I had a physics class that required Mathmatica and a stupid expensive textbook. The professor said the college forced him to use those because the college gets a kickback for it. Luckily he was awesome and told everyone that we could buy the much cheaper older version of the book and pirate the software.
Cracks are usually released separately from the uncracked game files. Repackers take those cracks and package them with the correct version of the game, compress the files and add an installer. Then they upload them to the more mainstream public trackers.
Repacks have several benefits. They tend to be easier to setup and usually more reliable. They download faster and use less data because they are compressed. They are also sometimes packaged with extras like soundtracks, mods, etc.
Fitgirl repacks are known to be more compressed, so the files are a little smaller but take a fair amount longer to install.
I recently watched, “Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone” and greatly enjoyed it.
It’s about what it was like to live in the Soviet Union at the end of communism and then the end of democracy. The story is entirely told with footage from the time.
I’d like to also recommend my two favorite documentaries about labor unions, Harlan County, USA and American Dream.
If when you run a fingernail over it, if your nail catches in the scratch, the scratch is very likely too deep to fix with paint correction(like buffing/polishing).
A proper fix will require prep, painting and blending, which you shouldn’t try to do yourself. You could buy a touch up stick that matches your paint to cover the scratch. It won’t look perfect and won’t last forever without clear coat on top, but it will prevent rust.
Before you decide how you’ll deal with this, you can bring it to a body shop for an estimate, most shops will do that for free. Most shops can give you an estimate from photos emailed or submitted to their websites.
I was a binge drinker. I would buy a big bottle of whiskey and drink until I fell asleep, then wake up and start drinking until it was gone. Then I’d be sober for a while and eventually binge again.
I had a sort of similar gradual experience with quitting. I was enjoying it less and less, mostly just getting depressed and feeling sick from the constant changes in body chemistry. I went from being blackout drunk 2 days a week to 2 days every other week, and then every month or so. At one point I realized I had been sober for 50 days and decided I needed to be done with it forever.
Now I’m at 200 days and almost never think about drinking. I have basically zero desire to drink, all I can think about is how bad it made me feel.
I don’t go to bars or really socialize in person at all. I would recommend trying to find other ways to socialize that don’t involve bars, but I have known sober people who can happily hang out with people who drink.
For most purchases, people really only have vanishingly few choices of companies to buy from. A truly free market might work, but the profit motives that have corrupted our political, legal and regulatory systems has made most markets into oligopolies. These companies work together to manipulate prices, without ever directly communicating in a way that can be punished.
For a free market to really drive prices down there needs to be real competition. When eggs went up in price, they allegedly did so because of avian flu. But that flu only affected a small amount of the production. Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer in the country, lost no egg production at all. Yet they increased their prices massively. If the market was working as you say it does, Cal-Maine would have kept their prices low to capture more market share. Instead they saw that other producer might have to raise prices and preemptively raised their prices.
I’m not convinced statistics can be used like this on big questions where we know so little. Just because we believe the universe to be massively large and ever expanding doesn’t satisfy the basic premise that underlies the assumption that there is so much stuff that some of the stuff must be alive. I don’t think we know enough about the universe to make the assumption that because it is so big, it must be infinitely variable.
But what do I know, I’m just some idiot on the internet.
I wouldn’t say I am ashamed, but I cannot believe I liked Insane Clown Posse and thought it was legitimately good music.
A lot of this self censoring is algorithm voodoo. Nobody knows what makes these platforms mark your videos as age restricted, so people do silly stuff like say, “unalive”. I’ve seen many videos where people use the word kill that aren’t age restricted.
Exactly. Federation means no single instance needs to serve millions of users. If one gets too big and becomes too commercialized, you can move to a different one that shares your values. If large instances cost more per user as they scale up, we just need more instances.
I also think people are vastly overestimating the cost to serve users on Lemmy/kbin. Last time I calculated it, lemmy.world costs were around €0.01/mo per monthly active user. That can be maintained with 1% users donating €1 a month.
I think the fact that reddit has never paid moderators in the past shows that they fear setting such a precedent. IAmA has always been a big draw for users and celebrities, yet they never put an employee in charge of it.
Once they start paying one set of moderators, other mods might start to expect something in return for their labor. This especially won’t look good to investors who might otherwise like the business model of paying nobody for moderation.
Crackers mostly post the cracks to IRC sites, cs.rin.ru, and private torrent sites. Repackers are the main way releases make it to the mainstream torrent sites.
Repacking isn’t that complicated anymore, it’s more about reputation. There was a time when games were big and internet speed was slow so saving every MB of size was important. Repackers would reencode video files and find other ways of dramatically reducing the file size. Nowadays they don’t do a lot of that, but repackers are still important for casual pirates who just want to easily play pirated games and not worry about malware.