That could be a fun kind of ddos attack for a botnet - compromise your competitors’ machines and download collective TBs of infringing material, then report it as an anonymous whistleblower!

It’s doubly messed up when considering the dealership [Rohrman] paid a bunch of money to the recent stadium renovation so they could have their name on the field [Rohrman]

I have 3 siblings, for a grand total of 6 in my family. Only my mom and I have passports. At present, despite all of us being born in the states and naturalized, only two of us have passports. So only two of us have standardized federal IDs that prove our citizenship. RealIDs are becoming more common, but nowhere near as common as a standard state driving license which does not prove citizenship.

So the requirement is going to require people to grab their birth certificates and social security cards which are not always available to every family member.

For example, my parents live out of state and have all the important family documents so 2 of siblings are screwed unless they make sure to grab those relatively sensitive documents and be prepared to carry them out and about then hang on to them for several hours.

It’s impractical, and it wasn’t a problem for the years leading up to my birth (96), wasn’t a problem in '00 for bush, or '04 for bush, or '08 and '12 for Obama. It’s suddenly become a problem because the GOP is getting called out for election shenanigans and they generally know unless they can make voting more difficult or less representative (through gerrymandering and goofy election maps) they will lose.

It does sound reasonable, but the existing mechanisms of enforcement and fraud detection have been, and continue to be, robust enough to keep voter fraud from having any meaningful statistically significant impact.

It only stands to make voting more difficult for most people.

That’s just…that’s just not how this stuff works m8. By and large no, “video game workers” are not gig/contract most of the time. It does happen, especially at lower levels; but it’s foolish to believe anywhere close to the majority of layoffs come from contracts. Those often have built in buy-outs anyways - this is talking about the full time artists/staff/programers who are always working on something

You don’t honestly think Infinity Ward laid people off after not getting the contract for Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) following Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) do you? Or consider the time between Naughty Dog’s Crash Team Racing (1999) and Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (2001) - That’s two years. Two years without releasing a game, yet they didn’t lay anyone off?

Buddy, there is always a next project. Project Managers will fill every single artist’s calendar of deliverables for supporting the current game (someone has to make DLC, though it is sometimes outsourced) and any future projects. They also do buy assets and employ contract work in these domains, but again, it’s small in the grand scheme of things.

Programmers will always be optimizing the engine, working on patches for an updated build, or again working on the next game because every business worth it’s salt isn’t going to fire experienced staff in preparation for the next project as demanded by the need for more returns

Unless other economic factors change - a company may choose to engage short term solutions to keep profits looking healthy. If it’s cheaper to lay people off then it is to compete on merit (make a new game) why would you from a business perspective?

These companies are run by bean counters; not artists and devs anymore. Almost every game company was started by people who wanted to make good games, and now these same companies are laying people off regardless of their position in the market.

Idk. Games come out way too frequently to support the idea that these people are getting laid off in between projects. It doesn’t add up. These layoffs are very recent in the grand scheme of the game industry.

Adding on to the pile here:

I know many have said, but embrace, extend, extinguish is also a legitimate threat to the fediverse I feel. I think the scenario you’ve described is already happening, but it’s natural compliment: Unless you pay the google/godaddy/squarespace/whomever racket, good luck getting any traffic from your personal, self-hosted email server. Even if it’s fully signed from industry standard certificate providers, you still need to effectively pay the big email servers to have your traffic be not marked as defacto spam/malicious. If you run the show, you get to point the protocol and standard operating procedures. Meta has every capability to eat the fediverse more or less, and frankly I don’t doubt they will if it is a profitable endeavor. I’m sure y’all have read this by Ploum, but it really articulates the genuine concern that is just as existential as implosion.

I’ve been making a simple 8-bit game with the pygamer board from adafruit/digikey and CircuitPython. It’s incredible to be able to run python on microcontrollers and it’s a really simple workflow, though customizing your environment can be a little difficult when working on a constrained platform.