Problem is that would require you to volunteer, donate, hit the pavement.

Me, a lowly peon, glancing around my subway: "Damn, miss those benches."

You, a CEO at Terminally Online Industries: "It's your own fault for failing to single-handedly solve homelessness."

If you don’t think trump’s real desired version

It's Steven Miller's vision. But, again, it's just an extension of the existing carceral state. Trump/Miller aren't dreaming up anything that didn't already exist under Ronald Wilson Reagan's California governorship. The only thing they're changing is volume.

trump hates getting stopped

Him and every other politico to the right of John McCain and the left of AOC. Only liberals have a fetish for being told "No".

He would love for all of those to be gone.

To paraphrase the great political theorist November Kelly, "I hate when the government defends itself against my team. I love when the government defends itself against the other team."

Trump doesn't need these organs gone. He has them fully co-opted by his MAGA co-conspirators and billionaire friends. Once he's out of office, he 100% wants a muscular SCOTUS to hold up the stop sign in front of every Barack Obama who enters office in his wake. He wants a Senate that gets nothing done under Democrats for the same reason he wants a rubber stamp from his fellow republicans.

The modern democratic system exists as a ratchet to the benefit of fascists. And Trump loves that the ratchet turns his way.

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

I'm from Texas. From my experience, it could apply to anyone over here or east straight on to Florida. Nevermind the nightmare politics of the upper midwest or the fascist fuckwit colony of Idaho.

Revisiting my old hobbies and - by turns - finding out some of this stuff was dumb shit for babies and some of this stuff was absolutely fucking impossible how did I ever get it to work at all when I was twelve?!

• Lands on Mars

• Attempts to turn Martian sand into glass panes

• It doesn't work

Omg. On Mars we will never experience Windows.

the horrible trump’s version.

Is just the existing immigration system expanded to more people.

And he’s taken that approach because the slow machinery of government doesn’t let him simply wipe the slate clean

Trump doesn't want to eliminate our carceral state. He's quite happy with the function of the government and simply wants to expand it.

I looked at this and assume the person who authored the survey had worded it:

Which Do You Prefer?

• Socialism

• Communism

• No Opinion

Specifically to create a troll graphic for FOX.

Btw, Cato Institute is a fucking Libertarian hothouse of business psychos and CSAM consumers. Take everything they put out with a grain of salt, even it's a surface level "Oh, that's good for us".

You get more and more immersed in right wing propaganda as you get older. You get exposed to more reactionary institutions, you find yourself increasingly segregated from people of different races and income scales, you suffer the psychological torments of the capitalist rat race more nakedly, and it all adds up.

Lots of people I grew up with in high school are Trump Republicans now. They weren't MAGA shitheads in school, mostly because they were blank slates. They were warm to ideas like "Free College" when they were in college and cooled on it once they graduated (or flunked out). They were "moderate" when they had friends who were coming out of the closet and dealing with racial abuse and coming home in body bags during the Iraq War. But they grew increasingly right-wing when the law firm and the O&G offices and techbro money orgies demanded it of them.

Even before AI started straight up poisoning people's brains, they were getting into Facebook groups and Discord channels that rotted them. Nevermind the endless barrage of NYT / WaPo "Why These Trump Voters Need To Be Listened To" articles and CBS / ABC "Transgender Athletes: A Threat To Your Kid's Scholarship?" TV slop that drives so many liberals insane. Nevermind the Zionists, those nice sweet liberal folks whose faces melt right off the moment you suggest butchering millions of brown people might be bad Middle East policy.

Fucking sucks, but time really does turn people rightward when you live in a fascist hellhole.

Two of the most despicable libertarian oil pushing fuck nuts

Technically only one fucknut left from the original four. They Ayn Rand'd themselves sequentially and now the organization they run is mostly burning cash on vanity shit for libertarian baby-brains. But at its height, they were a terror.

Even past this, I think we undersell the socializing value of public schools. This is particularly true of the big state universities, where you're going to be bumping shoulders with people from the opposite side of the state (even the other side of the country). But even public high schools have a way of co-mingling people from the other side of the tracks for one reason or another.

They are surrounded by people of the same financial ability, and their job keeps them in an area, and their income matches to a house.

Absolutely this. Bigger cities can kinda-sorta avoid this. But the people you know best are going to be your coworkers and your neighbors, strictly by virtue of proximity. One of the perks of social institutions like churches and gyms is that you butt up against people who aren't perfectly parallel with you in terms of socio-economic status.

My point is, it won’t happen to everyone

Sure. Nothing happens to everyone (except the one big thing).

But it happens to enough people such that it shapes general public perceptions and vibes.

I grew up in a conservative hellhole, one that may or may not have one of the most corrupt and theocratic governments of any state, if that gives you any hints.

But I agree, it cuts both ways. I wasn't a raging leftist in high school. I flirted with Republicans, because they were in the majority. I flirted with Libertarianism, because it seemed like they agreed me on a few things at least. I flirted with the local liberal establishments, because it at least looked like a runway towards progressive policies.

You can only see so much corruption, insincerity, and complicity before it drives you to the fringes. If I wasn't a fire-breathing leftist tankie wumao third-worlder Bookchin afficianado, I guess I would have ended up doing QAnon shit from the strain of it all.

that’s not being a blank slate though

It's people who don't have a strong opinion because they haven't been bombarded with a particular flavor of social media yet.

A twenty-year-old is going to have a different view of alternative ethnic groups than a forty-year-old, simply by way of psychological attrition. You can only get so many "Black Man With Sour Face In Orange Jumpsuit" local news jump-scare stories before the racism is bludgeoned into your gray matter.

Trump is shit. The SCOTUS is shit. But this policy of arbitrary protected status for very select groups of immigrations is also shit.

Going back to the Nixon Era, we've had this policy of promising to reform immigration to make it more logical and more practical. At every turn, we invent new special categories and exceptions and weird litmus tests that make the process more and more cumbersome and byzantine. Ronald Reagan wanted to admit a bunch of anti-communist refugees as a fuck-you to the USSR. Bill Clinton wanted a Wet-Foot Dry-Foot policy to cage off certain Cuban migrants and limit their impact on the Florida voter pool. Bush Jr wanted "Guest Worker" visas to flood the labor market with the cheap laborers we'd kept at arms length under NAFTA. Obama wanted DACA exclusively for kids under a certain age, mostly because they were more photogenic than their parents.

We admit people because of some wars and some natural disasters, but deport people because of sudden shifts in foreign policy or a smear campaign by reactionary media. We grant temporary status and then yank it away, because it gives us leverage over foreign espionage agents and business interests. We demand people strictly follow a complex and contradictory set of laws, then arrest them at their Green Card hearings because it's easier than chasing down folks on expired student visas. We deny people citizenship because we don't like their social media history. We admit people because we're enthusiastic about their terminally online shitposts.

It's all garbage and easy for a court to exploit precisely because it's so confused. Rather than establishing a universal standard of basic rights for all residents, we continue to adhere to a tiered system precisely because it offers us an excuse to lock people up en mass, rob them as they try to legally cross the border, and abuse them in custody both at home and in our black sites abroad.

It all fucking sucks. And - in a better world - we'd have a party enthusiastic about wiping the whole board and laying a new universal foundation for human rights both at home and abroad. We won't. But moments like this illustrate why we should.

🏴‍☠️

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.

If only...

Firing a large group of people and re-hiring a subset at reduced rates is a standard business practice used to keep wages down. This wasn't a mistake in policy, it was a clumsy execution.

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.

You'd like to think that the new Ultra-Left Tankie Mayor will reverse course on this kind of policy.

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.