Except that most firms that charge $2000/hour take the fee from the settlement, not up front, when doing civil litigation. Really only criminal law is paid directly by the client, at least in the US.

Nope, they are covered most of the time by what is known as the "corporate veil".

Better explained than I can do here: https://federal-lawyer.com/when-can-a-ceo-be-held-personally-liable/

Essentially, unless they are personally doing it, they are protected. Embezzle millions and you go to jail, poison a water supply, kill thousands, give birth defects, cancer, and a myriad of other health issues to a community at large and only the corporation is liable/culpable.

Personally I want to see the criminal shield removed for corporations. All C-Level executives become personally liable for any illegal actions, malfeasance, slander/liable, or injurious action perpetrated or instigated by the company with the ONLY defense being proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt (not just reasonable doubt) that an actor within or without the company caused the action with the express intent of harming the C-Level executives, either specific or generally.

Fuck corporate personhood. Fuck people making a LLC and doing whatever the fuck they want under the guise of the company then the company declares bankruptcy while they run off like a cartoon character with bags of money. Leadership liability and culpability should be the norm, not the exception.

Oh, I'm here for it.

Itch is by no means a small time player. Doing some very fast statistics off of the game price breakdowns available and the counts of games available vs. the number they rate as best sellers, if 20% of their best sellers make a sale each day and 7.5% of their non-best sellers make a sale each day, assuming an average price for the three pricing filters of (under $5, $2.5), ($5 to $15, $10), (over $15, $20), then Itch sells approximately $20k/day. Half a day is $10k. If those averages are actually much higher in their respective areas, as in just below the maximum then the daily total jumps to over $35k/day. There is wiggle room in my assumptions, but it is safe to say that Itch sees about $25k±7k/day.

As mentioned in other suits, there are nonmonetary damages as well which are harder to quantify without access to their analytics such as reputation damage, lost traffic, maintenance and repair from the forced outage at the domain level, etc. I could see a suit for $50k in actual damages and another $500k-$1M in punitive damages to send the message that this behavior is intolerable in general.

Here here.

They are paranoid about foreign actors having personal data, not domestic ones. That said, the whole TikTok thing is as much about stifling international competition as it is about data privacy and who is getting/using said data. Meta, Alphabet, and their ilk all harvest much more data than TikTok, and sell it to data brokers. There is absolutely nothing stopping the Chinese government from just buying the data they would obtain from the mandatory data sharing forced upon Chinese companies.

TikTok took market share from Meta and Alphabet, Suckerberg and whoever is the head letter at Alphabet called up the Congressmen they bought and started making a fuss, so their boys on the hill found excuses to ban it.

I am not sayinf some of the excuses do not have kernels of merit, but they are largely overshadowed by the anticompetitive effect that it has.

Just to expand and answer your larger question, the US government does not respect the privacy of the citizens. The anti-data-brokerage legislation we did manage to get through only occurred AFTER the harvested data was used against those in office, and even then it was made an opt-out legislation which requires us to contact each brokerage firm individually and request, in writing, that our data be purged and we not be tracked. That exempts all new firms from the restrictions and relies on the individual to A. Know how to find the firms and B. Be able to manage contacting each one of them. What this has done is invented an entirely new service industry for removing OUR information from these brokerage firms. So we have to pay for privacy, yet again, making it something really reserved for the rich.

If you look at the other laws, things like license law and such, you will find that the US government has quite truly conspired to make sure that corporations have carte blanch to do whatever they want with those who use their services.

What you said is patently wrong.

As someone who works with USD daily digging through the bowels of the code and working with the format at a root level, it is 100% something that gaming should (and is) adopting. The Godot team would be frankly stupid not to put full native USD support as a high priority. The ability to store rigs, transform animation, and easily encapsulated asset variations alone makes the format godly. It is also very clean in how it manages asset linking and scenegraphs which makes traversal a breeze to encode. Also, it makes an DCC agnostic format which allows game developers to engage with freelance artists and not care what they use. Houdini, Blender, Maya, C4D, and any future DCC are going to be able to export to it. Hell, Houdini (my preferred DCC) has an entire context dedicated exclusively to working with, rendering, and exporting USD format.

I would genuinely cry. He is older than both of them and could literally run circles around them, both mentally and physically. I would 100% vote for Bernie and be fine with it. The vote for Biden is because the armpit of hell that I live in doesn't do ranked voting and Trump will wreck the planet. A rotting potato powering a computer core running ChatGPT left ignored on the resolute desk for 4 years would be a better alternative to these two fuckwits.

Seriously, why did they have to run Joe? If they had run someone in their 50's or 60's they would win on "well, he isn't as old as Trump" alone. If they had run someone under the age of 40 I imagine every leftist voter under the age of 50 would have been voting for them. The only reason "he's fucking old" doesn't stick to Trump is because he behaves like a horny 15 year old jacked up on cocaine and Twitter.

Just... FML.

Sooo... Everyone should go share these news stories for her en masse and be sure to tag the police department and judge personally in them, right?

Valve is one of those companies that I genuinely believe makes a strong argument for ethical capitalism being possible. Sure, they have some shitty things, but overall they do treat developers and customers reasonably well, they provide hardware and software that is easy to use and non-abusive (not filled with spyware and data harvesters, doesn't use advertising, is well maintained, etc.). If we could obliterate all of the other major conglomerates and replace them with people/companies that understand that you don't have to be a massive pile of shit to make money the world would be better off.

This is 100% bullshit and they 100% know it. They pay employees in Denmark over 20$/hr and the food is actually cheaper there than it is here. If it was unsustainable, then they wouldn't be doing business in Denmark. The difference between there and here, Denmark is essentially 100% regulated by industry-wide labor unions. Starbucks employees shouldn't be trying to unionize, the entire fast-food industry should be unionizing together.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-workers-denmark/