I’m predicting that Democrats respond by drawing homophobic fan art of Trump and Kim Jong Un together. They’ll also say Trump is a Communist again.

Last time this happened, Trump paused the Ulchi Freedom Guardian war games in 2019 and every liberal insisted that the war games continue. It was good that the war games were paused but short lived.

I’m doubting Trump will actually stop the war games permanently. Liberals claim that DPRK loves Trump, but I’ve only ever seen KCNA publish articles saying that US foreign policy doesn’t change based on the president elected. I’ve seen 2 KCNA articles critical of Trump’s administration since he was inaugurated.

It’s not a real tweet obviously. If I had to guess it was probably made by a Hillary lib or a parody of that. In 2016 when Chapo first became popular they supported Bernie and the DNC ran propaganda that anyone who was pro-Bernie is a misogynist for not supporting Hillary or Warren. Democrats called Chapo misogynistic for supporting Bernie, both in 2016 and 2020.

The article that you posted does not even align with what you are saying. The article that you posted aligns with what I am saying. The article also says in the headline that the RIAA has realize that suing individual downloaders is an ineffective legal strategy.

That article does not say that people are being fined by the government because copyright infringement in most cases is not a criminal case, it’s a civil case. The article itself says that the state isn’t pursuing it. That article says that copyright trolls harassed 18000 people, 7000 people didn’t even respond and 11000 settled out of court or “were not prosecuted”. Weird that it doesn’t even say how many people even settled of court.

Why are you posting like you work at the RIAA? “Under the law, people can actually be charged up to $150,000 per infringement” Under what law? Why don’t you know the difference between a civil case and a criminal case? I already told you that criminal copyright infringement is different from civil copyright infringement. The woman in the article you posted was not being fined by the government. She was being sued in a civil case for uploading music on Kazaa, not even for downloading.

On top of that, the woman who was being sued in the article that you posted never even payed the damages. She declared bankruptcy to avoid paying the damages. “In March 2013, Thomas-Rasset announced she would declare bankruptcy to avoid paying the RIAA the $222,000.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records%2C_Inc._v._Thomas-Rasset#Aftermath

Repeating what I said in my previous posts. “In most cases copyright infringement is a civil case, not a criminal case. That means that you are prosecuted by the copyright holder and not the state. The copyright holder has to take you to civil court to sue you.” “For it to become a criminal case, you basically have to be charging money for pirated content.” “the copyright holder has to actually take you to court and prove that you infringed the copyright, which is very difficult to prove.”

Criminal copyright infringement requires that the infringer acted “for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain.” 17 U.S.C. § 506(a).[9] To establish criminal liability, the prosecutor must first show the basic elements of copyright infringement: ownership of a valid copyright, and the violation of one or more of the copyright holder’s exclusive rights. The government must then establish that defendant willfully infringed or, in other words, possessed the necessary mens rea. Misdemeanor infringement has a very low threshold in terms of number of copies and the value of the infringed works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_copyright_law_in_the_United_States#Legal_definition

In order to be fined by the government for piracy, the government would have to prove that you infringed copyright for “financial gain”, ie you made money, harmed your financial competitor, etc. If you were charging money for distributing pirated content, it would be criminal. If you financially gain from operating a website which distributes pirated content, it could be criminal.

Pirating books (without charging money) would be a civil case, if even prosecuted, and the copyright holder would have to track you down and then file a court case against you and then make a case against you in court. That is very difficult and costly. This is something that is very unlikely to happen, especially if you use a VPN to mask your internet connection or avoid using peer to peer transfers.

That’s just not true. You made that up. If people were getting fined $20k per infringement, piracy would be much less common and you’d see it on the news all the time. Piracy laws in the US are very loose. Most people have pirated books or music or movies or games. Most people have not been fined for it.

Here’s how piracy is “prosecuted” in the US in most cases. Copyright holders hire a “troll agency” to monitor public peer-to-peer filesharing of their content. The troll agency records IP addresses of the file sharers. The troll agency then sends threatening emails to the ISPs of the file sharers. In many circumstances, the ISP just deletes the threatening email without even telling you. Sometimes the ISP forwards the email to you. You are not obligated to respond to the email. In order to be “fined” for infringement, the copyright holder has to actually take you to court and prove that you infringed the copyright, which is very difficult to prove.

And if you use a VPN, they would never even find your ISP.

Here’s an article from last month describing how RIAA and MPAA uses troll agencies to threaten ISPs.

https://torrentfreak.com/eff-sides-with-cox-to-protect-piracy-accused-internet-users-from-copyright-trolls-250109/

I know what you are saying and you have to also consider fair use. For example, many people on youtube use clips from movies that they pirated in videos that they made for money. I’m not a lawyer.

My point is that it’s really hard to get arrested for copyright infringement unless you’re like selling bootleg DVDs on the side of the road.

If you did the same thing as Facebook, where you downloaded a bunch of books and fed it into an AI and somehow made money that way, without distributing exact copies of the book. I still doubt you would be arrested.

Rarely any person is arrested for piracy in the US. In most cases copyright infringement is a civil case, not a criminal case. That means that you are prosecuted by the copyright holder and not the state. The copyright holder has to take you to civil court to sue you.

If we downloaded multiple terabytes of books, I think it is unlikely that there would be any consequences.

For it to become a criminal case, you basically have to be charging money for pirated content. If Facebook is profiting from the piracy, it is possible that they are doing criminal copyright infringement.

It’s true but it wasn’t a secret though. USAID announced giving $52 million to Guaido in 2019.

https://ve.usembassy.gov/usaid-announces-52-millions-in-development-assistance-for-programs-inside-venezuela/

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-to-provide-venezuelas-guaido-with-52-million-in-funding-idUSKBN1W934P/

Simple explanation is that that the bitly link redirect expired and someone made it redirect to a different website.

You changed your comment after I had written my comment. My comment was replying to your unedited comment.

It’s a developing story. Claudia Sheinbaum announced that she had made a deal with Trump to delay the 25% tariff for 1 month. As part of the deal, Mexico is placing 10,000 Nation Guard members on the Mexico-US border.

Stock market spiked as soon as Claudia Sheinbaum announced that tariffs on Mexico were delayed.

“If you can communicate a product, you can make money off a product. Look at Gaga, she’s the creative director of Polaroid. I like some of the Gaga songs. What the fuck does she know about cameras?” ~Kanye, 2013

This is not a full league. It’s not 3.26. They have done these types of intermediate in the past, such as infinite delve league, krangled league, mayhem league.

People complained about POE 3.26 being delayed and it worked.

Trump has been floating the idea that he wants to replace income tax with tariffs. The intention is that he wants to offload the tax burden of corporations onto the cost of living. Canada, Mexico, China are not paying the tariffs. US working people are paying the tariffs.

I have over 10,000 hours in POE1 and reached almost level 98 in POE2, reaching 97 in poe 2 is like reaching 100 in poe 1. The endgame in POE 2 is barren.

The only good juicing strategy is running breach on delirious maps and they reduce the rewards further with every patch. I think they may even be silently reducing the rewards of breach juicing between patches without saying it.

To set up the strategy, you have to clear 10-20 junk maps to scout out a zone with 5-7 overlapping towers. Then you have to run another 20+ junk maps to set up the towers.

Once you have all the towers cleared, you put in breach tablets which have the mod which says 18-20% increased quantity of items dropped. This adds breaches to remaining maps within the radius and adds quantity of items to the map, overlapping towers stack. This is the only way to get reasonable way to get increased quantity of items on a map. You can get 20% increased quantity of items dropped on a map item as a prefix or you can get 100-400% increased quantity by stacking quant towers. I suspect this will nerfed in the future.

Map item crafting in POE 1 is logical. Every prefix and suffix in POE 1 both increases the amount of loot dropped and makes the map more difficult. The more mods a map item has, the more difficult and rewarding it is. It is a simple rule, more difficult = more rewarding.

In POE 2, map item crafting is dogwater. In POE 2, rewards and difficulty are separated into prefix and suffix. Prefixes are rewards and suffixes a difficulty. Suffixes also increase quantity of more map items dropping but it doesn’t matter because I still get like 5+ t15 waystones every juiced map, even with 0 suffixes on the map. This means that prefixes matter and suffixes do not matter. There are only 2 good prefix map modifiers, “increased number of rare monsters” and “increased rarity of dropped items”. Rare monsters are the only monster that drops good loot, magic monsters are mid. Increased rarity of items on the map mod is multiplicative with rarity mod on your gear, not additive. (This was proven to be true by reducing character item rarity to 0 with ventor’s ring and then running a rarity map, you get 0 currency because multiply by 0). It is important to have high item rarity in POE 2 because item rarity affects the tier currency orb drops, unlike in POE 1 where it only affects gear rarity. High rarity means more exalted orb and divine orb drops.

Here is how I craft my waystones in POE 2. I start with a quad tab full of t15 waystones (map item in POE 2), that is 576 x t15 waystone. I alchemy orb all the normal waystones and augment/regal all the magic waystones, so that all of the waystones are rare. Then I regex search for map mods which I can not run such as burning ground and I vendor those, which is about 5% of the waystones. Then I regex search for waystones which have either of the 2 good prefix (rarity, rare monsters). I exalted orb those waystones until they have 3 prefixes. If a waystone has both good prefixes then I use it for a delirium anointed breach map. If a waystone has 3 prefixes and increased rarity, I set it aside to run on junk zones. If a waystone has 3 prefixes and none of the prefix is item rarity, then I vendor it. If a waystone has 1 prefix, then I exalted orb it to have a second prefix. If a waystone has 2 prefixes and neither prefix is rarity or rare monsters, then I vendor it. Around 70-80% of t15 waystones I sell to the vendor because they’re worthless and not worth the time running them.

So you do all that and you open your juiced breach map and there’s a 78% the map will only have 1 breach, 15% chance for 2 breaches, 5% chance for 4 breaches, and 2% chance for 11 breaches. In POE 1, you could force spawn multiple breaches in every map. 1 breach per map feels pretty bad.

In case you were wondering, BAMA stands for Blink Arrow, Mirror Arrow. It’s a minion build where you summon a bunch of clones of yourself that shoot your bow.

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”

“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”

“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”

The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”

“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”

“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”

He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”

I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.

“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.

“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.

“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”

It didn’t seem like they did.

“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”

Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.

I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.

“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.

Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.

“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.

I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”

He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.

“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.

“Because I was afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”

I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.

“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”

He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.

https://www.pathofexile.com/private-leagues/league/Settlers+Restart+xdd+Thanks+GGG

This is a link to join the POE1 Pohx Private league. It launched 2 hours ago and it will last for 60 days. A private league is a sandboxxed version of the game where you can only interact with other characters in the same private league. Pohx is a twitch streamer known for playing the skill Righteous Fire, a skill which will be added to POE 2 in the future. This private league has 18000 registered players, which is a pretty sizeable amount, though I think a typical poe 1 expansion launch has around 150,000.

Instead of arguing, I am inviting you to play POE 1 with active players and a fresh economy so that you can experience the game for yourself. If you don’t know what to build to play, go to youtube and search “poe 3.25 lightning strike”, “poe 3.25 righteous fire”, “poe 3.25 archmage ice nova”, “poe 3.25 hexblast mines”, “poe 3.25 power siphon mines”, “poe 3.25 holy relic”, or “poe 3.25 bama”. It is important that the video says 3.25 because builds from previous patches will not work.

Please try Path of Exile 1. Any in game purchases that you made in POE 2, such as stash tabs, are also accessible in POE 1.

The chess subreddit is sort of like that still though. Just last month, Magnus Carlsen was disqualified from the World Chess Championship for wearing blue jeans. Then soon after FIDE changed the dress code so that Magnus could keep playing, maybe from the pressure of sponsors. Magnus Carlsen went on play in a final match against Ian Nepomniachtchi. After 3 drawn games, both players agreed to share the World Chess Champion title. It is the first time in history that a world chess championship title has been shared. There was a lot of criticism of the decision.

I never said that I was owed another POE 1 expansion. I didn’t say that I was owed anything. There’s no “entitlement” here. I am not writing a “screed” for the devs. I said that the devs lied for profits. In November, they said give us money now and you’ll get a POE 1 expansion in February. They took the money and then there’s no planned expansion. That’s just a recollection of events that happened.

I make posts on hexbear for my own interests. Path of Exile 1 was my favorite game ever. I have made many posts about Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2. If the devs say that my favorite game is indefinitely put on halt, then I’m going to say that it upsets me. I explained why it upsets me. You are telling me that I’m not allowed to be upset. You are not allowed to police how I feel.