Taiwan is one country I have absolutely no problem selling weapons to. They need as big a stick as they can get to maintain independence from China.
Taiwan is one country I have absolutely no problem selling weapons to. They need as big a stick as they can get to maintain independence from China.
If she was actually using that message, which I never heard, no wonder she lost. People don’t want the absence of something, they want radical change. They want a country that works for the middle class rather than just for the 1%. That’s why Obama’s message resonated. And that’s why Trump’s message resonates. He at least acknowledges that shit’s broken and he promises to fix it. He may be the wrong person to fix it and he may have no interest in fixing it, but his message at least acknowledges that there is a serious problem.
Harris had some policies, but not a real underlying message. She could have made a message like ‘bring back the American dream’ and that might have gotten her a win. Obama’s message was ‘yes we can’. Trump’s message is ‘make America great again’. You need a theme message like that, if you only talk positions you get lost in the noise of our shitty media.
I. Do. Not. Care. About. The. Tech.
Exactly. The tech doesn’t matter. Tech only exists in service of the gameplay, and (introduced with HL1), the story (previous to HL1 the ‘story’ of most games was just a quick blurb on why there’s monsters and why you have to shoot them).
Gamers DGAF about new tech. Gamers wanted to be told a story. We LOVED the story.
Valve could’ve used the existing engine, built NOTHING AT ALL NEW, and just finished the story with existing assets and we’d all have been over the moon happy.
This is exactly it. A lot of people are struggling. They see less jobs, less pay, meanwhile the rich get richer. They see a system that benefits everybody except them. So Trump comes along and says he’s going to fuck up the system. That sounds pretty good. And if he can make a decent excuse that he’s been fucked by the system too, people are willing to overlook a lot.
Plus, let’s not forget Harris had very little real message. Obama had a message- hope, change, yes we can. Hillary was as status quo as you can get, and people wants to reform. Kamala’s message was basically ‘I’m not Trump’ but unfortunately that’s not good enough to get you elected. Especially not when, before Biden dropped out and she got anointed, she was polling in the single digits.
Once again, you’re looking at steak. Obviously sizzle doesn’t keep you alive. But someone desperate for meat is going to follow the smoke and fire and sizzle in the hope that there is steak at the bottom of it.
So far that solution seems to be to ignore it as a problem and continue the policies that created it. Dems are a little better on unions, but neither one is addressing the systemic problem.
Just like conservatism, the problem is what parts of it you push.
Focus on divisive issues like gun control, open immigration, and hyper inclusion of any possibly marginalized group and you push people away.
Avoid the wedge issues, and focus on things that will make everybody’s lives better, like honest government, social safety net, and good health care, and you bring everybody together.
If you look at the entire range of issues, including the ones politicians don’t often talk about, you might find that Americans generally agree on more than they disagree on. But rather than focusing on those shared agreements and trying to build a better country, both parties are focusing on wedge issues where there is strong disagreement.
And you are doing the same thing that the other Democrats are doing, focusing on the steak rather than the sizzle. If you look at the things Trump has actually done in his life, most of it is just looking out for #1. And after his first 4 years, I don’t think we need another 4. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I was not impressed by his presidency.
But that’s looking at steak. He may not have much steak, but he has an awful lot of sizzle in excess.
You have a country that is (to continue the analogy) starving and malnourished. One candidate shows you a ton of sizzle and steam and flame and makes your mouth water. The other one just keep saying that eating red meat is bad for you.
That’s why Trump won. You need to understand that for a lot of people, voting involves emotion and desperation. You see the factories you work at closing, hearing about a giant tariff on Chinese goods sounds fucking awesome. You work lower end jobs and see companies switching from full-time American workers with salary and benefits to part-time immigrant workers making minimum wage, closing the border sounds like a great idea. And that’s not because of racism, it’s because you don’t want to be competing for jobs with people who will accept minimum wage and live 10 to a flat so they can all send money back home. There is of course little or no steak behind the sizzle, Trump’s first term showed that. But to an emotional voter who is desperate…
No they aren’t, and with that attitude we will continue to repeat this mistake over and over and over.
The people want change. A lot of change.
You can work 40 hours a week and barely scrape by paycheck to paycheck, and it’s been like that for years.
Housing is even more unaffordable.
Nothing has changed for years.
People are angry.
Donald Trump taps into that. That is his whole message. That he is an outsider, he is not the status quo, he is the one who shakes things up. He does not listen to PR people. He says what’s on his mind. He is the closest thing to a Bulworth candidate we’ve had in quite some time.
I personally think he is a liar and a criminal, but not everybody shares that view.
What does Kamala have going for her? She is the vice president, next in line of a succession. There is no radical reform there. It is status quo. And let’s not forget that before Biden dropped out and Kamala was crowned successor, she was pulling very low even among Democrats.
The problem is not that America refuses to hand the country over to a woman. The problem is that the DNC keeps putting forward the wrong people as candidates, and expects the whole nation to vote for them simply because they’re not Republican. It doesn’t work that way.
My point is though, as long as you blame sexism or racism or whatever for Trump’s win, you hide the real problem and thus prevent it from being fixed.
It NEEDS to be fixed.
For the good of the country, we (Dems) cannot expect people to just vote for us because we’re not Republican. We need to offer them something better. Obama did that. That’s why he won. Hope, change, yes we can. That was something better. And so he defeated a real non-crazy Republican.
Whoever is the next Democratic candidate, they need to do that. Offer a real message and a real plan. Not just ‘I’m not red’.
Okay Trump is recent, but his whole change of focus since buying Twitter is where public opinion on him shifted. That started a shift in public statement more toward the libertarian or perhaps conservative and that made him unpopular with a lot of the liberals who previously liked him for pushing environmental causes.
Now that he pushes conservative and libertarian ideals, supports a Republican candidate, he becomes persona non grata. That may well be valid, but it should not take away recognition of his other accomplishments. If he’s now an asshole, he can be a visionary asshole. Becoming an asshole doesn’t mean he isn’t or wasn’t a visionary.
I’m not saying he’s not an asshole. But he is a visionary.
And right now, if he wasn’t up Trump’s ass, you’d probably be saying he’s a visionary without sarcasm.
Obviously the right of people to live is very important. But if somebody encourages them to end their own life, their right is not being taken away, they are just being given bad advice. If they choose to suicide, their right to live is being surrendered by them, by their own bad choice. Taking away somebody’s right to live is murder. Encouraging somebody to do something stupid is harmful, but it is not murder. No more is it theft if I encourage you to set your money on fire and you do it. You choose to follow my obviously bad recommendation, you choose to set your own money on fire. That is your choice and your responsibility.
Making any sort of speech illegal is a slippery slope. Most civilized people would agree they don’t want to read racist rhetoric, encouragements of suicide, etc. but when ‘I don’t want to read that’ becomes ‘I don’t want you to be allowed to say that’ you start forcing the morality of the majority on everybody. And that rarely ends up in good places, historically speaking.
Read your damn history.
SpaceX is basically 100% Elon’s creation. He was founder, Tom Mueller (who designed the Merlin rocket engine) was the first employee period
Tesla was Elon and a few other people who had seen a good electric roadster, but it had been a one-off that that company was not going to produce. They decided they wanted to produce an electric roadster, so they did. Initially, Martin Eberhard was in charge of the company and Elon was just an investor. Search archive.org for the original Tesla blog. It’s all laid out. I know this because I was following them while it was happening.
Eberhard was in charge, and they were going for a setup with a two-speed gearbox. There was to be no clutch, just a synchromesh to allow shifting. Problem is, shifting at 10,000+ RPM under heavy load is mechanically stressful, and they were having a lot of trouble getting the gearbox to work reliably. After a good year of screwing with this, they were burning through cash and not getting close to actually shipping a car. That’s when Elon stepped in, pushed Eberhard out, and took over Tesla. Elon quickly switched to a setup with a single speed non-shifting gearbox (much easier to build, much less expensive, and will basically last forever as long as you lubricate it) and a larger and better cooled electric motor to deliver the required torque that they wouldn’t get from a lower speed gear. That setup is still in use today in all Teslas.
The problem is that ideas that are under people like musk, are doomed to always fail
Like electric cars, like reusable rockets…
Half-Life. I know there’s been some successful efforts to modernize it, but those only bring it up to Source 2 era.
I would love a fully modern remake. Modern lighting and raytracing could do great things for the detail of a headcrab infected scientist.
Absolutely. Game had a great mix of large-scale, good pace of a fight, and social element.
VGW
Why do we force them to do that? How does that help? The condo could be just as easily bought by a single family. The only point I am making is that there are a few legitimate situations where a corporation would want to buy property and we should let them. Houses should be for people to live in. Not for giant corporations to invest in.
I mean full respect when I say this- but if you advocate for a law or policy, don’t shy away from the hard questions about it. Think them through BEFORE you advocate for the policy, as part of your thought process of whether that’s a good policy or not.
In this case, those hard questions are exactly why I’m NOT in favor of such a policy.
If you make it illegal to recommend suicide, you create a situation where anyone who says anything even vaguely pro-suicidal is open to both criminal prosecution and civil liability. So that guy who (without any desire to see the poster suicide) said take a long walk off a short pier now is facing criminal charges, will have a criminal record, may go to jail, and then he’ll be sued by the family of the deceased and probably lose his life savings (or whatever he’s not already spent on lawyers).
Or, what if it’s not the disturbed guy from the scenario who suicides, but some other random person a month later and they see that the ‘long walk off a short pier’ post was in that person’s browser history? Do we blame that person for every single person who suicides who might have read that thread?
That in turn has a chilling effect on any online discourse and you’ll get a lot more people using proxies and VPNs and anonymizer systems just for basic online discussion lest something they say be taken badly and the same happen to them.
And then in the wake of some publicized suicide, some politician will say it’s time to clean up the Internet to keep our kids safe, and they’ll task an investigative agency with proactively seeking out such things. Suddenly online message boards are crawling with cops, and if you say anything even vaguely pro-suicidal your info gets subpoena’d from the platform and you get cops knocking on your door with a court summons.
Is this ‘better’? I don’t think it is.
To be clear-- I have great value for the sanctity of human life. I don’t want to see anyone dead, including from suicide. I think encouraging anyone to suicide is abhorrent and inhuman and I would personally remove such posts and/or ban such users from any platform I moderate.
But that’s my personal standards, and I don’t think it right or practical to throw people in jail or ruin their lives because they don’t agree.
I also think one part of free speech is if someone else wants to create a toxic cesspool community, I don’t have the right to order them not to. I’m okay with requiring a warning label on such a space though.
The dude is a giant shit stain and an embarrassment on society.
That said, he might actually have a point with this suit.
If I’m understanding the situation correctly, you have a situation where his website and media platform are up for auction to pay the huge judgment against him.
Ordinarily that would be fairly simple, various interested parties submit bids for whatever is on the block, and whoever bids highest gets it.
But it seems like in this case a significant portion of the ‘money’ from the ‘winning bid’ came from families who would receive that money agreeing to forfeit it as part of this particular bid. So the bid was ‘we will pay XYZ in cash and defendants ABC will forfeit their claims if we win’. And furthermore, there is a claim of collusion between the winning plaintiffs and the auctioneer. That is of course a huge ethical issue.
One could, without in any way supporting Jones, make the argument that due process is not being followed here and the auctioneer is not maintaining impartiality.
Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no love for the guy. But as much as I dislike him and the awful effect he has on our country, the judicial process must stay neutral. That is the difference between a fair trial and a witch hunt. If it truly was the case that the auctioneer was not neutral, and acted with the goal of ensuring Jones did not maintain any control over InfoWars, then he has an excellent chance of winning this lawsuit and at the very least having a new auction process for his media empire.