Hemingways_Shotgun

Exactly my thinking as well. Super Mario Brothers was the game that made “couch gaming” popular for more than just kids. Adults were getting into it as well. I still have fond memories of my dad trying his best at it and thinking sticking his tongue out in the right direction would somehow help his jumping ability.

Without the NES, the couch-gaming scene as we know it wouldn’t exist. And Super Mario Brothers was the game that brought it to the masses.

I agree with you.

However…there’s an argument to be made that the post itself is a form of criticism and falls under the free speech rules where it regards political figures. In many ways, it’s not any different than the drawings of Musk holding Trump’s puppet strings, or Putin and Trump riding a horse together. One is drawn and the other is animated, but they’re the same basic concept.

I understand however that that sets a disturbing precedent for what can and cannot be acceptable. But I don’t know where to draw that line. I just know that it has to be drawn somewhere.

I think…and this is my opinion…political figures are fair game for this, while there should be protections in place for private citizens, since political figures by their very ambition put themselves in the public sphere whereas private individuals do not.

Is there a meme of Margaret Atwood looking horrified yet? Because there should be.

What happens when I ignore the cookie preference dialogue on websites?

You get stuck with the leftovers; which is usually the maple flavour or those really really dry shortbread cookies that feel like dust in your mouth. And you’re not allowed a drink of milk to wash it down.

It helps to get in line early for your cookie preferences.

What? … Wrong cookies?

Sorry about that. I stand by what I said however.

For me it was because I was living in an apartment where the heat register was directly beneath the toilet paper dispenser, and so in wintertime when the furnace was running, if the TP was over it would flap around like one of the wacky inflatable tube guys you see at car dealerships. I started putting it under at that point and the habit just stuck.

But yeah, cats is absolutely the most common reason. Toddlers as well…dumb ones anyway. The smart ones figure it out regardless.

Some men just want to watch the world burn…

One of my life goals is to write a Broadway musical based on the life of Mata Hari.

Okay, to put it another way:

Once the child is born, it stops being literally a part of its mother and instead becomes an individual.

but it’s not like any sudden development occurs at the moment of birth.

You mean other than breathing its own air and no longer being physically connected to its mother’s womb? I’d call that pretty significant. I would argue that the moment it breaths its first breath on its own rather than as a part of its mother’s uterus, it becomes a murder victim, not an abortion.

You are absolutely correct regarding AI. I hadn’t considered that. It gives me something to think about. Thanks!

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I lean pretty hard left who is also pro death-penalty (IN VERY SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES)

• If the case has absolutely been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

• All appeals have been exhausted.

• Proof is absolutely undeniable.

• Guilty party shows no remorse.

• Crime is suffiently heinous (mass murder, child killing, serial killers, etc…)

• A legitimate psychiatric board has deemed that there is little to no chance at rehabilitation nor does the guilty party show any inclination to want to rehabilitate.

if ALL those things are true, (plus some that I haven’t even considered) then I would rather execute them than pay for their living expenses for the rest of their natural life, or worse see them released at the end of their sentance absolutely knowing that they’ll do it again.

Toilet paper forever more goes under. Suck it.

Apple. But not because of the tech. But because they popularized a very disturbing corporate trend that I feel is a direct contributor to the wealth gap and the current state of affairs vis a vis tech oligarchies.

I touched on it in another thread, and I’ll expand on it here, but in short, Apple was one of the first companies to stop defining their profit margin by real world economic factors like what the market can conceivably bear, and instead by marketing…ie. How high your profit margin can go is determined by how much your advertising can convince people to spend.

Even back when Reagonimics first came around in the 80s, most corporations were still operating with a traditional profit margin calculation. You take the cost of your product to make (that includes labour, research and development, manufacturing, etc…) You determine your growth projection for the year, allowing you to cover all your expenses and reinvest in your company to achieve a modicum of growth and provide a rise to the share price, and you set the products selling price accordingly. (That profit margin traditionally would come to anywhere from 30-50 percent depending on the product.

One of the factors that you look at as a company is what can the market bear? You try to ride a profit balance between what you need to make to continue growth and what your targeting customer base can afford. With the reasonable thinking being that if you over-price, then your customers will just go to the competition.

What Apple figured out is that with enough money invested in advertising and marketing, a corporation can completely override that affordability and just keep upping their profit margin as much as they want so long as they can convince people that it’s worth it. That’s how you end up with a trillion dollar company that not only has the profits to grow their business, but also to start producing fucking television shows with money they found in their sofa.

With enough advertising, affordability no longer matters. Humans will happily skip a mortgage payment, or a trip to grocery store, to contribute to your inflated profit margin if you can convince them that it’s worth it.

How they do that is a combination of traditional advertising and in-store shenanigans. STORY TIME:

When I was working at Staples, we started off selling the ipod. We weren’t allowed to sell the iPad at first, and when we were finally given permission to, it came with conditions.

• We were to construct a separate section for them to keep them segregated from the other tablets, with very noticeable and expensive signage.

• We are not allowed to refer to them as “tablets”. Only as “iPads”.

• We were to begin every tech conversation with “Have you seen our iPads”.

Similar rules came out when we decided we wanted to sell Macbooks. Similar rules.

…

Long story short, Apple figured out that if you spend more money in advertising (both traditional and non traditional like in-store display merchandising) than you do on the product itself, people will shoot themselves in the foot to give you their money, whether or not they can afford it. Whether or not they have to skip this months mortgage payment. Whether or not they have food in their fridge. . It doesn’t matter how good Apple products are. What matters is from an Ethics standpoint, Apple said “fuck what the market can handle. If people are stupid enough to pay us a 300% profit margin while they’re on food stamps…that’s their fault. we’re just doing business”

A number of companies have now followed that lead since then, leading to the sharp sharp (disastrous) divide between the billionaire class and the rest of us

And yes, in a lot of ways, it’s just capitalism and personal responsibility. But without that traditional profit margin calculation in place; with the sky’s the limit approach that Apple introduced, the class war is just going to get more and more pronounced.

Not that I actually give a shit what JD Vance thinks. But I do kind of wonder what JD Vance thinks waking up every morning knowing that he’s literally the vice president in name only and has no other function that hasn’t been completely taken over by Musk.

No it wasn’t. It’s typical bully tactics when they’re pushed back. “I was just kidding bro, settle down”.

Why’s your aardvark wearing a cone?

It might be his best book since Name of the Rose

My personal favourite is The Island of the Day Before. Though I haven’t read either in years and it might be nostalgia because that was my first introduction to Eco.

I don’t expect it. I just hope for it because it would be the most big-dick-energy move Zelensky can pull on Trusk.

I desperately desperately desperately want to read a headline that says “Ukraine signs rare mineral agreement with the European Union. Ukraine becomes a member of the EU and the EU gets large resources of rare minerals to supercharge their own homegrown tech industry and divest it from the United States of Trump”