I think it’s not necessarily a contradiction to hold your pro-choice and anti-death penalty stance, but it’s still a contradiction to hold the pro-life and pro-death penalty stance if your reasoning behind the pro-life stance is that all life is sacred.

I agree that a person’s body autonomy and the state’s power to execute citizens should not overlap, but I still think that giving the “all life is sacred” line to justify pro-life and then being pro-death penalty “because some people deserve to die” amounts to hypocrisy.

All games are time wasting. Rogue-like games don’t have no progress, it’s just not the same kind of progress other genres tend to have.

I think it’s really funny to hate a certain genre of entertainment because it wastes time though. The ultimate point of all entertainment is to waste time and produce dopamine.

I mean like, it’s cool to not like rogue-likes because you don’t like starting over. That’s a valid opinion. But saying it’s because you don’t want to waste time is kind of hilarious

My mind is blown. This is very well written. Thank you

Touché

You can die of cirrhosis from drinking too much for too long, but it’s still culturally held as a stress reliever. You can die from diabetes if you eat too much sugar for too long, but it’s still sold to children as edible happiness. Hell, you can die slowly and painfully from taking too much Tylenol, but it’s still the world’s most popular painkiller by far.

Too much of anything kills eventually. That doesn’t bare any significance to whether or not it’s good for stress in some amount.

most of the time for no reason at all

Not for no reason. It’s a form of control. If you genuinely believe that the opposing party is going to bring the country to ruin, you’re a lot less likely to consider their position in politics.

Look at the affordable care act. Conservatives hated/hate it because “obamacare” was portrayed as giving free health care to the lazy poor that you have to pay for as a hard working conservative. When asked if we should repeal Obamacare, conservatives poll something crazy like 95% yes, simply because it’s a bad word they learned.

Many of those conservatives have health care through the ACA and get mad when Republicans take it away because they need it. Those same conservatives mostly aren’t even aware that what they have is literally obamacare.

It’s control all the way down.

Politics is fundamentally different for conservatives. They have to have someone to hate. It’s drilled into them by their media outlets.

The tactic is a form of fear based control that conservative media has been working on since Nixon, and made into effect with the birth of Fox News in 1996.

Seriously. Nixon’s think tank conceived the conservative media outlet as a catch-all, exclusive source of news that as a primary function would steer conservatives to not trust other news sources.

They did this because they did not want another Watergate, where conservatives turned against Nixon because of hard evidence laid out by popular unbiased news, which at the time conservatives still were informed by.

The Frankenstein’s monster of a party that that tactic has turned conservatives into requires manufactured rage to fuel the fire. If the outrage ever simmers, you begin to see smarter conservatives recognizing what their party has become and it begins to fall apart.

So there’s your answer. It’s because the hate is necessary to continue the control. If you don’t believe me, turn on Fox news. There’s always the manufactured rage-of-the-day filling the air time.

They don’t go after lemmy. They go after the users. There are several ways, the easiest of which is to make using a federated network an implicit crime.

Like how downloading or talking too loudly about tor or tails puts you on a watch list.

They don’t even have to follow up on that more than a couple times for the chilling effect to drive people away from using it. Without a large enough user base, we’re spread too thin to affect change.

If the current system ever identifies federation as a threat, it’ll happen.

That baby’s making dough

All of these are examples of attempts to control billionaires in their field through bureaucracy and law.

Yes, this is the free market at work. These billionaires exist in spite of regulations not because of them.

Lifting regulations on corporations solely motivated by raising their profits is like pouring gasoline on a fire and hoping it goes out. It’s clear that there’s not a right answer, but enabling corporations to just do what they want because the current solution isn’t perfect is the exact wrong answer.

Instead of focusing on controlling the rich, we should educate the poor.

Stop arguing like these are mutually exclusive. Both can be done and both are part of the solution. But yes, we have a problem in the short term, and we require a short term solution before we can begin talking about overhauling the system.

It’s a lot harder to teach people en masse than stop “scammers”. Also, the “scammers” you’re describing are capitalists acting legally. You think that education alone will stop predatory market practices? That’s incredibly naive.

Why do we keep focusing on stopping scammers instead of teaching people about scams

There’s no reason we can’t do both.

It’s not as simple as “Why not just let employers pay what they want?”

First of all, union laws are exactly the kind of laws I’m talking about. Without explicit protection of those groups, employers will literally just fire everyone and hire new people. That’s exactly what worker protection laws are for.

Secondly, once you hit a critical mass in the job market, there will always be those who do the same job for less. This takes negotiating power directly out of the hands of workers without any recourse, and leads to driving wages lower while living costs rise.

Thirdly, we already do allow employers to pay what they want and negotiate how they want so long as they don’t pay what we define as poverty wages (a definition 20 years outdated by the way), and look what that gets us. Jeff bezos is the richest man in the world and turnover in Amazon warehouses is almost the entire staff in 3 months. Walmart manipulates the market to put mom and pop shops out of business by ushering their workers to take advantage of government subsidies to lower their overhead, then they gouge their prices. Mcdonald’s has doubled their menu prices since 2018 but only pays their workers $10/hour, which is not a liveable wage in 2024.

All of these are examples of the free market colluding under capitalism exactly how you describe that it should be and creating a wealth inequality that ultimately screws workers with no recourse.

When you say things like “why shouldn’t we let an unadulterated and unregulated free market just determine everything?” You are advocating for the biggest flaws in the current system without even realizing it.

I’m willing to consider the idea that minimum wage is a bandage and shouldn’t be relied on solely to fix society, but we would have to pass some serious workers’ rights laws before we touched that system.

The market might regulate wages, but the market under capitalism is also more than capable of conspiring to make sure that wages are lower across the board. The minimum wage is more a bandage over that than a solution to keep workers afloat.

Terraria and Stardew Valley still slap. I think Rimworld makes the cut now, especially if you consider the beta. I’m currently playing through fallout 4 again because I haven’t done so since I built my new rig last year and I’m curious to know exactly how many mods I can cram into a playable experience.

After Baldur’s Gate 3 I did a run in Divinity: Original Sin 2. That’s a more difficult game with the same engine. It’s definitely 6+ years old.

I played a campaign in XCOM2 pretty recently.

Come to think of it, almost every older game I play has a sprawling and active mod community. Maybe that’s why.

There’s something so satisfyingly full-circle about 3d printing Megaman.EXE.

Thank you for this

Fair enough

Unpopular opinion incoming:

I don’t think we should ignore AI diagnosis just because they are wrong sometimes. The whole point of AI diagnosis is to catch things physicians don’t. No AI diagnosis comes without a physician double checking anyway.

For that reason, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that an AI got it wrong. Suspicion was still there and physicians double checked. To me, that means this tool is working as intended.

If the patient was insistent enough that something was wrong, they would have had them double check or would have gotten a second opinion anyway.

Flaming the AI for not being correct is missing the point of using it in the first place.

That’s true, but games exist already where people can host their own servers. Pc gaming is kind of like the sandbox of platforms. Other major consoles solved that problem by sunsetting their free services so that you can’t just go play an existing online game for free on their platform.

It would be a gargantuan task to sunset free online connectivity as it exists in pc gaming today.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s that simple. Console online services get away with making you pay because the system is locked and you don’t have a choice. Pc gamers can host their own servers, and if steam ever becomes so anti consumer as to charge for access to your library, competitors will rise and the market will balance.

I figured that was the case, but I don’t know any of it, so I didn’t know better. Thanks for clarifying.