EldritchFemininity

All they know is that they lived through the Red Scare

Are living in the Red Scare. It never ended, even though the Cold War did. They’re still preaching the same anti-USSR propaganda to the kids today that they were in the 60s. You need look no further than the Republicans calling Obama a communist because he took a course on Communism in college. You know, the one that every college student was required to take during the Cold War and that every Republican politician also took.

Similar to selling your car privately. There are some forms involved to recognize that you no longer own nor are responsible for the gun in question. It’s probably a little more strict and polished now (maybe not), but it wasn’t that long ago that you kept a copy in case the cops came knocking looking for the gun and a copy got filed away in a drawer somewhere for basically the same reason. I can’t remember if gun stores were in charge of the records for private sales (which wouldn’t make sense) or if they were filed with the town/state, but it was all physical paper in a drawer somewhere regardless. There wasn’t like a system actively tracking ownership - so long as both parties had a LTC, they were okay and third party sales could be done anywhere.

Don’t worry, they want to replace your hardware with a “cloud based computing solution” as well.

When did that absurdity come back? I thought we killed the cloud computer nonsense a decade ago.

True, but it’s the one that I know and up until around the early to mid 2000s, you could buy a shotgun in Wal Mart. They had a whole section dedicated to firearms.

Plus, the whole selling an AR out of the trunk of a car in the Wal Mart parking lot is something that a kid I went to school with actually did in Mass. There’s still plenty of regulation involved (and increasing by the sounds of it based on what you said), but at the time it basically boiled down to signing the paperwork signifying the change in ownership and resale of the firearm. The only time the state would’ve been made aware was if they requested to see the paperwork, AFAIK.

Besides, the vast majority of people 3d printing guns are people with an LTC anyway, and the most frequently printed things are furniture and accessories. 3d printed guns are still largely a novelty, despite how much they’ve improved over the years. Even the much feared gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was bought legally, and any 3d printed parts were merely aftermarket grips or the like. The only large scale use of them that I’m aware of is in Myanmar, where they’re using 3d printed guns to fight against a genocidal regime largely because they can get 3d printers and ammo, but no country is willing to support the resistance and so they can’t get any actual firearms. You’re much more likely to see a Garage Gun like the one used to kill Shinzo Abe, and those are completely legal by federal law - largely because it would be impossible to prevent somebody from just gluing a PVC pipe to a 2x4 and using a nail as a firing pin.

But firearms are so easy to obtain in so many states that it’s much easier to buy one than to build one from scratch (whether that’s buy one in the state or one with more lax laws nearby). There used to be a ban on gun stores within the city limits of Chicago, but Republicans got elected into office for like a decade and not only repealed that ban but also took the bite out of the gun laws, and now they claim that Chicago is proof that gun laws don’t work when the city used to have some of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country. When they’re not being bought right in the city/state, they’re being smuggled in from the next state over with little concern for punishment.

No, but if the laws are anything like Massachusetts, then you can buy an AR-15 out of the trunk of the car of a dude who was selling it on Facebook.

Completely legal resale so long as you both sign off on the ownership paperwork.

Were arguing. This happened about 10 years ago, so keep the quality and variance of computer monitors at the time in mind. That, and the average person doesn’t know what color balance/contrast is. Plenty of people don’t even realize that the same image can look different on two different monitors.

Artistic? I see nothing in their posts to prove that they haven’t been reposting from other sources or straight up posting slop. Not that post history is everything, I’m not one to post myself, but based on the pro-AI stance, I am fully willing to believe the latter.

The US has so many large natural waterways and so much coastal land that canals were largely unnecessary and only really dug where it would be beneficial to avoid detours and dangerous areas like rapids or shoals. Plus much of the early US economy (in the colonial era, at least) was focused on the export of exotic goods to Europe, so colonies that became major cities like NYC were often built at the mouth of a river where river barges could unload valuable goods like beaver pelts right next to boats getting ready to make their way across the Atlantic.

The Mississippi River, the second largest river in the US, is over 3,765 km long, stretching almost from Canada all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Why build a canal when nature has already done the work for you?

You should hang onto it. They dug up some of the ones that were buried a few years back as part of a documentary and sold some of them at auction while the rest were donated to museums for preservation.

The “crisis now” part is the economic downturn. People aren’t spending as much on games as they were, especially after all these companies bet big on the idea that people would continue to spend money on games like they did during COVID forever. So now it affects the C Suite, and things only matter when they affect them personally.

I think we also experienced a few unusually high number of school shootings for a few years around 2016, and the media probably reports them less because Trump has taken up all of the media spotlight.

I seem to remember noting about a decade ago that we had a very high number of school shootings in the first 6 months of a year, and doing the math out it was something like 1.5 a month. I definitely remember talking to people about how crazy it was that we had one basically every few weeks.

This is similar to how many of the big names in the video game industry were built. Disgruntled designers leaving companies like Atari to start their own company. It’s how Blizzard got their start, and I believe Ubisoft, EA, and at least a couple of the other big names were founded the same way.

Then, of course, the bean counters started taking over and it all went downhill from there once they went from keeping the designers on task with realistic goals to maximizing profits.

If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.

It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a “family computer” system, not a game console.

Not necessarily owned by Amazon, but plenty of websites are running on Amazon systems on the back end for stuff like payment processing and web hosting, or the business uses Amazon to ship their products. There are plenty of Amazon affiliate companies out there as well, but sometimes buying from an independent business still gives money to Amazon through delivery or processing fees or something.

As of the end of the second quarter of last year, the PS5 was apparently just behind the PS4 in terms of lifetime sales, 84.2 million to the PS4’s 86 million at that same point in the PS4’s sales.

However, going into and during the November/December holiday season, sales dropped off compared to last year - selling 1.5 million units less during the last fiscal quarter compared to 2024.

So overall, the PS5 seems to be in a pretty healthy spot, having sold more units so far than the PS3 did in its “lifetime”, but it has not done as well as Sony wants it to. It hasn’t sold as well as the PS4, and definitely hasn’t outsold it. And if the downward year over year sales trend continues, Sony will find themselves in hot water. With the economic downturn, sales of everything will continue to suffer, and I think something that will hurt the PS5 (and PS6) that a lot of console players don’t think about is that PC gamers tend to also own at least 1 console. Many PC gamers owned a PS4 and a PS3 as well. But, with money becoming an issue, they’re not going to drop their PC for a console. They’ll drop the console for the PC they already own and accept that they’ll miss out on the exclusives. And Sony already had issues with people not replacing their PS4s with a PS5. For years people simply weren’t doing it. So far there are only about 8 PS5 exclusive games that aren’t also out on PS4 or were timed exclusives that are on PC as well. And we’re 5 years into the PS5’s lifetime, which is usually a decade at most for console generations. That’s not a lot of incentive to entice people to give up their money for a PS5 for. Why buy a PS5 for 8 games when I have the entirety of my Steam library going back to 2007? Plus, PC has its own exclusives. Practically an entire industry of them. The sheer volume of indie games exclusive to the PC means that you could play a new game everyday for the rest of your life and never spend a single cent on any AAA studio.

One thing that you’re missing is why Sony games sold “poorly” on the PC, and that comes down to the port quality, the delay between console and PC release, and the price. Many Sony releases had/still have performance issues. And there was the PlayStation account drama, which probably hurt sales. Add to that that it’s at least an additional year before a Sony game comes out on Steam, and then they charge full console price. Is it any surprise why they “sell poorly”? PC gamers have already had to wait a year or more for the game, they might as well wait for a sale for it to be at a reasonable price. But look at a game like Helldivers 2. The PC makes up a major portion of the player base. There’s a reason that Sony said “single player” games, not all games. Games sell on the PC. PC gamers just aren’t willing to accept the quality for the price that Sony was offering for their tentpole games. If we base the size of the market on the total number of games downloaded last year, the PC makes up almost half of the PC/console market: 857 million downloads vs 626 million on Sony consoles, and 546 million on Xbox, for a combined roughly 2 billion total games downloaded in 2025. The PC market is no drop in the bucket by console terms. We won’t talk about the 52 billion mobile games downloaded last year.

Sony will try again if the PC market doesn’t go in on buying a PS5/PS6 like Sony hopes, which I don’t think they will. I don’t think it will be anytime soon, but the line needs to go up. Forever. They’ll cut costs where they can and increase prices as much as their customers will let them, but eventually they’ll turn to other options, and the PC market is a low-hanging fruit tempting easy short-term gains for little effort.

1. They are not refugees, they should immigrate the normal (expensive) way like everyone else and not get a free ride on the American tax payer’s dollar. Especially when we have, what, 30,000 refugees from south of the border living in warehouses awaiting a chance to legally immigrate. 50,000? 100,000? Probably even more than that.

2. They’re escaping South Africa with fortunes made by exploiting the people of South Africa and will suffer no consequences in the US. They stand at least some chance of being punished in their own country (even more so if they’re running like this, seems like they can feel the noose tightening), and their money would stay in South Africa to help the country in such a case instead of disappearing into the offshore haven of the US.

3. They’re friends of people like Musk and Trump, and allowing them to more easily use their money to affect American policy will be worse not just for the US, but the world at large. Letting people with experience running an apartheid regime into the politics of a belligerent war hungry government who has already threatened numerous friendly countries over resources cannot end well.

“If God truly does exist, then he more so loves the atheist who questions the world around him than the Christian who blindly follows.” -Thomas Jefferson

More than half of the Founding Fathers were atheists or agnostic.

We knew this. Economists were shouting it over and over during COVID, when this productivity boom started as much of the world began working from home.

Microsoft said that people working from home would never work before COVID, and then they saw a massive boost in performance when people did. To the point where they eventually had to openly admit it. Before demanding people return to the offices as soon as they could.

The only people who refuse to listen are C Suite execs, middle managers, and people with a stake in commercial property.

Step 1: Ban “assault rifles” (no clear definition so specifics will vary greatly from place to place)

Step 2:??

Step 3: Mental health crisis, economic crisis, and various other underlying causes of gun violence are solved

Not to say that guns aren’t an issue. They are, but this is no different than arming the police with military surplus munitions and vehicles instead of decriminalizing drug use, improving social security programs and education, etc. It does nothing to actually address the issue - especially since these gun laws never actually target the guns most frequently used in gun violence/crime (pistols), and are never followed up by any step 2.

It’s security theater to look like they’re doing something to address the issue.

When the DM fits the villain’s entire backstory into one monologue