EldritchFemininity

I never said otherwise. I said that the economy does better under Dems than Republicans. That doesn’t mean that it’s the way things should be done, just that under Dems jobs are added to the economy rather than lost and the national debt grows at a slower rate than under Republicans. Between the two, the economy objectively does better under Dems.

I simply was saying that the “Biden bad because brown people and the economy broke because woke” narrative is a farce no matter how you look at it.

Your timescale is skewed. You’re either young, pushing a narrative, or both, so let me describe how things look historically from a sample size that actually matters. 2 presidents is not a big sample size.

Starting in the 80s, the American economy began to decline and the national debt began to rise under Reagan and politicians like him - trickle down economics had begun. In the late 90s, a president balanced the budget and actually began reducing the national debt (by cutting funding to social security and other less than stellar actions). That would be Clinton. And then along came Bush Jr and the post 9/11 forever war in the Middle East. Ever since the start of the Iraq war, the national debt has risen like an ICBM. I remember when news channels talked with disbelief about Bush possibly doubling the national debt within a year.

So it’s 2008, Bush just finished up his second term, and hundreds of thousands of people have lost everything in the 2008 depression (except for Bush’s rich friends. They got government bailouts and made bank buying up all the poor people’s houses). So, what now? Now, a black man who runs on a campaign of changing things for the better wins the election in a landslide, and tries to do most of what he promised. The economy sees large amounts of growth and jobs added, and the spiraling of the national debt slows down. However, Republicans vow to never let a black man do anything in the White House and the Democrats capitulate before the fight ever starts, so Obama is hamstrung and despite trying, ends up being forced by Republicans shutting down the government to not fulfill any of his campaign promises in his two terms (except for installing a healthcare system that Republicans fought tooth and nail against because it makes it illegal for health insurance companies to kick cancer patients off their health insurance and then refuse to cover them for having a preexisting condition: cancer).

Now it’s 2016 and a man who ran on a campaign of undoing everything the black man before him did and the promise of kicking out all the politicians that he’s been friends with since his big business days in the 80s has been elected. And what does he do? He spends the first 2 years largely going line by line and undoing every single thing that the black man did while in office, and then spends the next 2 years mostly giving tax breaks and government money to the friends he said he would kick out and “drain the swamp” while the national debt once again rises like a tide in a swamp and the economy stagnates. Then 2019 hits and the economy collapses again under a worldwide pandemic, just a month after he got rid of the office the black man set up to prevent a pandemic.

So now it’s 2020 and the country has just elected the old guy who was the black guy’s right hand man. He campaigned on not rocking the boat and keeping the course. Nothing exciting, but we’ll see what happens. True to form, 4 years of stabilization happen. The debt slows down, the economy sees jobs come back, and things are looking a little more calm.

Then, in 2025 the old guy who was so upset about the black guy comes back and his swampy friends are right behind him. The debt begins to balloon and the economy starts to shudder under the weight of global tariffs and worldwide uncertainty of a possible trade war against friend and foe alike. And that’s just in the first 3 months of the year.

Tl;dr: the economy consistently grows under democrat presidents and the national debt slows down. Under Republicans, the economy shrinks and the debt skyrockets. This stays fairly consistent the farther back you go, but Reagan is an important point in this because he started trickle down economics and showed the Republicans that big government can be good for them, too, so long as they hold the purse strings, and Bush is the other important point because he’s the tipping point for when the debt went from manageable to using a sink to try to put out a burning building.

makes me wonder if people will go with whatever works well enough and for the least amount of effort.

This has always been the case. People want something that just works right out of the box, and familiarity will keep a lot of people from considering anything else.

I’ve been talking for a long time now with a friend of mine about how sick we are of Windows, and more recently about how I’m planning on installing Linux on a spare HDD I have before making the commitment to getting rid of Windows entirely, and he’s decided to go to 11 despite hating it because he’s afraid of trying something new and having to learn a new system.

And it’s not just a computer thing. People can and will hurt themselves by repeating the same mistakes because it’s the familiar habit and doing something new - even if it’s for your own good - is scarier. Been there, done that, plenty of times.

Why would you smear Charlie like this? He died protecting our 2nd amendment rights, a noble sacrifice just like he said we need, and by showing any empathy, you’re doing a lot of damage.

The King James version was also written to specifically reword the Bible to include as many references to a monarchy as possible in the hopes of propagandizing the population during a time when kings were losing their heads at an alarming rate in Europe.

“If God truly does exist, he more so loves the atheist who questions the world around him than the Christian who blindly follows.”

Thomas Jefferson

50% of the Founding Fathers were agnostic or atheist. My question is: why does she hate America?

I don’t disagree that this isn’t the right community for this, but it is at least more useful to know because this is the head of US immigration, and so people outside the US should be aware of the caliber of people that we’ve put in power over people visiting our country. Like the tourist who got deported upon entering the country on vacation because he had a meme image of a bald Vance.

There’s another comment further up about a statistic showing that people who pirate content are more likely to spend more money on content as well compared to people who don’t pirate content. It seems that there’s a correlation between people who pirate things and people who care about the ethical treatment of creators. Stuff like people who pirate music from Spotify and then spend money to buy the music from the band on Bandcamp.

In that context, I have an even harder time caring about people pirating from the megacorps when they’re supporting creators at the same time. That’s closing in on Robin Hood style activities at that point.

Buddy, where have you been the past 20 years? The kids who were boots on the ground are now in their late 30s and 40s, and many of them are staunchly anti-military thanks to their experiences.

The US military runs one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the world, from Hollywood movies and TV commercials to Raytheon funding colleges and recruitment officers walking the halls of high schools. Their entire thing is tricking impressionable young kids into doing the dirty work for the wealthy. When I was in college, the seniors in the game design program were working on a VR boot camp scenario in Second Life that the army wanted to take with them to schools as a recruitment tool.

But no war like the culture war, I guess.

I’m not sure exactly what you mean by why this stuff matters, but the stuff that you’d be generating with AI for a game wouldn’t be a loading screen or something - it would be assets. Character models, weapons, buildings, textures, voices, that’s the kind of stuff that companies want to generate with AI. Right now, you can buy stock assets to use, and that’s where all the garbage asset flips come from, but companies want to replace employees with software that makes their own assets for them for cheap. Replace the people who make games with software that spits out gacha products. But if they aren’t protected under copyright, then any asset flipper can use your main character - taking the model right from your AAA game - and throw it into their 99-cent asset flip scam, and you can’t do anything about it.

I believe Steam has the policy on AI that they do both because of public opinion about the use of AI (and the way it’s being used to steal from creators) and because AI generated games tend to fall into the same category of outright scams that NFT games do, and games containing NFTs are straight up banned from Steam.

Edit: Going back and reading through the article, I see that they were straight up putting in AI generated images into the game as skins and loading screens and stuff. These also fall under the asset flip thing, especially if they’re so obvious that they have six fingers like the zombie Santa. The same goes for their social media promotional material. You can just straight up use CoD’s ads for your own game and they can’t do anything about it.

People are upset by the use of it because of the poor quality, and, as I said, these companies want to replace the people who make games with software that churns out slop to consume. They think of gamers as pigs at a trough and developers as leeches stealing their hard earned profits.

Hostages are taken from their homes or jobs with the express intent to threaten their lives, and exchange them for a political outcome.

While this describes them perfectly.

According to a US judge last year, “boneless chicken wings” does not mean the chicken wings don’t have bones in them.

I’ve always held to the rule of divide your age in half and add 7 as a good judge of the absolute youngest age you should consider dating someone.

At 18, that would mean 16 is the youngest they should consider dating. At 38, it would be 26.

I’m right around the same age as you, and I feel much the same way. I can relate to and was on very good terms with the high school kids I used to work with at my old job all through my late 20s, but I could never imagine myself dating someone who is in college or just graduated. Even at that age, people are still developing so much and lack life experience that it’s hard to relate to them on the same level. I could relate to them in the same way as the kids I worked with, in a “I remember what it was like to be that age” kind of way, but that’s about it.

I thought you were OP, so add their line about democracy being driven from the bottom up to your post and tell me if you can see the “If you people had just voted for the Democrats harder” in there.

Because usually when people talk like that, they’re leading up to blaming the Democrats losing on x group (usually either Millennials or a minority) not voting hard enough.

Also because voting is supposed to be the easiest action you can take, but for so many, even that is a risk to the roof over their head and the food in their bellies. The system has been rigged to the point where even the most basic of rights aren’t guaranteed, and we need to provide that for people if they’re ever going to be able to act.

My point is that for many people in this country, that’s practically an impossible task. You can either choose to vote in your gerrymandered district and get fired for taking a day off from work under right to work laws, or you can put food on the table. You can take the time off of work to get a license you may or may not ever use beyond proof under voter ID laws, again at risk of losing your job.

The people who can and don’t because their rights aren’t up for debate every 4 years are one thing. But many of us are already political by necessity, and it means nothing in the end.

Voting harder isn’t going to fix things.

Fuck that and the fuck the ADL. There is no unity to be had with fascists.

The system was designed from the ground up to make sure only the right kind of people had an actual say in it. The people at the top make damn sure that the people at the bottom have as little freedom to act on their right to vote as possible.

US media loves to go on about the horrible working conditions in China, claiming 11-hour days and all kinds of other sweatshop working conditions because nothing sells like a good tragedy, but nobody talks about the working conditions at home and talking amongst ourselves is often made difficult, either by cultural or business practices. It’s illegal to punish employees for talking about how much they make with each other, but that doesn’t stop businesses from doing it anyway, because people here simply don’t know their rights as a worker and companies love to take advantage of it. So we think we have a clear grasp of how the Chinese live while still believing that people here work 40-hour weeks and somewhere in the cultural zeitgeist is still the belief that people can afford a house with a white picket fence, a dog/cat, and 2.5 kids on one person’s salary.