The average lifespan in the US has fallen 3 years in a row and is the same as the part of the UK with the worst average lifespan. With the destruction of the CDC and the removal of food safety inspections they keep attempting, I don’t think many of us will have to worry about it.
Besides, Berretas are cheap.
His speech patterns and dialogue match up surprisingly well with Jim Jones of the famous Jonestown Massacre. Once somebody like that has a following, it doesn’t matter how crazy he gets, the diehard believers will literally die hard for the guy.
The first campaign drew the cult together from a cult that was already there (a groomed voter base who will vote Republican no matter who) and the first term bonded them together against an enemy (everybody with common sense) while the Republican party and the entire media insulated them from how bad he is. There were some people who saw what he did and turned away - he got less votes this time around than he did last time, and that’s even with the questions of election interference that keep cropping up - but that just means that the people left are the crazies who would defend him even if he personally started shooting up schools.
American politics is so screwed up that most people have little clue of what exactly happens in this country. A coworker of mine just the other day was effectively saying that daddy Trump had to hurt us because big-meanie Biden ruined the government deficit.
I would disagree with this sentiment on a basic game design level. I don’t know about the Zelda games, I didn’t care enough about BotW to play more than a few hours, but designing a large map that incorporates multiple biomes in a believable way is much more difficult than creating a bunch of smaller levels that don’t have to have any relation to each other in the slightest. You can get away with a lot more in terms of map geometry and set pieces when you load into each level individually.
This is obviously different when you’re talking about Bethesda-style load into every building style environments vs Elden Ring “You see that castle in the distance? You’ll be going in there eventually” design, but the fact that Bethesda makes their interiors separate from the rest of the world is how they cheap out on their games. It’s less hardware intensive and you can cheat a lot more in your design. And on a gameplay level that goes for Ubisoft-style collectathon map objects (and Zelda shrines in this case), but that’s not unique to open-world games - it’s a lazy cop-out that game devs have used forever to pad out their games. Collecting all the secret skulls in Halo is the same thing, but because it’s implemented well and doesn’t drag on forever with no reward like most open-world collectibles, it feels totally different.
I do a mix of this with food prep. I’ll buy a bunch of ground beef and make a bunch of burger patties, and freeze the ones that I’m not using right away since I can pull them individually out of the freezer and throw them straight onto the grill or into a pan. Or I’ll buy the stuff for a big stir fry and then have leftovers for like 3 other meals.
Unless you move to Italy, where they’re paying people to live in castles because so many of them are falling apart and in dire need of repair and people to maintain them.
And the only time the Bible ever made mention of LGBT people is if you go all the way back to the Latin text where one of the people that Jesus healed was a soldier’s slave where the word used was a type of male slave the Romans usually kept for sex.
And as far as I know, the Torah makes no mention of LGBT people either, but Hebrew supposedly has pronouns specifically for FTM people that expressly recognizes them as men trapped in the bodies of women.
When all this stuff was written, LGBT people were simply a fact of life that nobody thought needed defending because the two genders bigotry and homophobia came later as a package deal with the spread of European Christianity (and the problems with Islamic culture are the direct result of the US spreading radical Muslim propaganda, as mentioned before - it was exported out of the Middle East). It’s not the religion itself that’s the problem, but the people who use it as a shield for their hatred. Bigots will be bigots, and religion is just an excuse that they can twist to justify their actions. India has been having trouble for years with Buddhist extremists who are just as bad as the worst of the crazies in the US, and Buddhism is probably the most peaceful religion in the world.
It’s like the 2nd Amendment and the US Constitution - old documents created in a different time with different problems being reinterpreted to justify modern hatred.
Iraq, 1960, before US operations in the region during the Cold War:
Muslim extremism is a direct result of US intervention in the Middle East to use countries in the region to fight a proxy war against the spread of communism. The CIA had a years-long operation where they literally air-dropped extremist Muslim propaganda into the region to radicalize the population.
We destroyed the largest democracy in the region and installed a dictator at the behest of British Petroleum (BP) because they elected a man who was going to kick them out and nationalize the industry due to the horrible pay and working conditions they forced on the country. Al-Qaeda started as CIA-backed resistance fighters known as the Mujahideen. The list of issues created by European and American meddling in the region is miles long - neo-colonialism at work.
Buddy, where have you been the past 20 years? The kids who were boots on the ground are now in their late 30s and 40s, and many of them are staunchly anti-military thanks to their experiences.
The US military runs one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the world, from Hollywood movies and TV commercials to Raytheon funding colleges and recruitment officers walking the halls of high schools. Their entire thing is tricking impressionable young kids into doing the dirty work for the wealthy. When I was in college, the seniors in the game design program were working on a VR boot camp scenario in Second Life that the army wanted to take with them to schools as a recruitment tool.
But no war like the culture war, I guess.
It can in the sense that many forms of generating power are just some form of water or steam turbine, but that’s neither here nor there.
IMO, the graph is misleading anyway because the criticism of AI from that perspective was the data centers and companies using water for cooling and energy, not individuals using water on an individual prompt. I mean, Microsoft has entered a deal with a power company to restart one of the nuclear reactors on Three Mile Island in order to compensate for the expected cost in energy of their AI. Using their service is bad because it incentivizes their use of so much energy/resources.
It’s like how during COVID the world massively reduced the individual usage of cars for a year and emissions barely budged. Because a single one of the largest freight ships puts out more emissions than every personal car combined annually.
You should watch Shaun’s video on the Harry Potter series. He goes into a deep dive of how the books are littered with her political views - even the first one - and how you can watch her become more conservative as they progress and she became more wealthy: the books start out criticizing the system, but by the end, the message becomes that the system should never be questioned.
Throughout the books are a pattern of borderline racist stereotypes (the black kid is named Shacklebolt, the Asian girl is named two single syllable last names - might as well be named Ching Chong - the 15-year-old Irish kid is obsessed with whiskey and blowing stuff up, etc), but you can also see where her transphobia came from. Everytime she wants you to hate a woman in the books, she describes them as having some kind of masculine features, from a strong jawline to “mannish hands.”
As people become more wealthy or famous, they’re given a bigger microphone to cast their garbage opinions with and it’s never been easier to tell the world your shitty political beliefs than it is right now.
I don’t watch Star Trek, but even I know that the first show was hated in its time for having a black woman in the main cast and would’ve been called “woke” and boycotted for the socialist themes.
Oh how quickly history forgets the horrors of the past…
I mean, I’d personally rather see an anime girl themed desktop than those weird statues rich people sometimes have in places like on their coffee table that are stuff like a woman in the boob + butt out pose with no limbs or head. That shit is just creepy looking. I know it’s supposed to be reminiscent of broken Greek and Roman statues, but why do they always have to be posed and objectified like porn stars? At least with the anime girl, I know that I’m talking to an otaku rather than Hannibal Lecter.
I think it’s also the speed and number of connections leading to the topic change. I think many neurotypicals would jump from the carnival to the rodeo, or to the bee story, but they wouldn’t jump all the way to wondering about wasps from talking about the carnival in one go.
From the outside, the topic change is so different that neurotypicals can’t follow the connections.
The Republican party is a cult - especially the cult of Trump. All these grifters selling hate to conservatives have made it that much harder to convince them when they’re wrong, and the odds of them doubling down on those beliefs when they are challenged get more and more likely the deeper in they are. There’s a point where it becomes almost impossible to pull people out of a cult and there’s largely no line that they won’t convince themselves that it’s okay to cross.
I think that’s where we’re at and have been at for quite a while. Republicans convince themselves that they’re the good guys fighting the good fight against whatever the party tells them is bad, and believe that their bigotry and hate is justified.
A lot of these minorities also always think that they’re different because they’re “one of the good ones” and will reap the same benefits.
My friend told me once about how people in cults have a sunk-cost fallacy to the cult’s beliefs that makes it harder to get them out the longer they’ve been in.
People are more likely to double down on their beliefs when proven wrong because they’d have to admit that they were wrong and so were all the things that they did following those beliefs. And nobody likes to admit when they’re wrong, because nobody wants to believe that they’re the bad guy.
Fox News legally can’t call themselves a news station anymore because of how little of their programming is actually news. It’s always been an opinion broadcast, at best.
That was the implication. Somebody’s getting a blow job on my 65th birthday, and it sure as hell isn’t gonna be me.