i don't have kids, so i understand that i'm missing context.

would i take the games away from my own kids? what i want to say is that i'd raise kids that wouldn't want to play them. i mean, i never wanted to play; i was often around them, but i never had any real interest in them. i know it's not that easy...

i guess what i can honestly state is that i can be fairly confident that i wouldn't buy them games, no matter how much they'd ask. i just wouldn't do that to them, i'd consider it negligent. and, they could cry and yell and scream, and i wouldn't give a fuck - i have good headphones. this point i'm confident on: i would not give the games to them, so i would not have to confiscate them. and, to the extent that i could screen gifts from relatives, i'd screen any kind of video games out.

beyond that, i'd have to recognize and acknowledge a deficit of control. i think i'd have the right to decide what i give to the kid as a gift as that is my own will, and the right to opt to give them other things, but i wouldn't have the right to interfere at too great a level beyond that. and, if i were to end up with a kid that wants to live in some other person's house and rot their brains out with game systems all day, i'd have to accept it and let the kid go.

but, i would hope that the issue just wouldn't arise, that i'd raise a kid that is inquisitive and thoughtful enough to think that video games are boring......because they are boring, and the fact is that the smart kids will get that on their own without being forced away from them.

i'm sorry, but trump is good at picking targets.

i'm simply not going to stand up for gamers. no solidarity at all...

i guess that my position is that if this is an excuse to shut down the gaming industry, which i'd like to see shut down anyways, however bad an excuse it really is, then i'll take it for what it is.

read a book. play guitar. do anything but that...

would i support a ban on video games?

i would consider it to be about as effective as banning guns, namely not very. but, it may have a more net positive cultural effect. the gaming industry is really, truly a scourge on society and, whether it's responsible for mass shootings or not, it's not having a very positive effect on young men. i'd be happy to see the whole thing evaporate.

as mentioned over and over again, i don't believe in banning things. but, if a movement were to arise to ban gaming, i wouldn't be likely to stand in solidarity with the people opposed to it, either. i'd be more likely to stand back and let it happen, sort of thing.

nor would i consider a proposed ban on video games to be something that i'd vote against, if i otherwise liked a candidate's positions on other issues.

to be clear: i don't think that the gaming industry is the cause of anything, but i think it's popularity is a symptom of a fundamentally sick culture and a fundamentally broken society. i want to get at root causes.

but, i actually wouldn't want to interfere with an anti-gaming movement, at all. good riddance, if it comes to it...

what was osx86?

when i first bought the new recording pc back in early 2007, i wanted to cover all of my bases, so i initially intended a four-way boot process: xp-32, vista-64, debian and osx86. i built the machine with this goal in mind, explicitly.

it didn't take long for me to scratch vista off the list. i didn't have drivers for my older hardware, and it just didn't seem worth the effort. xp was faster and more stable and i could nlite it, whereas i was stuck with a buggy vista that i knew wasn't tested right (because i worked vista tech support, at the time). but, i hung on to debian for a while, until i needed the extra hard drive space.

osx86 was the last to get dropped on a machine that still runs an nlited xp-32 and, at this point, probably always will. the logic was that i might run across some music software that was mac only, and i would consequently need some way to get to at least a unix-like environment to run it.

but, it never actually happened, and, by mid-2013, i'd decided that it was never going to happen. so, i wiped the drive to get some extra space.

running the apple os on a pc isn't so strange anymore, since they started shipping on x86 architecture. the problem nowadays is not the processor, but a proprietary bios chip that you need to get around. but, at the time, there was a small community dedicated to figuring this out, and i was able to get relatively far on what i had.

you can read about that here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackintosh

or, if you want economic language, which you might falsely think is more rigorous (economics is not a science. sorry.), the way to describe what i just said in economese is to point out that the health care industry is a classic example of what is called a market failure.

first, let's make sure we understand what a market failure is:
https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/HighSchool/MarketFailures.html

and, here's your google search:
https://www.google.ca/search?newwindow=1&ei=qx1JXfiFKYnu_QbO-YH4CA&q=health+care+market+failure

so, that's why you can't do that.

what?

it's on youtube, actually.

good history lesson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Debate

so, what's with this idea that you can just put single payer healthcare and private insurance on the table and have them compete with each other? isn't that reasonable? won't the best option work out?

this is an idea being pushed by buttigieg mostly, by i think also by o'rourke.

in canada, as well as other countries like the uk, we call this a two-tier health care system. and, we call it that for a reason - because we know the private insurance packages will provide better choice. see, and i think this is the cultural difference that probably explains why americans don't have a public system in the first place....

if you tell canadians or brits or most other europeans that a two-tier system will offer greater health care in the private sector, we'll react by saying that's unfair. so, we will reject the two-tier system because it offers an inequality of outcome, and we believe to our core that this is something we should all have equal access to. i haven't seen a study, but i'm not convinced americans will have the same reaction. rather, i might expect americans will prefer the option that gives them greater access over their fellow citizens, because they care more about maximizing their own self-interest. fuck your neighbour, right? that's the american way.

i consequently realize that i need to be a little bit careful about the language that i'm using, if i'm addressing a mostly american audience.

we have a case study, namely quebec. quebec was a french colony that was conquered by the british in the french & indian war, aka the seven years war, a mere couple of years before the american revolution. in a sense, it's kind of like texas or california - an area that was initially settled by a more latin culture, in our case french and your case spanish, before it was absorbed by the anglo-american empire. i don't know what kind of lingering influence that latin civil law has had in the southwest (or southeast, including florida....or, i guess just south including louisiana), although i can say i've never heard of a case in texas or florida or california being adjudicated over civil law, but the british largely let the french keep their language and laws upon the conquest. it's tricky, and i don't want to present myself as an expert in the topic. i'm a loud, forceful advocate of the common law system as fundamental to the existence of the freedoms that we enjoy in the west; i don't think we'd have this thing called western civilization if it was left solely to the civil law. but, the point i'm getting at is that quebec has a parallel system of law to the rest of the country, so sometimes things are determined a little bit differently there.

and, a few years ago, the highest court of jurisdiction in quebec, specifically, actually declared the single payer healthcare system (which is, by definition, a monopoly on health insurance) "unconstitutional" under the quebec bill of rights. so, it's unconstitutional in quebec, but not in all of canada. and, the reason they did that was that the complainant successfully argued that it prevented people from accessing health care through parallel channels, when forced to wait in line for care through the official channels. what the court actually did (and this is based on the precedent in our abortion jurisprudence, r. v. morgantaler) was give the state a choice: increase funding to cut wait times, or give people the choice to buy their way around it. see, the reason it was deemed a human rights violation is that the monopoly on insurance, in conjunction with the wait times, amounted to a denial of service (which was the same argument they used to strike down the abortion laws). so, they'd either need to cut the wait times down or give the patient an ability to buy around it, to alleviate the human rights violation. many, many observers believe the intention of the court was to increase funding (and while judges are powerful in canada, they don't have power over the purse, that's up to parliament), and that the parliament took it as an attack on their own powers, and suspended the law out of spite.

so, in quebec, and in quebec only, you have a two-tier system. and, that means we have data. and, you know i like data.

it's pretty brutal, actually. average wait times in quebec, which are what the ruling was supposed to address, are now, by far, the highest in canada. there are doctor shortages. it's a catastrophe. and, that is all happening while the private industry is posting shorter wait times and more comprehensive care.

again: would an american see that as a problem? that's not clear to me. but, canadians recognize that the two-tier system separates care by ability to pay. it essentially allows people to buy their way into the front of the line. so, you have one system for the rich which is very fast and exclusive because it siphons resources out of the public system, and another system for everybody else that is underfunded and slow as fuck.

so, can you set private and public insurance against each other and expect them to compete on a market and determine which is better? it sounds like something nixon would say to khruschev, and it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what competition is, as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of how the health care industry works.

it sounds reasonable at first, i get that. but, please do your research on outcomes of a two-tier system, including comparing quebec to the other provinces in canada. and, ask yourself that question: do you want a system with equality of outcome, like the rest of the developed world? or do you want a system that you can buy yourself a special place in, if you can afford to do it?

when john mccain or donald trump or al gore or hillary clinton or whatever other politician or talking head goes on tv and threatens to bomb iran or iraq or whatever other country is disobeying american dictates this week in order to fuel endless expansionism, imperialism and genocide, that is a real, concrete expression of the roots of gun violence in your country.

we know the romans were barbaric. but, we don't ask why, because we know why - the romans could not have been the romans, any other way. they were a violent, warlike people that experienced aggression as a fundamental extension of who they were, as a civilization. so it is with america.

but, the country is completely blind to these truths. so it goes.

you have a country full of young men that lock themselves in their rooms and fantasy about slaughtering people.

do you think that's healthy?

you can't have the fucking debate until you can fucking define it.

coercing people to choose between "the people" or "the nra" is disingenuous and stupid. we are not with you or against you; public policy is not a binary choice. i will not be manipulated like that, and i'll tell anybody that tries to to fuck right off.

i am on the side of science, data and reason and this is all very clear from an analytical perspective rather than a contrived, emotional or politically-driven one: the united states does not have a gun control problem, the united states has a gun culture problem, part of which is reflected in the existence of the nra and, yes, part of which is reflected in the popularity of violent video games and violent movies. banning games will not work any more than banning guns will; you're missing the point. banning things never works in any context at all. you can't ban guns any more than you can ban drugs or sex or immigration, you have to look at the root causes, and the hyper-capitalistic imperialist bloodlust that the country was founded on, in genocide and slavery.

that is why you have a gun problem, and you won't address it until you stop denying it.

right now, you don't even seem to understand how to understand it. and, you are consequently doomed to continue on in failure.