The bluer the balls, the more mana they contain.

There’s only one type of tank found beneath houses and that’s a septic tank.

My entry point into Star Wars was KotOR so I’ve always been pretty critical of the average Star Wars media. I really enjoyed Rogue One, Andor, Mandalorian S1&2, and Clone Wars S7. Star Wars can deliver sometimes.

With a budget of $180M I was hopeful that Acolyte could be great, and it hasn’t delivered yet.

My 2yo niece visited last week and wouldn’t stop singing this.

Why does Communism require “true equality amongst its citizens?” What does that even mean, in practical terms?

Do you imagine a communist system that has social classes?

How would a group of people take advantage of this to form a “practical dictatorship?”

Castro, Zedong, Putin

Capitalism does not deploy the most efficient means of product delivery, but the most profitable…

You’re arguing Communism on a philosophical level against capitalism on a practical level.

What of Marx have you read? Or any leftist theorist?

As I said, I’m not well read and unprepared for the higher level argument you are seeking here.

I can make some suggestions for reading material if you wish.

I appreciate your desire to educate, but I’m too busy being exploited by the current system to dive further into social philosophy. When you guys are ready to rise up I’ll be there, but I won’t be a part of the debate on which system we should implement going forward.

The recurring issue with Communism in practice is that it requires true equality amongst its citizens and there’s always some asshole or group of assholes who want power and dominion over others, so it seems to repeatedly fall into a practical dictatorship.

Capitalism at its best requires businesses to find and deploy the most effective and efficient means of product delivery in order to compete with each other, which means that the consumer will always have the best product at the best price allowed by the market. The problem is that greedy assholes either conglomerate competing companies into monopolies, or otherwise collude with one another to maximize their profit margins.

I’m not well read in Marxism so I’m probably not qualified to answer this, but the recurring issue with Communism seems to be the same as capitalism, in that it requires people to not be assholes in order to properly function.

At the very least, they should raise real estate taxes on empty units. This will penalize people for owning several vacation homes, as well as incentivize landlords to lower rates in order to fill the unit.

Difficult to enforce, but send a few people to jail for real estate tax fraud and the rest will fall in line.

Well, according to China, those waters are their territory, which means that the presence of foreign military vessels is an invasion.

Practically speaking, I think you could call that area a contested region, so minor skirmishes like this are expected and could escalate to war (like Crimea eventually did).

I think that the Philippines approach has been something like, ‘You can claim those waters if you want, but you can’t possibly keep us from entering them, so we’re just going to ignore you until you start killing our people, and then we’re gonna call in big brother America.’

India is one of the last places I’d like to visit. This is based on how India has been portrayed in various travel shows over the years (Amazing Race, Top Gear). It looks crowded, dirty, and the locals often aren’t very friendly, especially towards women.

One of your main exports to the west is scam calls. It’s a huge PR problem and your government refuses to address it. Your other main export right now is Russian oil.

Indians used to have a fairly large online presence in English-speaking spaces with mixed results. There were a lot of helpful tech bros on YouTube, but also a lot of horny dudes on Facebook. I don’t really see much of either of those anymore though.

My wife works in software testing and has regular interactions with Indians. Some are really nice, but others are really not. Misogyny is far too common and when Indians are rude they are boldly rude.

Wait, no. Those kids can’t be highschool graduates already, right? Sandy Hook wasn’t 11 years ago, was it? WAS IT?

I’m a plate DPS main and I married a healer. There is a lot of pressure to ‘just tank’ for her.

I didn’t realize he wasn’t trying to sell his game, so I guess we need a different analogy.

Ok, imagine you and your brother are making a website where friends can post about their lives and keep up with each other during and after college. You’re pretty open with your project and then one day the one weird guy in your friend group launches your project without consulting you. The project takes off and makes billions of dollars. You sue the weirdo and he gives you some money, but you’re still pissed about it. Did you get Zucked?

Ok, so imagine that you’re hungry and you come across a sandwich shop that has your favorite sandwich for $15, but the shop next door has the exact same sandwich for free. Which sandwich are you gonna eat?

No, wait, that’s not important. Most people are gonna eat the free sandwich, so even if you eat the $15 sandwich, you’re statistically irrelevant.

Yeah, maybe some people that weren’t hungry are gonna get a free sandwich, but the people who were hungry are also getting free sandwiches, which means that the guy trying to make a living selling $15 sandwiches is gonna have to close shop unless he starts lacing his sandwiches with cocaine.

Ryan Fortnine made this point by climbing inside the engine compartment of a Dodge Ram.

They didn’t modify the truck and dude is over 6’ tall.

Sometime between now and September, if you look to the left-hand side of the Northern Crown, what will look like a new star will shine for five days or so.

Pretty cool if you own a telescope and are into astronomy, but not exactly solar flare levels of hype here. Don’t wake up your SO and drag them out onto the lawn at 2am to show them this Nova.

Miranda knows that she can continue to pocket a majority of the restaurant profits if she can get the staff to blame each other for their discontentments.

They skipped the era of country music that was “I love my dog more than my wife, but don’t ask me to choose between my dog and my truck”

Compelling villains are written with a deeper motivation for their actions than just ‘hurt people’ or ‘be evil’ and they have a tendency to challenge the status quo in some way. Such villains become sympathetic because the current status quo is oppressive.

It must be very difficult to write a villain for a contemporary piece of media because they can very quickly become a hero of the people.

You never know. Someone could make a time travel movie with it one day and then collectors will pay an arm and a leg for the left door.