This may be a stupid question, but… is “Excellency” used in a presidential context?:| I’ve only ever known it to be used when talking about monarchy and the Pope…

On a marginally related note, has anyone noticed how frustrating all of the Darth Vader “NOOOOOO!” gifs are because they don’t include that awkward stumbling off of the operating table?

On a thoroughly related note, what happened to our version, the European one? I seem to remember we had something similar, Eutelsat, or smth?

Edit: checked, yep, Eutelsat. What gives, like? Why not use that one?

Our free market’s good, yours is the problem! Gotta read the fine print!

Think you took a wrong turn somewhere, this is the Technology community…

Oo-er! Well aren’t you swanky!

Just a well-meaning joke (with but a smidge of envy:)) ), congrats for this! May the new currency bring you all good luck!❤️

Too fucking right… I have nothing more to add, you are as painfully on-point as possible…

If the actual spending was that large, we, the citizenry, would see it. But we don’t. Our living situation has steadily degraded over time, wages have stagnated for at least a decade, our infrastructure’s essentially unchanged from the 80s… And many other such examples.

No, the country isn’t spending, the politicians are, for themselves and their families. In Romania, as long as you don’t steal from the big wigs, nobody gives a shit.

Edit: in my opinion, Brussels should lay into them like a fucking hurricane.

cough check their pockets cough

Just sayin’, pretty much everyone around here knows…

“Thing set to die soon now worth less than the only other option remaining.”

That’s, indeed, my point. And, no, an industry in the sense in which the post and article mean it, in the sense in which it is understood in contemporary economics, is not needed.

What is needed is focused effort. It’s very easy to forget that things don’t actually cost money, things cost resources and energy. Those don’t have an intrinsic monetary value, the price tag is 100% arbitrary and made up. Otherwise, existing in the Universe would require paying taxes in money, and last time I checked, we’re the only biological doofuses who do that. And we do it to ourselves, no less.

Things can be done without money, and we need to remember that. Humanity has been doing stuff without money for almost literally aeons before someone thought it would be a good idea to dream that up.

As for getting things rolling, let’s not forget that muskets still work just fine with a bit of maintenance, and they’re hundreds of years old at this point. Guns last a long, long time, it’s just that the military industrial complex can’t function if people realise that and don’t treat them as perishables. And I doubt we’ve dismantled all guns pre-2000, for instance. And there are plenty of easy-to-make, DIY-type stuff which have been unfortunately demonstrated to be very effective several times over.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And, yes, it’s tough to shift the system, nobody said it’d be all rainbows and roses. But it sure as hell would be a lot easier if everyone started pushing.

Not saying we shouldn’t make our own, just saying that making an entire industry out of it while the system still functions essentially as it has is a very, very bad idea.

We need a paradigm shift if we’re ever to see a different society for ourselves. Repeating the same things over and over again ensures that we’ll burn ourselves to the ground. And we shouldn’t give into war paranoia, either. Being reasonably prepared is one thing, dumping everything we have into it is entirely different.

Just as the Church should be separated from the State, I believe the Military and everything else related to it should be separated from the economy.

I repeat, we seriously need to think differently from now on. The old ways have brought us this mess.

Well, that would spoil the fun, wouldn’t it! I mean, that soul-whittling existential anxiety I get whenever I pick up an online-only game is 90% of the reason why I play them in the first place!

Here’s a crazy idea: how’s about we just ensure we can defend ourselves if needed instead of building an industry out of it? Can we just do that, have some limit to it? Do we really want to go down the same roads the U.S. has been treading for years? Do we really like where said roads got them?

100%! Every single developer I’ve ever met has been adamant about wanting to watch their work, hours of their life, be killed off on a financial basis! They told me so personally!

Edit: speaking seriously now, I don’t get what their fucking problem is… Nobody’s asking them to keep the servers running indefinitely. I mean, the far, far smarter choice would be to implement LAN play. Hell, not even that, give us the source code and we’ll do it on our own! The community has been aces at keeping old multiplayer games alive and kicking, just look at Battlefield 2142, custom WoW servers, custom, like… whatever servers. There are so, so many people willing to keep these games alive without any help from the publisher or anyone else.