And yet, the 3rd parties themselves don’t seem to do anything until the Presidential election year. If they were serious, they’d be out there now, putting up candidates in the much-easier-to-win midterms, talking about how they’re really different from the entrenched parties. They don’t. They only come out of the woodwork and put up spoiler candidates for President.
How is this man in charge of anything?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Z9IpTVfUg tl;dw: people confuse action with leadership.
Going to be a beautiful, sunny day here. Nothing better to do than go hang out with some like minded humans.
Average spending is not a good metric for addictive behaviors - spending/consumption tends to be extremely concentrated in a small fraction. My go-to example for this is alcohol where, in the US, 10 drinks/week is the population average, but also enough to get you into the “top 10%” or “heavy drinker” bin, where the average consumption of that bin is 74 drinks/week. In both alcohol and gacha, a huge fraction of the population don’t pay anything.
I mean, even if the article’s $30/month average spend is entirely within their 20% “problem” spenders, it would only be $150, but it’s a little easier (for me) to see where $150/month gacha habit could be a problem for young people already on the financial edge. Not the fundamental problem that skyrocketing rent and stagnant wages are, but more in the last-straw sense.
That’s income, though, not net worth. Imagine you’ve got $250k in your 401k and you spent $250.
I think, for ‘lefties,’ the trouble is that Trump is replacing progressive income tax with regressive consumption tax. Not that US tax structure was particularly progressive, but it at least pretended. Now, the low end of the income scale, living paycheck-to-paycheck, spending everything on goods & services it going to have to spend an extra 15%, straight to federal coffers, ,while corps get a 25% tax cut and billionaires get elimination of the estate tax.
It’s schadenfreude to see billionaires lose 10 or 20% of their wealth, but they still own all the factories. They’re still going to make money, and they will make up for production reductions by reducing workforce and eliminating 100% of many worker incomes. That is why all the economists are crying recession: consumption taxes reduce consumption, reduced consumption reduces employment, unemployment reduces consumption.
It kind of amazes me that, in this day and age, email has turned out to be the lynchpin of security. Email as a 2FA endpoint. Email password reset systems. If email is compromised, everything else falls. They used to tell us not to put anything in email that you wouldn’t put on a postcard…how did this happen?
I don’t watch streamers, but I’ll watch videos like ‘which is the best weapon for [X]’ or ‘how to optimize production in [X].’ I’ve watched stream highlights like SovietWomble’s bullshittery, or IAmCrusty’s psychopathic VR vids. Once you get stuff like that into your YouTube algorithm, there’s a lot of it. It’s gaming content you can consume when location or time constraints won’t let you actually game, and that’s a larger chunk of my day than when I can sit down and play.
You can’t have stream highlights without a stream. Even if no one watches the stream, the infrastructure and technologies have to be there. And I can see where some audience members of those highlights would be attracted to the raw stream, trying to catch the ‘good stuff’ live, the same way some people watch NASCAR hoping to see crashes as they happen.
You forget that a lot of the country thinks its problems can all be solved by jailing or shooting the appropriate target. Words bad; punishment good.
Yeah, if this is what it takes to get new design nuclear facilities in the US, then I’m counting it a win, but I won’t count it either way until the watts come out. Who knows: if they run ok, an actual power company might even try one.
Thank god he can’t run for President. I don’t think he’d be satisfied being one-among-many Senators or Representatives. Governor of Texas, though…
It’s fascinating to watch. Vance, the old-school spin doctor, using euphemism, misdirection and weaseling to not-techincally-lie (eg, we want a national “standard” for abortion, not a national ban) versus Trump who just goes all-out loud, easily disproven, total bullshit. And that side seems to like Trump better, like they’ve been trained to recognize the used-car-salesman shtick, so it makes them uncomfortable even if they don’t recognize the lies, but the loud liar just cows any chance of disbelief with sheer volume.
I feel like there’s really interesting psychology to study there, among the…let’s say “reality challenged” population, if anyone could figure out how to recruit them.
It’s not socialism if it’s for me.
Zebrafish need that rhythmic activity to form heart valves. They have unidirectional flow before the valves form, through some magic of resonance and pressure waves reflecting off arterial curves, and the resonance results in (IIRC) a stagnant spot where the valves will form. Do something to interfere with the mechanics and no valves form.
And X-windows. There’s a few server tasks that I just find easier with gui, and they feel kind of laggy over 1G. Not to mention an old Windows program running in WINE over Xwin. All kind of things you can do, internally, to eat up bandwidth.
Yeah, it’s the screening that’s free. If that turns something up, then it transitions to “care.”
I’ve had the same experience with “wellness” check-ups: if I mention some complaint to the doc during the visit, it suddenly becomes “visit with complaint” and costs me $120.
Fun fact: for people over 45, colonoscopy screening for cancer is always free. If your insurance tries to make you pay for it, report them to your state insurance commissioner or the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. ACA made a lot of preventative medicine & screenings free.
I’d say colonoscopy, esp if you’re over 45, but those are required by law to have no out-of-pocket costs, regardless.
As an old fart, I actively dislike photorealistic graphics in most cases. I’m playing a game, and I kind of want it to look like a game, which generally means more surrealistic - exaggerated contrast, high saturation, low texture - than realistic. I’d rather play where the characters look like caricatures than my next door neighbor. And that doesn’t even go into great games with sprite-like graphics.
Enough is enough. You’ve saturated the art budget, it’s time to pay writers more.
It really depends on what your data is and how hard it would be to recreate. I keep a spare HD in a $40/year bank box & rotate it every 3 months. Most of the content is media - pictures, movies, music. Financial records would be annoying to recreate, but if there’s a big enough disaster to force me to go to the off-site backups, I think that’ll be the least of my troubles. Some data logging has a replica database on a VPS.
My upload speed is terrible, so I don’t want to put a media library in the cloud. If I did any important daily content creation, I’d probably keep that mirrored offsite with rsync, but I feel like the spirit of an offsite backup is offline and asynchronous, so things like ransomware don’t destroy your backups, too.