Spyke

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What's the real reason most countries aren't having children?

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As someone living in the USA going into my late 30s still without kids, you nailed it. We’ve been married for 10 years. In a different world, we might have had a kid at some point in the last 5, but between covid and climate change and the second Trump term and the general sense that everything is about to implode, it doesn’t really make us feel inspired to try.

To be clear, at the moment we have everything we would need to be parents if we wanted to. But the prospect of subjecting a kid to young adulthood in the 2040s seems brutal. We’re what I would consider “nudge-able” into having a kid or two, but the world keeps giving us nothing but nudges in the direction of choosing to be childfree for life.

Random example from this year: we keep getting barraged with news slop about how our jobs are about to all be replaced by LLMs or the economy is about to collapse under the weight of the LLM bubble. Not particularly reassuring. I realize there’s no perfect time to have kids and tons of people make it work, but as a couple who have always been in the “maybe” camp, inaction feels like the only thing a logical person would choose, year after year after year.

We don’t have many years left where it’s actually viable, and frankly I can’t imagine it’s going to change.

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Cure

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A lot of Americans cite foreign food as being “better” and note how much better they feel while traveling. The average American also probably walks 10-20x more while on a European vacation than they do at home. I don’t think it’s the food

games

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Know of any MTG proxies that are great in their own right?

This isn’t really an answer to your question, but you should honestly try Netrunner. It’s a cool game that previously was originally created by Richard Garfield, briefly lived at WotC and then was rebooted and run by Fantasy Flight Games as Android: Netrunner, but now is 100% community managed.

https://nullsignal.games/ is the community managing the game, they release new expansions about once a year and run tournaments. You can print and play the game 100% for free and there is no artificial scarcity. The community is small but active. A new expansion just came out in early March, Vantage Point. They also maintain a set of “starter decks” for newbies.

You can also play online for free at https://jinteki.net/ - people there are very welcoming and many are very happy to teach new players.

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Senate rejects extension of health care subsidies as costs are set to rise for millions of Americans

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Yeah what a coincidence that all the representatives that broke the shutdown weren’t up for re-election next time. Very convenient! I’m sure there was zero coordination to decide who would break rank.

But even if there wasn’t any of that, Chuck still bears responsibility for the failure of the shutdown even if you don’t want to admit it.

Chuck led the shutdown. For better or for worse, it failed to accomplish its goal. Ultimately more responsibility falls on him as minority leader than anyone else. It’s not insane to want someone who coordinates a major gambit like a government shutdown to be capable of keeping the other representatives from breaking rank to accomplish the goal of the shutdown. Coordinating votes is literally a huge part of the job as majority or minority leader. It’s disingenuous to say expecting a party leader in the house to line up votes is contrary to representative democracy.

Just admit the truth, you’ll suck Chuck off no matter what he does. You’re literally incapable of not sucking his dick

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Trial of 12mph bike lane speed limit grinds gears of Dutch cyclists

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Max speed for the average (50th percentile) for the commuting population, sure, I believe that. Did you mean to actually question whether or not the other user can actually ride a bike above 25kmh maximum? I would imagine the 70th percentile of regular commuting cyclists could easily exceed that on flat ground if they needed to.

My average speed on commuting rides is around 30kmh, ~18mph. My maximum speed on rides I regularly do for commuting is ~55kmh. Downhill, of course. Not all of us live in flatland.

For whatever it’s worth, despite regularly riding at that speed I am 1000% in support of speed limits on dedicated mixed use lanes. 25kmh is a reasonable speed limit to put on bike lanes IMHO. I’m riding along a rural road when commuting because I have no other choice. If I was in a mixed use path I wouldn’t feel comfortable at all going that speed.

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Steamed

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Idk about that, Gabe did a bunch of interviews around the time of windows 8 saying that signed app requirements and the windows store fiat that MS was trying to implement was an “existential threat” to valve and that they needed to migrate to a neutral OS as much as possible.

I’d argue that what we’re seeing now from valve is the fruits of a 10+ year campaign to undermine windows. And MS has been digging their own trench undermining windows at the same time, making their job even easier lol

But idk if it’s fair to call what valve is doing as “don’t worry about the competition” - I just think they (accurately) view MS as their competition instead of epic or EA or whoever is trying to do pc game stores

linux

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Arch Linux AUR Hit By Another Wave Of Now More Sophisticated Malware Attack

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CachyOS, which is one of the fastest growing distros and gets haphazardly recommended to tons of gaming refugees, ships with paru by default. Millions of forums, search results and LLM outputs encourage those same users to install stuff from AUR.

Any arch distro that has a sizeable non technical user base should know better than to ship or encourage using AUR. Shit like this is how we kill the “Year of the Linux desktop”.

steam

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Steam Controller: Reservations update

Holy shit, backlogged into 2027? I really wanted to buy two on release day, but by the time I managed to get through the chaos I ended up with only one, and as a result I can’t even queue again. Not complaining and I feel very lucky to have one, but it’s insane that there’s no way to get a second one for a long time

games

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4 Months After Launch, Dragon Age: The Veilguard Headlines PlayStation Plus March 2025 Lineup

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I’m not OP but I am a long time DA fan (in the sense that I have played each game as a non-completionist at or shortly after release, and have often listed Origins as one of my favorite games of all time) and I’m right there with you on the previous games. I found the game totally fine. It was on par with inquisition and better than DA2 imho. If you liked the others and are a fan I think you’ll enjoy it well enough. Sure, some of the dialogue and story is a little stiff, but I think people have rose colored glasses on when they remember DA:O’s story.

It’s really hard to get people’s real opinion about the new game because a lot of them just wanna use it as a culture war proxy and either hate it because it because they’re anti-LGBTQ, or vehemently defend it to show how pro-LGBTQ they are. Both groups are annoying even though I am a leftist. I don’t really give a fuck about any of that in the context of the game. The game is fun and anyone who is obsessing over the game for political/social stuff probably didn’t actually play it, because it’s a tiny tiny portion of content in the middle of a huge game. People just want to paint this as a bellwether on the future of wokeness in games, when in reality it’s just a bellwether on if people are still into the same ol (fun as hell) BioWare formula.