Unless you're going to tell me that Itch has a dynamic library filtering setting, family-sharing, the ability to have local machines on the network speed up my downloads, and the ability to dynamically remap controller profiles per-game, then yeah, steam is more user-friendly.

I don't understand the point of making a coin that has ~$3500 worth of gold in it, and then giving it an official face value of $50.

It also takes like 10 minutes of inhaling chloroform for it to knock you out like that

In Canada, we spend about $8k on healthcare each year per person. This is mostly taxes, but also partly co-pays and private employer insurance.

America spends about $14k per person.

In both the USA and Canada, about 28% of government spending goes to healthcare. In the US that means about ~6k in total government budget from your tax dollars is spent on healthcare, while in Canada it's about ~7K.

The difference is that the average american also pays an additional $8K in their own after-tax dollars from their pockets in insurance and direct-billing for services.

And for the privilege of paying nearly twice as much, the Americans have a life expectancy of 6 years less than Canadians (76.3 vs 82.6)

"Exempli Gratia" literally translates to "Example Given", so I'd say yes, it does stand for that?

It's not all that uncommon for workplaces to require a specific OS

Another emulator. Iirc some of the code running Nintendo's own retro gaming products was pirated FROM Ryiujinx

Shouldn't the black king be on a white square and the queen on her own colour?

This is just the neoliberal way, we're decades deep into the idea that all solutions to any problem must involve directing public funds into private hands, usually those of the wealthy.

At this point, the concept of allowing public-sector employees to use publicly-owned equipment to take publicly-owned materials and provide necessary services for the public who vote for and fund the government is tantamount to heresy. In their minds, money should only go one way, from the government, to a select few private hands. We have at least three generations of bureaucrats and politicians whose minds are so warped by this practice that they cannot conceive of any way to help people or really implement any policy without giving some private business a chance to run a profit off of it.

Think about it, try to come up with anything government has directly built since 1990. Not talking about subcontracted, or with "funding provided as a private/public partnership", that the government has directly built and run. Used to be that the government would actually employ people to do things like GO Transit, or Ontario Place, or the LCBO, but that era is long, long passed.

Now do the reverse, think about all the things that used to be publicly owned but have now been given away to some billionaire. Air Canada, Petro Canada, Potash Corp, Highway 407, Telus, Hydro One. The list is huge, and a lot of these are very profitable. Imagine if we still owned them? Imagine what we could do re: climate change if we still owned Petro Canada and Hydro One? Or what our internet services might look like if we owned Telus? We gave away billions of dollars of value and significant strategic assets, mortgaging our future.

In addition to the direct costs of all the money that could have been put back into the budget (or the cost savings provided to the average taxpayer by not requiring that these companies take massive profit margins), we are also losing government capabilities: think about all the people, all the equipment, all the buildings and services that used to be directly delivered but now are parasitized by rent-seeking private companies looking to extract as much value as they can from us before we die. Think about old-age homes, hospital services, corporate landlords that hold the lease on former government buildings, contractors paid instead of municipal works departments.

The government won't act because it would mean admitting that the neoliberal ideology that's made a small number of people very rich was wrong.

This video covers the UK, but it's all similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58t-YH7DURk

Ehh. This is an issue of a whitelist vs blacklist approach, it's not that nuts that the government would want to allow newer tech to be used by work devices as a default.

The military is very different and much more strict about this, the average civil servant is less sensitive.

My first thought was this was a punk thing, like, if you want to think of yourself as a bit rebellious you can buy the American phone instead of the phone made by the company that owns your nation.

Worse than that, Reddit banned all the NSFW subs from /all but DIDN'T ban the NSFL sub. So now instead of and unfiltered /all, with a mix of all the best everything, it's now a curated collection of no porn and the occasional gore.