I feel the reference went over your head…

You know, eventually, after we’ve seen enough of this shit, I feel like there’s a point we have to ask…will no one rid us of these turbulent justices?

Perhaps foolishly, I got rid of most of my older systems 20 years ago, so the oldest one I have left is my Sega Genesis.

If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.

If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.

That’s it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it’s just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.

Odd to me is Her Majesty’s instead of His, considering Charles is now King.

Do these places just retain the gender of the ruling monarch at the time of their construction?

I never really thought about the fact that 3/5 scions, plus the twins, all have white hair before…

Nier Replicant?

Yup, exactly. The only regulation I’d be in favor of for AI is this: if it was trained on data which can be accessed by or was posted by the public, it must be freely available, such that if anything in the training data was posted online in a way anyone can see, then then I have free access to tge AI too.

Basically any other regulation, even if the companies whine publicly, is actually one that benefits them by raising the barrier of entry and making it more expensive for small actors to create AI tools.

They’ve gotten smart enough to use reverse psychology on this kind of thing.

This very much feels like “Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.”

Smart in one way but it did cause a lot of storytelling problems because they constantly had to come up with half baked excuses for why it wasn’t working this time when just using the transporter would solve a major problem without fuss.

No shit! That’s our fucking election system. After the primaries, we wind up withtwo candidates that most people don’t like, and we vote against the one we think is worse. It’s been this way for a very long time. Case in point:

https://youtu.be/riDypP1KfOU?si=xwlInd1CS9p7rYcT

Acting like this is shocking news is disingenuous bullshit.

I don’t think ‘going’ anywhere would be an option. If you’re in basically, most of the civilized world, and not in a very secure structure, you’re immediately fucked. I said more than 50% but I guessed that as a very conservative estimate. We don’t normally realize just how many living things are around us, mostly bugs, but also small rodents and the like. If every one of those within a significant radius of every human suddenly went berserk and wanted the humans dead, most people are not in areas where the number of attackers would permit much survival.

Those who currently live in certain desert environments, in certain cold environments, and so forth, would probably survive the first day, and then might have a hope of making it longer. But most environments in which there isn’t enough animal/bug life around to immediately kill you present serious other problems such as food supply. If you live at McMurdo Sound Antarctica, you’re probably not going to immediately be killed. But you will soon have issues feeding yourself and keeping warm.

People in Iceland or northern Norway and other similar places might have the best chances. Probably not quite enough things around to kill everyone immediately, but the environment is one in which they might be able to become self-sufficient, but in the long term I have my doubts even for them. If the bugs and animals and such are so focused on killing humans that they no longer perform their normal functions, then you’re looking at immediate and total ecological collapse. If they’re not, then the population of bugs and animals will increase in all areas other than the most extreme environments, and sooner or later what few humans survived in those extreme environments are going to have to attempt to emerge.

If humans had prep time, maybe. Assuming we could get over our normal difficulties cooperating and actually prepare for the event. There’d at least be a lot of survivors. But if it came as a surprise, suddenly someone flips a switch and the entire animal kingdom is trying to make every single one of us dead? We’re pretty much fucked.

If this means that every animal immediately goes berserk and tries to kill all humans, and ‘animal’ includes bugs, then the animals probably win.

Those people in relatively secure places without enough animals when it starts could survive, but there’s probably be 50% or higher casualties among the general human population in less than a day.

This started to become noticeable years ago when Google decided to start censoring searches even with SafeSearch off.

I switched to Bing at that time, which was good for a while, but eventually they have started doing the same thing.

I can now no longer find a search engine that actually works to find me all the relevant results. I’ve tried all that I’ve heard of, and none will provide complete results.

The easiest canary in the coal mine for this is NSFW stuff. If I search for a popular character of which I know there’s lots of porn/hentai, with SafeSearch off, and do not get a heavy mix of SFW and NSFW results, I know that search engine is messing with those results, and is also definitely doing it with searches that are not so obvious.

I don’t think this argument would go in the right direction, cause there’s plenty of Republican types who’ll just go ‘ok, then let’s just shoot them on sight, bullets are cheap’.

Protests are effective if there’s a credible threat to those with the power to change whatever is being protected about. If the protesters do not pose a threat of any kind (and I don’t mean just one of physical violence, since that’s often one of the least effective potential threats, although it can have value at times) then nothing will change.

But protesting where you cause an inconvenience to those who neither support nor oppose the protesters can often be a bad move. On occasion it can serve to bring people’s attention to the issue and convince them, but in my experience, if the first experience someone has with an issue, the first awareness they have of it is some protest that caused them problems, that person is likely to be disinclined to become a supporter of the cause, and indeed is often likely to be pushed towards opposing and cracking down on the protest.

This of course can backfire, since if the protesters pose an electoral threat, for instance, and the protests cause a bunch of people to be angry at them and just want the crap to end, those in power are given the message that hey…there’s support for just getting rid of the protesters.

They believe the law is a magic language, where if you learn the secret words and perform the secret rituals, you get to use shortcuts to bypass the normal rules. They see themselves as a secret society of law wizards, essentially. In some ways media has encouraged this by making contracts and such to be these arcane things with tricksy loopholes if you just figure out how to sneak through, but their belief goes far beyond what you might see in media.

They also hold lots of contradictory ‘logic’ and opinion. Like that the government/corporations/someone is trying to screw you, and yet for some inexplicable reason they will instantly capitulate and be powerless if you speak the right words. It really, really has parallels to the concept of binding demons and such with magical contracts with the right magical words. Or the fact that they believe these things to be secret-ish and relatively unknown except by their peers, but at the same time become outraged when every minor functionary of any government or company doesn’t immediately recognize their secret words and capitulate.

It’s as though the same sort of people who once believed in witchcraft and demons and all have adapted to the modern world where all that stuff is laughably false, but we all believe in ‘the law’ and ‘science’ and such, and therefore they come up with superstitions dressed in the clothes of law, but it’s still the same old stuff. It’s very similar to the bronze age man who sacrifices a goat or his daughter or whatever in order to get better crop yields.

That upper class definition needs a little adjustment:

Remove ‘their lifestyle’ and replace with ‘a comfortable luxury-filled lifestyle’.

Also he needs to be up there to hit them with his sword.

Way to miss the point.

The point is his career took twelve years and it was considered a meteoric rise, incredibly fast. You want better candidates, start working for it and help them make their way through the system.

Who’s your representative in your state house? Who was their primary opponent? Did you vote in that primary to try and get a more progressive candidate? Have you worked to get your local community to support more progressive candidates in small offices, so they can eventually become high level candidates?

There’s a chance you can answer those questions and have done what you can, but the vast, vast majority of progressives seem to just complain that no perfect candidate has been delivered to them despite no effort on their part.