In a number-go-up kind of sense, yeah - it’s inherently gamification of social media and it is fun for some of our brains. However, I also think that karma or any other kind of “engagement accumulation” turns social media from a place of discussion into a competition for attention, where you’re more incentivized to post solely for upvotes. Only a small minority takes posting seriously like this I admit it, but it does make the experience worse for everyone.

That’s not to say the mindset doesn’t exist without karma, only that it gets amplified.

It’s just a sad state of affairs. Digital video games are 1’s and 0’s that you can copy for basically free (with the only cost being hard drive space which is dirt cheap), so preservation shouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, we live in a world where logic sometimes has to take the backseat in order to maintain the current ideology, and video game preservation is one of those sacrifices.

This time is quite different, actually. First, he learned his lesson about hiring institutionalists as his secretaries and advisors since they would push back against more questionable ideas, now he’s surrounding himself with yes-men like RFK jr, Kristi Noem and the likes. There have also been precedents set like the infamous “official act immunity”, and just many more lessons learned from 2016 in general.

There’s also just much more co-ordination now in general with the whole Project 2025.

Corruption pretty much. The director of the school would constantly pocket a lot of the public funds sent to school and then offload the cost of whatever that money was supposed to go to onto students.

One of my favorite examples of this is this tradition where last year students before graduating are supposed to leave something to the school, and our class was asked to buy new tables, with other classes having to do something stupid like that as well.

I still see the school in the news from time to time being involved in some new corruption scandal lol