This is greed, pure and simple. At $60, the industry was more profitable than Hollywood, and they raised the base price of games to $70 just a few years ago before immediately talking about raising prices again.

A “lost” son is truly just wandering.

Facebook now has a carve out in their anti-bigotry rules that specifically declares it okay to call trans people mentally sick.

Burn the whole thing down and start from scratch.

I was going to say the same thing. They started this back in January. Both taking the passports of people with an X gender identification on their passports as well as confiscating the legal documents of trans people attempting to renew their passports (birth certificates, social security cards, driver’s licenses, etc.).

You’re largely spot on, but one thing I’d like to add is that Republicans in Walz’s state have actually pushed forward a “Trump Derangement Syndrome” bill, which would classify openly speaking negatively about Trump as a mental illness that is valid justification for incarceration in a mental health facility, which is exactly what Russia did.

They read it as a third of 20% (with 20% of all Americans boycotting), meaning 6% of all Americans.

Rule number one of OpSec is if you’re gonna do something, don’t tell anyone. If they’re planning something that the government can/would consider illegal, saying something online is the stupidest thing you can do. Even if it’s as innocuous as planning to protest.

Behind this mask is more than a man, Mr. Creedy. Behind this mask is an idea, and ideas cannot be killed.

Be gay, select pronouns, and devour the world for 1.2k more copper plate production per minute.

I highly recommend watching The Worst Guide To Factorio, which is where that quote came from. Gives a great overview of the game with awesome lines like that.

Some other great ones include:

Do you have a STEM degree or similar mental affliction?

Using this very average German, we need to build an automation factory, and to do this, we’re going to become more obsessed with belts than an anime protagonist so that we can accomplish more insertions than a sounding enthusiast.

It was never about winning, it’s about sending a message. This planet is alive, and I’m going to teach it fear. And in order to do that, we’re going to be expanding harder than a furry artist trying to make rent.

Hope you started this several hours ago, because now it’s time for the Kovarex enrichment process. … Fun fact: It’s named after the game’s lead developer and works by exposing the uranium 238 to the radioactive yikes that is his Reddit posts.

Scale up our circuit production to an absurd degree and consume them like they’re Doritos. Size does matter and anyone who tells you otherwise is a bottom, and I’m always on top of my game.

And probably my favorite:

Finally, I have to address a bit of an elephant in the room. The lead developer of this game kind of sucks. I truly hope they’ve had a redemption arc since their controversy but I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending this game without acknowledging it. So to balance the scales I’ve done what any reasonable person would do in this situation. I learned LUA out of spite and made a mod that lets you be gay and select pronouns.

Counterpoint

This planet is unprocessed, and I will be the one to refine it. The Factory Must Grow.

They could’ve negotiated to try to prevent some of the damage for their vote for the bill. Would it have done anything? Doubtful, but it would have at least shown that the Dems are willing to try something before rolling over to take it in the ass.

An article from just after Jan 6th happened. My phone says I saved it on Jan 8th, 2021, so it was literally a day or two after.

My understanding is that historically, the vote has been almost 50/50, but that there have been issues with the question that have thrown up doubts about the validity of the referendum conclusions. Stuff like giving the options of statehood or territory, but not independence, etc. Even the one you linked says that only around half of the population responded and over 200,000 ballots were thrown out for either being blank or invalid.

I had thought that a significant portion of the population had been in favor of independence, especially since we came in and basically destroyed their economy. They had been one of the largest manufacturers of pharmaceuticals in the world before the US, and now I think their biggest industry is tourism, which, as someone who has lived in a tourist town for decades, is not conducive to a healthy economy.

It’s a delaying tactic. If the government shuts down, nothing can move forward. They can’t fire people and continue destroying offices because those employees all get paid through the shutdown but nobody can do any work. Any of the paperwork involved - pink slips, etc. can’t go through because there’s nobody there to send them or even read the emails.

If a shutdown helped the Republicans, then that’s what they would’ve been going for in the first place.

Every extra day it takes them is a day where things haven’t gotten worse for everyone and an extra day for the already fracturing Krasnov administration to continue to fall apart and eat itself.

When did I say that they weren’t? I said that I suspect that people who grow up under specific conditions are probably more likely to hold conservative beliefs.

In fact, I’d say that that is one of the examples I’m talking about. Think the white kid who grows up poor and hears his whole childhood from his parents and neighbors that it’s all the fault of those job stealing immigrants and those communist Democrats. He’s just as likely to grow up to be conservative as the kid who grew up wealthy or in a middle class white suburb where everybody looks just like him and who never faced any hardship and therefore can’t imagine a situation outside of his own limited life experiences. The first group blames their problems on The Other, while the second two can’t imagine that things are as bad as they say because the system benefitted them and therefore it must be good.

All run the full spectrum of conservative ideology, from indifference at best to the suffering of minorities to actively reveling in it. In short, my point was that cruelty and hatred are learned in these cases, not innate states of being, because one of the most effective tools against conservative beliefs is simply exposure to diverse groups of people.

Great question, because I had the same thought.

I think there’s a “nurture” factor in here, where people who grow up in “conservative” households, grow up benefiting from the status quo/without real hardships, or are just generally insulated from diverse groups of people when they’re young are more likely to hold “conservative” beliefs. Because one of the biggest fighters against bigotry is simply meeting people with different lived experiences than yours.

Fun fact: A study was done that apparently showed that the parts of the brain responsible for empathy are smaller on average in Republicans than the rest of the population.

The best evidence of this is the creator of Tumblr. He sold it and got a payout of like a hundred million dollars or something and completely disappeared from public life. He only ever appears in the news when he makes some big donation to a charity.