Government-sponsored facial recognition aside, I was gonna celebrate this as a rare event of a government doing something right, but then

The measures don’t apply to researchers or to what machine translation of the rules describes as “algorithm training activities” – suggesting images of citizens’ faces are fair game when used to train AI models.

and I feel like that undermines the entire idea, since you can easily hide behind that excuse and not give a shit. And given previous circumstances, I feel like a lot of companies are gonna get away with it.

I feel like it’d be wise to wait for further developments. Valve is notorious for being horrible at communication, but even then it’s rare that they do something like this without some sort of reason. It still sucks that Valve shut this down after 8 years, but it’s hard to know anything for certain until either side comes out with more information, especially with how stupid Valve’s legal team can be sometimes. Could be that they just backpedal and say it’s alright in a few days, who knows.

Of course, trusting Valve is always as risky as trusting any other corporation, given they have a bit of a track record with tolerating and even outright allowing gambling with skins, but this could easily be their legal team being overzealous yet again as well.

Seems a bit early to tell if this will have much of a lasting effect. So-called economic “shock therapies” have a long history of working for a year or so, and then unraveling later. And especially for Argentina, the cycle of decades of growth followed by decades of recession has been going on for a while now. I’ll be genuinely impressed if he manages to actually fix the economy long-term, but that still remains to be seen.

This was maybe the most pathetic coup attempt in recent years (excluding jan 6th and brazil’s jan 8th because they both wouldn’t have worked as actual coups regardless). At least some part of the military was clearly in on it too, but they didn’t even stop the representatives from voting to invalidate the declaration, and even worse, it was attempted while the opposition nearly had a supermajority, and with an incredibly disliked president.

Maybe this is overthinking it, but why would you ever try a coup without at least some popular support? Yeah, it doesn’t matter what the people think as far as making it happen, but lack of popular support often leads to a lot of instability, and the first one to die in an unstable dictatorship is often the guy at the top.

The whole capitalization of pronouns thing was pretty much entirely made up around the 19th century anyway (as well as the capitalizing the word “Lord”, which the King James version invented outright), so you can argue that protestant churches are following a woke plot to change the pronouns of the christian god as well.

Given the historical record on attempts at Mercosur-EU trade deals, this is likely to fail yet again, since the EU’s agricultural voting bloc (mostly in France and Italy) doesn’t really want the market to be populated by cheaper products from abroad (at least not any more than it already is). But at this point, given the several ongoing food crises that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused, the chances for a successful agreement are about as high as they can go, so they might as well go for it.