Just convince Ireland to enforce it… and thereby piss off the tech companies that are the basis for their economy because they pretend to be Irish. Or, convince the tech companies to move from their safe haven of Ireland to somewhere else in the EU where the GDPR is actually enforced… something they’d gain nothing from doing.

If you ever think that your job is useless, remember that FIFA has an Ethics Committee.

“pa-per”?

I’m not saying the suspension of the suspension is reasonable. I just doubt that Trump had much to do with it. Infantino is corrupt enough as it is, and he probably thought FIFA would get more money if the US had a better chance of staying in the tournament longer. He also allowed Cristiano Ronaldo to fully participate in the tournament despite his ban, and I’m sure Trump had nothing to do with that. But, again, bigger ratings, more attention if Cristiano Ronaldo is playing vs. on the bench.

To be the end of FIFA, the member countries would somehow have to work together and organize their own competing World Cup. A lot of the power FIFA has is that there are a lot of small football associations from corrupt countries (or at least corrupt football associations from small countries). Even if all the UEFA member states and the South American member states tried to do their own thing, that’s not enough.

Infantino can count on support from countries like Kyrgistan, Laos, Myanmar, Maldives, Yemen, Namibia, Eswatini, Somalia, South Sudan, etc. Infantino is corrupt, but he’s clever enough to spread some of the money to these other places. They know that if he’s removed or replaced, their funds will get cut off.

In the past, the only thing that worked was when a country that didn’t really care about the sport decided to step in. Back when the US wasn’t quite as corrupt as it is now, it chose to investigate FIFA and charged a whole bunch of officials with wire fraud, racketeering, money laundering, etc. I don’t know if there’s any country that has the power, the courage, and the lack of corruption to do that now. Without that, I don’t think FIFA is going to magically become clean from the inside.

He can’t really help. I don’t even think he was necessarily the one who got Balogun’s suspension suspended. All he really managed to do was taint things so Balogun’s suspension suspension is super suspicious.

OTOH, R16 is normally where the knockout rounds start, so the USA just got a free pass to what’s normally the real beginning of the tournament.

I’m saying this as a fan of Canada who didn’t make the round of 16 at all, but still had a wildly successful run by Canadian standards: first ever world cup goal, first ever world cup win, first ever advancement from a knockout round (but only from the round of 32 which normally doesn’t exist).

The US has a decent chance of getting past Belgium, but whoever wins that match faces either Spain or Portugal, and that will probably be the end.

“Birthright” is such a terrible term for that way of obtaining citizenship.

Isn’t it also a “birth right” to get citizenship based on the citizenships of the parents who gave birth to you?

Jus soli is “birthright”, jus sanguinis is also “birthright”. It’s only naturalization that is a way to get citizenship that isn’t a result of your birth.

IMO, this case is a kind of “canary in the coal mine” for whether or not the US can maybe return to a country governed by laws. Trump is massively corrupt. He has been pardoning all kinds of criminals. His justice department has been jailing innocent people and refusing to investigate obvious crimes. He has openly admitted to crimes in press conferences, and that’s just becoming normal now.

But, despite all that, this judgment is out there and he can’t seem to make it go away. If this were Russia, E Jean Carroll would have “committed suicide” by now, maybe leaving a note behind about how she was so sorry to have falsely accused Donald J. Trump, and how he was a tremendous, so tremendous leader, and man, some people are saying maybe the best that has ever lived. The judge that ruled against him would have accidentally fallen out of a window.

So, this might be a kind of Hungary situation, where there’s a leader who has warped the entire country and seems all powerful, but who is simply voted out of office and is no longer driving the headlines.

The estimates of Trump’s net worth are much less reliable than most net worth estimates. For example, a big chunk of his net worth is now in meme coins. They tend to calculate his net worth by saying each coin is priced at $X and he has Y coins, so his net worth is $X*Y. But, the second he starts trying to sell those shitcoins, the price will plummet. There’s nothing backing those shitcoins, there’s no real demand for them. People are only holding onto them because they think maybe other people will believe they’re valuable. If Trump sells them, the game is up and everyone knows they’re worthless, so the true value of what he owns in coins is a tiny fraction of that.

People have been trying to bribe him in various ways. But, again, that’s often through crypto, so it’s not like real money you can spend. Most of his net worth used to be in the supposed value of having his name on various properties. He didn’t own the building, but he’d slap “Trump” on it and collect royalties. But, right now, for most of the world slapping “Trump” on something decreases its value.

People who are rich via huge amounts of stock in a company they started are sort-of in a similar boat, but to a lesser extent. Elon Musk is worth, on paper, nearly $1 trillion. But, that’s due to comically ridiculous overvaluations of Space X and Tesla. He can sell a bit of his stock without triggering a massive sell-off. But, if he wanted to sell every share he owns and convert his money into cold hard cash, he could only get a small fraction of $1T because selling off big amounts of his companies would cause other people to sell off too, and the value would tank. In the mean time though, he can still go to a bank and borrow money against the supposed value of his shares. That’s something Trump can’t do because banks have realized that he can’t be trusted to repay his loans, so they won’t loan him money.

So, Trump could pay off this $5m judgment, but not without it seriously taking a bite out of his actual, liquid net worth. I’m sure a lot of the reason he’s refusing to pay is that he doesn’t want to, or doesn’t want to set a precedent, or just likes getting away with not paying his bills. But, another reason is that for him $5m really is a lot of money because his supposed billionaire status is with a lot of asterisks.

Yes, but they can get away with a tiny amount of it

Not really. Developers have forgotten how to write small, efficient code. Everything is a web page these days, and so the bare minimum app is a web browser, and a web browser is huge.

I’ve come to terms with the fact I’m not going to be buying any new computer-type devices until the bubble pops.

I’m just terrified what happens if one of my existing devices breaks. If a RAM stick goes bad, I might have to mortgage my non-existent house.

Even those contain RAM.

Enshittification. They have their users locked in, and now it’s about trying to make money for their advertisers.

There’s a subreddit where there are thousands of people. The equivalent community on Lemmy has a dozen. I participate there, but it definitely isn’t the same. I haven’t logged into Reddit in a couple of years, and I browse that old subreddit using old.reddit if that disappears the choice is logging in or using new reddit, neither of which is going to work for me, so I guess that’s it for me.

I’m really hopeful that Steam Boxes and Steam Decks etc. mean that peripheral manufacturers start making sure their stuff works well on Linux.

Honestly, a lot of the time all they’d need to do is document the protocol and publish it and probably someone else would build and maintain a driver for them. I think it could undo a whole chicken and egg situation. Right now, manufacturers don’t build their stuff with Linux support because not enough gamers run Linux. As a result, not many gamers run Linux, which means it’s reasonable for manufacturers not to build in Linux support.

As for the unknowns, there are unknowns in Windows too. I’ve had to go into the registry many times to tweak something so it worked the way I wanted. The only difference is that my Windows install was the result of months or years worth of tweaking and customizing. Well, not the only difference. Linux is much more tweakable, and it’s something where you go in expecting to have to spend more time adjusting things. But, Windows didn’t have its unknowns too. It’s just that most of them were already behind me. With Linux, I knew I’d have to start from nearly square one. I’m glad I did in the end, but it was still frustrating at times.

That’s a good start, but too often things happening slowly means that nothing happens in time. During Biden’s 4 year term they started to investigate and eventually prosecute things that happened in Trump’s first term. The clock just ran out though. Too many things were still being investigated when Trump took office again.

He gave the government until July 2 to comply.

Or what?

The FBI reports to Trump, and he put a toady in charge. Ditto for the DOJ. The Supreme Court has a tiny force of police who basically guard the buildings, but they don’t go out and arrest people.

It’s probably good that there aren’t competing federal police forces, some of whom report to the executive branch and some who are on the judicial branch. OTOH, the courts need to be able to do something if they’re being ignored.

Maybe it would work if the courts could tell the executive branch that until their orders were obeyed, the court wouldn’t hear any other business brought by the government. Any federal prosecutor anywhere brought a case, and the courts would refuse to hear it until other matters were resolved. OTOH, with the way the republicans want to break the country, maybe they’d be happy to have the courts effectively shut down completely. But, if the courts started issuing default judgements because the government wasn’t able to present their side, maybe that would work?

I daily-drive Bazzite on multiple machines. It’s excellent, even on machines I rarely use for games.

If you use the console version of Bazzite (which I use on a HTPC), it runs Steam in console mode on boot. I assume that’s what SteamOS does, it seems like they designed that mode to feel identical to using SteamOS on a SteamDeck. That makes it easy to launch games etc. without needing a keyboard and mouse. Then you can go to desktop mode when you need it.

The desktop version of Bazzite is just a Linux desktop that starts Steam on boot so that it’s running in the background. It has some gaming-related things installed but if you want to use it as a machine to write software it’s basically ready to go.

The part that takes energy and effort is making the switch.

I’m really familiar with Linux. I’ve been using it on and off since the days of Slackware. My work computer was Linux-only for several years.

But, even with that, it took weird driver issues with my GPU, combined with the impending death of Windows 10, combined with the ridiculous heavy handed Copilot BS on Windows to finally convince me to switch my main desktop PC to Linux.

It was just the momentum that was so hard to overcome. I knew what worked in Windows, and I knew what didn’t. I had already found and installed all the programs I needed. My settings were all how I liked them. I knew the keyboard shortcuts. With Linux I didn’t know what would work or what wouldn’t. With Linux, there were a lot of things I’d need to install and set up, and I knew that was going to take some effort. But, worst were the unknown unknowns. I didn’t know what was going to cause me problems, and didn’t know if they were things I could resolve in a couple of hours or if they’d take weeks.

I’m glad I made the switch, and the overall maintenance load is much lower than it was in Windows. The frustration factor is 10x better. But, I did have to make a real effort to make the switch. There were a few weeks where it was pretty frustrating.