The linked article is from California's office of the attorney general related to an existing lawsuit. As a non-Californian, I am supremely disappointed that this is happening just at the state level, but credit should still go where its due. And if their legal action sets a precedent that makes it easier for other states (or dare I hope, at the federal level if and when we get strong antitrust regulators like we had under Biden), then all the better.
ConstableJelly
joined 2 months ago
Search results on Amazon are fully pay-to-play anyway. You don't get anywhere near the top of the list without paying for the privilege. No big deal for slop producers who sell in volume, but basically useless for small businesses or private sellers.
I'm also playing this for the first time after owning it for a while. Took me a while to really get into it - it's the first high-production, AAA action game that I've played in a while, and it felt strangely linear and repetitive. The puzzles are so clearly tailored to your specific abilities they feel kind of silly against the otherwise immersive world. The rewards and upgrades are kind of trivial on normal difficulty; I'm still mostly spamming normal and sidekick attacks for every battle.
Eventually though I settled into the rhythm and I noticed that stuff less. The acting and scene choreography are outstanding - it feels like theater in a way that's unique to my experience with games. And I'm enjoying it more for what it is. It's just overall not landing as satisfyingly as the first one did, and I think that's because indie games have done increasingly cool things since the 2018 game came out and I've been playing them more, and my tastes have just changed a lot.
“I have a chip on my shoulder,” she said, describing her drive to prove she can win over private equity in Silicon Valley based on merit, not inheritance or legacy ...[T]he young founder hasn’t taken money from her parents for Phia. Instead, she’s insisted on raising outside capital even as some investors remain fixated on her personal life instead of her business venture.
I appreciate the sentiment, but it would be delusional to think her ability to "win over private equity" was divorced at all from her father's legacy and last name. And actually, I'm not sure I appreciate the sentiment. In 2026, merit is way down the list, like scrawled sideways in the margins, of things that matter to private equity.
I did read the synopsis of it and thought it sounded like an interesting take. I'm not sure I liked the movie enough to bother with the sequel though. As an ending to its own contained story, it felt really tone-deaf.
I just watched The Black Phone last night. Spoiler:
spoiler
The climax involves the child protagonist killing the villain. When he returns to school, all the kids whisper around him about how badass he is, then he goes to his class, sits next to the girl he has a crush on, and confidently tells her to call him "Finn" instead of "Finny" because he's personally grown so much from being locked up in a dungeon and haunted by the dead kids who came before him.
Fucking yikes.
How disappointing...
I'm not convinced there's a conspiracy here. Seems entirely likely that Rotten Tomatoes has no contingency for the release of a movie so blatantly sycophantic and propagandistic that the only people spending money on tickets are those who are already bought into the fantasy.
Not even Amazon - it's a cheap, travelocity-ass frontend for showing the cheapest existing prices already available. The administration has, admittedly, claimed that they've made deals with pharmaceutical companies to make some of their drugs available for as cheaply as they are already available in other countries. But, as the AP notes,
Many of the details of Trump’s deals with manufacturers remain unclear , and drug prices for patients in the U.S. can depend on many factors, including the competition a treatment faces and insurance coverage. Most people have coverage through work, the individual insurance market or government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, which shield them from much of the cost. https://apnews.com/article/trumprx-website-trump-drug-prices-pharmaceuticals-eae897ebf87349510a7795035a3043a3
So if you're looking for a meaningful, long-term solution to one of the U.S.'s greatest healthcare deficiencies, the administration would like to interest you in this service they constructed with all the forethought and durability of a child's cardboard lemonade stand.
“There’s several examples, you know from teachers handing out ICE cards and showing how NOT to cooperate… somebody has to lead this and say yes we will cooperate because we have a lot of teachers who are saying I won't let ICE here.”
Leandra also states on the livestream that ICE cards, which provide very basic constitutional rights, are actually getting students in trouble for being “misinformed.”
“Cooperate. It’s like the ICE ICE baby stuff. Stop. Cooperate and listen.”
This person is a fucking cartoon character.
I don't know California local politics at all, but surely this is a guaranteed way to immediately put your career on the chopping block in LA, right?
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In the context of the article, this sounds merely like evidence for the appeals case aiming to overturn the order to block information sharing between the two agencies. So...at best they don't get to continue breaking the law? Which seems appropriate - we can't just shoot everyone in the back who breaks a privacy law 42,695 separate times. It's not like they're teenagers stealing snacks from Walmart.