extortionist

These kind of coordinated efforts come from think tanks, lobbyist groups, etc. If you look around you'll see a lot of nearly-identical bills introduced in several states more or less simultaneously, not just about this topic but about all sorts of things.

I don't think there's any requirement anywhere that legislators write their own bills. But they do have a lot of incentive to introduce bills on behalf of their larger campaign donors.

I have one and use it probably a few times a week. It's become a necessity for flight sims for me, I no longer play them outside VR.

Flight sims aren't terribly mainstream, sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's enough of a crowd between flight and racing sims who are willing to spend small fortunes on peripherals to keep VR going at some scale.

For gaming generally, there's a lot of friction that'll have to be removed before mainstream success is a possibility, I think--reducing the weight of headsets, reducing the cost, solving motion sickness, improving the game selection, improving situational awareness with the real world, reducing the setup effort, etc.

A lot of current games aren't worth the effort of dealing with all that, at least not once the novelty of VR wears off.

He leaves behind a complicated legacy. It's important to note that credible allegations of domestic abuse lead him to sell SA in the past year, and this can't be set aside.

At the same time, SA's influence on the modern internet can't be understated. The 'image macro' of early SA (maybe created by Lowtax himself, from what Fragmaster says in his video in the link) is the direct ancestor of today's common meme image--impact font text over a silly image, easily accessible to anyone who wants to post it.

Many of today's well-known internet comedians and writers grew up with the site. And it's hard to estimate how big the impact (positive or negative) of things like ADTRW leading to 4chan have been, not to mention things like the rise of Let's Play videos, or the creation and eventual shutdown of BitTorrent Barnyard (and its ensuing spinoffs).

The site itself still remains one of the last vestiges of the old internet--one of the few sites that both survived and managed not sell out and go headlong into monetization--and as a result, is one of the last sites on the modern internet that (maybe ironically) is not entirely awful.

My job is split between maintaining a giant legacy perl codebase and doing new dev work in python. I vastly prefer python overall, but perl's still the best when you need quick one-off scripts to tear through log files or do some quick regex subs on a bunch of files.

I don't think python has an equivalent of 'perl -p -i.bak -e 's/foo/bar/g' *', for example (which will do in-place regex substitutions on whichever files are passed in, additionally copying the original files to 'original.ext.bak').

The regex syntax is also bit more streamlined in perl, so I find it quicker and easier to throw together a script that's just doing regex stuff in it. A simple example:

>> $string =~ m/(pattern)/i;

>> my $match_text = $1 || '';

>> $string =~ s/pattern//gi;

>> import re

>> match_obj = re.find(r'(pattern)', string, flags=re.I)

>> match_text = ''

>> if match_obj is not None:

>> match_text = match.group(1)

>> string = re.sub(r'pattern', '', string, flags=re.I)

Of course, the same magic that makes perl great for those one-off kinds of scripts makes it less than ideal for complex or long-living scripts that need to be maintained by multiple people, in my opinion.

Rents are only a part of inflation measurements and can easily outpace the general rate.

California's recent rent control laws caps rent increases at 10% or 5% + the yearly CPI increase (whichever is less) every year, for example, explicitly allowing rent increases to outpace the general inflation rate. Personally, the rent I pay has gone up 9% this year.

Rents can change based on whether an area becomes more or less desirable, as insurance or other costs for landlords change, as ownership of rental units consolidates, etc.--that is, for many reasons that might be only tangentially connected or even completely divorced from the reasons that the costs of other goods and services are changing.

One note that seems relevant to the grandparent comment, Ravel is now owned by LexisNexis.

My office has at least a few hundred thousand lines of perl 5 (v 5.8.0) running on legacy systems, though we've switched to python for new development.

We won't be using perl 6, and suggesting it in the office would get some good laughs out of everyone who's had to work on that codebase.

I'll still write perl when I need a quick one-off script to solve the kind of problem it's good for, like throwing a bunch of regexes at a bunch of text files.

I absolutely agree with you--there is no threat of anything resembling revolution in the US today. The issue is not the self-obsession or lack of engagement the ancestor comment describes, but that e.g. Occupy Wall Street was never going to result in the actual occupation of Wall Street.

I'd argue that taking to the street and protesting is also just giving people the illusion that they're doing something useful.

The Iraq War protests were some of the largest in history, and they accomplished exactly nothing (and to your example, look up Malachi Ritscher). Occupy Wall Street was a massive movement and accomplished nothing. The protests against Obamacare repeal were massive and widespread, and seem to have only succeeded in delaying the destruction of Obamacare to the current tax bill. Black Lives Matter is a massive movement that has accomplished meaningful change in a few jurisdictions and nationwide has managed to at least generate conversation, but that conversation has already been largely derailed to the question of whether or not football players need to stand for the national anthem.

Office holders are not beholden to people yelling in the streets but to the people who get them elected. This means the people who show up to vote and, increasingly, the people who finance their campaigns.

Agreed with this. I wouldn't take a 4-day weekend to do interviews and a homework assignment unless I was desperate or already out of a job.