EldritchFemininity

In the southern states, people were getting arrested for handing out water to voters standing in 8+ hour lines that stretched multiple city blocks in 90 to 100 degree F heat (that’s almost 38 Celsius) with no shade in states where Republicans shut down voting centers in and around traditionally leftist areas mere days before the election, forcing multiple voting districts to travel by car to the single open voting center miles away in a Republican district.

Voter suppression in this country is on a scale that most Europeans would think to put countries like Russia on.

That’s also clearly a photo of Luigi Mangione at the time that that healthcare CEO died under mysterious circumstances.

All they know is that they lived through the Red Scare

Are living in the Red Scare. It never ended, even though the Cold War did. They’re still preaching the same anti-USSR propaganda to the kids today that they were in the 60s. You need look no further than the Republicans calling Obama a communist because he took a course on Communism in college. You know, the one that every college student was required to take during the Cold War and that every Republican politician also took.

See, here’s the thing: they made a generalized comment on a screenshot of what looks like an Amazon order. That makes it seem like they’re talking about anybody who orders food online, regardless of whether it’s Door Dash or 5-7 day shipping. There’s no way to tell from that photo whether that’s a single can or a box of 30.

And that timesaving comment has the same levels of sarcasm as any “lazy youth” remark.

Besides, if you’re willing to pay somebody else a decent wage to deliver something for the convenience to you, what’s the issue? At that point it’s no different from ordering at a restaurant or deli - pizza places have had delivery drivers for half a century! Should we be upset with people who don’t cook all of their own meals?

Similar to selling your car privately. There are some forms involved to recognize that you no longer own nor are responsible for the gun in question. It’s probably a little more strict and polished now (maybe not), but it wasn’t that long ago that you kept a copy in case the cops came knocking looking for the gun and a copy got filed away in a drawer somewhere for basically the same reason. I can’t remember if gun stores were in charge of the records for private sales (which wouldn’t make sense) or if they were filed with the town/state, but it was all physical paper in a drawer somewhere regardless. There wasn’t like a system actively tracking ownership - so long as both parties had a LTC, they were okay and third party sales could be done anywhere.

True, but it’s the one that I know and up until around the early to mid 2000s, you could buy a shotgun in Wal Mart. They had a whole section dedicated to firearms.

Plus, the whole selling an AR out of the trunk of a car in the Wal Mart parking lot is something that a kid I went to school with actually did in Mass. There’s still plenty of regulation involved (and increasing by the sounds of it based on what you said), but at the time it basically boiled down to signing the paperwork signifying the change in ownership and resale of the firearm. The only time the state would’ve been made aware was if they requested to see the paperwork, AFAIK.

Besides, the vast majority of people 3d printing guns are people with an LTC anyway, and the most frequently printed things are furniture and accessories. 3d printed guns are still largely a novelty, despite how much they’ve improved over the years. Even the much feared gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was bought legally, and any 3d printed parts were merely aftermarket grips or the like. The only large scale use of them that I’m aware of is in Myanmar, where they’re using 3d printed guns to fight against a genocidal regime largely because they can get 3d printers and ammo, but no country is willing to support the resistance and so they can’t get any actual firearms. You’re much more likely to see a Garage Gun like the one used to kill Shinzo Abe, and those are completely legal by federal law - largely because it would be impossible to prevent somebody from just gluing a PVC pipe to a 2x4 and using a nail as a firing pin.

But firearms are so easy to obtain in so many states that it’s much easier to buy one than to build one from scratch (whether that’s buy one in the state or one with more lax laws nearby). There used to be a ban on gun stores within the city limits of Chicago, but Republicans got elected into office for like a decade and not only repealed that ban but also took the bite out of the gun laws, and now they claim that Chicago is proof that gun laws don’t work when the city used to have some of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country. When they’re not being bought right in the city/state, they’re being smuggled in from the next state over with little concern for punishment.

No, but if the laws are anything like Massachusetts, then you can buy an AR-15 out of the trunk of the car of a dude who was selling it on Facebook.

Completely legal resale so long as you both sign off on the ownership paperwork.

Artistic? I see nothing in their posts to prove that they haven’t been reposting from other sources or straight up posting slop. Not that post history is everything, I’m not one to post myself, but based on the pro-AI stance, I am fully willing to believe the latter.

That photo makes him look like a used mattress salesman.

I think we also experienced a few unusually high number of school shootings for a few years around 2016, and the media probably reports them less because Trump has taken up all of the media spotlight.

I seem to remember noting about a decade ago that we had a very high number of school shootings in the first 6 months of a year, and doing the math out it was something like 1.5 a month. I definitely remember talking to people about how crazy it was that we had one basically every few weeks.

1. They are not refugees, they should immigrate the normal (expensive) way like everyone else and not get a free ride on the American tax payer’s dollar. Especially when we have, what, 30,000 refugees from south of the border living in warehouses awaiting a chance to legally immigrate. 50,000? 100,000? Probably even more than that.

2. They’re escaping South Africa with fortunes made by exploiting the people of South Africa and will suffer no consequences in the US. They stand at least some chance of being punished in their own country (even more so if they’re running like this, seems like they can feel the noose tightening), and their money would stay in South Africa to help the country in such a case instead of disappearing into the offshore haven of the US.

3. They’re friends of people like Musk and Trump, and allowing them to more easily use their money to affect American policy will be worse not just for the US, but the world at large. Letting people with experience running an apartheid regime into the politics of a belligerent war hungry government who has already threatened numerous friendly countries over resources cannot end well.

“If God truly does exist, then he more so loves the atheist who questions the world around him than the Christian who blindly follows.” -Thomas Jefferson

More than half of the Founding Fathers were atheists or agnostic.

We knew this. Economists were shouting it over and over during COVID, when this productivity boom started as much of the world began working from home.

Microsoft said that people working from home would never work before COVID, and then they saw a massive boost in performance when people did. To the point where they eventually had to openly admit it. Before demanding people return to the offices as soon as they could.

The only people who refuse to listen are C Suite execs, middle managers, and people with a stake in commercial property.

Step 1: Ban “assault rifles” (no clear definition so specifics will vary greatly from place to place)

Step 2:??

Step 3: Mental health crisis, economic crisis, and various other underlying causes of gun violence are solved

Not to say that guns aren’t an issue. They are, but this is no different than arming the police with military surplus munitions and vehicles instead of decriminalizing drug use, improving social security programs and education, etc. It does nothing to actually address the issue - especially since these gun laws never actually target the guns most frequently used in gun violence/crime (pistols), and are never followed up by any step 2.

It’s security theater to look like they’re doing something to address the issue.

You’d be better off calling in a drone strike. Capable of hitting the target from beyond visual range (over the horizon) with a low risk of missing due to the explosive payload, and zero chance of being heard or seen by any camera in the area.

Sarcasm aside, a gun is loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage to those around you, and the bullet will over penetrate the camera, continue to fly, and possibly hit someone downrange of the camera. Especially since cameras like that are obviously located in high traffic areas with a large number of people passing through. So under ideal conditions where you hit your target, odds are good that you will also hit a person. And in the event that you miss? Well, you most likely just shot someone. Isaac Newton is the meanest son of a bitch in space for a reason and 9mm is the preferred pistol round for the police and military because its generally larger size and smaller powder charge compared to other rounds means that it has a lower velocity and is therefore less likely to pass through a target and the wall behind them and hit somebody in an adjacent room.

By 2003, I believe EA and Microsoft had also implemented CD Keys with a limited number of uses, usually 5 or so. If they hadn’t by then, it would be by 2010 at the absolute latest.

The war on secondhand sales of games and software had been going on since CD Keys themselves were introduced in the 90s, and probably in some other format in the 80s that I’m not aware of. Digital marketplaces were just the next logical step in the fight and the carrot of convenience for people to sacrifice their sense of ownership.

I think this is why Steam is well-loved today and why people say that they keep winning by doing nothing. When Steam came out, everybody hated it. You gave up ownership of your games and the online aspect was obnoxious with early 2000s internet. But they continued to add features of convenience - friends lists, achievements, stable servers for all kinds of games (like indie games), modding support and tools, the ability to download patches in the background, a user score/review system, frequent sales, etc. And now, Steam has so many features that it’s become a positive feature for a game in people’s minds while so much of the competition only has the lack of ownership and forcing people to download their launcher to offer.

In a comment on another post about this the other day, I saw someone claim that they had to resort to CCleaner to remove Chrome off of their system after this update. Chrome wouldn’t let them uninstall the browser manually.

Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, I haven’t used Chrome in a while and I’m not gonna install it just to try (or ever again - I like my ad blockers, thank you very much). But, with the current state of the software landscape, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true.

I can’t imagine VR as a whole made anything other than chump change until 2018+, but it was indeed there and chugging along quietly.

The graph specifically calls out the Oculus Rift as the start of what it considers the VR segment.

I would consider things like the Virtual Boy as VR to some extent as well, but I do see the logic as to why they only started the line with the Oculus. Before that it probably wouldn’t even show up as the money there was a drop in the bucket of a tenth of a percent of anything else, but it’s also widely considered that the Oculus and the Vive were the first really viable commercial VR headsets that started the VR game niche/genre. Before that, VR could probably be considered as niche as eye and head tracking hardware for sim games, and I don’t think that I’ve ever heard somebody mention those when talking about money in the games industry. Or even mentioned them in general outside of conversations like this. I don’t think most people even know that that kind of stuff even exists.

Where the hell are you getting your numbers? Everything I see says that Steam made a record 16 billion in 2025 while PC gaming as a whole made 43 billion. That would put Steam somewhere around 27% of the PC market.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/gamesindustrybiz-presents-the-year-in-numbers-2025-year-in-review

https://www.eteknix.com/steams-revenue-surpasses-16-billion-in-2025-new-estimate-shows/

You’re misreading how the graph is laid out. The y axis is the combined total revenue of the entire video game market, with each new piece of the market being added on top of the older ones over time (although arguably arcades are the oldest form and should be below consoles). VR is the newest niche, and so it goes on top of everything else as it adds its revenue to the gross total of the entire market, despite only being a tiny piece of that sum.

In your layout, consoles/arcade would be at the top with everything else underneath them.