Population contraction and major shifts in wages compared to cost of living.

I enjoy plex but the sync feature being missing isn’t saying much. It barely works on plex too. 😝

These kinds of conversations make me miss WASTE.

If they talk bad about other people, especially if you don’t know the would-be friend very well. If they’ll bad mouth other people to you they’re gonna bad mouth you to other people.

You’re not far off. Any license for collectibles certainly restricts the print run to ratios determined by the licensor. The person granting a license doesn’t want the person using the license to devalue it.

I think you may be conflating fakes with counterfeits. While technically not “fake” cards they were fraudulent counterfeits. I know it’s muddy as frequently fraud and forgery and fake and counterfeit are used somewhat interchangeably colloquially but they aren’t all the same thing.

Counterfeit was the term they used in the lawsuit so I reflected that, though it’s usually used to imply a believable forgery. Counterfeit is the correct term but I can see the confusion as usually counterfeits are a fake product pretending to be real. This is a “real” product that is not supposed to be sold.

Upper deck was not licensed to make cards for the US market. Even if they were - they are not allowed to just print whatever cards they wanted. The ratios, print runs, and distribution were predetermined by Konami per their license and contract.

So they were printing genuine productions of the cards - but without a license to do so. Then they began selling those behind Konami in a market they weren’t permitted to distribute in. Upper deck took all the profit from those sales. That’s multiple levels of fraud.

I’m honestly surprised UD somehow managed to survive the lawsuit. Konami had a slam dunk. They had to have paid Konami some ungodly amount of money to get out from under that, not to mention the personal legal liability of whatever executives were involved in scheming up that fraud.

Upper Deck was the king of sports trading cards and even though they were making hundreds of millions in the 80s, they got caught creating counterfeit versions of the most desirable cards to make even more money. Once they got caught there wasn’t much to be done as it wasn’t actually illegal for them to do so. It soured the collectors market for a long long time.

Circle back around to around 2000 and upper deck somehow got a license to print Yugioh cards in Europe. Only, they decided to start also making counterfeit cards of the 10 most desirable cards and made 50K of each of them and started seeding the collector market in the US by selling them in the states to make even MORE money. It wasn’t long before they got caught and then sued and settled out of court for some insane amount of money.

Somehow they’re still around and printing sports cards. It’s kind of mind boggling.

White noise. The white noise knocks me out almost immediately.

I love they have to sensationalize the title because if they said “raised prices by a dollar” most folks would wonder why it’s a headline.

What kind of antiperspirant are you using that doesn’t require soap to remove it? They almost always have a residue that keeps them in place that doesn’t normally just wash off.

I don’t disagree with you on alternatives but again it’s challenging for the technical folks amongst our peer groups to help adoption of an alternative if we can’t provide places for the folks we support to download the alternative and try it

There’s no way for any of my family or friends to understand how to build their own browser, let alone setup a WSL2 environment to make it work. Their eyes are going to glaze over at the thought then they’re going to go download something else.

They don’t even have builds. How can we support tools the bulk of users can’t easily implement or recommend non technical people to try?