I see what you mean, but I also believe that the value of places like Beehaw often lies in the intermediary stage before they become an institution or wither away and die.

Right now Beehaw is pretty close to the peak of what it can be. It’s the equivalent of a large online block party. If it gets bigger than this it will need to institionalize or wither away. What you’re asking is for it to institionalize sooner than is necessary, which is what will kill the feeling.

Beehaw has a lifespan to it, we should all recognize this now. Beehaw is great because it runs on good faith and trust. These are limited resources and they’ll run out eventually, either sell out or burn out.

The best way to approach it is to put into it what you get out of it, and stop putting into it when you stop getting value out of it.

What I dislike about these threads is that it always devolves into shitting on blue collar workers. Of course pickups are useless city cars but have you all ever met somebody from a town of 1,000 people where every single person works in a blue collar trade? These things do work that you can’t do in a different type of vehicle.

Threads like this are echo chambers of privilege. Maybe instead of shitting on tradespeople, shit on car and oil companies who enshittify the whole system.

Also pickups in 2023 that look like this are more powerful and more fuel efficient than more modest looking pickups from 90s or 00s. You may not like the aesthetics of it, but who fucking cares, you’re not driving it, you’re just the one judging someone else for having different taste.

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue.

I’ve selected this text as I think it’s the heart of your post, if you disagree then let me know. I don’t agree with this statement, I think that it is a rights issue, and I think I can prove that with a thought experiment.

Suppose for example, game companies took this idea to heart and did not do anything to stop piracy, they only focused on providing the most seamless storefront and gaming experiences possible. They create a store that works perfectly, has all the features you’d want, and has no DRM of any kind - this includes no log in needed, they go by the honor system. They expect people to only download a game that they’ve paid for. Here’s the question: will people pay for the games or not? I have a view of human nature that people generally go along the path of least resistance, and I think this is born out by evidence (but I could be wrong about this). Some people will pay for the games on moral grounds, the vast majority will not. If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.

This, to me at least, proves that piracy is only a service issue in a world where DRM exists. Because DRM makes piracy annoying. If people find the DRM more annoying than piracy, it has failed to be effective DRM.

So to get to the heart of things, I agree with you that when DRM is more annoying than piracy something has gone terribly wrong. Denuvo, in my life, for the way I play games, is not and never has even gotten close to being more annoying than piracy.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think it is morally or ethically wrong to put DRM on a game or storefront. I just see it as something to work out on a practical level, case by case. But I made my original comment in the first place because it seems to me like a lot of people have issues with it on a moral level, which I think is silly.

It’s not evil. DRM as a concept is not evil. There is actually no real philosophical justification for why it is wrong to use DRM to protect your software. Because if you made it, it is yours and you get to decide how other people use it.

The paranoia that surrounds things like DRM show just how laughably selfish and entitled some gamers are.

In terms of real harm to the rock, both permanent anchors and removable protection don’t do much damage. It’s mostly the aesthetics of permanent anchors being kind of ugly.

What is more damaging is the increased traffic to an area once it is bolted. Having to bring your own gear, and take it down afterwards becomes a barrier to entry that keeps wilderness low traffic. If you bolt a wilderness area, you can do things like make it permit only, but at the same time climbers are often known to just not get permits and climb anyways :). Then there is also the question of who’s job it becomes to inspect and maintain the bolts. Ultimately, bolts only make sense in areas that are already high traffic, where park rangers are highly involved and safety is a real concern. In my mind, the only reason to bolt wilderness is to turn it into non-wilderness. That’s maybe too pessimistic of an outlook, but it’s the only way I can read this.

I like all of them but the first. I am fairly sure that I understand what he’s getting at, that very often religious dogma is used to shut down curiosity. But factually speaking both philosophy and theology start with axioms, oftentimes the same axioms. The history of all philosophy, west and east, is deeply intertwined with theology and scientific inquiry. Up until the 1600s religious life, mysticism, intellectual life, and science were considered to all be essential to each other in most cultures.

“The World Doesn’t End” by Charles Simic

“Deaf Republic” by Ilya Kaminsky

“Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” by Ross Gay

“Words for Empty and Words for Full” by Bob Hicok

“Life on Mars” by Tracy K. Smith

Those are books that have personally influenced me deeply. Other poets I like but haven’t read deeply are Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Elliot, Wendel Berry, W.H. Auden.