For sandboxing in Lutris you’ll want to have a look at the “Command Prefix” option under “Runner options” - whatever you put there prefixes the command that runs the game, which is exactly how sandboxing with things like firejail works (i.e. you start your stuff from the command line with firejail firejail-args your-stuff your-stuff-args so you literally prefix your command with firejail).

It’s possible to configure it game by game and also as a global default for all games which you can then override for only some games (this later is how I run it).

Lutris also integrates with Steam so you can run Steam games from it.

Same here and for me too it was gaming holding me back, though I mostly buy my games via GoG hence use Lutris and it’ve had a pretty low rate of games that won’t work at all (and, curiously, one of them which won’t work in Steam works fine if I use a pirated version with Lutris), though maybe 1/3 require some tweaking to work properly.

It’s also interesting that by gaming in Linux with Lutris I can make it safer and protect my privacy because Lutris let’s me do things like run the game inside a firejail sandbox which I have set up as default for all games including disabling network access for the game.

Still have the Windows partition around just in case, though the only time I booted it in the last several months was to clean up some of the stuff to free one of the disks to make it a dedicated Linux disk.

Ah, the good old fallacy of justifying one thing with something completely unrelated.

One can just as easily use the same argumentative structure to claim that a delayed train on the subway is the tip of the iceberg which is the Worldwide Illuminati Conspiracy or that the wood in one’s wardrobe having a darker spot indicates it used to be a gateway to Narnia.

It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.

Yeah, the word “buy” in this is just one element of a broader pattern, and whilst per-se it isn’t sufficient to distinguish between acquiring a thing or getting access to a thing, in these cases of mounts, armor and so on being sold in games, the entire framing wording and even store structure around it tends to lead people towards concluding that the meaning of it is for “acquiring a thing” not for “getting access to a thing”, especially because in the absence of domain specific clarification (an absence I believe is entirely purposeful) people who aren’t intellectual property lawyers and fully informed of the subject matter will tend to for virtual goods use the same logic to deduce the full meaning as they would for equivalent goods in other domains, specifically physical goods.

This is why also in the physical world legislation forces some kinds of business transactions with consumers to explicitly use the words “rental” or “lease” in order to make clear the nature of the transaction but might not have any such requirements for business to business transactions because businesses are assumed to have the capability to assess the full contract.

Portugal has exactly the same system (I’ve lived in both countries) which has actually even more features (such as letting you pay yours bills at any ATM) than the Dutch one.

I think that at least in Europe the countries were ATMs rely on VISA or Mastercard for inter-bank withdrawals like in the UK and US are the exception rather than the rule.

I live in a 10 million people European country which is the leading cork producer in the World

Also the first European country to explicitly decriminalise drug consumption.

Those two things are unrelated.

Ultimatelly it boils down to whether people have spent the money to have something or to use/enjoy something.

Which is probably why most people who disagree with selling of items, mounts, armor and so on, don’t find it problematic when what is being sold is access to game areas: the former are things (even if virtual) and people tend to treat them as something which they have, whilst the latter is just access to new experiences, like buying a ticket in a carnival to go on a Ferris Wheel, and is thus not something people tend to feel like they own it.

So yeah, the problem is the preying on people’s instincts around ownership versus mere rental - in their stores these things are invariably framed as being a purchase (buy! buy! buy!), not something you are purchasing temporary access to - on things whose mere existence depends on the whims of a company and which can be taken away at any time.

Mind you, in the Age Of Enshittification this kind of scam has extended to even hardware which is powered by software that requires access to 3rd party servers.

In all fairness, he never had any in choice in your relationship and you always treated him like a baby.

I’ve lived in a couple of cities in Europe and I can tell you my nose was runny and my throat a bit rough far more often in a poluted place like London (UK) than it is in the small city I live in now in Portugal or the places I lived in when in The Netherlands.

(In fact moving to a small city in Portugal from London hugelly improved of my health when it comes to that kind of thing)

I suspect that the tendency to catch colds and suffer from alergies is often coupled with all the Sulfur Oxide gases around in cities with lots of car polution, since those turn into various sulfur oxiacids when those gases mix with water in the nose and airways.

There is a real possibility that the person who would be best for Palestine would be Trump simply because he doesn’t follow through on what he says and is too incompetent when he does.

It’s a very sad state of affairs that the US Presidential Candidate that might be the least Nazi-supporting one is Trump, not because of his ideology not being Fascist but because he’s incompetent, inconsistent and has a tendency for non-interventionism.

You have it backwards: going after the natural voters of the other side in a two-party system is the riskiest thing you can do because the other party has a massive advantage with those voters which is an historical track record of telling them what they want to hear and them voting for it - rightwingers trust them on Rightwing subjects and are used to voting for them.

Even if (and it’s a massive massive if) a party succeeds at it once due to the party on the other side having deviated too much from its traditional ideology, all it takes for the party on the other side is to “get back to its roots” to recover most of those lost votes and subsequently win, whilst meanwhile the leftmost party that moved to the right has created for itself an obstacle in their own “going back to its roots” in the form of a section of the electorate which feels they were betrayed.

Sure, they’ll eventually get it back if they themselves quickly “go back to their roots”, but it will take several electoral cycles.

Further, if that gap remains too long on the Left even in a two party system it would create room for a third to grow, starting by local elections, then places like Congress, then Senate and eventually even the Presidency.

One of of the key ways in which First Past The Post maintains a Power-Duopoly is because growing a party enough to challenge the rest in multiple electoral circles takes time and the duopoly parties will try to stop it (generally by changing back their policies to appeal to the core voters of that new Party).

The US itself once had the Whig Party as one of the power duopoly parties and that exists no more.

The Democrats abandoning the Left is not a stable configuration for them and carries both the risk that the Rightwing electorate sees them as fake and the Leftwing electorate feels betrayed, and now they’re stuck in the middle with a reduced vote.

Whilst the first paragraph does make some sense, it presumes that in such a situation the Republicans would not conclude it’s the style of the candidate rather than his ideas that caused the rout. That might be a little optimist considering that the traditional Republicans’ were just as far right economically before and almost as right in Moral issues, but they had a different style of candidate (remember Reagan?).

It might also be a little optimist to expect an absolute walloping of anybody, Republican or Democrat.

That said, it’s a valid scenario, though it relies on very low probability events.

The second paragraph is inconsistent with every single thing the Democrats have done in their pre-electoral propaganda, from the whole “vote us or get Trump” (something which wouldn’t scare the Right) to the raft of pre-election promises on Left-wing subjects like student debt forgiveness or tightening regulations on giants such as Telecoms a little bit. If they really thought they could win with only votes stolen from the Right, they would be making promises which appeal to the Right, not the Left.

Besides, the whole idea that Rightwing voters would go for the less-Rightwing party rather than the more-Rightwing party is hilarious: why go for the copy if you can get the real deal?

From what I’ve seen in other countries were Center-Left Parties totally dropped their appeal to the Left and overtly went to appeal to the Right, they got pummeled because the Maths don’t add up and, as I said above, Rightwing votes will choose the “genuine article” over the “wannabes”.

It’s not by chance that in Europe even whilst becoming full-on Neoliberal parties, Center-Left parties maintained a leftwing discourse and would throw a bone to the Left once in a while (say, minimum wage raises) when in government.

Three points:

• Biden and Harris are right now with their actions physically supporting the Genocide. Trump talks about supporting the Genocide even more. Well, guess what: Trump lies shamelessly (as the Democrat propaganda here doesn’t stop reminding us of in everything but, “strangely”, not this subject) and isn’t even competent when it comes to actual execution. So on one side we have an absolute certainty that the candidate supports the Genocide and on the other one we have a probability that its so based on the statements of a known liar. I would say the claims that Trump is worse on this are doing a lot of relying on Trump’s word (on this subject alone) in order to elevate his evilness of this above that of people who are actually, right now, shamelessly and unwaveringly supporting the Genocide with actual actions.
• If the Leadership of Democrat Party manages to whilst refusing to walk back on their active support of a Genocide, win the election with a “otherwise it’s Trump” strategy, they will move even further to the Right because that confirms to them that they can do whatever they want and still keep in power. Now, keep in mind that the Democract Party leadership already supports Fascism (ethno-Fascism, even, which is the same kind as the Nazis practiced), so far only abroad (whilst Trump does support Fascism at home) so there isn’t much more to the Right of that before Fascism at home. You see, for a Leftie voting Democrat now will probably be the least bad option in the short term, but it’s very likely to be the worst option in the long term because it consolidates and even accelerates the move of the Democrat Party to the Right.
• Some people simply put their moral principles above “yeah but” excuses and won’t vote for people supporting the mass murder of children.

In summary:

• Trump’s Genocide support is a probability based on his word, willingness and ability to fulfill it (i.e. his competence at doing it), whilst Harris’ is an actual proven fact with actions happening right now.
• A vote for the Democrats whilst their policies are so far to the Right that they’re supporting modern Nazis with the very weapons they use to mass murder civilians of the “wrong” ethnicity, if it leads to a Harris victory will consolidate this de facto Far-Right status of the party and maintain momentum in going Rightwards. Voting like that is, IMHO, a Strategically stupid choice even if the case can be made (and that’s the entirety of what the Democrat propaganda here does) that Tactically it’s the least bad choice.
• Some people can’t just swallow their moral principles, especially for making a choice which isn’t even a “choose a good thing” but actually a “choose a lesser evil”, and “Thou shall not mass murder thousands of babies” is pretty strong as moral principles go.

Well, cats as a bit more on the slicey and dicey than on the grindey side of breaking up things.

(One shudders to think on what cats would do if they could actually use knifes)

I was too tired to go beyond “1nm = 10^-9 hence 1 billion” and actually do the maths ;)

Before transistors there were vacuum tubes which did the same thing but using very different principles (and were also way bigger, even than traditional transistors and billions of times more than the transistors in the most modern ICs)

Before electric milling or even steam milling, flour used to be milled using watermills and windmills which, IMHO, are way cooler.

Any unbiased “what if candidates had done things differently” evaluation must include the actions of all candidates that resulted in a Democrat loss. This means it should include how much Clinton herself screw her own chances, for example by comparing the votes she got on those states with the votes previous Democrat candidates got in those states.

(I strongly suspect that Clinton has a far larger proportion of the blame for her own defeat than all 3rd party candidates put together)

This focus on blaming everybody else but your own leaders is just the traditional tribalist mindset of “the chief is good, it’s everybody else whose a problem”. The decades long enshittification of the Democrat Party is mainly the product of its supporters acting as mindless tribalists rather the rationally, thus not holding their “chiefs” to same standards as they do everybody else.

Unsurprisingly we see the very same problem of the Democrat Leadership having carte blanche from the party fans to do just about everything and even damage their own electoral chances - with, as we see right here, the members of the tribe eagerly scapegoating it all as being the fault of 3rd party candidates - with their support for the Israeli Genocide.

White vans, no less.

The style of architecture (notice the roof shingles, chimney shape, the dark red brick low wall between the street and the pump court and the iron fence in the middle of the road that goes by the pump - the photo was taken from the other side of the road), the kind of cars there, the weather and even the guy working with a reflective vest (all the way to the right of the picture) all suggest UK.

In fact even without the title the whole thing looks very UK (as opposed to other places in Europe, though I wouldn’t be as sure).

I lived in Britain and this picture immediatelly said “familiar” and “UK” as soon as I saw it. What’s funny is that to write this post I had to try and understand what elements made it so familiar.