EldritchFemininity

I am constantly reminded of a song from the early 2000s called Bastard by Ben Folds, especially the lyric that goes “spread the facts on the floor like a fan. Throw away the ones that make you feel bad.”

The Republican party is a cult through and through, and the way cults work is that they give the desperate and victimized an answer to their troubles. They tell them that it isn’t their fault, it’s someone else’s. Specifically, it’s the Outsider’s fault. They appeal to their emotions and create an insular bubble against anybody who says anything that goes against what they believe. Because if you aren’t with them, then you’re against them. And that makes you an Outsider, too. An enemy to be hated and vilified.

So they decide on their answers before they’ve even seen the facts, and any that don’t fit what they want can be safely discarded as the enemies’ lies poisoning their glorious truth.

And what makes this even harder to combat is that there’s a tipping point for most people beyond which it’s incredibly difficult to come back from. You have the real crazies who don’t care anymore, if the leader says babies are delicious, then they’ll start boiling cooking oil, but for most people in a cult, the thing that truly traps them even if they’ve realized that the cult is wrong, is that they’d have to admit that they’re wrong. And not just that they, themselves, are wrong, but that everything they’ve done, everything that they’ve believed, for years and years, is wrong. And it’s a rare kind of person who can look down from the summit of that mountain and accept that every step they’ve taken up it has been a step in the wrong direction.

I’m also reminded of Nazi Germany. The people turning in Jews weren’t the monsters at the top, like Heimlich Himmler, they were “good people” - the neighbor who always has a pocket full of dog treats when they go out for a walk, the owner of the local grocery store. The people you walk past every day at work or on the street. Your mother, father, aunt, or cousin. Your friends. “Bad people” are never “bad” people. They’re just people. There’s footage of Hitler that’s been floating around the web for decades at this point that people almost unanimously say is unnerving: it’s Hitler, sitting at a table outside, who turns to the person holding the camera and gets up, saying “What are you doing, filming an old man like me? I should be the one filming a beautiful girl like you!” People are unsettled by it because it’s simply Hitler being human, like anyone else. He’s not acting like the monster that we see in our heads. He’s just…a person. And that goes for all of the worst monstrosities to ever walk the planet - and the most gentle of saints. Each and every one of them is…just a person, who, like everyone else, believes that they’re the hero of their story.

It’s definitely a shower, not a grower.

It’s also 6 inches across. I don’t think my graphics card alone could fit in a 6 inch cube, let alone my full PC.

Apparently they were originally intending for it to be around the $750-800 range for the base model.

You do also have to factor in that it’s about a 6 inch cube, though, so it’s no surprise that the specs are underpowered.

I didn’t know “any license plate reader” also scanned your phone as you went by and added your dog to their database to better identify you as an individual.

They don’t just read license plates. They analyze faces/pets/distinctive clothing to ID people, scan nearby WiFi and Bluetooth signals to track devices, scan distinctive features of vehicles (dents, scratches, bumper stickers, etc) to track them even without a clear license plate, etc… Calling it a license plate reader vastly downplays their capabilities.

It’s like someone calling a fully automatic high-powered machine gun “a rabbit-hunting gun”. Sure it could be used to shoot rabbits, but that’s vastly understating the capabilities.

They definitely lost sales because of how horrible the user experience was/is, too.

Remember how the store launched without a fucking shopping cart so you had to buy each game as a separate transaction? Pepperidge Farms remembers that Epic isn’t even capable of the most basic of features required for an online store.

Of course, they’ll never get a cent out of me after they pulled that scumbag move of putting games on sale without ever asking the devs - they put games that hadn’t even released at like 50% off!