Nintendo made a huge deal about virtual game cards, saving us from exactly what you’re afraid of.

Not as good as what Sony and Microsoft do, where we can essentially install our whole library on every console we have, but it’s about as good as what Steam does.

Plus they’re bringing back a “game share” like feature, so some multiplayer games should be playable in a local family with only one purchase.

D- day is a great example of why opsec matters so much. The Germans knew that the allies were going to invade, and if they had been prepared they very well might have rebuffed the invasion. But the secrecy worked, and operation overlord succeeded instead of being a bloody failure.

If the target of the military raid had known when it was coming, they could have simply relocated anything actually important away from the target zone.

A useful analogy is probably a boxer and a ring: your opponent knows that you’re going to throw a punch, but you really don’t want him to know exactly what punch you’re going to throw when.

What exactly business are taxed on varies a bit from state to state, but for a tax on “profit”, which is the most common in the US, wages are definitely deductable from revenue to get the “profit” for a given period.

Walmart and Amazon would pay a hell of a lot more tax if they couldn’t subtract the wages they paid to their employees and contractors from the money that comes in the door when calculating their tax bill.

Maybe note that Wages arent like office equipment, in that there’s no asset to plausibly be sold to recoup a purchase price?

(This isn’t directly my area of expertise either, but I have a hard time thinking of a tax scheme that would allow deducting the cost of an office chair rented for an employee but not the wages paid to her.)

If you work for someone else, and THEY provide coffee, they can (and do) deduct it from taxable revenue. Same as they do the wages they pay you and the chair they have for you to sit in.

Security,.privacy, and logistics would all adapt and be of weirdly more manpower with teleportation than without.

There would be companies who do nothing but teleport goods across the world all day. Just because I don’t have to drive an hour to the warehouse doesn’t mean I want to take an hour to teleport to the warehouse and pick up my purchase myself.

Things like the MS-PL strike me as Open Source but not Free Software, but I can’t think of a contrary example which is Free Software but not Open Source.

There is a mythical “Sony fan” customer who pays extra for their video game consoles, and justified that by believing it comes with a right to be special and awesome and play games no one else is allowed to.

It’s a pantomine of a Nintendo fan, who pays for an underpowered console for first-party games that use unique controllers. None of whom would ever complain if their games were sold on PC so long as they could bring the controller over.

AFAIK, the only real people who want exclusives on PlayStation are Sony employees and shareholders.

This really depends on what you mean by “pray.”

Sincerely worship and praise a pagan godhead as if they were responsible for the deeds Scripture attributes to God? No. It’s as bad as lying in court, stealing, or killing someone.

Falsely go through the motions of pagan prayer, such as in a game, as an actor, or under threat of death? Usually. Some are sticklers, but most are OK with leaving cookies for Santa.

Sincerely giving praise or worship to a being other than God, for things asserted as being done in God’s service or things not done by Her? It depends. Some may be hard no, some may be open yes.

There are something like 3 billion nominal followers of the God of Abraham alive today. With such a large population, it’d be hard to find a statement that they all agree on, including “water is wet”.

There’s plenty of references in the OT to Jews doing the same thing.

And European Christianity chased out worship of anyone save the God of Abraham rather violently after a generation or two.

It sounds like you’re not proposing a technocracy, and are instead proposing a direct democracy with a bureaucratic civil service chosen by popular vote.

Which is a fancy way to have an inefficient and easily gamed democracy. As is done in Iran and Russia.

If “people vote” is a core and meaningful part of any system, that system is democratic. And inefficiencies in democracy are always and only ways to prevent the people from getting what they want.

If you don’t see how avoiding bloodshed for power changing is a fundamental advantage of democracies I think you may want to re-read your histories. The ONLY way power ever changed hands from one group to another prior to the American election of 1796 was through violence or the threat of violence.

The American political system occasionally having a terrible choice is one of the tradeoffs for having power be changeable without bloodshed.

Because of lifetime appointments the US legal system is nearly a technocracy as you describe. It arrived at a decision in 1971 that a wide swath of the body politic was so opposed to that they essentially lost all faith the status quo. What followed was a decades long campaign to shift that pseudo-technocracy. Not a bloody insurrection.

You and I may disagree with their position, and we both dislike some of the results of their movement, but the worth of a government form is how well it responds to such discontent.

I don’t think you’ll get any disagreement that the current administration is exposing some flaws in the American political system. But the potential fixes for those flaws are numerous, while a brand new system as you propose would have its own expected and unexpected flaws.

Let’s talk about those goldbugs, since anything else urges trolls to show up. If they’re in power what stops them from declaring that their opponents are “fake” economists? How would we remove them from power?

If we’re talking about which forms of government are “better” than others, we need a benchmark of what makes one better or worse. I’m a big fan of the ideal stated in the US declaration of independence: governments exist to preserve the rights of their people, in the broadest possible sense.

A technocracy, where established experts make relevant rules, is probably the worst form of government that’s still trying to be good. For whatever topic you have, the original paradigm becomes fiercely embedded, and because power wants to preserve itself that basic framework would be even worse than what we have now.

Imagine if a group of goldbug economists had been in charge of markets and banks when the great depression hit. Or if ma bell has been in charge of telecommunications when the Internet was invented. Or if the same GM engineers who killed the EV1 and bet on trucks were in charge when electric cars and hybrids started becoming popular.

Technocracies don’t have a way to change perspectives. You get all the bad parts of a bureaucratic democratic Republic, and none of the way to short circuit bloody revolutions that makes democracies the least-bad option. You might as well just go back to monarchies – at least for those, there was a person who could be almost impartial when it comes time to decide if old ways need to change.

Pascal’s wager is a defense of theism in general, not a specific flavor of theism. If you accept that there is a God, any God, then you can reason and argue about which way to worship her is correct.

If you do not believe that God exists, however, then the particularities of which godhead you worship are irrelevant trivia.

If God or Brahman or Kamisama exist, then they are aware of the imperfect worship flavors that they receive and have appropriate accommodations included, if they are worthy of worship at all. (Please note that Zeus is not included in this list, because that guy’s just a rapist bastard.)

Spoiler alert : it was just a survey of the reported confidence of folk who admitted to using AI.

So, AI users exhibit a reduction in literally the one skill that the AI expects them to actually have?

I should probably go read that link and see if it’s actual degradation or just selection.

I see you understood the point made by the example.

For nuclear weapons specifically, the activation code was supposed to be a command and control measure to prevent unauthorized use. Having it both be an easily remembered code and one widely known made that whole system meaningless theatre.

Are there any real-world examples where encryption backdoors have been successfully used without compromising cybersecurity?

No. Adding a backdoor to cybersecurity is fundamentally introducing a vulnerability that can be exploited by an attacker.

A backdoor in your IT security is like a hidden button to bypass the lock on the impenetrable front door of your impenetrable house. Sure, it makes the police serving a warrant easier, but now there’s a button that anyone can push to bypass your door.

What you will find are instances with no apparent violations. Just like setting all the nuclear weapons to have the exact same easily remembered activation code didn’t actually lead to a nuclear exchange.

Do tbey still mindlessly phone home so MS can censor what you do on your own PC?

The issue isn’t fucking “social division”.

It’s that one of the established American political parties went bat shit crazy and abandoned every principle they ever had in the naked pursuit of bigotry and power.

Any time you spread “both sides” bullshit, *you’re aiding a hard-right propaganda machine *

Assuming you’re a US citzen:

0. Identiy that the fault is how we fund healthcare, not “government meddling” or “bad researchers”.
1. Pick a major political party.
2. Register as a member and find out where your local meetings are.
3. Make clear that the ONLY issue you care about is fixing healthcare.
4. Volunteer, donate, or run if you can.
5. Vote in every general, primary, or special election for whomever makes fixing healthcare a priority. Spoil if you must, but VOTE.
6. Dont fall for lies.

Fixing healthcare funding is itself broadly popular, but since its inherently unprofitable to care for sick, disabled, or elderly people all possible fixes are either “socialism” or “die quickly”

Healthcare should be like roads or schools or calling the police, not like cars or contractors or hiring a lawyer.