sp3ctr4l

So for starters, I agree with Chomsky broadly here, he isn't wrong that... its good to keep up on what a class or segment of people read if you want to know how their brains work, how they think, what they often do not even realize they hold as unchallengeable beliefs... and that when you're in a cultural (?) space for corpos, you get to see what they're actually worried about, vs what they project outward to a more general, mass audience.

To specifically answer your question:

No, it hasn't changed that much.

WSJ, FT, The Economist...

yeah, they're all generally in that same boat, I am just telling you as a former corpo, former executive level data analyst, that most of what is in those is basically just the bougie version of a gossip rag, lifestyle pieces.

A bougie lifestyle piece just is the latest 'enlightened' perspective to have on monetary nterest rate policy or whatever.

Its like Patrick Bateman.

Most of them don't really care, beyond perfecting the brand that is their own corporate persona.

The people that actually know what they are talking about may yes, read these occasionally, semi-regularly, just to generally keep abreast of things, but the really powerful data and announcements are in industry journals, and most of the time, the really important conversations and missives are not publicly available.

If you have access to or know how to read those, you have a 90% chancd of knowing what the FT, WSJ, and Economist are going to be talking about in 6 weeks to 6 months.

Is this truly the amount of mountain-moving we have to do to counteract a single organization's opinion?

It looks like another commenter has already well replied to this, but uh, yes.

thunder crack

Welcome... to the real world.

...

Video games are treats.

Treats only flow by the arcane and abstract machinations of those with power, and those with power are fickle, greedy, and often do not busy themselves with the minutiae of the affairs of the hordes of useless eaters.

I agree with you, the power differential is absurdly vast, the situation is plainly 'unfair' by most viewpoints...

... but the question that matters is what are you going to do about that?

Agreed, I am genuinely impressed by this, this is unironically a better run, better organized response to a situation like this than most billion dollar + companies that trade on the stock market would pull off.

Absolute kudos and bravo to the itch.io team!

Entirely seriously:

While this is far from some kind of total victory, that a conversation is happening at all is much better than that not being the case.

I am guessing payprocs did not have any fucking clue the extent of backlash they would receive from just being extremely vauge / heavy handed.

Hopefully this can at least result in some more concrete and specific definitions of what they will and will not allow, so that existing platforms at least have an idea of what the actual rules are, and then from there, potentially a more targeted public pressure campaign could manifest.

If itch.io manages to get them to actually clarify the rules, this could lead to other platforms, Steam, Nutaku, etc, also reworking their allowed/not allowed games, now having more clarity and less fear of being totally nuked for violating vague guidelines.

Vibes based legal system, sure, why not?

Broad tariffs are basically a sales tax with many extra steps and massive inefficiencies.

Sales taxes are of course, regressive, they disproportionately harm the poor.

Frame Perfect!

enemy sprite transforms into scrambled eggs

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-07-fbi-national-st-paul-cyber.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/minnesota-calls-national-guard-after-st-paul-slammed-by-digital-attack-2025-07-29/

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/30/minnesota-activates-national-guard-as-cyberattack-on-saint-paul-disrupts-public-services/

So, this actually was first detected on Friday July 25, escalated all the way up to the Emergency Operations Center on July 28 (Monday), state of emergency / near total intranet shut down (they are quarantineing the whole system) on July 29 (Tuesday).

It seems to me that some kind of rather sophisticated threat actor managed to get into the core ... this techxplore article calls it a 'VPN', but it isn't technically a VPN, its a secure access tunnel system that city-gov systems and employees use to talk to each other, it almost certainly is not intended to be geared toward broad internet access/usage, beyond accepting user input from public facing government web portals, such as say, people paying their utliity bills online or trying to submit a business liscense application online, things like that.

This system is sounding like it got fully compromised (as in, low level/high privilege level access was secured), and was either sending data out/in through improper IP addresses, and/or was possibly being hijacked to do some kind of DOS attack ... on itself?

I am having a really hard time finding any exact details on this, but this is my best guess.

Given that the EOC essentially immediately shutdown everything and called in a National Guard Cybersecurity team, it seems to me that there is a high chance this was done by basically a nation-state level threat actor.

It also at least seems like the systems, the data, the hardware, have at least not yet been locked down in a ransomware style move, which... could be largely due to their just quickly pulling the whole thing offline, or could be because that wasn't the goal of the attackers... or some combination of both.

After shitting in the duck pond and fleeing, he returns to his tiny home:

A fuck-off huge, old wine barrel.

Article:

https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/living-pay-cheque-to-pay-cheque-you-are-not-alone-68-of-americans-are-too/3923390/

Source Study:

https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PYMNTS-New-Reality-Check-February-March-2024.pdf

Oh hey, Forbes says nearly 72% of those living paycheck to paycheck have less than $2,000 in savings!

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics-2024/

Yeah, this is what an economic collapse looks like, Great Depression 2.0, hold onto your butt, and good luck.

EDIT:

We also have a massive negative net worth problem.

Negative net worth means you have more debt than assets.

Because this is difficult to measure accurately, unless you are a credit bureau....we've got anywhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 3 Americans with more debt than assets, ie, they are de facto debt slaves.

https://www.creditkarma.com/about/commentary/americans-have-a-net-worth-problem-and-its-not-positive

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/whats-your-net-worth-25-of-americans-say-theirs-is-%240-or-less

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/thirteen-million-us-households-have-negative-net-worth-will-they-ever-move-from-debt-to-wealth/

These are all from 2 or 3 years ago, I imagine its now closer to 1 in 3 than 1 in 10.

Diogenes stands ready to pluck away the feathers of hypocrisy

Then, suddenly, Diogenes appears, plucks every feather from the duck, shoves it into the faces of those sitting on the bench, screams 'This is no bird, behold, a man!', laughs manically, shits in the duck pond, runs away.