My personal favorite platform is GOG simply because it offers actual ownership instead of a crippling dependency on their ecosystem. My second favorite is Steam because it has games GOG doesn’t. I’m not sure why I would want EGS beyond the free games, which are frequently not of interest to me anyway.

As a mostly liberal American, I just don’t know where to begin.

As an Irishman, I would say Ranked Choice Voting. It’s not a silver bullet, but it does solve the main problem that prevents the other problems from being solved.

I think most of us have experience of the concept of something being said ironically, as a joke, at first but then being increasingly serious. It’s like magic really does exist and if you say words often enough they start affecting reality, like a spell. Freedom of speech is a right but it’s also a profound responsibility.

Well that comes under point #3 but yeah

This is most likely a combination of:

• Trump’s tariffs driving international users to seek alternatives to American OSes

• Windows 10 support coming to an end soon despite most people not wanting to upgrade or not having a desktop capable of upgrading to 11

• Steam supporting Linux increasingly well

I don’t have kids so I dunno if it’s still happening, but my dad had a brief and very awkward conversation with me to tell me that if I had sex to make sure to use a condom but if I ever did get a girl pregnant I could always tell him and it’d be OK, we’d figure it out, etc. Nothing fancy or anything; just the essentials to make sure I wasn’t a dumbass about sex.

Honestly, nowadays a part of the “birds and bees” talk should include an explanation of privacy settings and common Internet scams.

Absolutely not; I wish all kids argued their case using well-thought-out presentations

In principle I agree. The problem is that there are countries which don’t care about respecting law and if you kill AI in the West, all that will happen is the West will get left behind.

A large what?

Well, yes. It’s no use just paying and not actually downloading it, for obvious reasons but also for the reasons I assume you mean, whereby once you have the files you’re no longer reliant on GOG to keep them available.

Just buy your games on GOG. No DRM

I would develop some city neighborhoods and set up some community land trusts to run them.

Put simply: if RCV had been in place for the US presidential race in 2024, the Gaza issue wouldn’t have split the Democratic vote.

Don’t blame me; I voted for Kodos

i’m not advocating that

You don’t have to. Forbes already publishes a real-time up-to-date list of the richest people in the world.

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#5b60b1453d78

It can be sorted by net worth, country of residence, industry the person made their fortune in, or age.

or sometimes no candidate

How does FPTP help in that scenario?

risks more people accidentally voting different than they wanted

Can you describe how that might happen?

It’s not just the USA that’s in dire need of it. The UK should also adopt it. First Past The Post (FPTP) voting encourages polarized extremism. Because it functions on a Ricky Bobby-esque “if you’re not first, you’re last” philosophy that punishes moderates for being moderate.

Poe’s law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

Poe’s law is based on a comment written by Nathan Poe in 2005 on christianforums.com, an Internet forum on Christianity. The message was posted during a debate on creationism, where a previous poster had remarked to another user: “Good thing you included the winky. Otherwise people might think you are serious”.[4]

The reply by Nathan Poe read:[1]

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.

The original statement of Poe’s law referred specifically to creationism, but it has since been generalized to apply to any kind of fundamentalism or extremism.[3]

I assume that’s a reference to the intro screen to Mario 64 where you can pull and deform Mario’d face.