Yeah the “they’re ruining the integrity of video game journalism” argument was insane to me. What integrity? Companies routinely paid for good reviews and everyone knew it. It’s a really corrupt industry, but people only got upset because of some shenanigans by women? I think? I never actually looked into what it was about because the whole thing seemed nonsense to me.

There were also eras of peace in the Middle East when empires had complete control. And a hell of a lot civil wars in Europe when Rome ran things.

Europe has also been a warzone forever.

It sucks when playing by the rules too.

Last game of monopoly we played strictly by the rules with four players. So I’m coming around the board and can know the the most likely outcome is that I’m going to land on a property with a hotel and go bankrupt. According to the rules I’d have to hand over all of my properties to that person that person just won the game even though there would still be three players. There’s nearly zero probability that someone with a big pile of cash that owns half the properties with hotels on a bunch of them already will ever lose.

So before rolling the dice, I sold all of my houses. Band made a couple of deals with the youngest family member in the game. First deal, I bought the electric company for all the money I had. Second deal, I sold all of my property (including the electric company) for $1 to that same player. Rolled the dice and as expected, landed on a property with a hotel. Handed over the $1 I had and I was out. This is all fine to do within the rules.

It actually made for an interesting game after that because the players left were evenly matched. But not everyone saw it that way so we never played again.

Really the properties should go back to the bank if someone goes bankrupt, otherwise a game with more than two people is effectively over as soon as the the first person goes bankrupt. Still nothing you can do about someone just setting up someone else to win by making a bad deal (whether intentionally or not).

It’s just kinda a shit game no matter what you do.

I think if we weren’t so dependent on oil we probably wouldn’t have so many problems though.

Think of the countries that have a lot of oil that are run by psychopaths: Russia Saudi Arabia Iran Venezuela

People go around taking sides with some of these countries against other countries as if they’re not a bunch of psychos. Rationalizing why it’s ok for them to be psychos because of ideology or something that happened in the past or whatever. But they are psychos. Something about having that much concentrated wealth turns people into Harkonnens.

Yeah but by then it’ll just be powerful elites scamming people into fighting for them on made up religious grounds just so they can control the resource that the transportation infrastructure is dependent on.

It’ll be completely different!

Or maybe the Redditors are refugees and the lemmy nativists have convinced themselves they are eating their pets.

Yeah, Yoda became a parody of his character in ESB.

In ESB he comes across as someone that’s speaking in a second language. Sometimes he mixes up the grammar, especially when emotional and trying to speak quickly, but when he’s more relaxed and speaking slowly (or saying something simple) he usually gets it right.

In other portrayals it feels more like he’s got brain damage.

Ya should’ve just binged “google” first.

In real life, Qaddafi got rid of landlords in Libya. It resulted in a lot of housing problems.

Some people don’t have wealthy parents that can buy them a place to live outright. There is a need to have housing available that doesn’t require someone to have wealthy parents or get out a large loan. The ability to rent a place is important.

The real problem is the high cost to own a place to live which results in people having to rent when they’d rather own a home.

Yup and the reason why he had to tweet about it is because HR wouldn’t reply to him about his job status. And that was because HR’s records were flagged “DO NOT EVER FIRE THIS GUY.” Genius boy was probably too busy tweeting to bother replying to all the messages from HR who were probably desperately trying to explain the situation to him.

So genius boy publicly suggested this guy was probably faking his medical condition to get out of doing work. Got the attention of employment lawyers everywhere, because that’s a huge no-no.

As it turns out, the guy did indeed have a serious medical condition, and like you say if Musk fired him he’d have to pay him a couple of hundred million. Dude was basically a saint in Iceland, chose to get payment from Twitter (when they bought his company) in the form of income so he could pay more in taxes because he appreciated what the Icelandic government did for people with medical conditions like his.

There were so many levels of stupid to this it was mind boggling.

He’s such a genius businessman he thought it was a good idea to publicly cast doubts on an employee’s medical condition.

Yeah he was Iceland’s man of the year once. Basically a saint.

Voting Green has the exact same effect as not voting. Yeah, it shouldn’t be that way, but it’s the way it is. There’s wanting the ideal system where third party votes matter and there’s pretending it already is an ideal system

You don’t get to an ideal system by voting for people that won’t have any power to change things. You make a difference by writing to and calling the people who do have power and ensure the people you call are at least sympathetic to what you want.

It is indeed not that complicated.

A ranked choice type system would mean a third party wouldn’t be just something that screws up elections. In fact it would probably really benefit Democrats as people who might not go to vote otherwise might go vote green as their top pick and then vote Democrat as their second pick. If the Green candidate won, that’s someone they could make some compromises with to get legislation passed. If the green candidate loses, then many of their votes would go to the Dem candidate making it more likely they would win.

Twice in this century a GOP candidate has won the EC without winning the popular vote. So it’s obvious why the Democrats would want to get rid of that.

But as it stands voting third party (or not voting) is just letting everyone else decide how things should be. The way it works now is you vote for the candidate most likely to care about your concerns (and who could feasibly win) and write to them and tell them what you want. Yeah it’s a pain in the ass to write to a representative, but it’s more likely to have an effect than anything you write on the internet. Be polite, tell them the things you want that can be reasonably be implemented. Also you’re probably going to have to vote in many elections to get what you want. But if it’s something you really care about you’re willing to vote in as many elections and write to your rep as many times as needed to get it done.

It takes time, but it’s more effective than doing nothing.

If you actually want a potential President Kamala Harris to have some good legislation to sign, you might want to consider voting for congressional candidates that will write the kind of legislation you want. And if you want to end the Electorial College bullshit, you might consider voting for state reps. And while you’re there, you may as well vote for Harris if for no other reason than you might someday say to your grandkids that you voted for the first woman President. That’s a better story to tell than explaining about how you were too angsty about “the system” to bother going out to vote.

The politcal system means that voting for a third party means you’re not actually opposing fascism. It has the exact same effect as not voting at all. While it’s not supporting fascism, it’s also not opposing fascism. So it’s just being fascism neutral.

It would be nice if you had a system where a third party vote wasn’t the same as not voting but that kind of system will never happen if you continue to waste your vote.

Most fascist movements die out before they can hold onto power long enough to transform society.

We tend to focus on the fascist movements that have obtained power on held onto it long enough to transform a country into a fascist state. Mussolini, Franco, Hitler etc.

But the danger is there so it’s important to be vigilant.

That being said… yeah, on lemmy.ml, anyone that fails the leftist purity test is a liberal and all liberals are fascists. Everyone is a fascist that isn’t an authoritarian with a red and yellow flag.

Yeah and there comes a point where you know you can win, but don’t want to go through all the turns to get there.

I think most chess games don’t end with a checkmate, many games end when a player concedes because everyone knows the outcome and it’s pointless to play it out.

Kinda. Finishing my coffee is synchronized with the clock. I take a shit soon after that.