Schadrach

Right, emulators aren’t illegal but a bunch of adjacent things can be - for example system BIOS/FW/encryption keys/ROMs if you don’t dump them yourself from your own personal hardware.

What got Yuzu in the crosshairs was announcing support for Tears of the Kingdom before it released, meaning they were testing their emulator on an unreleased game and the odds that every dev and tester had legitimately gotten a copy of the game before official release is so low that they weren’t about to fight it and go through discovery (which might have identified significant additional piracy on their part). It was easier to fold and settle, and probably saved them from an immense amount of fines for piracy used for testing.

I know we have citizens united but corporations are not people lol

Citizens United didn’t make corporations people. Corporate personhood had been a thing for a very long time, largely about whether or not forming a business means you lose legal rights operating under it (Does a business entity have freedom of speech? What does freedom of the press even mean in an 18th century context if it doesn’t apply to a business [aka a newspaper]?) and whether or not regular old laws prohibiting a person from doing a thing can be applied to businesses.

Talking about being able to ride a bus in the US is comical.

Depends where you live. It’s much more doable in the densest urban areas than it is somewhere rural. I have a friend who lives in Boston for example and he doesn’t have a car, at all. Because Boston’s mass transit is good enough for his routine needs. I can’t do that here, however.

(so far?) avoided falling off the right wing conspiracy cliff

People’s views typically tend to move slowly but what’s the current progressive position tends to move much faster, so if he’s young enough he’ll probably eventually fall off the progressive treadmill.

Another Chinese-owned social media.

Doesn’t that mean it’s just law enforcement noticing it exists and applying the law that bans TikTok away from also being banned?

No, no, no. Just like a tax on unrealized gains is a bad idea because of how much it would royally fuck up the stock market, including every 401(k). What they need to do instead is tax the ways used by the extremely wealthy to utilize their gains without technically realizing them, even if that sometimes means taxing debt (aka treating it as income when they borrow against it and taxing accordingly).