I don’t understand the point of making a coin that has ~$3500 worth of gold in it, and then giving it an official face value of $50.

Even big singleplayer games can be fun. I liked being involved in the early days of BG3’s release, for example. But then again, no mans sky and cyberpunk sucked

There was a time where the fact that launch meant a high player count, big community energy, and lack of hyper-optimized strategies minmaxxing the fun out of a game was sufficient reason to get it at launch.

But given how often modern launches are bungled, even that is not always true

If the error is hidden well, yes. Close-reading a text and cross referencing everything it says takes MUCH longer than writing a piece you know is accurate to begin with

The next update will fix everything, just need this one hotfix and everything will be solved, just wait.

Just one more update, okay? Just one more. One update. Just one.

And in fact, increasing the tax on profits makes it much, much more valuable to reinvest in the business.

Like, lets say your business is expecting a net profit of $200K after a year. You can either choose to reinvest that into the business to buy new equipment and hire new staff, or you can record that as profit, pay the taxes, and then put the after tax dollars money directly into your and your investors pockets.

With our current corporate tax rate of 15%, it’s really tempting to just pay the 30K in taxes and personally keep $170k as take-home, which gets taxed at a MUCH lower rate than regular income, rather than keep it in the business. $30K as a fee to keep $170K in personal income is pretty cheap.

However, if taking money our of the business was much more expensive, say 45% or something comparable to the marginal personal income tax rate for a working professional, then maybe as a business owner you might think that paying $90K to keep $110K is not as good a deal, and so you will think about whether there are other opportunities WITHIN the business you could invest in, putting those profits towards new equipment or training, rather than losing 45% of it to taxes just to add a small amount to your own pocket.

This is what conspiracy theorists don’t get. The world’s scientists are not skeptical of your claims that water has secret spiritual memory because they hate you, they are skeptical because the claim you make, if it were true, would be so important and world-changing that they want to be absolutely sure of it before they endorse it.

The difference is that, to a scientist, “this would be amazing if it were true” is not a good reason to believe it anyway

You, an average person? Probably homeless after you offended the wrong rich person.

If you’re rich though, you are immune to consequences.

Yeah, the definition of “Productive” is all sorts of wacky when you consider that, by the numbers, the people doing high-frequency stock trading are some of the most “productive” people on the planet, because they manage to hoard so much money to themselves.

Meanwhile, the people actually providing goods and services that make people’s lives better and create new things, those people are “unproductive”, because they don’t get filthy rich off their honest work.

The real reason we are not “productive” is that foreign investors are paying us to do the hard work of extracting resources (lumber, ore), or generating new research (we have MANY top universities), but then demanding that the money made from refining those resources or selling those idea goes to them, in other nations (typically the US or China)

Okay, so the problem is that because fossil fuels are cheap, most people don’t find it very worthwhile to explore new or more efficient ways to do things. This is especially true for the wealthy, for whom gas and heating costs are basically nothing, so they will do dumb shit like heat their homes while leaving windows open, or buy larger and less efficient luxury cars.

The federal program fixes this. It adds a small cost to using fossil fuels, collects that money, and pays it back out to everyone. That means that people who use more carbon than average (which, again, is the willfully wasteful) will see a small penalty for their waste, while the people who are already trying their best to cut back will see a LARGE benefit, as they get a direct payment of cash for doing their part to conserve. If you are about average, there’s very little impact on you, but you NOW have an economic inventive to try and economize.

I’m pretty sure it was invented as a series of fairytales to get kids (and slaves) to shut up and obey their masters, with the threat that asking too many questions would get them tortured by a spooky ghost.

And then it got WAY out of hand

The problem is that’s literally just money laundering?

They are using a shell corporation and bullshit liscencing fee to cover over the fact that this transaction is and should be illegal.

Like, the idea here is that the church is not allowed to donate to a political figure, so they’ve set up a shell corp in the middle. The church pays $60 to the shell corp, who sends back 30 cents worth of paper, and then passes on 59.70 to Trump as a “licencing fee”, which is obviously just going to be spent on his campaign.

They measure up to 4.0 metres (13 ft 1 in) long, weigh as much as 590 kilograms (1,300 lb)

Huh. Nope.

Another emulator. Iirc some of the code running Nintendo’s own retro gaming products was pirated FROM Ryiujinx

He’s like the third guy to do this in a year, big money doesn’t want you to know about it

We’ve removed critical functionality from the operating system because our boss didn’t want more than 6 buttons on screen at any time. Sorry the system is 100x more difficult to use!

But then how will congress give taxpayer dollars to a private company to do a terrible job?

I mean, we COULD have a government run agency that retains skilled engineers and keeps a good talent and knowledge pool of people specialized at delivering services that hundreds of millions of people rely on OR we could give money to the lowest bidder and blame “government inefficiency” for the contractor’s fuckups.

Actually, in most cases having fewer police on the streets leads to LESS petty crime.

This is because cops tend to spook people, so everyone (including the innocent, law abiding citizens) will leave areas that are patrolled.

This creates the ideal scenario for crime: there are few/no witnesses around for a while after the cops come by.

In pretty much every case I am aware of where cops go on strike and stop doing regular beat patrols, crime goes DOWN.

Yep. The goal of all of this this is to force people into straight marriages because that’s all that matters to religious zealots.

They know that if kids practice safe sex they won’t get pregnant and ‘shot gun marriage’ rates will go down.

They know that if kids discover their gender or sexual identity is non-cis, non-het, or non-monogamous that they might not wind up having a traditional marriage.

The know that people who only have 1 partner in their lifetime are much, much less likely to successfully leave an abusive partner, meaning there’s a higher rate of divorce if people learn that having multiple partners in your life is normal and okay.

They know that kids who are educated about healthy sex and consent in relationships are less likely to go along with a child marriage or an assigned marriage.

They know that removing sex ed means more teen pregnancy, more intimate partner abuse, and more child-rape. For religious people whose only goal is to get young women into marriages, those are good things.

Example: An actual elected official in the state of Missouri defending his stance that “Parents Rights” includes the ability to marry off their kids to adults at age 12, because “Do you know any kids that have been married at age 12, I do, and guess what, they’re still married”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H6UJ-uCrgc

These people legitimately believe that it’s morally correct to kidnap a 12 year old girl and force her to be entirely subserviant to, and dependent on, some pedophile husband who controls everything they do, because them being trapped in that awful situation means that there’s one more marriage in the world.

Grocery stores know that when people are struggling to afford to eat, they try to save some money by going for the cheaper brands, which are typically owned by the store. Since the store control all the prices, they are able to jack up the price of everything, making their customers go “wow, food is expensive, better try to bargain hunt more”, and suddenly you’re not buying the competitor bread, now you’re buying Western Family / No Name, and they profit both from the price hikes AND because they grow their market share on first-party goods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

It’s fucked up that they are allowed to both make AND sell the same products on the same shelves as their competitor’s goods, but that’s because our antitrust sucks.

There is NO downside for the store when they make you starve, you still gotta eat to live so you’ll pay anything, and these things are all owned by the same handful of megacorps.