I was always disappointed that celebrity and character voice packs weren’t a thing for the voice-assistant platforms. I’d pay literal ones of dollars for a voice assistant with a Sebastian Michaelis intonation and theming.

Cortana for Windows Phone came closest, I think they did use the same voice actress as the game character.

I suspect that democracy is a “good times” system. It works well enough when the problems are either low-stakes or widely agreed upon.

When you get into a world of hard choices-- for example, anything where we have to devalue some existing wealth – suddenly there’s going to be both a lack of consensus (likely manufactured) and leaders too afraid of losing the next vote to pull the trigger.

That’s why I expect to see China solve its climate change and housing problems faster than the West. Without the almighty polls lurking in the shadows, they can say “petrol is 100 yuan a litre to discourage its use” or “we’re nationalizing second homes and disbursing them to schoolteachers.”

I put out one of those big plastic storage units with like 30 little drawers recently, figuring although 2 were missing, someone could still use it. I stood it next to the dustbin, on trash day where it would be optimally visible for anyone who wanted to scrounge it.

The bloody HOA took a picture and sent a nastygram.

Can we get the politicians to shift from illegal aliens to Sasquatch? Build a wall across Washington state and make Canada pay for it?

On a less deranged take, there’s definitely potential to mend the Sino-Soviet split. Their interests and capabilities dovetail quite a bit, but I suspect unification is wildly impractical for any number of cultural and historic reasons. OTOH, if they presented a Warsaw Pact-style alliance, perhaps using the cudgel of mutually assured economic destruction instead of nuclear destruction, that’s a hell of an act for the West to try to follow.

The mafia has infested law enforcement too.

I accidentally took the wrong streetcar when visiting San Francisco and ended up in the Castro.

They put a boot on my gender and had it towed. Apparently I have to pay $450 plus $85 per day storage to get it out of impound. I said “forget it” and they crushed it into a cube.

So thry’re saying they have plenty of licenses for the use case, but somehow people are still pirating?

Maybe their license management paradigm is just garbage. This could be the vendor, but also poor IT policy if the users can’t requisition what they need.

As usual, service problem.

So much licensing fuckery-- dealing with floating or reissuing licenses, users needing to move to different machines-- could be solved via affordable site licensing. But that might leave dollars on the table if users don’t overbuy.

Once you get to 50k people, you have to set up Harbour Goth, and at 100k, Airport Goth.

I can see the former with merman/maid themes, but not sure how to implement the latter-- black fishnet pilot iniforms?

I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn’t like don’t need to follow me to the next build.

In a conventional install, that just means “don’t check the checkbox in the installer next time”. In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?

I suppose the closest I’ve gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don’t use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.

I suspect the tooling isn’t quite there yet for desktop use cases.

If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.

The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.

I’m sort of intrigued how they got the startup funding.

You’re building a retail business around a meme. Even in the best possible case, you have a couple years of relevance to pay down the debt.

It’s brick-and-mortar, with real inventory, not like just online drop-shipping stuff silkscreened on demand, so the overhead is pretty high.

If a bank financed any of this nonsense, I want to know so we can send the FDIC Shock Troops in to find out what other stupid shit they’re doing with depositor money.

There seems to be a size heirarchy to it.

Supermarkets become either a gym or a Goodwill.

Mid-size businesses become Spirit Halloween.

Small businesses just get replaced with “hobby” businesses where it’s obviously someone with money cosplaying as a storekeeper selling scrapbooking suppkies or country decor items.

I’m waiting for rackmount snacks. Tubes of Pringles lined up in a neat 2U enclosure, and redundant arrays of chocolates.

TBH, I sort of wonder the history of why they push the LGBT repression so hard in Russia.

In a place like the US, where you have culture war manifested through elections, it’s an easy way to score points with a specific and identified demographic/donor group. Demonize the gays and then you don’t have to lean on other voters who will ask about why the schools are failing and the economy is spiraling.

Does the Russian political system have such pressure groups?

I could sort of see it as part of a larger suite of “traditional values/restore past glory” messaging, but even there, it seems low on the checklist, and again, is there even meaningful campaigning where it pays dividends?

The immigration angle is bait and switch politicking. Has been for decades.

People feel economically stagnant and culturally disconnected.

Couldn’t be the capitalist machine grinding you to dust while gnawing away any sort of social institutions or greater visions than “line goes up”. It’s clearly Juan or Abdul who are scrabbling to send a few dollars or Euros to their family. Excluding them is gonna roll back the clock to when a single worker could get a no-degree factory job straight out of high school and raise a sitcom-style family of four, you know!

I’m not there. You might try a forum like Audiokarma.

Don’t toss the Technics reciever either.

If I’ve learned anything from GTA… just drive the news van around and hit pedestrians until you make budget.

The interesting thing is this was apparently the portrau=it that won the original design conpetition in 1932.

I thought the goal was the two nuzzling with ^ . ^ faces. So cute.