As … immensely ironic and basically ideologically cruel as it is, we should absolutely emulate this attitude, learn from them.

They get starved and blockaded, we get flooded with hypereffective digital marketing, insane overproduction of single use garbage, horrendously overpriced cars full of more factory defects than a t34 from 1942, that is half illegal to repair on your own … while almost no one makes anything built to last any more.

Again, very ironic, but this actually results in a very similar situation for most normal people, at least once all the credit cards stop working.

… I am quite sure they will call me ‘some sort of crazy person’.

Ok so you’re fine with paying money to Google.

Got it, you willingly fund an immoral corporation that’s on many different boycott lists of many different organizations, for many different reasons.

Sure, ok then.

I on the other hand value my moral nonhypocrisy more than you do.

Guess we just have different preferences.

Thank you, but my writing ability, in this sort of way, is nothing in comparison to… Charlie Chaplin.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/articles/29-The-Final-Speech-from-The-Great-Dictator-

I still cannot watch or even just read this without being moved to tears.

We need a new story to believe, now that the ‘American Dream’ is so thoroughly broken.

We need hope, placed in the right direction… in ourselves, and in each other.

Now this is unironically what I think of when the tiny, near-dead embers of patriotism in my soul get a whiff of oxygen.

Great Depression 2.0 is here, what did we do back during the first one?

Well, lotta people fuckin’ starved and died, got terrible diseases, died before the age of 2, or in child birth, etc.

But, we also formed co-ops. We took a random sad sack of broke and broken people, and their stuff, people with no proper wage work available to do, got em together and said ‘anything useful you can do, for anybody else, is better than nothing’

We talked to those people. We commiserated. We built solidarity with others, face to face.

We fixed shit, we jerry-rigged shit, we made things that were completely broke into things that were only slightly broken.

We took shotguns to local foreclosure auctions, and not so subtly implied to anyone other than someone who’d promised to just gift the home back to the homeowner, that the shotguns were loaded.

Nowadays… call it recycling, upcycling, right to repair, what the fuck ever… stop wasting your money on stupid shit that won’t last a year or even ever be used by you once.

You don’t know how expensive food or fuel is gonna be in a month, 3 months, etc. Could triple by next year, who knows.

Build your life around trying to plan for that.

You got a storage unit full of shit? A walk in closet full of stuff you ain’t worn in a year?

You don’t need it.

Somebody else probably could use it. Figure out how to find that person, and get it to them, with as few or at least as fair middlemen involved as possible. You get a fair price, or maybe even a haircut or week of babysitting, fuck, a pound of flour… they get some barely used clothes.

Every random plot of possibly usable garden space, make it bloom. Fuck your yard of useless grass that literally is a traditional offshot of nobility having so much land they could show off making some of it not productive.

HOA in the way? Learn their bylaws and just investigate them by way of malicious supercompliance. Chances are high they’re doing some kind of money laundering or fraud.

… We’ve done this kinda shit before, our grandparents at least.

Most people actually get joy and purpose not from accumulating wealth, but from feeling like they’re actually some kind of important, in the service of others, in some kind of real and tangible way.

The system has failed us, in every possible way…, it will eat us alive if we do not build our own.

In the words of Adam Savage:

“I reject your reality, and substitute my own”.

We do not have another choice.

No, it wouldn’t, just ask them to offer lower donation amounts/tiers, if the existing tiers are too high.

This really would not be much harder than managing an RSS feed.

If an adequate amount of money goes to doing the math to divide what would be donations equally, after Google’s cut of course… then you are being lazy, and are fine with giving Google money.

Would you give to a charity that had the same ‘admin overhead’ to ‘actual money put to use’ ratio as Google takes in their cut?

YouTube is also my main source of video entertainment.

I am very poor, but if I wanted to help fund Youtubers, I would just donate to their patreons or ko-fis or directly purchase a channel membership to them specifically.

You being lazy about how you support creatives you like is a choice, a choice that indicates your laziness is more valuable to you than you not giving Google money, so please don’t lie to me when you say you hate giving Google money, you obviously don’t.

Yeah, that they’ve even been going back and cracking older games that shipped with Denuvo, but had not been cracked around their initiap release date… suggested to me that somebody figured out some method that applied more globally to Denuvo itself, as opposed to particular implementations of it.

Welp, that would explain why seemingly every Denuvo game has been getting cracked, lately.

I suspected somebody(s) had just figured out how to bypass the entire thing, but hadn’t had that confirmed untill now.

… people pay for youtube?

… you know you can just block the ads, right?

… and you don’t need a propietary app to get youtube on a tv?

Donald Trump.

World’s most contemptible belligerent asshole, and also, unintentionally, world’s most effective EV salesman.

Does anyone think… gas prices… are going to meaningfully go … down, in the future?

If so, well I know a guy who can offer you a timeshare on a bridge he sublets from a travelling used car salesman.

… the best bridge.

Ok brb making a game about being a self righteous asshole boomer who is always correct and its actually everyone else’s fault that he has no friends and his wife and kids dont speak with him.

Call it Boomer Shooter, but its not an FPS, its actually primarily a series of small adventure/puzzle levels with complex branching dialogue options.

You get points for shooting down ideas you either didn’t think of first or don’t like because they might imply that you aren’t perfect.

The rules are made up and the points don’t matter beyond a high score at the end of the bad ending.

The good ending happens when you don’t get that many points, despite the game constantly handholding you and telling you thats what you should focus on.

There, enjoy your retirement.

EDIT:

The DLC will add the ability to play as a privileged white woman who gets points for morally policing everyone around her but herself, spreading misinformation, and guilt tripping people who trust her.

EDIT 2:

In case I’m not being clear enough, a Boomer that wants a video game for their enfeebled retired ass can fucking make it themselves, and/or possibly think about why it is the case that the industry has enshittified to the extent that it has.

Who is it exactly thats in charge of all these enshittifying gaming companies again? Oh right yeah, its your 401ks, teaching children how to love their gambling addiction, so that you can retire well.

I mean, it can’t be that hard, right? To make a toy that satifies Boomers? Just bootstrap it yourselves, I’m sure you’ll discover that if you just shake a few hands and burn a few hundred million dollars, it’s just about showing up and doing the job well, or something.

… you want a Boomer game?

It already exists, its Candy Crush, its Words with Friends, its Scrabble Go, its Solitaire.

That’s not even an insult, that’s just literally market research data.

My napkin math results in ‘further than a guillotine’.

So your stance is ‘this is bad because other people wont go for it’ and ‘but also there are some other companies/organizations this should happen to’.

… ?

I say maybe the government ‘doing a communism’ in the colloquial, horrendously innacurate sense of the word, is infact exactly what we need.

I don’t care that other people get the ick from this.

I get the ick from corporations fiscally and environmentally raping us all to death.

You want a New, New Deal?

This is approximately what that would look like, at least a part of it.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/controllinginterest.asp

A controlling interest occurs when a shareholder or group gains enough shares to exercise major influence over a company’s governance and strategic direction.

No, it is, you’re wrong.

Yeah, most people can read through simple typos and understand them correctly.

Ok, what’s ‘more than nothing’?

Like, what is the actual thing that you want to happen?

What is your preferred policy, law, government action?

Bernie’s entire idea is that since these things functionally plagiarized everyone, ‘everyone’ (via the government) should own a controlling interest in the companies… if they are profitable, if their stocks go up, use that to start a soverign wealth fund that can help out thr government’s budget, maybe be used to fund social service improvements, healthcare, ubi, etc.

That’s his idea of ‘more than nothing’.

What is yours?

What’s ‘enough’?

Oh well I’m talking about the one Bernie is proposing.

What’s your idea?

Just… continue to let the AI companies ‘self regulate’?

It makes perfect sense at any time, given that Bernie is calling for nationalizing half the shares in these companies, with no compensation or payment to the previous shareholders.

Costs the government nothing, because they’re just seizing the shares.

It would give the government a controlling interest in these companies, thus ability to regulate them.

That makes sense at any point in time.