You do realize how close we were to elected officials hanging from the gallows on the front steps of the capitol, right? 1 locked door and a half dozen cops.

But regardless, the point is that the ringleader was never punished, and he was reelected and is sitting in the Oval Office right now talking about committing more election fraud after Elon “fixed those machines right up” in 2024.

Fun fact: There was a group of psychologists who were doing a study on how difficult it is to prove your sanity and get out of a psych ward, and checked themselves in to then see how long it took to prove that they were actually psychologists and get out. The longest one took 10 years before he was released.

Another fun fact: The terminator in the second movie is a cop because Cameron believes cops are humans who should have empathy for others but don’t - like a machine. When asked why he made the villain a cop, James Cameron said ACAB.

I would not be surprised if he researched the use and abuse of psych wards and the abuse that patients in psych wards commonly experience, or knew somebody who suffered similar circumstances.

It’s also a clever double entendre because there has been plenty of hating on the French in the US over the years despite them being one of our closest allies since they armed us during the revolutionary war. I noticed it decades before 2001, but it really intensified again for a while during the Iraq war because France refused to get involved. Remember “freedom fries”?

Are you telling me that every Flock camera is equipped with estrogen?

I had heard that Flock cameras were transing the youth with the 5G…

When they go low we go high.

The higher fall lets the guillotine gain more energy before impact.

Unfortunately, Elon isn’t the only one. There’s been like a half dozen different times now that people have claimed to solve the self driving car issue by…putting cars on train tracks.

So trains, but worse in every way. Single occupancy, traffic congestion, motors on every pod, traditional rubber car tires, magnetic strips planted into a normal highway for computers to follow, etc. Every time, they’ve found a way to make trains but worse.

Romneycare*

Never let Republicans forget that the best socialized healthcare system in the country was copied from a Republican system created and approved by voters in one of the most leftist states in the nation. It makes them so mad that they can’t blame a black guy for it when you do.

I don’t have the data to back it up, but I disagree. By the time that lootboxes and micro transactions appeared, the video game industry was already in competition with Hollywood for profits - if not already making more.

One of the largest costs for the industry historically has been manufacturing the physical media. It costs a lot to produce all the cartridges and packaging, and to have that shipped around the world. As technology improved, however, those costs began to drop on a per unit basis from the cartridges of old to the cds and dvds of the 2000s, allowing for a higher profit margin on a per unit basis. But the biggest kicker was the development of digital storefronts. Suddenly, you didn’t have to make a single piece of physical media in order to sell a game, and companies suddenly began to make back a lot more of that $60 directly instead of having it spent on manufacturing. They make the game once, and then each copy they sell after the first costs effectively $0 to manufacture since it’s the exact same copy as the first. Then you also have every game selling a “digital deluxe edition” for as much as $100 (or more!), often for just some exclusive cosmetics.

Micro transactions and live service is what they call the “long tail” of a game - you already made the product and sold it, but it continues to bring in money after the fact. Companies don’t have to spend huge sums to make a brand new game when they can just trickle out incremental updates and skins and rake in the money.

Whales are largely a myth told by video game (and gambling) companies to hide the truth of who they’re actually targeting and to keep you blaming the wrong people.

They want you to blame the dude with more money than the church and not enough brains to know the difference between cents and sense, but the truth is that the vast VAST majority of money made through lootboxes and other forms of gambling comes from 3 sources:

Kids aged 15 and under, people with addiction issues, and people with mental health issues like depression or neurodivergent conditions like ADHD.

Game companies hire psychologists to develop the most effective ways to exploit the way the human brain functions in order to maximize the amount of money that they can squeeze out of people, and all 3 of these groups suffer from the same issues that they exploit: poor impulse control and difficulty with keeping track of how much they’re actually spending. Kids because their brains aren’t physically developed enough yet, addicts (and people with ADHD to a lesser extent) because their brains are literally wired that way, and people with mental health issues have reduced capacity for both and are more likely to seek out things that promise quick access to dopamine and serotonin (think “retail therapy” or self medicating). Also of note is that researchers suspect that kids who grow up spending money on lootboxes and micro transactions in general are more likely to develop addictive personality issues later in life - basically being groomed into gambling addicts.

That’s also why they never let you buy stuff directly with money and use fake currencies that don’t have a 1 to 1 translation - it makes it 10 times harder to track how much you actually spent. It’s also why you can never buy the exact amount you need for an item: if you have currency left over, you’re more likely to buy more so that it isn’t “wasted”.

The children only matter when they can’t speak for themselves.

That way they can’t disagree. It’s why they put so much emphasis on the unborn. Once they can speak their own opinion, they’re worthless.

It will be 100 degrees and data centers will be draining local water supplies, while residents will be told not to water their flowers or take too many showers.

Wasn’t this already the case like 2 years ago in Texas? Except I remember the governor telling people to drink less water and shower together when possible to save water for the data centers.

Don’t forget the number of places named Springfield. A quick search pulls up an article that puts the number at at least 30 different places in the US.

This reminds me of a story about a French ship that landed someplace, and a native of the area walked down the beach and greeted them, saying “Bonjour.” Shocked that the locals spoke perfect French, the sailors asked “Parlez-vous francais??” and the local, confusedly asked “what did you say?” in the local language.

As it turns out, both the local language and French had apparently arrived at more or less the exact same word for a greeting by pure coincidence.

I see, so you understand that an economy exists, but not that it has many different interlocking pieces that can be examined in different ways. Let me see if I can break it down for you:

When you spend money at the store, when the store pays its employees, or when it buys goods from other vendors, are all examples of what is often referred to as “economic activity”. This can take many different forms at many different scales, in much the same way that a walk around the block is not considered an international flight.

For example, you go to the store and purchase a head of lettuce to make a salad. The store buys that lettuce from a local vendor who gets it from a local farm. That entire chain of transactions would be considered part of the “local economy”.

The fact that the US buys more than half of its aluminum from Canada would be considered “international economics” as the transactions involved take place between two different countries. In this way, you can examine different economics from as small a scale as you buying eggs from your neighbor who has chickens to the macro-economics of multinational corporations dictating the stupid price of RAM by effectively buying goods that don’t exist with money that doesn’t exist while handing the same 20 dollars back and forth to inflate their stock value to a disgusting degree. Hell, you can even pick out specific sectors, like with the aluminum example: when Trump started his pissing contest with Canada with tariffs, the American car manufacturing industry said that tariffs on aluminum would cause them to shut down plants within 6 weeks.

So when we talk about the economy of California, people are talking about the farms, the restaurants, the businesses that exist in the state. The people who work and live there, and the money that flows between them all. If these companies were to pull out of California, they’d be leaving all of that behind. Even ignoring the idea of the loss of sales, they’d also be losing the experience and skill of the people that they employ in the state, and the “value” of the property that they have there - whether that’s real estate or more logistics based like renting storage for goods or the cost of transportation from a manufacturing facility in a new location.

What economy is exclusive to the United States?

That’s what they said about Massachusetts’ “millionaire’s tax” - a 4% additional income tax on household income above 1 million dollars. And despite what finance rags claim, the data says that between when the tax was voted into law in 2022 and 2024, the number of Mass residents with at least $50 million in total wealth grew 35.2% from 1,954 people to 2,642 people. And the tax brought in an extra $2.46 billion in tax revenue during its first year.

So despite all the crying, the data says that they won’t leave. We’ve seen it happen multiple times across the country over the years. A state or a city enacts a new tax on the wealthy, the wealthy threaten to leave and cry bloody murder, and nothing happens except an increase in tax revenue to be invested back into the area.

People and businesses located in California buy goods and services, and produce goods and services that are sold both in the local region and abroad. This exchange of goods and services is frequently called an “economy”.

The economic activity within the state of California would make it the 4th largest economy in the world if it were an independent country, and it is the largest subregional economy in the world.

That’s so much cooler than the plastic shell that you could put your phone in that Bethesda sold with one of the games for like $200.

I don’t engage at this level anymore, where people show no respect.

False. Your first few sentences are insults, and the rest of your post is literally just this:

Yes.

Who do you think is doing all the keyboard smashes?