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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Mine is Magic: The Gathering, except I fully realize that I am pulling away from it and why.

    The game sparked an immense amount of joy when I picked it up in high school. Now I barely recognize the game anymore. It doesn’t truly have an identity of its own and exists in this permanent state of limbo where 3rd party IPs are taking over the demand for new product and the rules are becoming so bloated that they can’t fit them on cards anymore.

    This is such an “old man yelling at clouds” moment for me, because I heard just about every reason under the sun for why people quit the game when I was playing from power creep to changing art styles to just getting priced out of the hobby in general. I realize now that those people were not wrong, they were just not the target audience anymore. I am no longer a profitable demographic to pander to. I never buy packs anymore, and I’ve even stopped buying singles and I don’t attend tournaments or collect anymore, so why would Hasbro/WotC make products for me? Especially when there are deep pocketed whales out there who will pay top dollar for their favorite crossover set, no matter how silly or out of place it might seem.

    I wish I could enjoy the game the way I used to, but I just can’t be bothered to hop back in when it doesn’t feel the same anymore.







  • This wouldn’t be a problem if we still had NASA doing the shuttle program, or some continuation of it, rather than outsourcing our spacecraft to the cutthroat lowest-bidder private sector. Is it really any surprise that SpaceX and Boeing are blowing up on the launchpads and having quality control issues when their sole objective is to make money? If we nationalized these initiatives again and cancelled the private contracts with these crooks, there would be no incentive for profiteering and corners would not get cut as often as they do now.

    Sure, it would be a big cost to the taxpayer once again, but I think I’d rather have a reliable space program and like 2% less military budget to fund it, I think we’ll manage somehow without producing more tanks and planes that nobody is asking for.







  • Precisely. They never check that you are who you say that you are or that you are in fact still alive, so this “rule” is unenforceable. Case in point, many years ago I told Valve that my birthday was Jan 1st 1916, the earliest date it would let me select when I get prompts to input my age for mature-rated content. It still remembers that and autofills it for me on every age-restricted game page I land on in the discovery queue. If it were true, I’d be a 108 year old gamer right now, which isn’t impossible but would probably raise some eyebrows at Valve if they ever had the intention of enforcing the “no passing down your account to other people” rule as it would be highly likely that I would be dead and my successors are the ones actually spending 7 hours on the weekends binging TW: WH3 and Stellaris.


  • Yes, this is also true. I see things like UBI as an inevitable necessity, because AI and automation in general will eliminate the need for most companies to employ humans. Our capitalistic system is set up in a way such that a person can sell their ability to work and provide value to the owner class, but if that dynamic is ever challenged on a fundamental level, it will violently collapse when people who can’t get jobs because a robot replaced them either reject automation to preserve the status quo or embrace a new dynamic that provides for the population’s basic needs without requiring them to be productive.

    But the way that managers talk about AI makes it sound like the techbros have convinced everybody that AI is far more powerful than it currently is, which is a glorified chatbot with access to unfiltered Google search results.





  • It’s a big stretch to call this a debate.

    I feel like the context of that statement is self-evident, considering it’s a top level comment, but since you seem to be stubbornly obstinate about it, I’ll break it down for you.

    Meta is a private company and can do whatever the fuck they like.

    This is in direct response to RFK complaining that his first amendment rights were being infringed by Meta. The thing that presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr. apparently doesn’t understand about the constitution is that 1st amendment rights shall not be infringed by the U.S. government. No law or statute can be passed that would limit or remove one’s freedom of expression. However, as I mentioned in another post in this same comment chain, Meta is not a government entity. By using their platform, you agree to their rules. They get to set the rules as whatever they want and you agree to abide by them so long as you are an account holder. If they decided that they don’t want anyone to say the word “Facebook” anymore and started banning people for saying it, that would be fully within their rights as a private entity, albeit unfair. This is no different than a platform like Lemmy banning you for posting Nazi shit or CSAM. You do not have unlimited free speech in private forums, and that’s a fact.

    So when I said “Meta can do whatever the fuck they want”, I’m not sure how you possibly came to the conclusion that what I meant was “Meta doesn’t have to follow laws”. Of course they have to follow laws, everybody does. But if they aren’t breaking any laws, they can do as they please with their platform. When I asked you what the law in question was that was being broken, you responded with nothing but deflection, because you’re a clueless simpleton and you have no idea what you’re talking about.

    This guy shouldn’t be let anywhere near a position of decision making, let alone the highest office in the nation.

    Given that I previously highlighted how out-of-touch RFK is with the substance of the constitution, this should come as no surprise. Anybody stupid enough to use a response from a AI chatbot as “proof” of anything is technologically illiterate and deserves to be ridiculed.

    “Debate” over. You are blocked.


  • I don’t believe in crypto either because it’s current value is solely derived on how much you can exchange it for real money. Outside of a few edge cases, nobody buys anything with crypto outside of the black market.

    I’m sure crypto is a great solution to some finance problems related to centralized banking that I’m too lazy or dumb to care about, but I look at the energy consumption to calculate these massive chains for little tangible benefit, and the scammers and hypemen who are profiting off of other people’s hopes and desires to get rich quick on the next big boom, and I can’t help but feel like it’s an actively harmful element of society. At the very least, whatever regulations are currently in place that are attempting to reign in crypto are insufficient at reducing harm.