Ah yes, the ‘nuggies’ to ‘egg’ pipeline.

Linguistically odd how that works out.

They are going into effect this weekend.

Trump also said he’s gonna 25% tariff the EU, and is very much going forward on tariffing Taiwan as well, doesn’t look like his meeting with Nvidia CEO Huang earlier today was able to change that.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FnfffKmr6QE

No American is ever going to get an Nvidia 5000 series card for less than $2000 rofl.

Inability to get apply for or renew a US passport.

Hope you’re either not in the US, or don’t plan on travelling.

… So… Dragon Age is dead.

But DA isn’t dead. There’s fic. There’s art. There’s the connections we made through the games and because of the games. Technically EA/BioWare owns the IP but you can’t own an idea, no matter how much they want to. DA isn’t dead because it’s yours now."

In a subsequent post, Chee wrote, "So someone just reposted my thing saying they’ll write a giant AU [alternate universe] and that’s what I’m talking about.

So, Dragon Age is not dead in the sense that you can still occasionally commission DeviantArtists for DA art, and you can still freely write DA fanfiction and not make any money off of it.

… And someone can make yet another medieval fantasy world, maybe actually turn it into an actual profitable and thus widespread IP … assuming you’ve quite considerably changed the basic concepts and don’t use any actually named characters or groups.

Wyvern Era.

Drake Epoch.

Dragon Age is dead, add yet another notch to EA’s IP/Studio murder count.

They’ll probably manage to finally kill Battlefield / DICE this or next year.

EDIT: I somehow missed the title.

Yes, you absolutely can own an idea, thats what patents, trademarks and copyrights literally are.

This is actually delusional levels of cope.

You can talk all you want about French revolutionaries and Camus, but at the end of the day, you didn’t revolt against anything, you signed away your creative output to a soulless corporation for cash.

You could have found or founded a worker cooperative non profit, you could have copyleft your world and story and characters, you could have MIT or GPL liscensced the game code, and still sold the finished game for money, but nope, you did none of that.

Conversely:

Nuclear weapons are not real, physics doesn’t work that way, all of history since the advent of nuclear weapons is a cover up / conspiracy, all physics post 1945 is a lie.

That’s a joke… so far, but this is not:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Sony-files-patent-for-AI-Powered-input-prediction-to-enhance-gaming-experience.946884.0.html

Yep, Sony’s solution to not being able to make an affordable machine / game combo that can do 4k60fps is to augment ai frame generation with ai predictive player input.

So, basically, if/when this gets implemented, everyone will literally be playing with ai assisted aimbots and auto triggering movement macros, you know, hacks.

Because real rendering is too hard, because actual optimization is too hard… so… ai generate fake frames, which cause input lag, so then just ai generate player input, to compensate for the lag which is basically a result of UE5’s nanite and lumen being horrendously unoptimized and unperformant.

Makes perfect sense. Why bother with root cause analysis when AI!!!

https://us.nothing.tech/products/cmf-phone-1

$240.

Can run e/os (basically de googled, more secure android), though its currently in alpha, a bit buggy, if you want more security.

https://xdaforums.com/t/rom-alpha-tetris-14-e-os-for-cmf-phone-1.4692763/

That’s how you spell his last name?

Vought?

As in the exact same spelling as Vought International in The Boys?

Great.

This is Elon’s fault.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-doge-executive-order-elon-musk-us-digital-service-it/

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/21/doge_us_digital_service_renamed/

DOGE is actually just a rebranding of US Digital Services, basically the IT for the Federal government.

To repeat: Elon, the idiot who blew up Twitter’s technical back and frontend, is in charge of IT services for the Federal government.

EDIT: Oh dear god.

https://futurism.com/elon-kids-gutting-opm-doge

Yep, for the stuff Elon isn’t directly in control of, he’s appointing basically interns and other employees from his and his techbro friend’s (Thiel) companies.

I used to as well.

I was going to post you a link of Land of Confusion cover, but I broke down into ugly crying for 10 minutes… something in it triggered me, remembering all the high hopes I used to have for humanity…

… Gamer Priest?

I am just imagining like a Christian BF42 server that bans you for swearing, but a lan party of such people, in a church.

You’re thinking like someone who exists beyond this quarter’s profit margins.

I mean, you do, but as your boss, I’m required to tell you that you need to maximize short term results, and take all the responsibility for medium and long term calamities caused by me telling you to do that.

Your expectations were too optimistic.

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.

Agent Kay, MiB

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

George Carlin

(By the way, the average American has the literacy level of a 5th-6th grader now, so that’s about 160 millionish people basically dumber than 6th graders, 11 year olds)

Oh cool, thats wonderful, the only thing impacting the housing market that’s changed in 30 years is the MHA MFTE program, the entire rest of the economy just stayed perfectly static.

Population hasn’t grown, wealth disparity hasn’t grown, construction costs are the same, the unemployment rate never changed, zoning laws are the same, the tech sector is still as small.as it was in 96, no neighborhoods have gentrified, covid never happened, nope, everything affecting housing is all down to a single experimental variable and everything else is a control variable.

Did not realize I was actually talking to a clown.

Honk honk!

Yes it is happening.

Yes, the fact that this is happening is considered in my comments thus far.

https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/Housing/Reports/2023_MHA-IZAnnualReport-a_157808.pdf

Rough numbers:

2023, MHA payments from the payment option totalled $63 million.

$8 million of which went toward helping to build 230 new units, which is roughly 1/10th the total cost of actually building 230 new units.

The rest went toward maintenance of existing low income units/properties.

So… yeah, woo, $50 million from this new tax basically doubles that.

We need 100x, 1000x, not 2x.

Rent control actually always brings down rent prices in the affected units, this is widely agreed on.

It makes non affected units marginally more expensive, and the other widely agreed on malefects are that people in rent controlled units don’t leave as often, and that landlords skimp on maintenance, evict people more frivolously/baselessly, and disincentivizes new construction.

So throw on better tenants rights / eviction protection, crack down on maitenance skimping landlords by making a city hotline / web portal for residents to make complaints to directly, have an actually funded and staffed enforcement agency for that (take away some police funding and move it to that)… and then have a reasonable way to avoid incentivize and fund the new housing construction that the free market won’t want to do.

A reasonable implementation of rent control, as I literally just described, is what Seattle has been doing for 30 years, giving certain new or remodelled buildings the option to either pay a tax that goes toward city built/funded social, low income housing, or forgoe the tax but endure a rent control scheme for some of its units.

This approach just needs to be expanded, augmented, increased in scope, increased in magnitude of the low income housing tax and the required number of rent controlled units, and make those rent controlled units even less costly to renters.

Did you read anything I wrote in my last reply to you?

The MHA / MFTE program that Seattle has had in place for almost 30 years is, imo, the right framework, but needs to be dramatically upscaled.

It basically is a two option system:

Option 1: Landlords pay a tax upfront that goes toward the funding of your favored social, low income housing.

Option 2: Landlords avoid this tax but willingly agree to a percentage of their units being rent controlled.

This is a good framework, the problem is the numbers aren’t there.

You need a larger percentage of a building’s units to be rent controlled, you need those rent controls to further and lower rents more, you need the other option’s upfront tax to be much higher so as to throw 10x, 100x, 1000x of this pithy $50 million at building low income housing, and probably you also need to expand the MHA / MFTE guidelines to apply to more residential properties than it currently does.

If landlords don’t accept this, fuck em, option 3 is the city emminent domain buys your building for pennies on the dollar and turns it into low income housing, like what happened when I5 came through or any other number of public works bought up land.

Hey, while we’re at it, pass another law that says if you have a home on the market, or unrented apartment, you legally have to lower the price some amount for every month its just vacant, or work in a tax on the home seller/apartment owner that increases logarithmically for every day on the market, something like that.

Huge problem in the housing market right now is everything just sits there, being theoretically worth the asking price (which in reality is being price fixed by computer systems landlords use to keep prices climbing, don’t see you complaining about that) until finally a rich buyer shows up.

Fuck that. If you can’t get a tenant in a rental unit or a buyer into a house, tax the listing seller, the apartment opening, for every day beyond 30 for an apartment or 60 for a house.

That’ll incentivize people to price things more reasonably.

Do something similar with vacant office space, jam up the cost of that untill they start getting converted into apartments (and subsidize/incentivize that!), or lower their prices such that a commercial tennant moves in.

=D

Ah, your sentence makes a lot more sense now that you’ve added a subject.

Unfortunately your subject is ‘they’.

Presumably you mean lawmakers.

Presumably you’re talking about MHA / MFTE apartments.

No, they have not closed the ‘loophole’, it isn’t a loophole, its very clearly designed as a program with 2 options, its not some kind of accidental flaw in the law that allows exploitation via clever manipulation.

Option 1: Pay the city some amount in taxes, which the city then uses to pay for low income housing.

Option 2: Offer a certain amount of your rental units at MFTE price levels (ie, a volunatry for the landlord, rent control scheme), and then you functionally get a tax break by not having to pay the extra sum to the city from Option 1.

The problem with this whole approach is that it isn’t working to actually alleviate rental costs, rental prices are still out of control.

Basically, the MFTE program is very, very far from a solution as is.

The ‘affordable’ prices it generates are completely unaffordable to something around the bottom 30% of the population, and there are at max only enough ‘affordable’ units to even house about 9% of that bottom 30%, who can’t even afford them anyway.

…

Maybe this framework could work, but you’d have to enforce both a much more severe optional rent control schema, and have the other option be a much larger tax on landlords… and make the whole thing apply to far more than the measely 9k ish apartment units it currently applies to.