guess. Or simply just the economies of scale making it impossible for anyone other than a major retailer to do it.
Retailers can afford to lose a card or two to damage out of each large order (and usually make it back through upselling warranties that customers rarely use); the many individual packages with direct selling would make it far more likely some of them would end up damaged during shipping at AMD’s expense, and would be more expensive to ship than large bulk orders to boot. It’s far more economical to bulk ship to a distributor and let them do all the work.
Besides, would you trust GPU vendors with your deliveries? The “bad drivers” jokes write themselves!
I’d also give GameStop as an example. Even years after digital media took over, they still had significant influence over publishers, up to dictating advertising and release schedules. Partly due to contracts preventing publishers from pulling away, but largely because a lot of people only buy in stores - most significantly, gift-givers and others who don’t know anything about what they’re buying and need an employee to guide them. Holidays alone kept GameStop in the black for years after Steam/Live/PSN dominated the marketplace.
With graphics cards, I’d be willing to bet most people buying them know very little about their choices and need someone to guide them. Enthusiasts are the minority.
Don’t forget the healthy markup! It’s not a proprietary Sony storage device if they don’t charge twice as much for a tenth the space.
GuavaScript?
I remember people arguing over 2 vs 3 spaces, back when terminals only displayed 80 characters and every character width saved was a huge deal. (Oh god, memories of all the single-character variable names have returned to haunt me)
I can’t go back, won’t go back. I am so glad the Bad Old Days are over. *returns to coding on my dual-widescreen monitor setup*
The painful part will be when the 4.5 alpha starts shortly and includes a bunch of cool features that didn’t make the release window for 4.4. Do I stick with stability, or ride the unstable wave of cutting-edge?
I don’t know if I’d agree that Sourceforge’s reputation has recovered. The previous owners’ actions of hijacking open-source projects and injecting adware into their installers absolutely destroyed any trust they had, and even years later few of the projects that left the platform in protest have returned.
Admittedly the lack of new/returning projects is likely because of how much better the competition is from a UX perspective, as you noted. But at least personally, that scandal is still the first thing to come to mind when I hear the name Sourceforge.
This seems pretty normal to me. Isn’t needing to remove copyrighted files when asked by the holder how it already worked?
It’s better than content hosts being held liable by default. Public file sharing would be a non-starter without a safe harbor provision (where the host is only liable if they don’t remove items they’re made aware of).
I agree that how the US treated its allies is abominable (our abandonment of local guides and translators, who were promised a place in America for risking the lives of themselves and their families, to be murdered by the Taliban/ISIS should be persecuted as a crime - not to mention the minorities left to die to appease larger powers, such as the Kurds, Armenians, and now Ukrainians). However, most Americans don’t know about any of this.
Most Americans are living in a bubble that hides or vastly distorts anything outside of it. Our media is hyper-focused on a narrow band of issues that gets guaranteed views (mostly culture wars that said media invented or spread in the first place) and only pays lip service to anything outside of that. For many, “news” means pithy one-liners and relentless attacks on the other side. They’re told some minor issue is the single most important thing right now and are so whipped up they don’t look outside to see the world is burning. The right-wing media is an endless parade of hate, while the left complains about said right while offering no solutions. Neutral media is a joke, and foreign news has no foothold outside individual posts being shared if they agree with a person’s existing position. Major news gets cycled out after mere days and is quickly buried by the next meaningless story. It’s a constant cavalcade of worthless noise that obscures any actual reporting.
If America could somehow shrug off the 24-jour news hype cycle and see what’s actually happening in the world, I think you’d find there’s a great deal of empathy in the populace - it’d be hard to stir up an audience if they didn’t care about something. Sadly, I can’t see such a thing ever happening - the biggest shakeup in news this decade was Fox being called “woke” and what was once tabloid trash becoming accepted sources amongst the right, even getting dedicated reporting positions in the government while traditional media was kicked out. So if anything it’s only going to get worse, with the addiction to drama and outrage leading half the country even further into isolation and delusion.