El Pit wrote on May 13, 2025, 15:27:
Trump vs cheap Chinese imports 0-1

The Art of the Deal meets the Art of War...

NKD wrote on May 11, 2025, 17:53:

Jim wrote on May 11, 2025, 17:40:
I'm looking forward to the nothing we get while trump tells us its something along with insisting eggs and gas are now cheap.

That's the pattern with Trump. Claim the status quo is broken and unfair, fuck things up in some attempt to fix it, then claim victory when bringing back the status quo, or often times, just making a small step back towards it. Then he just never mentions it again.

Scott Bessent did an embarrassing suckup to Trump boasting about how Trump is doing 4D chess. I think it's more along the lines of playing chess with a pigeon - The pigeon just knocks all the pieces over. Then poops all over the board. Then struts around like it won.

Beamer wrote on Apr 12, 2025, 17:09:
I thought the whole point was to get Apple to start manufacturing here. Guess that's out the window. So, then, the point was either market manipulation or insanity? Can't see any other arguments.

Love when people call him brilliant for fixing the mess he caused for no reason, and brave for capitulating

Saw this posted on Facebook and it's accurate:

"Yes. Nothing unusual here. Attempt to bully every country in the world with huge tariffs (other than Russia), and hope they will come negotiate a trade deal that favors the US.

So far he’s batting .000.

But he’s up at the plate again. He’s wagging his finger at the pitcher, saying how he’s about to hit the next pitch out of the park. His supporters in the dugout are cheering and screaming.

Here comes the pitch. Oh my, it’s a batting practice fastball, right down the middle of the plate.

And Trump does what he always does. He runs back to the dugout saying he has a sore thumb. So he sucks his thumb to make it feel better.

And his supporters in the dugout cheer again. What a brilliant strategy to scare that pitcher."

Autarky worked *so* well for the Soviet Union...and it was not even a complete autarky, either, since they still imported a lot - just not as much as they could have.

Simon Says wrote on Mar 20, 2025, 13:04:

Disclaimer: I profoundly despise "Red Skull" and think all of his companies should be tariff'd and banned all over the world for his fascist and anti-democratic actions into bankruptcy.

But...

The vast majority of those Tesla owners bought their car before they knew who he really was. And they probably bought it in an effort to be early adopters of less polluting transport.

They don't deserve to be doxed, except perhaps the Cybertruck owners, you really have to be a douche to buy that useless monstrosity, but I digress.

I put myself in the shoes of the cheaper Tesla model owners, they will especially have a hard time selling, because they probably have budget constraints nowadays about buying a new car.

I fear this website will mostly target innocent people who also despise Red Skull, but currently have no real option of divesting from his products.

I concur with all the above. Although Red Skull's douchiness did become a lot more apparent 7 years ago during his highly-publicized attacks against one of the rescuers in the Thailand Cave rescue. And 16 years ago he was involved in a nasty battle with his ex-wife who discussed publicly his sociopathic and controlling behaviors and utter lack of empathy. His actions toward underlings has been periodically publicized over the years as well.

jacobvandy wrote on Feb 21, 2025, 01:01:

Cutter wrote on Feb 20, 2025, 22:09:

Xeth Nyrrow wrote on Feb 20, 2025, 18:59:
Maybe he's hoping Trump, Musk, or even Zuckerberg would hear this tailored dog whistle/Bat signal to buy GameStoop (purposeful misspelling) out.

The overwhelming majority of people - the silent majority - refuted out of control radical left-wing bullshit in America. And it's going to happen in Canada this Fall when the Cons take it all - they already run most of the provinces now. It's happening the world over as well. So, you can whinge about it all you want, but you're in an absolute minority. If it sucks so bad why not move to Africa or Central or South America and see how that works out for you.

Thefuckouttahere with that hyperbole. The amount of votes tallied for the 2024 election winner correspond with ~22.7% of the US population, vs. ~22% for the runner-up... Just so it's made clear that there was nothing 'overwhelming' about it, and that both groups are smaller than the amount of adults which did not care enough either way to vote at all, i.e. ~31.7% of the total population. An 'absolute minority' only exists as the last functioning braincells inside the skull of anyone who believes the boasting of that bloated orange gasbag and his cronies.

Worth also noting - the 2024 popular vote margin of victory was the 11th lowest out of 60 presidential elections (while his 2016 victory was the 3rd lowest). Also every President from Nixon through Biden won with higher percentages of the popular vote - including the single-term Presidents like Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden, and George H.W. Bush.

The GOP control of the House of Representatives is the smallest since 1930.

Cutter wrote on Feb 3, 2025, 18:18:
Meanwhile your national debt continues to explode unchecked. You guys sure make it easy to loot the treasury because you have zero interest in how your government takes and spends your money. I'm all for accountability of government spending, but I'm weird like that.

Canada's national debt is ~107% of its GDP. The U.S. national debt is currently ~123% of GDP. That's not much difference.

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CAN/FRA/DEU/ITA/JPN/GBR/USA

The U.S. holds the world's reserve currency, FWIW, which is why so many nations are willing to invest in U.S. debt. Both countries have the same credit rating overall.

Cutter wrote on Feb 1, 2025, 19:41:
Trump isn't a racist because you actually have to care to hate someone. It takes effort. The only color Trump cares about is green. And if you're rich and will make him richer he'll love you no matter your race. Or maybe you missed all the minorities in his cabinet and how he got a lot more votes from minorities this time around because even they are sick and tire of the woke bullshit.

I'm pretty sure I've missed "all the minorities in his Cabinet" because there are almost none.

13 White men, 7 White women, 1 Black man, 1 Latina Woman

Beamer wrote on Jan 27, 2025, 15:21:

Riahderymnmaddog wrote on Jan 27, 2025, 15:16:
Trump can put a Tarff on Deepseeek tokens, problem solved.

For some levels of service, Deepseek offers the same token value for $10 that OpenAI offers for $270, so it'd have to be a hell of a tariff, haha.

If Deepseek is legit, it just popped the entire AI bubble. Not because AI isn't real or valuable, but because it just absolutely deflated the value of being the company building the AI itself rather than the company implementing it as a tool.

My gut feeling is that we may end up seeing AI as transformational as both GPS and the Internet - and with about the same ultimate value. Meaning that GPS (and the Internet) has been extremely transformational - but Garmin isn't exactly a trillion-dollar company. We saw the same with other transformational industries - railroads initially made their owners wealthy and are certainly still by far the backbone of overland transportation of goods because of their efficiency and carrying capacity - but we haven't seen railroad titans since the 1800s.

Ultimately, stuff becomes so integrated and taken for granted in the things we do that it becomes banal. Competition, driving down costs, and some regulation certainly also have an impact. Most of these stratospheric valuations are pretty much assuming an eventual monopoly with zero pricing pressure so future profits are maximized. That just isn't going to happen. Same goes for Tesla. On the self-driving side, Waymo is far ahead with its own taxis, and on the production, cost, competition, and market share side - that all goes to China's EV manufacturers.

Jaysen wrote on Jan 20, 2025, 13:40:

(I'm sure I still have a ratty copy of A Splinter of the Mind's Eye around here somewhere)

Do any of you recommend other books by Alan Dean Foster?

Alan Dean Foster's novelization of "The Thing" is very, very good. Captures the eeriness and paranoia of the film quite well. And he wrote it from the screenplay so it includes a very creepy incident out on the ice that never made it into the film, as well as tied up what happened to Nauls.

Mark Zuckerberg: “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

Overon wrote on Jan 5, 2025, 15:04:
If I got 10 Billion dollars, I would invest it, and take some of the interest/investement income and just give it away to people. It would be remarkably easy to not be a piece of shit, I could have afford to be emapthetic toward everyone and just give them money to help them. It would life altering money. That 2nd billion dollars is more useful to others than it is to me.

I agree. Past a certain point, you're just accumulating and it becomes more like a game and just numerical counting. Realistically, they can't possibly spend it all and they know it. But nevertheless, they become more and more possessive and less willing to part with a single penny through taxes or real charitable giving. Basically, like Tolkien's quote about Smaug from "The Hobbit" where he noted that dragons know the value of their hoard down to the last coin and even though they can't make any actual use of their treasure, they are enraged if even a small part of it is taken from them.

Unfortunately, empathy tends to have an inverse relationship to financial accumulation in virtually all people. Chuck Feeney would be the rare exception to that rule by being a billionaire who actually gave away his entire wealth while he was still alive - and actually gave it away as opposed to the billionaire clowns with their fake-charity private foundations and donor-advised funds which were created as tax-avoidance schemes and provide only a trickle of actual charitable giving, just enough to qualify for the tax writeoff.

Cutter wrote on Dec 10, 2024, 01:05:
It's too bad all the angry people going out on killing sprees don't take out on the elites. Go storm some boardrooms and lay waste. That's about the only way we're going to bring the oligarchs to heel. If they don't start sharing the wealth it's just going to be another bloody revolution yet again.

Supposedly (according to a lot of finance sites) a pretty high percentage of American households are millionaires... (not likely nearly as high as they claim)

Financial sites keep citing surveys like the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances which in its most recent iteration purports that 1 out of 5 American households have a net worth of $1MM or more: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/guess-percent-households-over-1-193023481.html

Meanwhile, according to Wiki's article about the survey's methodology:

"Participation in the study is strictly voluntary. However, because only about 4,500 to 6,500 families are interviewed in the main study, every family selected is very important to the results. In the 2004 survey, the median interview length was about eighty minutes. However, in some particularly complicated cases, the amount of time needed was substantially more than two hours. The majority of interviews were obtained in person, although interviewers were allowed to conduct telephone interviews if that was more convenient for the respondent....To retain the scientific validity of the study, interviewers are not allowed to substitute respondents for families that do not participate. Thus, if a family declines to participate, it means that families like theirs may not be represented clearly in national discussions."

I've seen other finance articles claiming that 1 out of 20 American households have net worth of $1MM or more. I find even that not very likely. About 2/3 of American households live in their own home, and about 2/3 of those still maintain a mortgage while a not inconsequential percentage of the rest have a home equity or reverse mortgage on their home. And the average home value is not that high to account for enough home equity to push a household very high - especially since most surveys indicate that home equity is almost half of the median net worth of all households and is the overwheling majority of most household net worth.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Dec 4, 2024, 23:00:

WannaLogAlready wrote on Dec 4, 2024, 22:32:
Sorry for the guy if his work was honestly good for the people in need, if not ...

It wasn't. UHC made record profits while claim denial also went up. His paycheck was literal blood money.

News is now reporting that the bullet casings had words inscribed on them: "deny," "defend" and "depose"

cappy wrote on Nov 8, 2024, 14:45:

Beamer wrote on Nov 8, 2024, 09:44:
Word on the street is Trump is already annoyed at the sideshow RFK is creating and may just dump him.

Now, I think some of that is wishful thinking from the media, or them writing something based on loose rumors that they know will get enormous clicks, or something that may make Trump change his mind. But at the same time, Trump is pretty well known for making promises to people when they're useful and immediately dumping them when they're not, and in this case, he'd probably find someone worse than RKFJr, like putting Nick Fuentes or Andrew Tate in charge of it. But it'd still be hysterical for that to happen to RFK.

I have already been suggesting this is a strong possibility.

Trump cannot tolerate anyone else grandstanding and claiming the spotlight. He's also not going to like if there is strong and broad backlash against stuff RFK Jr. (or for that matter Musk who wants to gut government spending and cause pain) does or proposes. Both of those are grandstanders who also want the spotlight.

Trump would rather put someone quietly incompetent in charge of something - as he did with putting Louis DeJoy in charge of the Postal Service.

Beamer wrote on Nov 8, 2024, 09:44:
Word on the street is Trump is already annoyed at the sideshow RFK is creating and may just dump him.

Now, I think some of that is wishful thinking from the media, or them writing something based on loose rumors that they know will get enormous clicks, or something that may make Trump change his mind. But at the same time, Trump is pretty well known for making promises to people when they're useful and immediately dumping them when they're not, and in this case, he'd probably find someone worse than RKFJr, like putting Nick Fuentes or Andrew Tate in charge of it. But it'd still be hysterical for that to happen to RFK.

I have already been suggesting this is a strong possibility.

Trump cannot tolerate anyone else grandstanding and claiming the spotlight. He's also not going to like if there is backlash against stuff RFK Jr. (or for that matter Musk who wants to gut government spending and cause pain). Both of those are grandstanders who also want the spotlight.

Trump would rather put someone quietly incompetent in charge of something - as he did with putting Louis DeJoy in charge of the Postal Service.

Cutter wrote on Nov 6, 2024, 20:36:
"It was decided by low information "swing" voters"

Right, because anyone who isn't on your side must be an obvious moron. Gee, isn't it strange how the people you insult by calling them idiots don't want to vote for your party? And maybe you live in some exclusionary bubble where prices haven't drastically increased on EVERYTHING in the last four years, but that isn't the case for most people. Food and rent are much too high for most people. Most can no longer afford to buy a house or new car. Poverty has been growing by leaps and bounds. The homeless abound and keep growing. Foodbanks everywhere have been closing because the demand is too high! And that's all compounded by the millions upon millions of illegal aliens the Dems invited in, or maybe illegal aliens don't need food and places to live. They also keep wages depressed for actual citizens. War and instability is everywhere. Then throw in trying to force the radical left woke agenda on everyone and what the hell do you think was going to happen? None of these things were a problem under Trump. In 4 short years we went from peace and relative prosperity to everything going in the shitter, and the Dems controlled Congress for two years and still failed to get anything done - which is why they lost in the midterms. No, it was decided by a bunch of arrogant liberals who think they always know better than everyone else and actually don't.

The reality is that most voters are not highly engaged and are not following all aspects and details of both candidates' campaigns and platforms - or even care about most aspects and details. They're either unaware or at most vaguely aware, because most people don't have the time, energy, or interest. That's a simple fact. So they vote according to what concerns or interests them the most and for a candidate (or more often simply the Party) that seems better able to reflect their main concerns or interests.

Granted, "low information voters" has certainly been used by some highly-engaged voters as a way of looking down. But it absolutely is an accurate description of *any* election for the majority of voters. And especially once we move below the level of President and U.S. Senator and Representative. Most voters are going to know virtually nothing about either Party's candidates running for State-level Senator or Representative, or Justice of the Peace, etc. Maybe they saw an ad on television or got a flyer and that's about it. Or they just vote straight-slate sight-unseen which has been very common for the past 20+ years.

It's no different than car-buying. There is a minority of car buyers who carefully evaluate and compare all aspects of several potential cars, pricing, options, etc. And then there is everyone else who will only buy a particular make, or prefer a color, who don't care what options are included as long as they can drive the car off the lot, don't price shop between dealers, etc. Doesn't mean they are dumber than the highly-engaged buyer. Most folks just don't have the time or interest to do all of that tedious research.

Ditto for computers. A minority of enthusiasts like to research and build computers and plan out all the components. Meanwhile, Dell and Apple and Asus and lot of other manufacturers have sold a massive number of computers to "low information" folks at Best Buy and other retailers. Packard Bell (now-defunct) sold a lot of 486SX computers back in the day to folks who didn't know the difference between SX and DX and would not know what an FPU/math coprocessor was. And that's perfectly fine.

jdreyer wrote on Nov 6, 2024, 19:10:

InfectiousCheese wrote on Nov 6, 2024, 18:27:

jdreyer wrote on Nov 6, 2024, 16:43:

ByteCrawler wrote on Nov 6, 2024, 16:10:

jdreyer wrote on Nov 6, 2024, 15:58:

Cutter wrote on Nov 6, 2024, 15:45:
The fact you don't understand why the Dems lost is why they lost. But by all means, keep on vilifying everyone who won't drink the radical left's Kool-Aid and see how that works out for you. You better get comfortable with losing from here on in in that case. This wasn't approval of Trump, it was rejection of a shitty and incompetent political party and their far left agenda. Same thing that's happening in Europe, Canada, and the rest of the world. Next time try having an actual open primary and let people pick a candidate they want, not the appointed DEI hire.

Nah, it was the 20% inflation that happened during COVID. Voters blamed the Dems for that since Biden was president. It's really just that simple.

Ah yes just inflation. Illegal immigration, draining of budgets, rampant crime, DEI hiring practices, sensationalism, transgenders in sports, shrinking the definition of women (oh wait, unless we're talking about abortion then woman matter again), supporting terrorists, failing social initiatives, instantly demonizing anyone that doesn't agree with you point for point, do as i say not as i do, I should listen to the rich celebrities because they're so relatable, Kamala wasn't snuck in as the candidate just to save Biden's war chest. All these had nothing to do with it. Just inflation...

Cutter was right with his original statement.

All of those issues are partisan issues. As I said, those people did not decide the election. It was decided by low information "swing" voters. They aren't paying attention to "rampant crime" (bc it doesn't exist: crime is at its lowest point statistically in decades), trans issues, "supporting terrorists" (no idea what you're even referring to), etc. What they are voting on is the fact that housing prices are 50% above 2020 and inflation has increased by 20% over the same period. It's a shock to have to pay $8 for a dozen eggs, and you don't need to watch Fox News to understand that. The Dems get blamed for that, even though it was caused mostly by supply chain issues and corporate price gouging.

And this all this is massive exaggerations. I buy eggs at Whole Foods for $4 per dozen, if you are paying more it's because you want to.

Eggs were an example (the cheapest eggs I could buy at the market yesterday were $7.99, but I do live in an expensive area), but it doesn't disprove the facts:

From 2020 to 2024, the total inflation in the United States increased by 21.4%. Here's the breakdown:
2020: 1.2%
2021: 4.7%
2022: 8.0%
2023: 4.1%
Sept 2024: 2.4%

Had COVID never occurred, that would have been around 8%, and nobody would have noticed. 21% is a massive increase. Something that used to cost $40 a few years ago is now $50. That's noticeable. And the average is misleading since some things changed little while others much more: my favorite coffee has nearly doubled in price during that period.

Gas was $2 per gallon in 2020. It skyrocketed to $5 per gallon, and still hovers near that today.

Home prices have increased 47% during the same period driven mostly by the COVID work from home trend adopted by most companies. So that house down the street that sold for $300K a few years ago is now selling for $440K. That prices most middle class families out of the market.

These price changes are shocking. And for average voter that ignores politics for the most part, they're going to blame the party in charge.

FWIW - 2024 has been very well proven to be a very consistent worldwide election throwing-out and rebuke of incumbents in every country and region and regardless of whether the incumbent in control was conservative or liberal. The consistent theme has been dissatisfaction because of inflation and its impact on the economy and purchasing power. Many other countries have also included immigration - legal or otherwise - as another area of major concern for voters.

GHOB wrote on Sep 19, 2024, 05:45:
Rock Paper Shotgun is not going to be around for long. Their views are way out of touch with the majority of the gaming player base. Gamers are tired of 'messaging' in their games, from both the left and the right.

I personally fully support what the Saber CEO wrote and am happy to spend money on their games if this is going to be their guiding philosophy. Make good games and leave the messaging to the idiots who want their projects to fail.

Get Woke, Go Broke.

Funny. I'm not aware of any so-called "woke" company actually ever going broke - despite folks repeating that silly mantra like it's some kind of whimsical magical "Bloody Mary" invocation.

AB InBev's stock price has mostly traded flat for the past 3 or so years (predating the non-troversy over its Bud cans which apparently was the last straw for some folks or else the excuse they needed to stop swilling crappy beer) which is consistent with and in several cases far better performance than the other alcoholic beverage conglomerates like Diageo, Molson Coors, Pernod Ricard, Boston Beer Company, etc. And AB InBev revenue reached a new record in 2023. Harley Davidson - ditto - flat for 5 years. Their problem is aging demographics for their main customer-base, not "wokeness".

Rolling Stone profiled some of the companies that faced boycotts over supposed "wokeness" and found most are more profitable than ever: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/woke-companies-broke-profits-1234710724/

Predating all of that, the U.S. military integrated even earlier and somehow survived becoming "woke".

As crazy as this idea sounds, gaming - like so many other things - benefits from appealing to wider audiences. And funnily enough, this kind of thing has been going on for many many decades. The entire decade of the 1970s saw an explosion of television and movie entertainment that reflected "diversity" (another apparently scary word for some bizarre reason) - Dog Day Afternoon, The Jeffersons, Roots, CHiPs, Sesame Street, etc. (Star Trek and some other shows and films were already starting to do this in the 1960s). For that matter, Dungeons & Dragons encouraged players to develop adventuring parties composed of many races. Somehow folks managed to enjoy themselves and not ceaselessly whine about having to cater to the physical weakness of halflings or mages, or the goody two-shoes nature of paladins.

"Messaging" in entertainment changes over time. Over a century ago, British fantasy inevitably had a hero from the upper-class accompanied by a loyal but lower-class batman, and the messaging was that a stiff upper-lip and good breeding would always win the day over the raw savages and uncouth working class drudgery types who had their place and knew their place. And now a lot of American entertainment in recent decades has presented exactly the opposite - where the upper-crust person is either a twit or an adversary.

One of the great advances in games has been expansion of virtually everything - story, complexity, characters, etc. Pong was great in its time in its own simplicity, but generally most folks seem to appreciate that there is more to gaming than batting a virtual ball around. Some of the messaging around even first person shooters is what exactly makes the bad guys "bad" - spelling it out with their actions rather than just boringly saying "they're bad so just play the game".

As far as I've seen, the expansion of romances in games doesn't force anyone to do a romance option they don't want, and is there to provide options that appeal to more gamers. Because again, entertainment and any other money-making enterprise benefits from expanding its audience. But apparently basic capitalist concepts are "woke" these days and the "core audience" doesn't like sharing whatever it's latched onto with anyone else, so go figure.

MeanJim wrote on Sep 3, 2024, 19:10:

ZeroPike1 wrote on Sep 3, 2024, 06:46:
On that note one of my coworkers tried to get a job at an airline. She was accepted and was all set to leave. My boss decided to talk her into staying here, where she is unhappy, by telling her she’s too old to start a new career anywhere else. She’s 40 ish. And it doesn’t help she’s neurodivergent, so she is easily manipulated. Pissed me off he pulled that on a vulnerable person. She remains here so stressed out sometimes she has to cry at work.

Labor Day Everyone!

A professor I had in college once gave us a piece of advice. He said if you ever get offered a new job and your current employer counters that offer, never take it. They will only keep you around long enough to find your replacement.

I have never known anyone who was better of staying - even with a counter-offer or a supposed promotion. I have always told people that they should never take a counter-offer because the inherent reason why someone wants to go somewhere else is not going to change.

If they weren't being paid well enough, they will resent having to be halfway out the door before their worth was recognized by their current employer, and their current employer or even their co-workers will resent that the employee used the leverage of another job offer to get a salary increase. If the reason(s) are anything else, those won't change either.