“Once we have enough information on our elected officials, they will most certainly align with our interests” is a beautiful idea. But simply not born out in practice.

Far too often, you can have someone on camera dead-to-rights doing the most corrupt shit imaginable and… they’ll win in a landslide in the next election cycle, because they’re doling out the red meat to the right constituents.

Should no basic, inexpensive vehicles be produced

I’m all for basic, inexpensive vehicles. This isn’t basic, it’s threadbare. And it isn’t inexpensive, either.

Also, this one is electric.

Why do you think Americans have to spend so much more money on an electric vehicle than their international peers?

We have an acre

Must be nice.

You can get a flatbed pickup for $25k if it’s not brand new. And it does the job just as well as whatever this thing is.

Correct

Go to the garden store, buy 20 bags of mulch

I can’t afford a car, but I’ve got a house with a yard that needs that much mulch?

Of the 100 or so options available at launch, 33 percent cost under $100, 50 percent are under $250, and 80 percent are under $500.

It just looks like they’re going to nickel and dime people for every little thing. Car meets DLC.

DOW is just his name in capital letters

Dow stands for Charlies Dow, the co-founder of Dow Jones & Company.

DOW is back over 51k. That means everything is good and nobody is allowed to complain.

It’s never been a better time to cash out those 401ks full of tech stocks.

Why can they keep up both output and quality?

A lot of games produced under the Capcom brand are merely financed by Capcom and developed by smaller studios. Like how GameFreak makes Pokemon games for Nintendo. Clover Studio produces a bunch of indie games under the Capcom banner. Ninja Theory produced several of the Devil May Cry releases. Inti Creates spun out of the old Megaman team to keep turning out new titles when the franchise lapsed. Pragmata was built by a fully independent development team inside Capcom.

And… idk about “quality”. They’re as prone to releasing a flop as anyone. They just turn out a lot of iterative and derivative materials. Why are there 18 different Ace Attorney games over 24 years? Because there’s just not a lot going on between versions, mostly. Same reason the Megaman franchise could turn over so quickly. One basic engine could support a plethora of titles.

they need to be like 60% off

I just buy the game when it gets under $30.

🏴‍☠️

Even past that, you can find sub-$10 quality games all over the various online platforms.

I’m old enough to remember a friend in college blowing $1200 on double-GeForce cards so he could max out specs on Oblivion. And from that perspective, gaming has always been unaffordable. But you don’t have to game like this. Nobody needs to go four figures out of pocket to play Slay the Spire or Dwarf Fortress or even Counterstrike.

The notion that Bungie was some kind of golden goose prior to the Sony deal really relies on you ignoring how much the studio had floundered over the last decade.

This more speaks to how hard up Sony executives were, being forced to pick through the trash bin at Microsoft.

Halo was the reason most people bought an Xbox

Nicknamed it “The Halo Playing Machine”, because I dropped $300 on the box my senior year of high school and that was the only game I owned for two full years.

They’ve been in the middle of remastering Halo because it’s the best thing the company ever produced and still sells copies.

I wouldn’t want them to stick to single player. But I also don’t think the company that made the original game really exists anymore. The Leads and Senior Devs have all either cashed out or gone elsewhere. What we have left is a collection of IP managed by an increasingly detached set of business sociopaths.

I wonder if it’d be worth it to valve to start producing ram.

They’d need to source the components outside of the increasingly monopolistic US-alligned group of hardware manufacturers. The only way you end run the Big Three is to go to… CHINA. And we’ve layered so many sanctions, tariffs, and putative measures on import of Chinese hardware that it would be a fool’s errand to bother.

I don’t know if there’s a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.

Even if there’s an AI crash, the long-term outlook for chip demand only goes up. The problem isn’t with the economic demand, it’s with the provisioning of capital. For the most part, you need to spend tens - if not hundreds - of billions of dollars to start producing even the middle tier of nano-computing components in modern use.

I might suggest there’s another way to tackle this problem. And it’s one that Valve already is heavily invested in.

Lower resolution games. Lower hardware requirements. More efficient software engines. More games focused on the mechanics and story than the raw, realistic visuals.

You can run Doom on a pregnancy test and people still buy that game. Games like “Undertale” and “Vampire Survivors” do incredibly well in part because they are so accessible to anyone with a 15-year-old rig. Rather than trying to build a PS5-killer machine, you can go the Nintendo route and build a novel interface that runs on more basic components. Then you exploit the hell out of your Disney-esque IP without worrying that Halo: Remastered Delux Ultra looks better than the next iteration of Metroid Prime.

Now you’re just bragging.

even casual drinking increases your risk of cancers by alot

Not according to the CDC. Binge drinking carries a host of risks, even if done infrequently. Moderate (ie, less than 2 drinks a day) drinking is generally not associated with negative health impacts.

also besides alcohol is use to subdue a population from causing an uprising.

I’ve heard both sides of this. Beer as an intoxicant reducing the population to drunken louts, incapable of self-defense. And beer as a social lubricant, capable of bringing people together for collective action.

I don’t think the alcohol is the proximate cause, either way. Certainly, there have been a multitude of hard-drinking Revolutionaries and Reactionaries alike (Hoffbrau’s were popular with both Lenin and Hitler). Meanwhile, Prohibition as a public policy was largely used to harass the working poor and monopolize production/imports into the hands of well-positioned political insiders.