CIWS-30

Yep, watermarked memes (and watermarked most things in general) are a scourge on the internet. I stopped following a Youtube channel that's mostly playthrough's of old fighting games because he suddenly decided one day to add an annoying (and ugly) watermark to the corner of ALL of his videos including the old ones.

Luckily, I'd found a similar one who was actually better at playing the fighting games themselves. I switched to that dude instead.

Always, but things like unfettered worldwide capitalism and the concentration of wealth and power just makes it easier to do and cover up.

Inequality and lack of competition (not just economic competition, but also things like political party alternatives) lead to concentration of power, which leads to corruption.

Diversifying power and providing people with alternatives, checks and balances, and separation of powers leads to reduced corruption that groups of average people can fight back against.

Hence things like the 2nd Amendment and the Founding Fathers believing that Citizens should be armed to resist even tyrannical overreach from corrupt elements of their own government for instance.

No I'm not a Republican by the way, I just find it ironic that the people that started the USA actually had some good ideas that their successors have unfortunately just thrown out the window.

Eh, if it's not environmental disaster due to climate change, I have a hunch it might be microplastics or forever chemicals. That's what I expect will do me in before old age does.

And to think that I was seriously considering moving up north to the Great Lakes to get away from Climate Change and to move to a place that actually has fresh water. Joke's on me, that fresh water has microplastics to kill me. Total Catch-22.

Me too. If the sales aren't high enough, Microsoft may reconsider and decide to sell it on the PS5 (probably with some DLC included) a year later or so. It cost them a whole lot of money to buy all those companies, including Bethesda, and they're going to eventually have to recoup a profit from those purchases.

If that means releasing on Playstation again, I think they'll do it rather than risk losing money. Even Disney has learned with Disney+ that having your own exclusive platform and not sharing isn't great business sense. It costs them a lot of money every month to host everything and produce content, and if they don't license out that content to competitors, they can't make their money back.

I can see Microsoft learning the same lesson. Especially given that Disney+ hasn't been profitable ever, and now the red ink is starting to catch up with Disney. If keeping big games from big studios starts losing Microsoft a lot of money, I think they'll fold, at least partially.

Agree. Even recently, I would have up to 5-6 cans worth myself (have since cut down a lot), but alongside the financial cost, there's also the acid eating away at your stomach lining and the excess caffeine to worry about alongside the Aspartame.

Frankly, given the stomach issues and acid reflux that too much soda can give you, I would imagine that people (even sodaholics) would have to stop much sooner than 20 due to all the other issues involved with sodas before the problems with Aspartame would even come into the picture.

Not to say that I'm not leery of Aspartame, but diet Soda has other major issues beside it.

Tim Walz was right. Isn't this the real pro-life and pro-child position to have? Some Republicans used to think like this. Waay back in the day when I was a naive young moderate Republican, even I thought that this stuff should be common sense.

Bible said that rich people who ignore the poor might go to hell, so I even thought it was the Christian thing to do and what Jesus would want. You know, the Jesus that the GOP's always going on about? Hell, when a bunch of people followed him and got tired and hungry, he fed them all for free. He wasn't all like "Hey guys, you should have planned better than this, use your own wallets and have some personal responsibility."

I also believed in taxing the rich to house the homeless, even if the housing was just barely acceptable. I also thought that all poor children should be taken care of with government money because if you force babies to be born (I was pro-life) it's YOUR responsibility and you have to take care of them now.

Needless to say, I didn't stay a Republican very long. I realized really quick what they were really all about. Cognitive dissonance, bait and switch, and total hypocrisy.

Yeah, it's strangely always those hypocritical types with zero self-awareness that are like this too. I.E. see all the actual sexual predators going around calling Democrats "pedos" while being arrested for exposing themselves to a minor (like Lauren Boebert's husband for instance) or something similar.

Every accusation is a confession and all that.

Honestly, you shouldn't tell anyone to calm down when they're upset, especially don't yell it at them. People who are upset want to be listened to and validated. It's common sense for empathetic people, but even research science backs it up.

You'll often find this fact in "Top 10" lists of things to not do for people skills / customer service jobs / relationship advice, etc.

This crap has sent me back to physical stores. If they have it in stock, I don't have to wait for it to ship, I just drive there and pick it up. Same with returns too, and exchanges. Same day.

Plus, I can trust that the company itself has probably looked at and tested the products, and has a real product and not a fake. I doubt I'm the only one going back to brick and mortar as well.

Too true. What's bonkers is that rules on this vary state by state. You move across state lines, and sometimes it feels like you're in an entirely different country. I used to favor "States' Rights" and flexible, empowered local governments who could respond to nearby challenges more surgically than a larger, more lumbering government bureaucracy further away.

Looking back, I see that now that I was naive, and that what I had was an ideal, and wasn't the reality. Republicans always seem to turn "States' Rights" and "Local Authority" into a way to flout sensible Federal laws and do horrible shit like this instead of what they claim to be doing.

Not so fast, Kaiba?

To be fair, it's one of the old school Republicans that would cross the aisle and vote for something Democrats made that are now Extinct in modern Politics. They died with John McCain, honestly. Better Manchin than Sinema or an actual modern Republican.

If I had to vote in 5-10 more Joe Manchin style "Democrats" to kick the same number of Republicans out of office in Red States, I would. Especially if it gave us 60 Democrats and the ability to have a filibuster-proof majority. Even if they were like "Immigrants are bad" or "All guns are good" or "We have to stop being woke about gays and trans and pronouns." or whatever, as long as they weren't all of that at once (and preferably only ONE of those at once) I'd vote them in, so long as they voted to do something about climate change, and also hopefully to reform the economy so all the money and power's not in the hands of the big megacorps and billionaires.

People won't stop being stupid and bigoted, so we have to take the wins we can. Everyone complains that Republicans keep trotting out "God, Guns, and Gays" every time they campaign, but what they're not addressing is that Republicans keep WINNING with the 3 G's and also immigration. They hold the house and have enough of the senate to filibuster everything. They've also used their control of the house and senate (and Presidency, when they have it) to pack the Supreme Court too.

I honestly want Democrats and liberal ideological purists to start being realistic now that the world is burning down around us and see that we've run out of time and need to start winning now, or else we won't have a future. The fact that young Republicans believe in and want to do something about climate change is also a good thing. Reality is about power and consensus, it's not about ideals.