skulblaka

I want to see Atlus mop the floor with Nintendo over this because Shin Megami Tensei had all these features 6 years before the first Pokémon game ever existed.

Come to my house and I’ll play you some of my CDs

If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer

That’s basically unenforceable unfortunately. Search engines are effectively made to be gamed by the way they function. SEO up to a certain point is what makes your website actually findable, it has just gotten out of hand.

I fix cars for a living every day.

reliable

Maybe, compared to a BMW or other “luxury” car marketed to rubes. But a Honda or a Toyota would totally eat VW’s lunch in regards to reliability, at half the purchase price.

relatively easy to repair

The VW Beetle is famously easy to repair, basically every modern VW model sucks ass. It needs some proprietary tool to access half the vehicle on more than half the models. I do not like working on them. We also get wonderful examples of German Manufacturing Precision™️ where you have a half a millimeter clearance to remove a part. This was worse in older VW’s in my experience (the Germans really took to AUTOCAD like fish to water when that became common, methinks) but it still happens.

comfortable interiors

Actually totally agree here, the interior of most modern VW’s is pretty nice. Shame that doesn’t extend under the hood.

VW also got caught straight up lying about their emissions testing a few years ago so that also destroyed basically all trust that I had in their brand. They’ll sell you a car that runs, but there’s really no knowing if the numbers that it reports are actually accurate.

A complete lack of all moderation, an owner / management team who studiously ignores all the child abuse on their platform because it is profitable to them to ignore it, and a legislative and judicial system that is unwilling to prosecute businesses for anything in general and child abuse in particular.

It’s a perfect microcosm of the American condition, really.

When people complain that their parents were able to afford an education and a home off the back of a single part-time income… yeah that isn’t exaggeration. You really could do that in the 70’s-80’s. Now it takes 4 full-time employed unrelated roommates sharing an apartment to make rent every month.

I don’t know if you were present in the “millennials just need to stop eating avocado toast and pull themselves up by their bootstraps” conversations, but all the rampant hate for the Baby Boomers didn’t come from nowhere. This is why it exists. Our parents (and their parents, depending how old you are) had the easiest and most luxurious existence that has ever been possible in American history, ever, and then pulled up the ladder behind them. When faced with the fact that they’ve made the life they lived impossible for following generations, the popular response is to blame the children and call them lazy.

“When I was your age, I walked into a car dealership with a smile and a firm handshake right after high school graduation and that’s all it took to get a job. A year later I owned a home and was married expecting a child. It’s easy, you just don’t want to work.”

No grandpa, because you and your buddies decided the purpose of your life was to extract all possible value out of everything and leave behind a shriveled up husk of a country, not one single independent detail of that story is still possible.

Kids these days don’t even know the future that was stolen away from them by their own parents or grandparents.

Yeah this is spot on. Tech literacy is at an all time low, today’s kids and young adults are having to be taught during work orientation what a file browser is now.

People who are currently between the ages of 30 and 60 are the generation that learned how to use their technology effectively. Older than that and you’re likely to be the “clueless boomer” trope, younger than that and you’re likely to be a tablet baby.

Not to mention that in my experience at least, public school teachers cared about basically every single petty problem except for the ones that would have actually benefitted anyone. You’ve been punched straight in the face every single day for two years by the same bully? I sleep. One of the girls wore shorts this morning and has visible knees? Get sent straight home immediately. Do not pass Go. This is a sin that cannot be tolerated.

All that to say, this story is definitely made up but there are places in America today where it could happen 100% as written.

You’re probably right.

That doesn’t change my opinion, though, that everyone at Apple can go suck-start their own asshole, and they’ll never receive another cent of my money for as long as I live.

I already wasn’t buying their shit but this has signed and sealed that for the rest of eternity.

You could install Mint on your mother’s computer and don’t tell her, and she’d probably still think she was using Windows until it came time to install new software. Linux For Normies has come a long way, especially recently. It could be ready for mass adoption very soon, if not already.

Well, that’s good news for my desktop build, and bad news for my hope for the future, I guess.

Linux users do though. If people keep moving from Windows to Linux they’re going to run up against the trash Nvidia driver support pretty quick.

This is a problem that Nvidia is capable of solving but they haven’t been interested in it for over a decade so I don’t see them starting now.

Expecting a major flood of new Linux users might be a bit of a pipe dream though. But the momentum is building. If we do manage to swing the market noticeably in that way, AMD is going to get a big boost over Nvidia in the gaming GPU market.

I doubt that will really move the needle for crypto bros or AI farms, but it is something.

Don’t worry I’m sure the owner has already pocketed $10m in investor money and is currently parachuting away to plan their next fuckup

Been seeing some of that as well, so I looked it up myself. The actual text of the EULA states:

"You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.”

That’s a brick. They haven’t actually done it to anyone yet, but they’ve reserved their rights.

Oh sure, but they’ll continually claim until they’re blue in the face that everything they do is about money. So they should be continually exposed as the financially irresponsible idiots that they are.

For the people where egregious human rights violations and terrorism aren’t deal breakers, wasting money is. Frankly I don’t respect their opinion, however, they also vote, therefore their opinion does matter.

More than the doctors? No, absolutely not.

More than the bean counters who want to replace these doctors with unsupervised robots? I’m a lot more confident on that one.

I’ve never met this man in my life and I am 100% confident it was the latter.

You’d think so, right?

Receipts you say?

We’re at 56 pages of this now for a nice round count of 1400 charges

So far as I am aware all of these are publicly searchable court cases

In the South? Yes, definitely.

1. The Mexico border is down there. This is worrisome, not because of the Mexicans, but because ICE gangs like to hang out near the border to try and catch runners. A lot of them are tied up in northern cities right now kidnapping citizens but I wouldn’t expect them to leave the southern border undefended.

2. It’s extremely hot as fuck right now. Further south you go the worse it gets. I’m ~600 miles north of Orlando and it was 109F outside today (that’s about 43C) with over 50% humidity. When you pass through my home state of Louisiana you’ll be seeing closer to 115F/80%. With heat that high and humidity content that high heat stroke becomes extremely easy. You’ll be dealing with this from Florida through around maybe Texas where it starts to become a drier heat, with lower humidity, but places like Arizona used to hit 120F/49C before we were all talking about global warming.

3. Southern Americans (as in, Southerners in the US, not people who live in South America, I know it’s confusing) are not all racist, but uh… you’ll see more who are, than aren’t. If you’re any shade of brown you’re going to have a rough time. If you speak with a “funny” accent you’re going to have a rough time. Armed racists populate huge swathes of the southern and midwestern US. This is statistically more likely to be just upsetting rather than directly harmful in most situations, but I wouldn’t want to roll those dice, it’s still very possible to find people who would just abduct and kill a foreigner they don’t like.

Currently speaking, your biggest problems in the American South right now as a foreign tourist are going to be local racism and ICE. The local racism has been around forever and is mostly tolerable if you don’t take offense easily, but you can probably expect to be called some slurs right to your face in more than a few small towns. ICE is a newer and probably bigger problem at the moment. They have orders from the president to capture and deport more people than they will possibly be able to accomplish, so anyone who looks or sounds foreign and doesn’t have three forms of ID on them to prove citizenship is increasingly likely to get bagged, tagged, and dragged to a blacksite somewhere. I’m not confident that a tourist visa (or even a work visa) is going to stop them, it’s already been proven that actual valid citizenship doesn’t stop them.