I’m only but one person.

It is called the Takings Clause by the Supreme Court, Cornell Law, and pretty much anyone else who talks about it. Expect the word “take” in a discussion about it.

The clause itself uses the word “take”. Taking with compensation is still taking.

It is called the Takings Clause by

They talked about just compensation, but the change and precedent provided by the Kelo case was in the lowering of the standard for taking. The case also set the precedent that the government could take private land not just for public use, but to transfer that land to another private party. Thus the focus on that. Compensation or not, the land was taken against the owner’s will for the purpose of enriching a corporation.

Wikipedia isn’t the end all, but in this case I think it provides a working definition.

Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

There’s a danger in any game where it might be largely designed and marketed to be one thing, and then has lengthy mandatory sections where it becomes another.

Poorly made stealth sections are a prime example. Game designers want to change things up, but if the game isn’t made to do stealth, it can easily turn into an annoying mess. There are a few (not a ton, but a few) games where the mandatory stealth sections are well liked, but they were made to carefully take advantage of the game’s strengths and knew when to end.

Hold up, “enshitification” is just turning into a buzzword now.

Enshitification has from the beginning described a service or product which is first released one way, and then over time is made worse for the users in ways designed to squeeze more profit out of them.

Without some serious mental gymnastics, forced stealth sections tend to just be bad design choices. Not every bad thing is the same kind of bad thing.

Indeed.

The Prosecutors: Legal Briefs, episode 117.

The show is hosted by two prosecutors, so in various episodes on criminal cases their opinions skew heavily pro-prosecutor, but when laying out facts like going through a SCOTUS case they tend to be more fact based and less opinion based, I have found.

Its an educated wish.

“What makes money” is always relative to how much it costs to make though.

Season passes, microtransactions, and DLCs. Additionally creating brand recognition among the masses along with flashy trailers. These are all reasons that AAA behemoths are still banked on to make huge net profits.

Sometimes these massive games fail and lose money in spectacular ways, but it happens a lot less than us enlightened good taste gamers would like to imagine. Money gets shoveled into creatively safe massive games because they usually make a huge profit. I love say, Wasteland 2, but that game probably has made less money in its entire life than the newest Fifa game made in a week.

cannot be set higher than an amount that is reasonably likely to ensure the defendant’s presence at the trial

That is a sentence that you can really roll over in your head. It does not necessarily also mean an amount within the resources of the defendant. I watch a lot of hearings, and something I’ve seen at least a few times is a set of allegations and past facts (usually something like multiple failures to appear in the past, and/or fleeing from police) in a situation where the actual charge being bailed on has a statutory requirement that bail be offered. The judge doesn’t want to let the person out on bail, so therefore sets the bail at $1 million or something which is functionally the same thing as not giving them bail.

Usually this triggers a motion for a hearing about the bail amount by the defense lawyer to argue down the amount, but if the court date on the charge is earlier than court date for the motion, it becomes a moot issue.

I’m not an expert, but I did just listen to a podcast on this (which basically makes me an expert, right?)

I think yes, technically, legally the federal government could. ‘Kelo v. City Of New London’ ruled that purely economic development was a sufficient justification for using the takings power (eminent domain). The reaction by most states was to make their own laws limiting eminent domain powers so that the Kelo situation couldn’t happen with the state government, but the federal government has never passed laws limiting its powers. Bills to limit federal power like S.1313 were introduced but never passed.

Perhaps they are going for a tone of heroic escapism, or fantastical drama over gory and downbeat “realism”.

If you really just want to see heroes maiming people it’s been done. Invincible, The Boys (show and comic). Even back to the 90s there were comics like Stormwatch that centered on the premise of “realistic” consequences of super powers.

Personally, I think Star Citizen is shallow and pedantic.

It gets me thinking. Tech literate people are the types to install blockers, and would be the same type of people both motivated and knowledgeable about how to switch browsers. On the line of thinking it seems like it is just going to drive them away from Chrome. Tech illiterate people remain unaffected since they are getting ads anyway.

But then on the other hand, if someone is tech literate then why are they even still using Chrome? Does such a person value whatever advantage Chrome theoretically provides over their ad-blocking?

Unfortunately the good taste of people who actively comment about games often has only slight overlap with what makes money.

Three of the top ten US game earners in 2024 were yearly sports game rehashes. One of the top ten games was Call Of Duty. One was Fortnite.

These are money making machines. We can argue and beg and plead all we want. There is a huge mass of gamers out there was simply don’t care, and who will continue to buy formulaic rehashes and microtransaction infested treadmills.

The AAA publishers are not in it for the art. Look at AA and indie if you want games that are willing to appeal to a niche. I’m talking to you and everyone else reading this because this might actually have an effect. Saying what AAA publishers and developers should do is pointless, not like they will ever read it.

Oh boy. Time for an 800 comment long flamewar about Star Citizen. I’m ready.

I’ve been off Reddit for a couple of years, but that’s still sad news. That was a legitimately good community, and the name flip was good, and I think they were partnered with worldpolitics which was the flipside community.

Privating protests definitely had some teeth in the short term, but not in the long term

Toothless.