No horse ahead

I really need to go back and watch the whole thing, but I remember in one of the first two seasons there’s another point where his wife discovers some duffel bags that he’s stashed that are just absolutely stuffed with cash. Like, tens of thousands of dollars, if not a six-figure number. And when she confronts him about it (I think she knew what he was doing and he had promised to stop?), he says that he wants to make sure that she and the kids are taken care of after he dies.

But he was lying through his teeth. What started out as a desperate attempt to save his life quickly spirals into a power trip, and his ego can’t let him stop even when he has no need to keep going. The money is just a side benefit at that point.

Welcome to the hypocritical world of Puritan culture.

Some of the earliest British settlers in the US were so extremist that the Church of England kicked them out after they tried to assassinate the king and replace him with a puppet of their own to force their beliefs on the rest of the country.

It was partly these crazies that started the whole sex and bodies=bad and shameful thing in the US that advertisers still believe in today. And swearing is yet another of those weird things. But sex sells, so it’s okay to imply it as long as it’s selling a product and no other time.

We call these people “snowbirds” where I’m from.

You also missed the part where they vote to prevent any additional funding for education and other services in the communities where their summer houses are because it would increase their taxes.

I don’t know about Wal-Mart, but every other site you listed is famous for being filled with Chinese companies that make cheap knockoff garbage. Yes, even Amazon. It’s like the perfect blend of enshitification and consumerism.

I don’t know about the tech companies, but with clothing companies you’ll see the exact same companies with names like asdfghjkl on both Amazon and Temu, selling the exact same product with the exact same pictures as 3 other similarly named companies. And what you buy will only last slightly longer than the 6 months the company is around for before it disappears and the owners open back up under a new name.

For tech, you gotta do research and see what the experts are saying and find out the reputation of the brands that you’re looking at. Unfortunately, it isn’t as easy as just going on the website and checking the reviews.

As for your original question, I think the answer will be FOSS projects. No company is going to willingly drop the potential ad revenue of AR ads. “This dream brought to you by Underwear brand briefs!”

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed Machine.

Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day, the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you.

But I am already saved. For the Machine is immortal.

I think they should name an airline company after him instead. Or maybe a steak company.

Those definitely won’t go bankrupt, surely. No way a businessman of his caliber would let that happen.

Except it’s even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people’s brains to get them to pay.

So you have the stupid people, but also the people whose brains are naturally wired to be played like a fiddle by these companies, and then on top of that, you have the new generation of gamers who have simply never known a world where you didn’t pay for skins.

But it’s okay, “because it’s just cosmetics.”

Probably exactly where they got the idea from.

That’s the one. He’s got it as a clip on the YouTube channel, and that got served to me by the almighty algorithm.

Except that shit is designed by literal psychologists to prey upon people with poor fiscal responsibility, like people with ADHD, depression, addiction issues, and kids.

It’s like blaming people for smoking cigarettes after they got addicted from secondhand smoking.

That shit is never going away, and for one simple reason: it’s incredibly profitable. By converting real money into some nebulous fun bucks that doesn’t directly correlate in value, they obfuscate how much money you’re actually spending and make it more likely that you’ll spend more than you intend to. The same reason that casinos have no windows and pump extra oxygen into the air so you feel less tired, all so you don’t realize how long you’ve been in there.

The one and only point that I disagree with you on is your take on mtx. They may not affect you, but everything about them is designed to be psychologically exploitative, and the wealthy whale is largely a myth. The vast majority of money from mtx is made from people with addiction issues and other mental health issues or atypical neurology, like people with depression or ADHD.

Microsoft bought up all those studios and didn’t support them, but that’s business as usual for Microsoft, and the money that they’ll make from mtx like this will more than make up for it. I recently watched a former Blizzard dev who was talking about how a single $15 mount for WoW made more money than StarCraft 2 did.

The big issue I see is that most people largely don’t know about anything beyond the big AAA releases, and as we’ve already established, that’s an exploitative wasteland nowadays. There’s plenty of demand for good games and there always will be, but while the indie scene is the best that’s it’s ever been, the majority of indie companies go under after their first game. It’s still hard out there for them, too. There’s just enough of them popping up and putting out truly great games that they can actually compete with the AAA space.

I think it’s “legally grey” in the sense that governments have largely made no policies one way or the other on the data harvesting. It’s not banned, but it’s not openly encouraged either, and there’s no real legal precedent to point to for this specific matter besides the general data harvesting big tech does.

The area with the largest similarity I feel is music sampling, and as far as I know, the music industry was very quick to ensure that data harvesting for AI had to follow the same copyright laws as sampling.

I wanna say it became a thing from Twitch streamers when e sports was a big thing, but I’m by no means sure that that’s correct.

Well, this is the third time the community has failed to secure the AT mines, so it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the game for them to just give them to us anyway.

It was definitely the other way around. When I first checked the planets, there were around 1.5k divers on the mine planet and it was in the 0.x% range, while the children’s planet was around 54% with close to 60k divers on it.

It’s by the design of the Democrats, though I think our current situation is an unintentional cascade effect.

It’s the result of one of the oldest election strategies in the world that remains incredibly popular for one simple reason: it’s easy and it works. “Vote for me because I’m not the other guy” is a much easier policy to convince people on than actually having any policies of your own.

For many years now Democrats all over the country have been funding the campaigns of the most unhinged and extremist of their opponents to set themselves up for an easy win - there was even a lady who wrote a book about her doing it, only to lose to that same extremist in the very next election.

And that’s why we find ourselves in the situation that we’re in. Because the Dems keep thinking that they can court some mythical moderate Republican voting block by propping extremists up as the nominees. But that doesn’t exist because the Republicans have always been voting against Dems rather than for people they like. Republicans don’t care if the nominee is Bush, Biden, Putin, or Stalin himself, risen from the grave to finally put an end to capitalism. So long as they have an R next to their name instead of a D, that’s who they’re voting for.

I’m pretty sure active shooter drills have been ongoing for over a decade at some schools at this point. There was a whole thing a few years ago about schools “putting litter boxes in classrooms for kids that identify as cats” that conservatives were freaking out about where it turned out that the schools had cat litter in classroom survival kits. They sell Kevlar backpacks for kids.

This country has been screwed for decades now.

Because social media exploits the same mental addiction as gambling, “retail therapy,” and adrenaline and exercise addiction. You may as well tell a caffeine addict to just stop drinking coffee every morning and cut chocolate out of their diet.

This is something that people who have never experienced mental health issues like addiction struggle to grasp because they’ve never had the wiring in their brain used against them by companies like this. It takes immense willpower to fight against the physical makeup of your brain and not fall to the temptation of reinstalling social media for the endorphins.